Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026For me, it depends on my familiarity with the author’s speech patterns and dialect.I only really appreciated Les Murray after hearing him read, though he was not really a perfomance poet. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026For a birthday in his late 80s my dad separately requested vaccuum cleaner bags from several members of his family: they slept like bats in his bag grotto (an understairs cupboard). For his 75th we got him a flight in a biplane. He liked that too, and convinced the pilot to do a loop. 001
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 26/09/2026I have this Carrie, lmk if you want me to scan it for you. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026I can’t lie down and read a book on the floor (or consult several so located books) if an armrest is in the way. 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026No. But universal credit replaced benefits for families, for working people and people looking for work or unable to work because of sickness or caring responsibilities. It also extends to some people over pension age where they have a working age partner. 020
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026but by the time I was five I must have drunk from the well of the patriarchy. One day, dad took me with him to collect my mother from night school. I was unsurprised to find myself confronted with the other nemesis of my infancy: the open staircase. 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Additional to the horror of the thing itself was the disquieting thought that my mother somehow had a life independent of her duties to *me*. Aged four I knew my mother had had a very important job at Sainsbury’s HQ, as an operator in the switching room of their pneumatic capsule messaging system, 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Night School. When the happily named dinner lady Mrs Currie accosted me in the playground and asked if I was Molly Blackwell’s son and I admitted that I was, she told me that she and my mother attended night school together. I did not greatly like school, but night school sounded very much worse. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026I used to drink flowers bitter there, back when I worked at Lisson Grove Health Centre; I also drank, by way of contrast, at Crocker’s Folly, no longer recognisably a pub. 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 31/08/2026He was a DWP secretary who made Therese Coffey seem engaged. Also: “melmentum” 020
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 15/08/2026I remember my infant son testing a pound coin in his mouth and telling me, more in perplexity than sorrow, ‘pretend chocolate money’. 0383
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Unambitious man deems homemade eclipse viewer adequate. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 11/08/2026The government also intends to change planning law to make it harder to open new vaping and betting shops. 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 11/08/2026In rhe UK, vaping is much much cheaper than smoking per milligram of nicotine absorbed, mostly due to higher tax on cigarettes. There will be a new tax on vaping from October. 210
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 07/08/2026Especially as the removal of the two child limit means many more families are capped 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/07/2026You can’t infer the latter from the graph shown, because we don’t know how long the people still alive will go on living. The new drug *could* be curative for some subtypes of pancreatic cancer and ineffective for others. 120
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 21/07/2026A friend was in a choir with Anna Burns. When Anna returned to choir after winning the Booker (and I think a period of illness), they sang The Milkman of Human Kindness to welcome her back. 161
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 17/07/2026My son would throw his rabbit from his cot and wail until it was retrieved for him. I asked him if he threw the rabbit so we would visit him and he gave me a look I could only interpret as ‘finally the fool has understood one thing about how the world works’. 050
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 14/07/2026Well no but yes…. www.computerweekly.com/news/3665534...computerweekly.comTop science journal faced secret attacks from Covid conspiracy theory group | Computer WeeklyOne of the world’s most prestigious general science journals, was the target of a two-year long sustained and virulent secret attack by a conspiratorial group of extreme Brexit lobbyists with high-lev... 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 05/07/2026troubled by that Boot of Damocles hanging over to their right. 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 25/06/2026farce first: theonion.com/man-finally-...theonion.comMan Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist MovementWASHINGTON—After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant ... 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 20/06/2026Go to Brighton or maybe Lewes - about an hour by train and 15 or so degrees fahrenheit cooler 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 13/05/2026Hated in the country, loathed by the party and a teeny-tiny majority in his constituency. Not universally adored by healthcare workers. Even if he can unite the technofools and blueshirts of the PLP right, surely that’s wouldn’t be enough? 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 03/05/2026Hmm. I quite like my heat pump drier, but it does take four hours to dry more than a few items. 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 29/04/2026It was good! And as it supplied both birthday event and gift for my friend, it also delightfully efficient. 020
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 25/04/2026thus the crazy impetus to force the humans out of the loop 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/04/2026You could address these by continuing the child disability elements and work allowance during the child’s apprenticeship, and mandating child maintenance over the same period (ie do not treat apprenticeships as paid employment for maintenance purposes). 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/04/2026Parents of disabled children lose any child disability elements in UC as well as the basic child amount. 100
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/04/2026Working single parents who do not have another child lose their work allowance (the amount they can earn without universal credit being affected). Single parents are more likely to receive child maintenance than couples and to see it reduced or lost once the apprenticeship starts. 100
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/04/2026I think the worst issues here are the differences in treatment between couples and single parents and the loss of child disability support. 100
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 23/04/2026maybe so, but for a 35 hour week it’s more than three times what a single person under 25 on universal credit is expected to live on - apprentice MW has increased 70% in real terms over the past 10 years. 100
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 22/04/2026Yes - disappointing that many English local CTR schemes are silent on the treatment of the transitional element (as a result taking it into account as income). 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 18/04/2026Median FT earnings 39k. 6.1k annuity per 100k (single, LPI, no health, no protected period) gives closer to 640k. I didn’t include SRP (you said fully funded) this accounts for c200k of the difference. 100
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 18/04/2026Yes, but then this *is* a very good investment. 000
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 18/04/2026You’d need about £700,000 in today’s money - your 8k investment needs real terms growth of very roughly 7.5%. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 18/04/2026Latterly Thames, now Southern. Great company. Brilliant financial engineers, top notch contract lawyers. And to be fair, perhaps us poms are due a bit of reverse colonisation. 010
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 13/04/2026If they’re doing this at MS now, we should prepare for a post MS future. If they’re foisting it on customers, but not on themselves, we should prepare for a post MS future. 020
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 08/04/2026Reminds me of the very first error I reported on .GOV.UK - you couldn’t successfully search for Jobseeker’s Allowance because IIRC it was comparing a literal apostrophe against its UTF encoding. 110
Tim Blackwell @timblackwell.bsky.social · 26/03/2026Good to get into the weeds on this, but surprised that there was no mention of Hegseth gutting the Civilian Protection Centre www.politico.com/news/2026/03...politico.comHegseth ignored military officials when he slashed offices that limit risk to civiliansThe Defense secretary’s decision to cut offices that mitigate civilian harm faces renewed attention as the Pentagon investigates a strike that killed hundreds of Iranian children. 040
