Cathy Kennedy 🎗️

@Adam_FineArt @RCT @swordersfineart Beautiful. I have a copy of Van Dyck’s portrait of Cornelius Van der Geest that brings me such joy and pleasure every time.

The success of a copy depends on its ability to capture the spirit of the original. This example derived from Van Dyck’s ‘The Eldest Children of Charles I’, the original of which is in @RCT, is offered in the upcoming @swordersfineart sale on 19th May.

@govauctionnews Those Victorian watercolorists were something else. Beautiful

Last week, in a dark corner of a quiet antiques shop in Mid Wales, I met these two chaps, sitting high up on the wall. My first thought was that they were probably prints, my second that, if they were original watercolours (as indeed they are) they were by William Henry Hunt...

@alt_w_v_g From a British pov, eBay is still the only place I browse and buy architectural antiques. I hate fb marketplace and there is no alternative site. I’ve used eBay since 2002 and ignore all their hyped stuff. Still, I’ve noticed the changes and hate them.

You used to sell stuff on eBay. Maybe an old camera. Maybe Beanie Babies. Maybe a coat that didn't fit. You paid a small fee. The buyer got the thing. Everyone went home. That eBay is gone. The website looks the same. The logo is the same. The 135 million buyers are still there. But the company isn't really a marketplace anymore. It is an advertising business with a marketplace attached for distribution. Last year, sellers paid eBay $2 billion just to make sure their own listings showed up. Read that again. The board calls this growth. A Canadian who runs a video game store called it something else. Here is what actually happened. In 2020 the board hired a new CEO. His name is Jamie Iannone. He arrived with a strategy called focused categories. In plain English, that means leaning into the stuff people pay extra for. Sneakers. Watches. Trading cards. Auto parts. The everyday seller, the person with the camera and the coat, was no longer the customer. The customer was now the seller who would pay to be seen. In 2025 eBay did $80 billion in transactions. They kept $11 billion of that as revenue. Of that $11 billion, $2 billion came from advertising. Sellers paid them $2 billion to promote listings on a website those sellers already pay fees to use. That is the growth story. In the same year, the number of enthusiast buyers, eBay's own term for their best customers, was 16 million. It was also 16 million the year before. And the year before that. And the year before that. Four years. Zero growth. They mention this on every earnings call without mentioning it. So what does a company do when growth stops? It buys back its own stock. In 2025, eBay returned over $3 billion to shareholders. Most of that was buybacks. In February the board authorized another $2 billion on top. Buybacks shrink the share count. Earnings per share goes up even when earnings stay flat. The stock price follows. The stock was $68 a year ago. It is $108 today. The company did not improve. The denominator got smaller. Then a man from Canada noticed. His name is Ryan Cohen. He runs GameStop. He started his career selling pet food online and sold it to PetSmart for $3.35 billion. He looked at eBay. 135 million buyers. $80 billion in transactions. Real margins. Real cash flow. A board harvesting the business instead of running it. He bought 5% of the company through derivatives and stock. Then on May 4, he offered to buy the rest. $125 per share. $56 billion total. On May 12, the eBay board rejected the bid. They called it not credible. The math is credible. What the board means by not credible is we would have to explain why we sold. Then Cohen went on Piers Morgan. He said eBay is run by a bunch of losers with perverse financial incentives. He pointed out that eBay's CEO has been paid $144 million over six years. He pointed out that he personally takes no salary and has put $128 million of his own money into the company he runs. You do not have to like Ryan Cohen to notice he is making a point that is hard to argue with. eBay used to be a place where regular people sold things to other regular people. Now it is a $48 billion company whose largest growth driver is charging its own sellers to advertise to a buyer base that stopped growing four years ago, while spending billions a year buying its own stock to make the chart go up. The board calls this strategy. A video game CEO from Canada called it what it is. The market is now waiting to see who else agrees. Plz fix. Thx. Sent from my iPhone

@twinturbomonkey @StJunt @iky_fwjett @eyojoel77 He is only 3. It shouldn’t be that hard.

@StJunt @iky_fwjett @eyojoel77 “Stay in your room” 🤣

@Mocherin It’s an old British saying too “starve a fever, feed a cold”. If I’m not feeling well I always reach for the marmite 🥰

久しぶりに風邪をひき熱でクラクラしてた時に、なぜか「シュガーバタートーストを食べたい」と思いフラフラしながら食パンにバターと砂糖(うちのは茶色いやつ)をかけて焼いて食べたのですが、さっぱり甘くない！むしろ「魚の香りがする、やばい味覚障害だ！コロナかも！」思いつつ、よくみたら「ほんだし(写真左)」を「砂糖(写真右)」のと思い込んでかけていた…。でと本だし、と思って食べると案外美味しかった。 結論　熱出てる時は大人しく寝ておくべき。

@Aiur_Zeratul @patsmithcomedy It’s a very British name for a dickhead.

@patsmithcomedy What the heck is a bellend?

Decisions decisions..

me waiting for the cashier to notice me after i screwed up the self check out again

@SewellLeigh @annimeaculpa We used to have one in a former garden. The first year we lived there I couldn’t understand why the tree was humming. It was so smothered in bees that the whole tree was vibrating. Just the most wonderful experience every year.

Red horse chestnut ( Aesculus x carnea) flowers 😊 This is an artificial cross between Aesculus Pavia and Aesculus hippocastanum bred as an ornamental. #thursdaymorning #flowers #treepeople #trees #macro #flowerphotography

@afneil Dear Andrew, Why do you think the letters editor thought it a good idea to publish it? Anyhow, here’s my letter to the letters editor

@tagsalegirl The second and third pictures are of an ancient ‘Holloway’ - a path that probably dates back to Medieval times. Now it is in the middle of a wood that touches the Avon about 6 miles from Stratford upon Avon.

