Spatial Awareness

My 2025 Duolingo stats are in! How did you do? #Duolingo365

@TheHughAnthony @TheWapplehouse Only in the sense of “National Socialist”.

@TheWapplehouse No, I am a socialist.

I didn’t want to do this, but sadly it has gotten to this point. My dad has just been arrested for assault against me, and I have been kicked out of my house because of my politics. If you can please spare any help it would be greatly appreciated. paypal.com/donate/?hosted…

.@ODEONCinemas your customer service is appalling, possibly illegal. You make it virtually impossible to cancel #odeonlimitless - maybe @MartinSLewis might be interested?

Dear @c2c_Rail at #Shoeburyness - do you think it might be a good idea to let customers know that, if the next train out is on the board as being on platform 2, there are actually 2 trains on platform 2? #renationalisetherailways

@SecretDJBook Is it weird that I read that to the tune of The Theme From Shaft?

When you enter the modernised and spanky clean Ibiza airport, travelling light and digitally checked-in - and then ascend to the gates and WALLOP - no matter what your nationality if you are going to the UK there is a special, massive and deranged queue just for you. Brexit.

Massive thank yous to @swissadam1 and @TakTentRadio !!

OMG! @djdebgrant & @tom_ravenscroft MASSIVE thank yous for playing #DreamFood and the kind words and looking forward to you renaming the show, I’m honoured ;) @BBC6Music @hottwerk

. #LeftOfCentre next Saturday night 11.05.24 #acidhouse #dub #balearic #disco #techno #chug #electro #southendonsea #essex #southendmusic #essexmusic SAKS 16.00-02.00 TICKETS ra.co/events/1881671

GET IT IN YR EARS X

@ROBERTF14823757 @implausibleblog That’s a terrible slur on toads!

@implausibleblog Toad of all Toads

Boris Johnson, "I'm told that I'm not woke, but some of my best friends are woke, probably.. Putin is going to use all sorts of things to try and muddy the waters. To send people down all sorts of rabbit holes" Weakening the UK and the EU with Brexit? Johnson did this so he could stand a shot at being Prime Minister, which he was so bad at, his own party kicked him out after he lied incessantly.

Only two more sleeps before we release Dirty System into the wild. #melantronica #NewMusic

Out March 29: Dirty System - the first single from our debut album, Eyes Closed Listening. Includes two tasty remixes by @SpAwareness. #dub

@RickAmericus @WalshFreedom @GOP And no one cares If there is a hell I’ll see you there #nineinchnails #fucktrump

@WalshFreedom @GOP is dead

1. As a Republican, when you publicly oppose Trump, you end your career as a Republican. When I came out against Trump 6yrs ago, I took a blow torch to my livelihood & ended any chance at ever getting elected again as a Republican. 2. That’s what Pence just did. And as pissed off as we are at his past 8yrs of groveling before Trump, he deserves our thanks for what he just did. 3. Not every Republican who finally turns on Trump is genuine. I know Mike Pence. This move is genuine. Thank you @Mike_Pence

@Man_Power_Music Oh my god, the world so needed Mario and Luigi as Bob and Terry

Clement and Le Frenais wrote one of the drafts of the 90s Bob Hoskins Mario Brothers film. WTAF???

#DYWF After the roaring success of the 1st thrilling instalment of #doyouwannafunk we return for the next monthly helping of #disco #disconotdisco #house & those other indefinable things inbetween. #southendonsea #southendmusic #housemusic #lgbtq #southendpride #essex #essexmusic

I’m not saying that #Bodies tv show on @NetflixUK is a bit of a twisty headfuck, but a knife went into one of the characters and I thought it was going to turn out he was cake.

@dommaguire How monumentally shit must something actually be for James Cleverley to be a potential improvement on the situation?

She's gone, thank The Lord but Cleverly? Cameron? Coffey's still here. It's rearranging the deckchairs on The Titanic.

@SecretDJBook Oh shit, that’s a point - what if it does a “Springtime For Hitler”?

@SecretDJBook Im actually really curious to read it. Library though, I don’t want a penny going to that walking stool sample.

