Yes, hello, is that God? Yeah, hi. I have a complaint. You gave me this brain that’s designed for finding berries and avoiding lions and now people are ‘just circling back’ to see if we can ‘move the needle’ on ‘key initiatives’? NONE of those things are berries.
The vicar walked into the pulpit like "this week's Gospel reading is the longest one of the year, and I'd love to preach on it, but apparently some idiots think they're starting a holy war to bring about the second coming of Christ so I've really got to address that right now..."
Incredible to read the sermon I heard on Sunday summed up so succinctly here...
CANONISE YOUR OWN SAINTS, LOVE THOSE WHO HAVE GONE BEFORE YOU 💚
Medical transition for trans kids is now banned for new referrals on the NHS. Trans kids in the UK can still go private or DIY (for now).
This means the new clinics that replaced GIDS are close to useless at best, conversion therapy at worst. 1/5
When the music finished I drove 150 miles home in heavy fog wondering how I end up in these situations.
Two messages. The first: It's 8pm and I'm sat in a freezing church listening to a band that just does folk songs about the moomins being queer The second: The bass from the gay moomin folk band has just made a small child cry
Texts I send from my normal job:
HOLY WEEK at St Nicholas Church, Leicester PALM SUNDAY: 29/03 18:30-19:30: Palm Sunday Eucharist HOLY MONDAY: 30/03 17:30-18:00: Evening Prayer HOLY TUESDAY: 31/03 17:30-18:00: Evening Prayer HOLY WEDNESDAY: 01/04 17:30-18:00: Evening Prayer MAUNDY THURSDAY: 02/04 18:30-20:00: Compline and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, followed by the Stripping of the Altars GOOD FRIDAY: 03/04 18:30-19:30: Taize Service HOLY SATURDAY: 04/04 12:00-15:45: Polish Easter Basket Making Workshop and Blessings 15:45-16:15: Evening Prayer EASTER SUNDAY: 05/04 06:00-10:00: Easter Fire and Breakfast 18:30-19:30: Easter Day Eucharist Find out more: www.stnicholasleicester.com/whats-on
We've got something going on every day during Holy Week - if you're in Leicester why not come on by?
The man in the bookstore told us its the ghosts that look like people that you should be most afraid of
They spent years telling me about this fantastical, non-euclidean, impossible vertical garden, and all the impossible things that could be found there, and when we finally went to Knaresborough together I was able to confirm that literally everything they had said was 100% true
Love is an active thing, you know?
You know what I love? Gifts you use every day.
I got a bookmark for Christmas and every time I read I'm reminded of the love of the people who gave it to me.
And this effect doesn't wear off. I got a frying pan as a housewarming gift years ago and I still feel warm and fuzzy when I use it.
A Saint Dies Beside the Nidd By Jay Hulme - from 'The Vanishing Song' Prostrate before God a final time I reach out my arms to the earth. This stone blooms with the millennia, this soil burrows with chitinous song; life bursts from the death of another — each earthly thing I've loved is fossil-rich, renewed, re-created, recycled, returned. Soon, I cannot consider the miracle, only this moment, so wholly my own. The breeze in the trees reminds me of the song of my mother’s womb; though I’ll only realise that later — after I’ve gone.
"Prostrate before God a final time
I reach out my arms to the earth.
This stone blooms with the millennia,
this soil burrows with chitinous song;
life bursts from the death of another —
each earthly thing I've loved is fossil-rich,
renewed, re-created, recycled, returned."
A Saint looks up from his prayers to discover he’s been dead for some time For St Robert of Knaresborough By Jay Hulme - from 'The Vanishing Song' After he retired to the cave prayer grew in him like a forest, sowed its seeds inside his psyche, rewilded his heart. He didn’t see that centuries had passed without him. One day he looked up, hearing requests for intercession, and the woods were older than expected, the riverbanks shifted by the years — and as he knelt before the altar in his hermit's church, his knees disappeared below the edges of his emptied grave.
"After he retired to the cave
prayer grew in him like a forest,
sowed its seeds inside his psyche,
rewilded his heart. He didn’t
see that centuries had passed
without him."
Jay sits cross legged on the floor by the altar and pulpit steps, gesturing as he speaks. Someone sits in the pew in front of him listening (hopefully)
Someone visiting St Nicks: "hmmm, I wonder how old this church is..."
Me, a small and gnomelike creature that lives in the walls, appearing silently and from nowhere to say: "let me tell you the secrets of this ancient and sacred place."
Me, walking into St Nicks: "anyone wanna hear a fun fact?"
Everyone in the building: "is it? Actually fun? Tho?"
Me: Absolutely!"
