Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Nobody "leads" a shortlist! The authors are all on the shortlist together! Grr! 2542
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Didn't buy that copy of Palladian in Skoob a few months ago and have thought about it 2-3 times a week since, but it's fine, found the exact same edition in the Dalston Oxfam yesterday, for £1.99, sometimes satan *is* looking out for you 🥹 140
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I'm reading a charity shop copy of 'At the Source' by Gillian Clarke, an experience elevated by its previous reader being a poet who clearly knew her, at one point quite closely. Who?? This extra layer of text is making me very emotional. 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Woke early and went to get a glass of water from the kitchen, whereupon, in the dark, I stepped on a slug. I won't disturb you by describing the loose, slow way it burst under my heel, or the viscous remains I had to wipe from my skin and the floor. I mean only to record the experience as exorcism. 100
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Found a copy of Edgar Morin's Les Stars for £1.50 in Cancer Research what the fuck is going on in Crystal Palace 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Excellent trip to Crystal Palace Museum today. NOT ONLY are its photo captions all incredibly poetic - "brickdust billows from open windows", "dawn breaks over smouldering ruins", etc - BUT ALSO these are presented in ✨️Comic Sans💝 250
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/09/2026I'm always hoping you'll be faithful but you're not, I suppose We've both given up smoking 'cause it's fatal - so whose matches are those? 130
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Riddled with bangers. And with brilliantly silly lyrics like "if my balls of steel have got stuck halfway down your pipe / I've got some KY time to open open open wide" 130
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Had to explain 'Educating Rita' to one of the kids I was tutoring today, and the RELIEF on her face when I told her that Michael Caine and Julie Walters do not, in fact, fuck 031
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026One way to make reading the new Rachel Cusk novel more fun is to pretend that M from 'Life of M' is the the same M as M from James Bond 020
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/09/2026One morning our entire primary school was led into the assembly hall, sat cross-legged in rows with the blinds down, as they screened 'Apaches' on the projector usually reserved for displaying the lyrics to hymns. I guess a local child had recently died on some farming equipment? 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Booker shortlist announcement tonight, and the algorithm has decided to send me SO MANY "I read the longlist and here are my predictions" videos that I think it'd be best if they announce M John Harrison and Makenna Goodman and then the mic cuts and there's a powercut until November 100
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/09/2026Ah, the true test of how far your life has fallen: the job application form 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Currently tripping my absolute balls off at the Anish Kapoor exhibition 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 16/09/2026Sometimes (like just now) my mum texts me an X, unprompted, no accompanying message, and I know it's a sign of love but it also feels like I'm being targeted by a serial killer 040
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 16/09/2026That involuntary wince and intake of breath when you see that Adam Mars-Jones has a reviewed a novel you plan to read and hope to enjoy 170
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 16/09/202641 years ago today Kate Bush breathed "it's you and me, daddy" over some synth violins and actually THAT's why the entire millennial generation is bisexual 040
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Found some children's modelling clay in the bottom of my bag so I made a miniature still life to go on the bookshelf 020
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 08/09/2026It's raining and though he can go out he doesn't want to and he just bit one of my toes about it 141
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 03/09/2026I asked my student how fleshing out her essay plan was going and she sent me back this 0112
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 03/09/2026Losing my mind in West London. Walking along behind a woman telling a boy who is no more than eight "what women find sexy is a man who is good at his job" 101
Reposted by SwithunSimon Nixon @nixonsimon.bsky.social · 31/08/2026Amazing. It seems that plagiarism is only a problem for The Times when black people do it 91259439
Reposted by SwithunMatthew Fox @mattfoxwriter.bsky.social · 25/08/2026After a summer in which Europe was literally on fire, maybe we've reached a 'tipping point' in the public understanding of climate change: Every £1 of oil we drill and burn costs us more than £4 in the damage caused by heatwaves, storms, forest fires, floods, crop failures, rising food prices... 184
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Also grabbed this from the Fruitmarket Gallery bookshop on my way to the station. Sample from the Toni Cade Bambara interview: "For all my Aries impulsiveness, I'm a plodder; my Mercury conjunct with Saturn is in Aries, too, so I like to get things sorted before I leap." Toni 💝 062
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/08/2026Re-read Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr on the train home from Edinburgh. So good, so creepy and shadowy. What a brilliant idea to set the dream house not in some deep dark wood of the psyche, but stark and alone on an arid plain. 130
Reposted by SwithunAndy Churnwell @churnwell.bsky.social · 19/08/2026This is what it's like living in the UK. It's like having somebody with this face screaming at you relentlessly while the country burns and the rivers fill up with sewage. 731576