I've ripped this stellar review of Mad Nad's new book from The Times for you cos who the fuck wants to give Murdoch a penny? Enjoy! I did - The problems with Nadine Dorries’s very long and very strange book on the fall of Boris Johnson begin on the title page. It’s called The Plot. Plot is a word with multiple meanings. In this case it is used to suggest a malign, shadowy conspiracy. But a plot is also a sequence of events presented by a writer to a reader. It’s a prerequisite for writing a story that people might understand. I picked up this book in the admittedly naive hope that the title might imply the existence of at least one of these two kinds of plots. I put it down having discerned neither. This really is the single weirdest book I have ever read, and anyone who does not reach the same conclusion after reading it should be sectioned. Years ago AA Gill compared reading Morrissey’s bitter, overwrought memoir to listening to one’s neighbours bicker through a partition wall. Reading Dorries is more like having a neighbour shout random observations on British politics, the quality of service at high-end London restaurants, interior design, iPhone transcription apps, James Bond films, the character defects of some posh people you’ve never heard of, how sexy Iain Duncan Smith must have been in his prime, and things you don’t see much “these days” — proper country pubs, old men winking — through the letterbox, for hours and hours and hours. Sorry: you may still be wondering what The Plot is and why it exists. Those are two surprisingly difficult questions to answer. Last year Boris Johnson was ousted by his MPs less than three years after winning the biggest Conservative landslide in four decades, or, as Dorries mistily recalls it: “He sent a great blue Tory ferret so far up Labour’s left trouser leg they couldn’t move.” It was a result that might have permanently rewritten the iron laws of British politics, but didn’t, for predictably squalid reasons: the lockdown parties in No 10, the misleading denials and (this really is a direct quote from the book, by the way) “you know, the bottom-pinching guy … what was his name? Chris Pincher,” the handsy minister whose inappropriate behaviour Johnson pretended not to have been warned about. The fundamentals of this rather sad study in unfulfilled promise and misconduct in public office are pretty simple. Tory MPs had their reservations about Johnson and elected him anyway. He won them a general election, then proceeded, over the course of 30 short months, to live down to their lowest expectations until they couldn’t take it any more. It is not an especially complicated story, hence why it is so difficult for some fans of Johnson — particularly Dorries, the most devoted of the lot — to take. But, to give her credit where it is due, she has managed to make it so convoluted that it is literally impossible to make sense of. She does us the courtesy of admitting as much early in the first chapter. “I’m not Tim Shipman; it will be hopeless,” she tells a source. “I like to write historical and romantic novels…” You might think that reads like self-effacement. Wrong! It’s really the kind of warning sign you see in American national parks, telling hikers to turn round and get out if they want to stay alive. The 10,000 or so words of this book that were serialised in the Daily Mail seemed to suggest that Nadine blames the Movement, a secretive cabal of Tory fixers led by Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove and a guy called Dougie Smith, for engineering Johnson’s exit to make way for Rishi Sunak. They did so at the behest of a mysterious, rabbit-killing alleged arsonist and concierge for billionaires whom Dorries refers to as Dr No. Like so many people to whom she gives code names — by Chapter 18 she has run out of male Bond villains and unaccountably calls two elderly Tory grandees Bambi and Thumper — they are never identified. I have no idea who Dr No is supposed to be: by the end of the book you can’t help but wonder whether he’s really a fiction who exists to stop everyone else more easily identifiable from suing. If that were the story, then The Plot might have been readable in a Dan-Brown- meets-George-Brown kind of way: overcooked, potboiler prose about Westminster iniquity. Sadly, that is not the story. Dorries instead spends 350 pages framing the following people not only for Johnson’s fall, but also for that of Theresa May, Iain Duncan Smith and William Hague: the membership of the Federation of Conservative Students circa 1986; the schools minister Nick Gibb and his brother, Robbie, the former BBC journalist; the entire editorial staff of The Spectator, the BBC, Sky News and ITN; Daniel Finkelstein, of this newspaper; Sue Gray; Simon Case, the cabinet secretary; Gove and Cummings; Lee Cain, Johnson’s spinner; Dougie Smith and his wife, Munira Mirza, Johnson’s former head of policy; Paul Ovenden, the Labour Party’s head of attack and rebuttal; Sunak; Oliver Dowden; the former No 10 aide Cleo Watson; George Osborne; Roula Khalaf, the editor of the Financial Times; MI5; and, inevitably, Mossad. Or, to put it more accurately, those are some of the people Dorries’s sources tell her may or may not have been responsible for Johnson’s fall, in interviews that run for dozens and dozens of pages at a time. She occasionally pops up to complain about the appointment process for the chairmanship of Ofcom, which she oversaw as culture secretary, and offer reflections such as: “It was the best celeriac soup I had ever tasted …” Hers is a keen eye for detail. “The light was fading fast as my chaperone handed me a Werther’s Original and spoke.” Our intrepid investigator is also absorbed by the minutiae of the journalistic process she endearingly admits to not really understanding: “When my source and I came to the end of our Zoom call, our dogs woofed goodbye to each other.” But otherwise what feels like a majority of these pages are given over to transcripts of conversations that meander so far from the notional subject matter that it is genuinely possible to forget what the point of the book is. Gnomic utterances like this: “Tebbit sensed the danger way back; he was a wise man.” Economic policy assessments such as this: “Look at corporation tax in Abu Dhabi: 6 per cent.” Or, my personal favourite: “I mean, even the bacon rolls: who even eats that shit, it’s so bad.” If you’re struggling to make sense of this, then don’t worry, so is Dorries. “Maybe it’s because I’m from Liverpool,” she writes. “Maybe it’s because I was brought up on streets where you had to have your wits about you. Maybe it’s just because I’m from up north where everything is far less complicated.” The only person more confused than her is Johnson, who muses that Sunak was out to get him all along and acknowledges some of his mistakes. These inexplicable on-the-record interviews with the former prime minister might have packed a bit of a punch were it not for Dorries’s commentary. It is already difficult to take Dorries interviewing Johnson seriously. When she begins chapters like this, it’s impossible: “It was early Sunday morning and he greeted me in the kitchen of his house in the Cotswolds. Both the lids of the Aga were up and I had to take a very deep breath. I’m a woman of a certain age who has had an Aga since I left the poverty of my background. However, you can never escape your upbringing, and the thing about an Aga is, when the lids are up, the heat is escaping.” Dorries says she quit frontline politics to write this book. Don’t mention the resignation from the Commons over the peerage she didn’t get. No, seriously, don’t: she doesn’t either. Reading it is such a slog that you would wonder why she bothered if she didn’t so frequently remind you. “If the people who live on the road I was born on, Breck Road in Liverpool — one of the most socially deprived areas in the country — have a vote that, in reality, is a farce, a fake, then what power do ordinary people actually have?” It’s a good question, sincerely asked. Buried somewhere inside The Plot, wrapped in invective about Gove’s divorce and lusty descriptions of Carrie Johnson’s wardrobe, is a good story about Westminster’s dysfunctionality — the abuses of power, the rotten culture, the venality, the unaccountable aides. Nadine Dorries is the last person who should be telling it. Not because she’s a bad person. Far from it. Maybe she’s nice to waiters, her driver, small children and civil servants. But she can’t write.