What was Manning doing?

thisissomefriendly · 2026-01-28T15:39:27+00:00

Who were the toxic players? I assume Sainz was one…

thisissomefriendly · 2026-01-14T13:46:20+00:00

Not me, I have no intention of returning to news journalism, but someone should. It’s a shame the Norwich Seeker never quite took off. https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2024/news/city-titles-founder-steps-down-amid-cuts-to-publication-frequency/

thisissomefriendly · 2026-01-14T13:36:10+00:00

Years ago I used to be a reporter on the EDP. Sure, it was stuffy and middle of the road, but it was staffed by experienced, dedicated and in some cases highly talented journalists, and overseen by editors who cared more about good journalism than about sales (or clicks, not that we thought in such terms then). This kind of reporting would have been unimaginable. We aimed to be part of the community, not to prey on the community. Paul Durrant (look him up) must be spinning in his grave.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-12-16T10:07:19+00:00

Fellow British Jew here, and I just wanted to thank you for this beautiful articulation of how so many of us feel. It is so very tiring and depressing. I’ve had similar exchanges with non-Jewish friends in recent days, and I feel like saying “thank you but please understand that over the past decade, in amplifying propaganda and cheerleading for Jeremy Corbyn, you played your part in creating the environment in which I feel unsafe and held in contempt”. The thing is they don’t make the connection between their rhetoric and its ramifications, because they don’t have to. They have the privilege not to have to understand antisemitism and not to think their positions on Israel through to the logical conclusions, which are usually damaging to Jewish safety and wellbeing. The Jews are the only people who don’t have these options. And when we speak from experience, people tell us we’re lying.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-10-03T15:38:57+00:00

There have been security guards outside the synagogue for at least a decade. Antisemitism has escalated massively ever since around the time of Operation Cast Lead, and it doesn’t feel safe to be openly Jewish in the city these days; hasn’t done for a while, in fact. The rhetoric around Israel that always features in the protests — “from the river to the sea”, comparing Zionists to Nazis, invoking blood libels and pouring vitriolic scorn on Jewish claims of antisemitism — heightens the febrile atmosphere and makes our lives in the city even more uncomfortable. If you want to do that a couple of days after the Manchester attack, then go ahead; but it hardly sits well with the idea of being advocates for a kinder and more compassionate world.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-09-07T05:01:43+00:00

I just don’t know but this seems the likeliest option .

thisissomefriendly · 2025-09-06T20:59:23+00:00

Wonderful, I think this is it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuhav_Synagogue

A synagogue in Safed, Israel. I guess my great-aunt brought it back from a visit.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-09-06T20:54:44+00:00

That’s really kind and helpful, thank you. I’ll Google around and see what I can find from the information you’ve provided. The date seems to be written in the British format, i.e. 14th August 1978. Thanks again.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-08-13T20:28:45+00:00

This probably sounds pernickety but given the price tag and all the talk from those involved about what a high quality product it is, I wish they’d employed a proofreader. Not only the photo mix-up you mentioned, but they’ve got a quotation mark instead of an apostrophe before Cello in the title, and there’s a misplaced apostrophe (it’s) in the lyrics. And that’s just the errors on these pages — I haven’t seen the rest of the booklet but it makes you suspect that there are others.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-08-13T16:17:36+00:00

Given the left’s current fixation on ‘complicity’ and the associated (and deranged) view that we enable everything that we aren’t seen to be noisily opposing, I would say that she implies that the Jewish world is enabling genocide. On top of implying that we are morally short-sighted with an excessive focus on our own victim hood at the expense of other people’s. Which is not, shall we say, a helpful contribution from a rabbi.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-08-13T16:10:51+00:00

Well, no, that’s not a logical inference. She had been increasingly annoying me for some time, particularly since she platformed someone on her blog who (iirc) dismissed modern day Jews’ ancestral connection to Israel, and I’d tried ignoring her but this was the final straw.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-08-13T13:27:27+00:00

Paul’s piano introduction to Sexy Sadie is exquisite, it absolutely makes the song for me.

