Paul Cooper

"always the golfer, never the wildfire victim."

I do love a ghost gable like this found near Ancoats in Manchester - but it's rarer still to find the intangible signs of the puff of smoke from the chimney...

folks theyre saying the pale rider doesnt want us to break the seventh seal, theyre saying no one has the strength to handle it. what do you think folks, what do you think of that pale rider. should we do it?

*crowd going absolutely ape shit*

i dont know, i want to but they say I shouldnt

speaking of Corfe Castle
Still don't quite believe this one, few years back by complete fluke i panned the camera up and captured *the most Dorset scene ever™ *
no chance i'd ever be able to recreate this 😩

See some cozy pubs at Corfe Castle here >>>
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kav...

#CastleSaturday

A great bank of stone running through bracken to an outcrop

#HillfortsWednesday the great scree and earth ramparts of Garn Fawr hillfort, north Pembrokeshire, which link a series of outcrops across an exposed coastal summit.

This powerful place was a complex & long lived settlement, overlooking the seaways between Wales & Ireland

📷 My own

Travel back through the English language in Bluesky thread form...

Thank you, that's really kind!

we live in the ruins of a greater civilization

"I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees"

Tall stones on moorland surround a small chamber tomb

#TombTuesday - a quiet morning at Callanish before the tourists arrive in June 2024, with my cycling buddies giving me a moment..

Marvelling at the miniature chambered tomb which sits at the heart of the stone circles & alignments, crammed between the tallest central stones 😮

📷 My own

A recent stones trip to Coldrum long barrow in Kent with @classicalalan.bsky.social - misty, muddy and very atmospheric! This place is 6,000 years old, just so awesome. #StandingStoneSunday

its #RuinedPrioryFriday & there's this curious quartet of monastic sites in a crescent around Shrewsbury which deserves a bit of a thread

🧵👇

shakespeare was on fire writing the history plays and im not afraid to say it. in henry IV part 2 the king laments that his son will take the throne and "commit the oldest sins the newest kinds of ways" which goes absolutely crazy

Just a reminder, the greatest living American historian filmmaker, Ken Burns, released a 720 min exploration of every facet of the American revolution using zero generative AI and paying for all of its assets instead of cobbling it from stolen data, then he gave it away for free on PBS this year.

😬

Cropped up in my phone memories, it makes me smile every time I see it - @paulmmcooper.com doing a casual drive-by on poets (and writers more broadly) in the middle of a really tense and climactic scene (from his excellent River of Ink).

A bird's-eye view of a former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp showing a wide dirt pathway flanked by parallel rows of barbed-wire fences. Groups of visitors walk along the path, surrounded by the remnants of brick structures and barracks, now reduced to foundations. Green grass contrasts with the somber history of the site, as the path leads toward a guard tower in the distance.

Auschwitz was at the end of a process. We must remember that it did not start from gas chambers.

This hatred gradually developed: from ideas, words, stereotypes & prejudice through legal exclusion, dehumanization & escalating violence... to systematic and industrial murder.

Auschwitz took time.

me? oh yeah, fine. I'm doing great. just sort of left my body for a second to observe the current moment and my place in it from a high angle, sort of like what I imagine you'd see from a spy satellite? but one that can look through time? but yeah, I'll have that report done by the end of the day

If you're living somewhere outside the USA, one thing you can do is pressure your leaders to boycott World Cup and Olympic events here.

☹️

Yes! "Scotorum pultibus proagravatus", using the Latin exonym Scotti which was used to describe the Irish or Gaels. Eventually Scotland starts to get called "little Scottia" as opposed to Ireland's "Big Scottia" - so like Pict it's a good example of exonym eventually becoming endonym.

Book extract: Much of what we know about Pelagius' thought is the result of the Patristic heavy artillery directed against it. We owe an unflattering and typically biased description of his person to his controversy with St. Jerome, over the latter's commentary on Ephesians, which, Pelagius claimed, showed an Origenist influence. This touched a tender spot with Jerome-one of the founding fathers of the character-assassination brand of scholarly debate-who counterattacked by dismissing Pelagius as a "portly Scot, stuffed with Scottish porridge."

Knowing all the thousands of texts that have been lost from the ancient world, it must sting to be Pelagius and have one calling you a "portly Scot, stuffed with Scottish porridge" survive into the archive

History is fun to read about but usually not very fun to live through!

The living carcass of the American empire, flesh decaying on its bones

Thanks my friend, glad you enjoyed!

‘You Who Wronged’ by Czesław Milosz. For some reason or other this poem came to mind this morning. Written in a time of tyrants:
#Poetry

Thanks my friend, that means a lot. All the best.

Stark and otherworldly - sunset at Mitchell’s Fold, the Bronze Age stone circle on Stapeley Hill. I got this shot at the tail end of a blizzard, when the sky took on a golden glow that made a spectacular contrast with the snow-covered landscape. It was every bit as cold as it looks. #Shropshire

A huge roman temple with four columns holding up the pediment. Small person standing on the steps for scale

This place never fails to amaze - The Temple of Jupiter in Dougga, Tunisia, built ~166 AD!

How is this still standing, after so many years!?

🙋‍♂️ Me for scale!

#RomanSiteSaturday #archaeology #photooftheday 🏺

Well we kind of do audio first, so you don't have to watch the videos if you don't want to