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 19/08/2026My Airbnb host's orchids are so successful I need them to be fake. for my own sanity 040
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 17/08/2026They've just changed crew on the train to Edinburgh and the new announcer sounds just like my Auntie Dot, but it is not her, because she would NEVER get a train to Edinburgh given that it is "full of English twats like you" 💝🥹 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 12/08/2026What I really want from the eclipse is some kind of spiritual reset. For act one of the year of the fire horse - and truly the horse has been on fire, fucking HELL - to end as the sun's reappearance heralds act two. I know you all want this too. I know ritual when I see it. 0103
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/08/2026I cannot believe I am going to for this, but -- my sister is disabled. She can walk but can't run or do stairs. She has to manage her energy most of the week, work from home (sometimes bedbound) so she can go out and about in a mostly non-accessible society at weekends. (1/3) 140
Reposted by SwithunSerpent's Tail @serpents-tail.bsky.social · 05/08/2026🎧 Listen to Adrian Duncan on The Library of Lazy Thinking podcast 🎧 The author of the upcoming #AThoughtWithoutCollision talks Jo Lloyd's collection, 'The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies' and how these stories relate to his own work. Listen here: lazythinking.substack.com/p/adrian-dun...lazythinking.substack.comAdrian Duncan on The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo LloydWriter and artist Adrian Duncan shares his thoughts on The Earth, Thy Great Exchequer, Ready Lies by Jo Lloyd 032
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Putting off starting the final volume of Proust because I don't want it to be over, also because then I might have to actually read Infinite Jest 150
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/07/2026Finalising my trip to Edinburgh and fondly remembering all the terrible Edinburgh shows I have seen. Once I ended up in the front row, and the solo performer did a big serious stare directly into my face and I laughed aloud, into mEaNiNgFuL siLeNcE. Then: blackout. It was the end of the show. 240
Reposted by Swithuncones @coneshotline.bsky.social · 20/07/2026it is 2066. roving bands of brits pin scraps of the bayeux tapestry to their rags as they traverse the blighted wasteland. musk’s head in a jar rules the badlands, the crystal tower of number 10 north crumbling in the distance. lisa nandy is still culture secretary 19316
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 17/07/2026Is the 50-something man in a Siouxsie Sioux T-shirt and Birkenstocks dating the much younger woman with the stick'n'poke tattoos, or is she his London-raised, equally hipster daughter? You literally NEVER know the story in a Peckham coffee shop 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 15/07/2026In 24 hours EXACTLY I will be unemployed and it's already making me a more appealing person 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 14/07/2026This led me to look this guy up and he's 48. FORTY EIGHT! That's nothing! Gay men older than you go clubbing in mesh vests! Stop going to bed at 4pm and comparing erections with your son whose blood you inject, or whatever it is you do, and just LIVE! Then maybe you'll be okay with dying someday. 071
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 13/07/2026I think much British schooling functions, tacitly, through bullying. I had several teachers who picked a kid to victimise each year, to scare the rest of us as a form of class control. Often that kid was already marked as "different", & it gave silent permission for other kids to bully them in turn. 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 11/07/2026How does Nigella make having a drink and a bag of crisps during a shoddy football match sound like she's having the time of her life?! My mouth actually watered. We have, as ever, no choice but to stan 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/07/2026If I could travel in time I would use it only once, to go to San Francisco in 1979 and brush past Robert Glück in a sauna one midweek afternoon 010
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 06/07/2026Repurposed this class for the summer school today and it went down like a lead balloon 🙃 130
Reposted by Swithunceej @ceej.online · 06/07/2026I could probably eat ten, twenty madeleines without thinking 3455441
Reposted by SwithunJo Lloyd but jolly 🌍🐎 @jolloyds.bsky.social · 26/06/2026I have a story in Radio 4's new Once Upon a Time series - a week of reimagined fairytales in the Book at Bedtime slot Lineup includes Katherine Rundell, Ben Okri, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, and David Almond (I KNOW!!!) My story "Kakapos" is on 30 June and then on catchup www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...bbc.co.ukBBC Radio 4 - Once Upon a Time..., Kakapos by Jo LloydIn Jo Lloyd’s story, very ordinary Muriel meets Rip Van Winkle in the below world. 158720
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/06/2026It is, in my opinion, not a B-52s concert until I have been danced into by a stranger who is joyfully apologetic about it, and it happened twice tonight. Fantastic night 🫠💖 020
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 24/06/2026Really enjoyed the rural queer lives exhibition - but why nothing on Bernd, the patron saint of gay rural Germans, from 'Taxi Zum Klo'? 120
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/06/2026The Schwules Museum has exhibitions on Susan Sontag, rural LGBTQ+ lives, and queerness and Christianity. Because they knew I was coming, presumably? 141
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 23/06/2026Doing a really good job of not buying too many new books - only five so far today! 110
Swithun @swithuncooper.bsky.social · 22/06/2026I'm in Berlin - a city I think is okay, but which hates me, presumably for not loving it. Haven't even left the airport and already it's given me lip 110
