I’m sorry to hear that. As our dear departed mutual friend Mark Watson (the heart transplantee) always said, ‘Life is worth the fight’ so please keep on keeping on.

Police treating arson attack as antisemitic hate crime It comes as a man attempts to ignite a plastic bag containing containing fluid in north-west London.

And another one.

It would be nice — albeit a triumph of hope over experience — to think we had vocal allies right about now.

Reports of a third attempted arson attack on Jewish targets in North London this week. It's getting really scary and more people need to start taking it seriously.

So that’s what Chris is up to these days. It’s been a while since I heard news of him. Send him my best and wish him luck from me.

It’s like he’s in the room with you… revelatory, astonishing and beautiful!

Monty, a Yorkie-Lhasa Apso cross, who fits perfectly into the gap between my leg and my chair’s armrest.

Optimal workplace configuration achieved this afternoon

I liked to climb high towers — To conjure up a bit of sorrow to make new verse.

I bought this from Venus Vinyl in Norwich a few years ago — must listen again, thanks for the reminder!

Congoman YouTube video by The Congos - Topic

Happy 83rd birthday to Congo Ashanti Roy!
youtu.be/TkmDH-uw8fs?...

We have some fascinating archives @uniofeastanglia.bsky.social: contemporary literature (including poetry), film, visual arts, history, rare books. We also have Visiting Fellowships for writers to use them for research. Deadline to apply is 17th April: please share! www.uea.ac.uk/research/res...

That is disgraceful… I’m so sorry.

White House correspondents: “Maybe we should wear the pocket squares… tonight?”

Zarah Sultana: "Glad Keir Starmer's Labour government is prioritising stopping musicians from performing. "Wouldn't want them distracted from their complicity in Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people and an illegal war on Iran. "What a pathetic excuse of a Prime Minister.

If your commitment to the Palestinian cause extends to somehow taking issue with the government for banning a man who repeatedly said "I am a Nazi", released a song last year called "Heil Hitler", and sold swastika merchandise...maybe it's time to rethink your life choices.

Ian Hamilton, the Pillars of Hercules, and 1970s Soho Literary Scene Between 1974 and 1979, Soho was the epicenter of an emergent young London literary scene, over which the poet, critic, biographer, and television presenter Ian Hamilton presided with rumpled, charisma...

Looking forward to chairing this celebration of the great critic, poet & biographer Ian Hamilton in Soho in two weeks’ time, where I’ll interview his son Matthew & the poet Hugo Williams. Advance tickets have sold out but some will be available on the door. Come along! wegottickets.com/event/692987

It’s a matter of different strands of Judaism, I think. Jewish law proscribes anything but burial, so the Orthodox follow that, but Liberal Judaism is more flexible.

Joe Orton Television Interview 1967 YouTube video by THEORTONCOLLECTIVE

Here’s Joe Orton at his best: charming and funny in discussing his conviction and imprisonment for defacing library books, on Eamonn Andrews’ talk show in April 1967. As he wrote in his diary, “I had a dreamy look about me — barbiturates.”

youtu.be/rWmVsEEHIPc?...

Joe Orton’s diary entry for April 23rd 1967, after appearing on the Eamonn Andrews show under the influence of his (Orton’s) partner Kenneth Halliwell’s barbiturates.

That diary entry for April 23rd 1967. “I looked very good and came over well … They photographed everyone to look as pretty as possible and, having no competition, I won.”

Joe Orton Television Interview 1967 YouTube video by THEORTONCOLLECTIVE

Here’s Joe Orton at his best: charming and funny in discussing his conviction and imprisonment for defacing library books, on Eamonn Andrews’ talk show in April 1967. As he wrote in his diary, “I had a dreamy look about me — barbiturates.”

youtu.be/rWmVsEEHIPc?...

There’s sadness at the talent lost, of what more he might have produced, but too much of his personal life was stomach-turning and you sense that in any case this was never likely to be a long life.

Just finished… oof. Acidulous, scalpel-sharp, funny, charming but ultimately repellent. At first I felt haunted by knowledge of how it would end but, after Orton spends spring 1967 in Tangier living out his fantasies of sex with children, his murder finally prompted a feeling of indifference.

The cat with the sharpest claws in the world is ’helping’ with my convalescence

12" of Augustus Pablo - King Tubby's Meets Rockers Uptown on Island Records label. Released in 1977. Produced by Augustus Pablo.

🧵1/12

I'm picking out a dozen deep dubs from the 1970s today in a 'House of Reggae plays the dub masters at Bluesky station'.

Starting off with the don of all dub versions. This was so good, Island made it the A side...

youtu.be/A_Fyp0I_WjA?...

#reggae #reggaesky #vinylsky #vinyl #musicsky #dub

The headline is misleading — this article is instructive and encouraging for anyone (like me) who’s writing memoir for the first time and is concerned to avoid accusations of self-indulgence.

My mum would have been 79 today. Here she is in the mid-1970s in her and Dad’s flat in the Cranbrook Estate, off Roman Road, London E2. Sometimes I still feel her gaze, and it usually gives me a kick up the backside when I need one. I miss her very much.

It feels extremely bad that in the absence of actual Jews people will just be antisemitic to non-Jews to demean them, it’s a reminder that the Jew is not a person but an abstraction

In some ways Joseph Roth is the perfect writer to read in these times… in other ways, not so much.

“In principle of course we do, but we’re up against a very tight deadline here, so needs must!” Etc, etc…

i know writers who use AI and they're not writers

if you don’t like the process of writing then don’t be a fucking writer, it’s not that complicated

An excerpt from the article: "Anyone who has studied the Talmud in detail will be acutely aware of how the sages viewed the state-sanctioned death penalty. The Torah’s imposition of death as a punishment for various crimes is unambiguous, with four distinct methods delineated. However, the leading religious authorities of the late Second Temple era, as subsequently set out in the Talmudic tractate of Sanhedrin, effectively made the death penalty impossible to enact. "Let me give a few examples to underscore the point. There needed to be at least two witnesses to the crime, both observant Jewish men, not related to each other. The witnesses had to have specifically warned the individual carrying out the crime that it was an action punishable by the death penalty, and the perpetrator had to have actively and verbally acknowledged that they knew this and were doing it anyway. "Moving on to the court case itself; if the justices on the court unanimously ruled in favour of death the verdict was negated, on the assumption that if not a single judge could find a reason to vote against death then the court was clearly biased. Ultimately, using a logic which can only really be described as Talmudic, the late Second Temple’s religious authorities determined that a verdict of death could only be decided if the Sanhedrin, the highest Jewish court, was sitting in a specific location on the Temple Mount – and thereafter permanently stopped convening there."

I've written about how - despite the awful spectacle of convicted terrorists being released from Israeli jails as a result of Hamas demands in return for freeing captives, the death penalty cannot be Israel's answer.

www.jewishnews.co.uk/knessets-dea...