Advent calendar 1

Dec. 1st, 2025 04:31 pm
antisoppist: (Christmas)
[personal profile] antisoppist
AnWhen the kids were very little, a friend gave me a whole box of Christmas picture books that hers had outgrown. Instead of reading them all at once, I got 24 cardboard folders, decorated them with pictures cut out of old Christmas cards and drew big numbers on them. I put a book (or sometimes two because there were lots) and lo, we had an Advent book box, and every day we opened a new folder after tea and read a new Christmas book. It carried on long after they had outgrown picture books but they did eventually outgrow it. Last year we were talking about traditions and the daughters said the Christmas picture books were great and it's a pity that doesn't happen for grown-ups. So I said what if we took it in turns to pick a Christmas scene from a book and typed it out and printed it (or photographed it and printed it) every day from 1 December so we did that and every day whichever of us it was put it in the kitchen before they went to bed and the others read it when we got up. The source was only written at the end so you could play "guess what this is from" while you were reading it.

This year we are doing it again. Opinion is divided as to whether we can use the same ones or not but the current plan is to try and find new readings but we can re-use last year's if we can't think of any more. We are torn between the repetitive seasonal familiarity and the fun of hunting them down and thinking what to pick.

But I thought I would share a paragraph here each day for you to identify or ignore.

"I want some crackers
And I want some candy;
I think a box of chocolates
Would come in handy;
I don't mind oranges,
I do like nuts!
And I SHOULD like a pocket-knife
That really cuts.
And, oh, Father Christmas, if you love me at all,
Bring me a big, red india-rubber ball!"


I'll add the source as a comment at some point in case anyone wants to do it as a quiz. I'm not banning spoilers in comments otherwise though and due to time zones it is not a competition!
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Posted by Peter Walker Senior political correspondent

Richard Hughes departs after investigation into how official forecaster accidentally published budget 40 minutes early

Richard Hughes, the chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility, has quit after the findings of an urgent inquiry by the watchdog into how it inadvertently published Rachel Reeves’s budget 40 minutes early.

Hughes wrote to the chancellor and to Meg Hillier, the chair of the Treasury select committee, last week to apologise after the OBR uploaded its documents setting out the details of the budget before Reeves began to speak on Wednesday.

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Posted by Giles Richards in Doha

  • Norris passed Mercedes driver near finish of Qatar GP

  • Red Bull had initially hinted at foul play in title fight

Mercedes driver Kimi Antonelli has received an apology from Red Bull after being subject to death threats amid a torrent of online abuse following suggestions from some members of the Red Bull team that the teenager moved over to allow Lando Norris through at the Qatar GP.

In the final stages of the race Norris, who had been chasing Antonelli for fourth place, managed to get past the Italian when he made an error at turn nine and went wide through turn 10, ensuring the British driver’s advantage over Verstappen was 12 rather than 10 points going into the last race of the season. That gap means Norris can finish third rather than second at this weekend’s title-deciding finale in Abu Dhabi and still claim the championship from Verstappen, who is in second place.

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Posted by Jasper Jolly

Move by firm, owned by US group Avis Budget, will remove access to shared fleet across London at end of year

The world’s biggest car-sharing company, Zipcar, has said it will close its UK operation, removing access to its shared fleet across London at the end of this year.

The company, owned by the US car rental group Avis Budget, said it will suspend new bookings after 31 December, pending the outcome of a consultation on possible redundancies. The UK operating company had 71 staff last year, according to its latest accounts.

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Posted by Jakub Krupa

Ukrainian president says focus remains on security guarantees, maintaining sovereignty and territory

UK prime minister Keir Starmer is delivering a major economy speech this morning.

You can follow all the key lines on our UK live blog with my colleague Andrew Sparrow, but there’s a particular line of argument that will no doubt reasonate in Europe, too.

“Let me be crystal clear, there is no credible economic vision for Britain that does not position us as an open, trading economy.

So we must all now confront the reality that the Brexit deal we have significantly hurt our economy and so for economic renewal, we have to keep reducing frictions.

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Posted by Shrai Popat(now) and Frances Mao (earlier)

President’s remarks come amid calls for an immediate investigation into reports Hegseth ordered a second strike on alleged drug-smuggling boat

The president has picked up where he left off before Thanksgiving, when it comes to his anger at the six Democratic lawmakers who took part in a video urging service members to “refuse illegal orders”.

