Never seen anything like it.

Never want to see it again.

(And there's no explanation for that that leaves everyone looking good.)

Back in 1987, I remember our lender's representative doing his level best to make an endowment mortgage sound cool and exciting. We're both very cautious when it comes to potentially losing large amounts of money, so he didn't get anywhere. But lots of people will have bought into similar appeals.

Just read a *huge* spoiler for JEANNE DIELMAN ET CAETERA courtesy of the @lrb.co.uk . A warning, at least, would have been nice.

Alas, can't be done. I was mightily impressed with Pong when I first saw it, but that was in sixth form.

Good honest October In October I read – or finished reading – two books from the £10 Box: Kate Wilhelm, Somerset Dreams D.F. Jones, Xeno Reviews on blog. I also read (or finished) Thomas Pynchon, Vineland My favourite…

Right with you.

gapingsilence.wordpress.com/2025/12/14/g...

Sure, "it could be you"; it could be you whose number on the roulette wheel comes up every time, and who always backs a long-odds winner. That's what you'd say if yoj were promoting gambling companies, because your believing that will statistically only benefit them.

No one who wasn't a politician would say that gambling "brings joy to a lot of people" without acknowledging that it (necessarily and unavoidably) brings misery to a lot more.

It's been pointed out to me that the gambling industry is in fact within Nandy's remit, so there's that. But this statement is still a prize exhibit in the Museum of Political Idiocy.

I think it’s “basically anyone who hasn’t demonstrated implacable hostility to the Left”. Surprised, etc.

Apart from anything else, what business is it of the Culture Secretary to take any kind of view on gambling? (This point would have been made loud and clear if her take on it had been negative.)

My guess is that they'll find someone else who feels a pressing need to resign over the weekend, although it won't be Starmer.

The line now seems to be that Number 10 asked the FCDO whether Mandelson could be treated as fully vetted and was told they could, whereupon Number 10 asked – just to be sure – whether due process had been followed and was told it had.

Bad, bad FCDO, tacitly redefining 'due process' like that!

He could have come out fighting – "we've won a majority so I've got a mandate, things are going to be different now" – but he never did. He would have had to have ideas of his own and be ready to assert them against McSweeney, and McSweeney was the one who'd been feeding him lines up to then.

It's quite an experience, the fish show. One long string of
Bad Guys Do Something Incredibly Stupid
Good Guys Do Something Incredibly Unethical
How Would That Even Work?
UNIT Person Is Incredibly Unprofessional
Russell Tovey Says Nothing At All With Great Sincerity
and
So *This* Is The Plot Now?

Man Torn Over Which Shirt Worthy Of Wooden Hanger Area Resident Considers Pros, Cons Of Each Garment

Man Torn Over Which Shirt Worthy Of Wooden Hanger theonion.com/man-torn-over-which-shir...

GenAI breeds delusions, beginning with the delusion that "this will do".

As for #2, if we assume "a lot of literary talent" has actually been observed, it's vanishingly unlikely to look like #3/#4, let alone like #1/#4.

Reject premise of identical results. I'd expect #4 to have a lot of similarity with #3 if the AI was any good, and a lot of similarity with #1 if it was crap, but I would not expect ##1 and 3 to look at all alike.

Hookland was made by Soviet science fiction and cosmonauts. It was made by pulp novels my mother didn’t want me to read, but that my Aunt Barbara still lent me. Made by countless bad films surreptitiously watched on an old black and white TV. It has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at the work of Stephen King because Salem’s Lot was brilliant when I read it at 11 and still is. In fact, it has been shaped by a refusal to sneer at anything that generated a sense of sublime, awe and terror in childhood – even being forced to perform interpretive dance to Tomita. It has been made by brilliant writers – Aickman, Machen, Jackson – and it has been made by bad ones. It owes large debts to comics, goth, punk and movie soundtracks that is will never repay. Its substitute parents are free public libraries and Radio 4. It comes with a childhood place soaked with fear of ghosts and UFOs, it comes from a place of love for those exact same engines of terror. It comes from a revulsion for how psychogeography has increasingly became an academic and art language that excludes people from their own primal experience of landscape. It comes for a raging dislike of commodity writing about place and nature. It comes from an absolute refusal to allow fascists to easily occupy their cherished grounds of myth and folklore. It comes from the cunning, the ghost soil, the landscape of England as experienced by this broken body for five long decades. It comes from being a Fully-grown Changeling. Fay Godwin, Paul Nash and Dame Laura Knight are always muttering about it with disapproval in the imagined afterlife. Nothing in it is made up, just remembered differently. It was designed to be a permissive space, a common ground where people could explore and find their own hauntings. You all own it, you all make it. You are all marching with the spirits of dead spaceman, wood sprites and a thousand lost childhoods. You are all scuffling up your memories, your own stories as you navigate across th…

Today's answer to What is Hookland?

Clearly there are more important things to get off one's bike about at the moment than Peter Bradshaw's reviews, but a change is as good as a rest.

It's a "he's a ghost, she's a man, it's a sledge, Bond's dead" level of spoilerage. It's the kind of review you just don't write, or not till the film's been out for a few years.

...and yes, he includes the shocking revelation.

He then ploughs right on to reveal a slew of other plot details related to the shocking revelation. The review doesn't just contain spoilers, it consists of spoilers; it's addressed exclusively to an audience who have seen the film.

I really must stop reading Peter Bradshaw reviews.

I've just read his review of THE DRAMA; it's billed as containing spoilers, but I already knew the shocking revelation the trailer doesn't show, so I thought I was OK.

Bradshaw devotes most of his review to describing the plot, as he often does...

"Just get it done - and don't involve us."

If you look at the 1997 election, Labour's polling dropped a lot in the run-up - but it was *really* high before then. I think people like McS must have factored that in, & expected Labour to finish up in the high 30%s and with a reduced Tory majority. Low 30% & a win was a surprise all round.

And that's how you end up with very senior civil servants being told to stretch points, blur lines and keep shtum, to get Peter what Peter wants. It's also how you end up with a Prime Minister who never takes an initiative and whose idea of policy development is drifting to the Right.

8/8

You've also got an 'advisor' (McSweeney) whose ostensible boss (Keir Starmer) is actually his creation – and who, again, can pull the plug on him any time he likes.

And you've got a Prime Minister who can be leant on at any time, by someone who can in turn be leant on by Peter Mandelson.

7/n

Put all of that together and what have you got?

I think you've got someone (Peter Mandelson) who can pull the plug on his protégé (Morgan McSweeney) any time he likes.

6/n

It's also well known – again, because the people involved have told us – that McSweeney's stock-in-trade is pitching to the reactionary Right and undermining political rivals through negative briefings, and that he was close to the great practitioner of this combination, Peter Mandelson.

5/n