John Clark

@BigBearF1 “Roll on ball?” “No I want it for my armpits.” Last heard this variant on “Not the Nine O’Clock News” (early eighties). Still good.

Unbelievable! I went up the Co-op and asked the assistant if they had any antiperspirant because of the hot weather.☀️ “Ball type?” she asked. “No,” I said, “it’s for under my arms!” 👀

@history99917180 Out this morning at 0700 to our moderately local park. Not the only dog owners out there either. Same yesterday. Afternoon walks in the woods with streams, which they love. Tarmac is very much to be avoided.

Quick update for animal welfare in the heat. If you place the back of your hand onto the pavement and it’s is too hot to tolerate, it’s too hot for a dog walk. And before you ask, the wife works in the Vet world.

@CopMoustache @RAF_Luton Well you had better source yourself up for your travels: much increased chances of being photographed from a Canberra when you least expect it.

Not sure why but @RAF_Luton followed me back last night for some reason 🤷‍♂️🤣🤣 Great end to a brilliant day 👍👍😊

@Mr_Andrew_Fox This must come as a shock. Very best wishes to you and hope for a fast recovery.

Fun story: felt a bit rough yesterday. Cough, headache, dizziness, temperature, aches all over. Local GP sent me to A&E as I’ve just got back from Africa, and those symptoms are malaria-adjacent. Checking in at A&E, the waiting times are on the board: 15 mins until triage, then four hours for treatment. A long, boring wait at any time, but especially annoying because by this stage, I’m struggling to stay upright, sweating profusely, and just want to lie down. I see the triage nurse, who takes my vitals and immediately picks up the phone and books me a bed… in the *resuscitation ward*! Apparently the reason I was feeling so ropey was my blood pressure crashing through the floor whilst my pulse was racing. Cue a somewhat hasty wheelchair ride, arms full of needles, hooked up to bags of liquids. No four hour wait for this callsign… Positives: it’s not looking like malaria (one more day of tests to go) and I’m feeling a bit better. Also: against all odds, my liver is the only bit of me that passed the blood tests without an “abnormal” marker. Negatives: no clue what it is, arms full of holes already, more blood and other tests to go. Thank you for enjoying my exciting story. I’m off to go poo into a pot.

@JonathanLevitt7 I liked it!

@VikingSocrates My song, The Streets of Golders Green, released yesterday, attempts to address some of the root causes of the issue... open.spotify.com/track/7yizl4jk…

This is a practical way I and others can help support basic freedoms for UK citizens. I have also done so pretty recently too, which is telling you something about the appalling state of the UK right now. We have been sleepwalking to this place amidst political cluelessness and state gutlessness generally. I rarely make “political” tweets, but I’m getting rather angry.

@aakashgupta Doesn’t the number of PG students matter too in this debate. Yale has 8000+ PGs.

Universities had 17 years of warning. They responded by doing the opposite of what the math demanded. In 2008, American birth rates fell off a cliff. The Great Recession made people stop having kids. Those never-born children would be turning 18 right now. The number of U.S. high school graduates peaked at roughly 3.9 million in 2025. By 2029, that number drops 15%. By 2041, it drops by nearly half a million students per year. Every school in this tweet had access to the same Census data. They all saw the same curve. Administrative positions at U.S. colleges grew 60% between 1993 and 2009, ten times the rate of tenured faculty growth. Non-instructional spending (student services, administration) grew 29% from 2010 to 2018. Instructional spending grew 17%. Average tuition at public four-year schools went from $3,500 in 2000 to $10,560 in 2023. Yale now has more administrators than undergraduate students. 5,460 administrators for fewer than 5,000 undergrads. They built the cost structure of a growth company on top of a customer base that was mathematically guaranteed to shrink. The split in this data tells you everything. Clemson, Syracuse, Duke, UNC, and Indiana are all cutting because the model broke. Alabama, Ole Miss, and the University of Florida are turning away more applicants than ever. Harvard gets five applications for every spot. The middle is where the cliff hits. Elite schools absorb demand. Everyone between elite and community college fights over a shrinking pool. The Fed published a study in December 2024 predicting 80 colleges will close in the next five years. Since 2016, over 100 already have. In 2024 alone, 28 shut down. One per week. These program cuts and layoffs are a decade late. The birth rate data was sitting in Census spreadsheets the entire time. Everyone in higher education administration saw the enrollment cliff coming. They hired more administrators anyway.

I’m afraid the Party and Government are having a hard time coping with narrative collapse; there is little doubt that is what is happening (FWS, International Olympic Committee, various tribunals publications from academia regarding statistics of offending,…). A significant number are up to their necks in it with no face-saving way out. A horrible and dangerous time for the country.

