iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 12h

If the UK broke up would all the people who are currently British but not English (in Braverman's concept) suddenly become English as it replaced Britishness as a state identity category rather than an ethnic category?

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

Every time I read about other property markets I'm relieved to live in a place where property was never going to make enough money to be worth considering as an investment rather than a home.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Got the band wrong. Actually Atomic Kitten. Own your errors etc.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I pay my fucking subs and you give me an All Saints earworm. Bastards.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by a fucking idiot, full of sound and fury Signifying nothing.

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Sarah O'Connor @sarahoconnorft.ft.com · 24/09/2026

Please excuse me while I scream into a cushion at the thought of ALL the articles I had to write on the "UK productivity puzzle" in the 2010s www.ft.com/content/c819...

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Actually had time to pop in to the new library today. Still think it's all really well put together.

Side elevation of Huddersfield town hall taken from the balcony of the new Huddersfield library.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

My unacceptable opinion on this is that MPs should be banned from their constituencies by something like the five mile act until a period of pre-election purdah. All the local interest/casework stuff should be handled by councillors. Central London MPs have to join sittings and vote on teams.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

I lost interest in my own family tree when the branches revealed most of them had just been hanging around a few patches of the south pennines for hundreds of years (surnames heatmap shown). Even with this parochialism I presumably wouldn't qualify due to some irishness.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Obviously it's easier to say this on a lovely autumn day but this is a really pleasant well designed space. Plenty of people hanging around generally mooching already.

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Balderdash @balderdash.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

69 today. Happy birthday Nick Cave.

Black and white photo of Max Wall about to sit down at the piano

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

They should get an actual lion (not a tame lion you know) to do the voice over for Aslan and then just have subtitles.

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Municipal Dreams @municipaldreams.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

🚨 Brand new post: high ideals, regretted compromises, harsh realities - a study of Huddersfield's housing and civic history from 1951 to the present ... municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2026/09/22/a...

Buxton House, an 11-storey block, designed by Bernard Engle & Partners with Bernard Kramer’s mural Systematic Sequence in Line and Shade

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Tim Chapman @othersfield.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Had an early look round Queensgate Square and the new library. Pretty nice.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

In my early teens my uncle gave us a gazetteer/road atlas which I used to plan longish (60 miles) circular bike rides up to the dales from West Yorkshire. It was far too heavy to carry around so I had to memorise the route before setting off. Does this count as knowledge rich curriculum?

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Katie Martin @katie0martin.ft.com · 21/09/2026

Did he by any chance say we should believe him?

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The cost of not seeing urban consolidation. The dot map shows total population and overall density in North Kirklees (Dewsbury) should mean a sixth large West Yorkshire town, but the failure to consolidate and focus services on one town centre can be seen in the weak decentred bus network.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Cyclists on pavements is bad but I've just cycled home from work through about 150 cunts in hatchbacks donutting on a roundabout that's being used by a fleet of tanker drivers trying to compensate for a bust sewer main in Elland and I think anyone who likes cars should be nailed to a fucking tree.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Here is a photo of my daughter when she was two where I always imagine she was trying to do an impression of Wilson looking thoughtful and wise with his pipe and face paint cat's whiskers.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Just remembered that this photo of Harold Wilson hoofing a retriever in the head exists.

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Carlton Reid @carltonreid.com · 18/09/2026

These things are filed in my head under “rank hypocrisy” — take, for instance, then MP Kate Hoey raging against “all cyclists run red lights” and who was later convicted of guess what in her car?

Belfast Telegraph headline: Kate Hoey fined for running red light.

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Carlton Reid @carltonreid.com · 18/09/2026

I ran a fair few stories on the taxi tycoons mistaken rants at the time. I met with him and handed him an “ipayroadtax” cycling jersey, the campaign I was running at the time which explained how “road tax” no longer exists and hasn’t paid for roads since 1930s.

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Carlton Reid @carltonreid.com · 18/09/2026

In 2012, Addison Lee boss John Griffin was all over the news when he ranted that cyclists should “pay road tax.” Yesterday, HMRC won its case saying that, since 2013, the taxi man has been avoiding paying income tax. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Telegraph headline from 2012:

Cyclists should pay road tax, says taxi boss Careless cyclists are on a
'voyage into the abyss'
The head of London's largest minicab company says cyclists should think more about their own safety before "throwing themselves on to some of the most congested spaces in the world".

Guardian headline today:

Addison Lee founder owes
£20.5m in tax after UK tribunal ruling
HMRC wins challenge over John Griffin's claim to be non-dom despite having lived in England since childhood. With pic of old man in office.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

How free access to bus services that don't exist isn't much use.