Me: "the architect of our north aisle died in 1885 when he tried to get off a train before it had fully stopped, and he fell between the carriages and got decapitated"
AMERICAN POETRY FANS: If you're interested in my queer folkloric poetry, you can pre-order my book (with free international shipping!) through Blackwells blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro... 💚
The Poet Laureate of the UK is famous for his translation of St Gawain and the Green Knight, and Kym once got up on stage, looked him straight in the eye, and then performed this.
Unsurprisingly enough, every time they've encountered each other since, he's remembered them.
I do not think the police have ever raided the Quakers and been on the correct side of history
A brick wall with slightly ajar double doors coated with brick to camouflage them
Actually? I love this. I want more of it. Now pls.
If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
Some nights I simply have to turn out all my lights and succumb to my craving for candlelight.
Highly recommend wandering around with a candle in your hand to light your way through the darkness. It'll heal something inside you, I guarantee it.
Limestone Quarry, Knaresborough It’s not my fault the rocks are insane, I’m just announcing stone-intent. If you were two-hundred-million years old and each century was worth less than a grain of sand if you had been mud and coral in Pangea and saw extinctions and then in the great yawn of tectonic plates became a little spit of something that one day would be England, if humans were the latest news, a misplaced handaxe your first trinket, if you watched Romans introduce gods and rabbits, if you saw Christ carried in a book, if you were a sprawl of caves, a castle, a cliff, a series of shrines, generations of homes, if you wore a vast forest as a cloak, if you buried a prophet, dug up a saint, if you kissed the last boar goodbye, if you became black with soot, if the forest was shorn to a sliver, if the river washed you to sand, if the day and night were a spinning top and your voice was the great echo of grit, if there was no moving through your history but the history was you over and over and over again, wouldn’t you be a mudslide, a haunt, a great unspoken secret?
Blog post: Inspiration behind the poem If you sit me down and ask me to guess the length of a minute, I’ll wander off midway through, come back a half-hour later and ask you what time it is. For someone this thoroughly timeblind, I have a peculiar obsession with it. Deep time, in particular, the way that it passes for a stone or fossil not measured in days, but in the long yawn of epochs. It’s a scale utterly unimaginable for any of us. In Knaresborough (a Yorkshire market town) when I was a teenager, I met a man who kept a vertical garden. A normal garden would stop where it reached the edge of a cliff-face, but his simply went on up, dug into it, occasionally supported on wooden two-by-fours. It was a fantastic endeavour in non-euclidian landscaping complete with fishpond, at least ten feet up. In front of the garden was his bookshop, poky and ancient like himself. One year during a summer squall, he told me ghost stories, how he invoked the Lord against bits of haunted furniture and how his own dead son had walked through the door one day. Another year, he claimed his garden, his cliffs and the caves under them as the birthplace of a prophetess. He said to me that he’d had an archaeology student spend a summer with him. When this had happened, I couldn’t guess. This archaeology student spent a summer digging in those caves, looking for the tunnels that supposedly ran from there up to Knaresborough Castle. Instead, he found
stone tools and Roman coins. Proof that there’s been people continuously living in and around these cliffs for almost as long as there’s been people on this island. Time flattens. I see myself returning here at fifteen, at twenty-five and all the years between, slipping between Royalists with their muskets, medieval hermits, Georgians on their way to take the waters at Harrogate, Roman legionaries, and my strange, nimble bookseller. But even that is a short gasp compared to the stones themselves. Knaresborough is surrounded by limestone cliffs, which given that limestone is formed from calcite and that calcite was once ancient sealife, I figure those cliffs to be about 99% ghosts—scientifically speaking. And look at everything those ghosts have seen! The last time I visited my bookseller, the shop was shuttered. He had been elderly the whole time I had known him, and I suppose time must have caught up to him at last. Though, I almost don’t believe it. How can I? When I see him vanishing into those ancient caves, his ghost stories, that green cliff of his own making.
A sample poem from my forthcoming @ninearchespress.bsky.social collection and a blog post. Something about time, booksellers and folklore 💚
Giant snake on an info panel about to eat a screaming child
The Museum of Scotland using small children in size comparison info panels is absolutely sending me.
Also most NHS practices that *do* monitor hormones keep trans patients on a lower dose than is healthy, leading to health problems, so banging on about the safety of NHS vs DIY is bullshit at the best of times.
Buy Kym's book. I promise it's so good you're gonna want to eat it. Consume it. Let the words populate you like an infestation, or a haunting, or both and both and both.
I'm telling you, Knaresbrough is a special place that drives everyone who spends time there gently and wondrously and inexorably mad.
requiem for vanished birdsong
did have to stop myself reminding them that sucking isn't a protected characteristic.
"We can always tell" woman fails to identify Chinese Intelligence Asset she married.