And those who disagree should be sent to re-education camps until they become good little Apparatchik’s. F’cking idiot.

@bagshaw2112 Don could ‘sing a bit’ too.

Can anyone remember this Classic comedy . This was pure belly laugh but not allowed nowadays 🤷🏻🤷🏻 #comedy

Evening’ all, I see the powers that be are talking about merging forces again—bigger and bigger, they say, more “efficient.” Well, I don’t see the sense in it. You take away the local bobby and what have you got? Strangers in cars who don’t know your name, don’t know your troubles, and don’t care half as much. Dock Green looks after its own. Merge us up and you lose that, plain and simple. So keep an eye on your neighbours, lend a hand where you can, and let’s keep our policing close to home where it belongs. Goodnight, all. God bless.

Are you old enough to remember this programme / series . #nostalgia.

@soniasodha @LabWomenDec Absolute madness. At some point our administrative institutions will need to be de-radicalised. Leaving training in important matters to local institutions just isn’t working.

Lorna Young was dismissed by Manchester City Council for her social media activity. One of her tweets, part of the gross misconduct case against her, criticised the concept of “transage” - adults who identify as children. The MCC investigator here appears to defend that 🤯

@nickwallis @LesbianLabour It’s jaw-dropping.

Tribunal Tweets are doing a fantastic job of describing the cross-examination of a workplace investigator whose evidence is turning into a car crash.

@history99917180 @YappAppLtd And also it would appear that there are **two** on the bike. The police and local press have reported it as such and if you frame by frame it before final impact you can just about see it. Absolute insanity.

@YappAppLtd Yep. If you ride like a knob it will catch up with you.

🚨LIVE: Air ambulance lands at serious crash on Morley Street in Bradford A motorbike rider was thrown into a parked car after overtaking an Audi that was turning right. The Yorkshire Air Ambulance has touched down at the scene right now, with emergency services dealing with the incident. m.facebook.com/story.php?stor…

@history99917180 It’s a matter of perspective. Turn your phone 90 degrees anti-clockwise and you find it much more to your liking. You’ll jump at the chance.

Over 100 comments. Not a single one suggesting Sam is a very lucky girl and would struggle to replace me. Up your game people.

@DrEliDavid @kajakallas The hamster sounds like a great candidate at the next round of elections. (If it lives that long, obviously.)

German Member of European Parliament to EU's Foreign Minister @kajakallas: “I read your autobiography. 432 irrelevant pages. In Estonia it is sold at 80% discount for €3.99, and on Amazon it's not available. I'll gain more from a discussion with my hamster about black holes.” 🤣

@NoContextBrits Captivating.

Very interesting.

@ImShahinyan 1.d4 with the threat of 2.Rg3 1…ed(ep) 2.Qg2# 1..Qd4 2. Qf8# These are the only two moves to stop the immediate 2.Rg3#

White mates in 2 Very very tricky 😱

@MaeveHalligan Many thanks for a tremendous speech! Unanswerable, which likely explains some of the interruptions.

"No, I don't subscribe to this 'kindness' - I'll tell the truth instead." I spoke at the Cambridge Union last night about LGBs, children's safety and women's rights. Full video here:

@runthinkwrite This speech will live on long after the vote is forgotten. Tremendous. Wow!

This is, as many people have said, a tremendous speech. I'm neither surprised nor too worried that the vote was lost - that many students voted against women's and LGB rights. As a student, I was passionate and a bit dogmatic, confident that I was on the right side of history. But when I heard counter arguments, even if they didn't persuade me straight away, they went round and round in my head for months and years. They bugged me. There will be plenty of cambridge students today who are unsettled, reflective, moving towards their own 'hang on a minute' moment. It's difficult to overestimate the importance of what @MaeveHalligan and her colleagues have done, and the effects will filter out over the decades to come. Just having the arguments is tremendously important. To present them as intelligently and articulately as they have done is a magnificent bonus.

I was listening to the court's Youtube live stream from Oz earlier this morning (5am UK time). I wasn't the only Uk viewer either to put it mildly. The judges did make some oblique remark about not commenting on the "desirability" of aspects of the law, which I read as throwing it back to the parliamentarians with the implication that this legal dog's dinner was of their making in the first place. It will almost certainly be an election issue in 2028.

If you think this is a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. If you tell me to ignore reality and my own integrity and demand I call him a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. If you try and defend this bloke and call him a woman, you’re a fucking idiot. Hope I’ve made myself clear.

@CountBinface We could be witnessing the first part of a seismic shift in British politics.

I bring people together.