A reminder, that Trump initially went on a Truth Social tirade, accusing the members of Congress (all of whom are veterans or former intelligence officials) of sedition, adding that their actions are “punishable by death”.

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Posted by Patrick Marber

The director worked with theatre colossus Tom Stoppard on two smash hits. Here, he remembers their heated rehearsals, the night they stayed up watching Jaws – and the last four cigarettes they smoked together

Tom was my hero from the night I first saw Travesties in 1979. I was 15. The older kids at school did a production of it and I was spellbound; it was glamorous, sensual and completely incomprehensible. I wanted to know everything about this cool, obscure playwright. I started in the school library with the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Then I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (incomprehensible) and then I read a third of Jumpers before giving up (totally incomprehensible).

As an English Lit student in the mid 1980s, I studied Stoppard and found his work slightly less incomprehensible. But in 1993, I saw the original production of Arcadia and felt that same spell I’d felt as a child. Let’s call it art. And beauty. And words spoken from a stage like no one else. A couple of years later, my first play, Dealer’s Choice, had just opened at the National Theatre and Tom was on the board. Someone told me: “Stoppard saw your play and mentioned it in some speech to donors as a good example of new writing at the NT.” A week or so later, I met him at a drinks do. He approached me. He approached me. All hair and suit and cigs and warmth. He gave me a hug and told me I was a proper young playwright.

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Posted by Guardian sport

  • Players, staff and HMRC not paid in March, May and June

  • Club now bottom of Championship on -10 points

The Football League has confirmed Sheffield Wednesday have been handed a further six-point deduction, leaving the beleaguered club rooted to the bottom of the Championship on -10 points.

Reports of the points deduction emerged on Monday morning, with the sanction in regards to the club’s failure to pay players in March, May and June this year, as well as in relation to other non-payments to staff and HMRC. Wednesday were handed a 12-point deduction in October after being placed into administration by former owner Dejphon Chansiri, who has also been banned for being an owner or director of an EFL club for a period of three years.

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Posted by Rob Evans

Undercover unit monitored Stephen Lawrence’s family, as well as thousands of mainly leftwing political activists

Two senior officers who supervised an undercover Scotland Yard unit spying on political campaigns were “horribly and incredibly” racist, a whistleblower has told a public inquiry.

Peter Francis, a former member of the unit, testified that one regularly used the “N-word”, while the other used a repertoire of explicit racist slurs.

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'Twas ever thus....

Dec. 1st, 2025 03:53 pm
oursin: Painting of Clio Muse of History by Artemisia Gentileschi (Clio)
[personal profile] oursin

There was hoohahing going on last week on bluesky anent people pirating books on account authors do not need the money and should be creating for Love of Art.

And I will concede that when it comes to Evil Exploitative Academic Publishing Empires, I cannot get my knickers in a twist over people downloading papers for which they have not paid the extortionate fee, none of which goes to author of the paper or the reviewers who reviewed it for the journal in question (wot, me, bitter?) - in fact I will be over here cheering or offering to use such library access as I have to get access and offer a copy.

But honestly the Average Author of fictional works is not making molto moolah but is probably supporting themselves by doing something else or being supported by someone else (hey, Ursula K Le Guin? e.g. mentions somewhere she was a housewife when she first started out) and writing is not their sole occupation or source of remuneration.

And even writers who we look back on as Important and Successful had their money problems: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund... show authors at their most vulnerable:

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

But looking back over the history of the fund:
“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

I wonder how far the All More Complicated Stories behind the need are in the documentation, though:
Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here.... Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

She was, as I recall, the principle breadwinner of their polyamorous menage and support of its offspring. (Personally we should have danced on Hubert Bland's grave.)

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Posted by Andrew Sparrow

Office for Budget Responsibility says Rachel Reeves ‘had every right to expect that the [report] would not be publicly available until she sat down at the end of her budget speech’

Q: Yesterday you said Rachel Reeves was lying. Today you are saying she gave out false information. Are you still accusing her of being a liar?

Badenoch replies: “Yes.”

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Posted by Rebecca Ratcliffe in Bangkok, and Oliver Holmes

Millions of people affected by torrential rainfall in Sri Lanka and large parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, southern Thailand and northern Malaysia

Sri Lanka and Indonesia have deployed military personnel as they race to help victims of devastating flooding that has killed more than 1,100 people across four countries in Asia.

Millions of people have been affected by a combination of tropical cyclones and heavy monsoon rains in Sri Lanka, parts of Indonesia’s Sumatra, Thailand and Malaysia in recent days.

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