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Mark D @markjd84.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Which of England's roads carries the most buses? by me, with #OpenStreetMap and related tools cultivate-transport.uk/blog.html

cultivate-transport.uk

All of England's buses for an hour | cultivate transport

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Either these dicks don't know what a principality is or this is the real reason Harry and Meghan are back.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Going to get Lisa Nandy to fund an opera house for Huddersfield by describing it as plucky.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

TBH I have been hoping, waiting for an overweening state to destroy the way of life of small Oxfordshire villages ever since reading Good Omens as a teenager.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

I commute by bike but don't ride on pavements (except occasionally within the guidance set out by Paul Boateng when it became an offence) and obey traffic law so I don't have responsibility for or solidarity with people who don't.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Can't believe it's been nearly 1100 years since that slag Athelstan smashed into the kingdom of York following the death of Sigtrygg, it still freaks my nut out to this day.

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Mike @mikeyashworth.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

The original plans for the mighty Hebble Viaduct/Burdock Way, planned for Halifax, W Yorkshire, in the late '60s - only Phase I was built. I've seen the second before but not the first; from a 1973 Corporation brochure they appears to be by J D Monroe Harvey. @roads.org.uk @c20society.bsky.social

Inner Relief Road - Stages I & II : Hebble Viaducts from North Bridge : County Borough of Halifax : Inner Relief Road : completion of stage I : brochure : Borough Engineer's Office : Halifax Corporation : Husband & Co. : Sheffield : April 1973 :

At least one of these sketches, that looking west, was reproduced in a contemporary Official Handbook to the town but this copy, from the brochure issued by the County Borough's Borough Engineer and Surveyor along with the Consulting Engineer's, Husband & Co. of Sheffield, is much clearer and I have not seen this, the second sketch, looking east from North Bridge, before. They appear to be by John Dean Monroe Harvey (1895 – 1978), one of the greatest British post-war architectural perspectivists. Here we see the broad span of the Victorian North Bridge, designed to ease traffic movement in the Victorian town, underneath the planned double level viaducts across the Hebble Valley.

Stages I & II : View from New Bank : County Borough of Halifax : Inner Relief Road : completion of stage I : brochure : Borough Engineer's Office : Halifax Corporation : Husband & Co. : Sheffield : April 1973 : At least one of these sketches, that looking west, was reproduced in a contemporary Official Handbook to the town but this copy, from the brochure issued by the County Borough's Borough Engineer and Surveyor along with the Consulting Engineer's, Husband & Co. of Sheffield, is much clearer and I have not seen the second sketch, looking east from North Bridge, before. They appear to be by John Dean Monroe Harvey (1895 – 1978), one of the greatest British post-war architectural perspectivists.

This sketch looking west from New Bank shows the final version of the planned roads soaring across the Hebble, the old North Bridge below and the now conserved Dean Clough Mill complex to the right.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

It would be refreshing to see someone suggest that we should just keep on pushing taxation up to find the point where Laffer's theory can be proved.

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Jack Bailey @jack-bailey.co.uk · 12/09/2026

The post isn't even internally consistent. If the UK "is taxing itself to death", and if Laffer is right that "taxes can become so punitive they reduce revenues", then why would lowering taxes require you to cut spending?

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Huddersfield Exposed @huddersfield.exposed · 12/09/2026

There's also a free talk on Wednesday evening about Joseph Kaye, aka "The Builder of Huddersfield". huddersfieldhistory.org.uk/event/herita...

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Solve the problems of successive brutal invasions/regime changes with this one weird hack. Live in agriculturally poor upland areas that nobody can be arsed fighting over. Welcome to the South Pennines.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

I have some terrible news about the existing centralised power, egalitarian structure and efficient tax collection that made pre-conquest England so attractive to outside aggressors.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

In Huddersfield we call them as we do not have the concept of people making overnight stays for leisure.

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Can only assume the leader of my local council thought insane, AI generated, union flag/mad spider/synthetic rug backdrop was a winner.

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Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

For a sign of how absurd this is, *Theodor Herzl* did not observe dietary laws particularly closely, did not keep Shabbat, and was not in any way religious!

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Chaminda Jayanetti @cjayanetti.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

because Justin Webb is openly and brazenly right wing he is untouchable at the "woke left wing" BBC

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Chaminda Jayanetti @cjayanetti.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

if you're openly right wing and you are at the BBC you have the best job security of anyone at the entire corporation, because they won't touch you because they fear the Telegraph headlines that would follow.

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Municipal Dreams @municipaldreams.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

🚨 Brand new post: A Housing (and Civic) History of Huddersfield: the first post takes the story up to 1918, when Huddersfield - the second town to build council housing - was ‘as advanced a town as any in the kingdom’: municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2026/09/08/h...

Black and white aerial photo showing rows of terraced council housing in an industrial landscape

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Bob Melling @bobmelling.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

There is something sinister about the notion that 501 seagulls should be attached to a giant, aunt killing peach. Why does no-one say something about what "the peach" says about its creator and his views on killing aunts, giant peaches and seagulls?

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