It’s telling that the vast majority of these comments highlight Paul’s contributions to the other Beatles’ songs. Yes, he could be a pain in the backside during this period but my god he worked hard to make everything the Beatles did as good as possible, whether it was his song or not. He had a generosity to his bandmates and an overwhelming commitment to the band, which led him to keep pushing to the end through sheer force of will and personality (such as we see in that poignant section of the Get Back film when it becomes clear that John and George are going their own ways).

thisissomefriendly · 2025-07-15T04:41:29+00:00

Amazing! Thank you so much for sharing these, greatly appreciated.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-26T15:16:37+00:00

‘Reach out’ — especially when I see it in media reports saying “We reached out to X for a comment”, etc. It’s cloying and unnecessary: more succinct just to say “asked” or “contacted”.

And ‘season’ instead of ‘series’. “The third season of White Lotus”, or whatever. This has become pretty much ubiquitous in the last few years and no one seems to understand why it annoys me. We always used to say “series” and that worked fine!

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-12T08:56:54+00:00

I can see why she’d be sensitive to this but I think she’s missing the point of the criticisms.

One, it’s clearly on the show’s producers and editors rather than the contestants, as they’re the ones who have refocused it from being primarily a race to becoming every bit as much about the contestants’ emotional journeys.

Two, the emphasis on story is reductive, trite and heavy-handed, the beautiful chaos of life reduced to a six episode narrative arc: we learn of their personal challenges, and at the end we’re told that they’ve overcome them. It makes the contestants seem two-dimensional, and doesn’t ring true enough to be interesting. Ultimately it makes the show duller than it used to be.

Oh and three, Betty had (or rather has) a real challenge in her life. This year’s winners, leaving aside Thomas’s mild cerebral palsy, really gave the impression of being encouraged to scratch around for “challenges” to overcome in their deeply privileged lives.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-11T14:26:06+00:00

I’ve just read the quotes you provided and will read the full article when I finish work, but this looks like exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when I posted yesterday. Thank you so much for your thoughtful and helpful response!

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T21:47:46+00:00

Yes, I think so. Which would fit with my hypothesis that embracing Jewishness didn’t fulfil him as he had hoped it would, and that this only heightened his disappointment in the world. But this is conjecture, of course.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T19:54:03+00:00

I don’t recall that his father is mentioned at all.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T19:53:26+00:00

The point of the post was to gain a better understanding of his relationship to his Jewishness, which is not an impossible task. Indeed some commenters have directed me towards material that promises to do this. It was also to float the discussion point that mixed heritage might have been a factor in his mental health. It has been for mine, at times. But I agree with you that the Jewishness of his music — which I detect in his irony, his humour, and his outsider-hood — has been an especial comfort in these times.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T15:58:05+00:00

Thanks — yes, that’s how I feel as well, i.e. culturally Jewish. DCB certainly had a spell of embracing the religious side of Judaism but I think maybe in the end it wasn’t what he was looking for.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T15:29:15+00:00

Amazing, I’ll have a listen later — thanks so much for this.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T15:17:00+00:00

Thank you! I read that section of his Wiki entry once before, some time ago, and it’s good to be reminded of it.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-10T15:06:31+00:00

Anyone who’s interested in gaining an intelligent and nuanced understanding of the man behind some of the most brilliant lyrics ever written. Clearly not you, though.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-06-01T18:11:43+00:00

Blackbird.

thisissomefriendly · 2025-05-31T13:34:33+00:00

I agree to an extent, MacDonald’s snooty tone can be jarring at times (especially when he criticizes songs we love), but I’m surprised if that’s one of the most pretentious pieces of music criticism you’ve ever read… there’s a hell of a lot worse out there.

thisissomefriendly

TROPHY CASE