@ArthurAndEric With the path!! 🥹🥹👌👌👌 just so so good!! Thank you!! I’ll tag you when I post one so you can see (and be credited as photographer!)

Sooooooooo any of my UK pals have bluebell photos they might want to share? I would never paint from someone’s photo without asking, so this is me asking! 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

@NobleF1 I just can’t be bothered to read it. I love F1 - I’ve listened to just about every podcast going, watched the races multiple times with different commentaries. But this isn’t it for me. I’ve zoned out.

F1's revisions to the rules for this weekend means that the FIA's power unit stipulations for each event have got even more complicated... Here is the Miami version. Enjoy. #F1

@OtterSecret @AllForProgress_ Precisely. Which is so infuriating from a human point of view - Lorenzo was meant to prevent deaths from lack of shared information. But as you rightly say, the stakeholders within the NHS didn’t want it. It nearly broke my husband.

@ArthurAndEric @AllForProgress_ This was a case study in my MSc Computer Science - how not to run a software project. Key takeaway was that if the stakeholders don’t actually want a solution, don’t try and build them one

Remember that plan that the Labour government hatched that would require British workers to enrol in a digital ID scheme as a precondition of proving their right to work in the United Kingdom? Well, sometime in the last week, the government quietly dropped it. The plan had been briefed, defended, and floated through the lobby press over a period of months. It had been positioned as the centrepiece of the present government's response to illegal working in the British labour market, which is itself one of the principal demand-side drivers of small-boat Channel crossings. It is, now, no longer being pursued. The reason it is no longer being pursued has not been clearly explained. The official line is that the consultation responses were "unfavourable." The unofficial line, in the government departments closest to the scheme, is that the operational complexity of building, securing, and integrating a national digital ID system across employers, banks, government registries, and the Home Office's existing visa infrastructure was, to use the technical term, well beyond the capacity of the present civil service to deliver inside any politically meaningful time frame. Nothing to do with the fact that the entire thing was also an extremely convenient vehicle by which Labour could subtly pursue two of its most ardent and insidious principal aims during this government - the reduction of civil liberties and the intensification of official surveillance of law-abiding citizens Because let's face it: no one in the black economy was going to be put to any kind of inconvenience for this load of old rubbish. It is yet another device, the only device at which Labour and the entrenched civil service sort of excel in creating, for making the lives of law-abiders and taxpayers more difficult in this country. Anyway, I digress. This was supposed to be about operational competence. But the truth is that this cancelled scheme is what the present British state is. It is a state that can describe a problem only half-competently, identify a plausible but democratically unideal solution to that problem, and brief that solution through the press with political support coalescing around it. And then, when the moment to actually execute the solution arrives, fold completely. In this case, it is to the public's benefit. But, tally up all such similar failures, and you can see that, on the available evidence of the last 15 (/30/45/60?) years, the British government can't build large operational systems for reasons good or ill. There's the 500,000-record Biobank breach, the 22-week wait for a driving test, the failure of every recent attempt at NHS IT modernisation. And don't get us started on the litany of nightmarish megaprojects, from river crossing to HS2, which currently lay on the beach. These people can't execute. Because their instincts are appalling and their principles derived from bonkers dogma, that's sometimes to our benefit. But until we can pull able operators and the ideologically-uncaptured into this terrible game, we're stuck in a dismal holding pattern wherein Britain can't build...anything, really.

@AllForProgress_ Each Trust was allowed to ask for different information and to demand that the way even shared information was shown differently. There was no overarching authority and some Trusts were deliberately difficult - requiring layers of knowledge without the understanding of process.

@AllForProgress_ My husband was part of the team that tried to implement Lorenzo - the NHS IT system that aimed to create a national patient database that could be accessed by any doctor anywhere so there would be no gaps in knowledge. The NHS trusts made it impossible, aided by government.

@Skog200 Could be alstroemeria - the Peruvian Lily? Very early but perhaps you have it under cover or in a very mild microclimate.

Mystery plant in my Nursery area .. the stems and leaves makes me think lily ..but the buds look different ..over 20 years teaching Horticulture and drumming it into students to label everything .and i rarely do 😂have to wait and see

@NationalHways @HighwaysWMIDS Hi, there’s a section of the M6 - approx 5 miles before Stafford Services that is always showing 50 on the matrix signs. There’s never any actual reason and I’ve noticed that some drivers are now ignoring the signs. Could you check if they are broken please?

We've reduced speed limits to 50MPH nationwide for safety while we carry out a planned overnight technology upgrade. You won't see us at the roadside as we're working behind the scenes. Thanks for your patience. For more information: nationalhighways.co.uk/travel-updates…

@standard_yeti @FondOfBeetles Just in case anyone lurking is interested - a TikTok (sorry) showing just how wide their necks are. @vanef1vane/video/7189265043689721093" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">tiktok.com/@vanef1vane/vi…

@standard_yeti @FondOfBeetles That’s so interesting. I’ve long postulated that there will never be a successful female Formula 1 driver. I was considering lung mass, musculature etc but I never considered that they started from such a significant disadvantage in neck strength.

If you grow male brain neurones and female brain neurones on a plate, then subject them to injury via stretching, the female neurones "break" earlier and the male neurones recover quicker, because they activate a stronger and more efficient inflammatory response. Female brains are more fragile under injury conditions, and they don't recover as well.