Hand sanitiser gels contain microplastics.

🤦🏼‍♂️

A wee visitor to our garden at night…

Homeschooling break in the garden.

An Ann rose in our garden.

Here’s one way to look at Facebook in a culture war context: the conflict is already there, Facebook is just an arms dealer.

Ming-Na Wen is indisputably awesome.

Maltese boats.

Vivid memories from a holiday to Malta very nearly 20 years ago.

Colourful boats in a harbour in Malta.Colourful Maltese boats from autumn 2000.

The view from our back garden in Dollar, Scotland, 30 years ago.

Photo by my late mother.

Looking down at Dollar in 1990, from a house in the High Street.

Looking back at locked-down May in 1 second every day.

Down by the Adur.

The news we need, if not the news we deserve: Dogmatix to Get His Own Asterix Comic Book

Reusable containers safe during Covid-19 pandemic, say experts.

Time to get the Keep Cup out again.

One unexpected - but happy - side effect of lockdown: I’m now wearing jeans of a waist size I haven’t managed to squeeze into since my 20s.

It is just possible that 1989 Adam was trying a bit too hard.

This was a useful read for me - and I suspect might help others:

How to engage with life when you feel down

Malta in early autumn 2000. While the clothes certainly date it, the complete absence of phones is quite remarkable. Just a film camera and a chunky video camera.

Tourists in Malta in autumn 2000.

More lockdown creativity: This is the most unusual version of Tubular Bells I’ve come across - but it all comes together in the end!

My daughter just uttered the phrase: “No. You are NOT selling my precious Shakespeare books!”

BRB - exploding with pride.

Clare Foges:

Politics can either be a parlour game of ideological point-scoring or it can be the business of meaningful change. To be the latter our politicians must avoid the temptations of descending deeper into the culture wars.

I am middle-aged enough that I really am very excited about my new compost bin. 🌱

Gaming through the eyes of privilege

20 years ago I was quite involved with the tabletop gaming world, and the fringes of the SFF world, as an author. Hit Amazon or Wikipedia and you can see the tracks of my time there.

For me it was a good escape and a creatively rewarding outlet in a tricky period of my life.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that for many others it was a community where they opened themselves to harassment and abuse just by their very presence. And that should never have been acceptable.

Many people, including a few I worked with, have been accused of harassment and assault. There was a wave a few years back. And now there’s been a second round of exposures.

The fact that it was such a positive place for me, and such a negative one for people less white, straight and male than me, is a pretty good example of exactly how privilege works.