Purpletigron

I was reading this (and the various other reports about pro-natalist pontificating and getting women - the right sort, obvs - to BREED): Reform by-election candidate calls for ‘young girls’ to be given ‘biological reality’ check:

Mr Goodwin – who is standing for Reform UK in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election – argued: “We need to explain and educate to young children, the next generation, the severity of this crisis.
“We need to also explain to young girls and women the biological reality of this crisis. Many women in Britain are having children much too late in life, and they would prefer to have children much earlier on.”

- no other than Dr Marie Stopes, who was so not about woman as mere breeding vessels. And was a) the daughter of an older mother and b) an older mother herself by the time she actually progenated.

Okay, she had views of the day (particularly when it came to daughter-in-laws, sigh), but she was also very much about women's choice, women pursuing careers, women not spending their entire lives in child-bearing, fewer but healthier babies through contraception and spacing, etc etc etc.

In many ways, yes, she was a monster, but a monster I would happily reanimate from the waves off Portland Bill where her ashes were scattered and send after these guys.

"Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker:

London is being used as the backdrop for inaccurate viral videos that reach enormous audiences around the world by playing into the worst stereotypes about the capital.

Last summer, the man says, he found himself sitting in his car, analysing trends on TikTok. His day job was conducting viewings for an estate agency but he was trying to come up with an idea for a viral video account that could be run as a money-making side-hustle.
“I was thinking of unique videos I can do for people,” he says on the tape.
That’s when he had a brainwave: “Hate brings views.”
At that time protests outside asylum hotels were spreading across the country. The man says he noticed “far-right people” were among the most engaged on TikTok. They were easy to rile up: “They hate such videos of illegal migrants. I was like, why not?”
....
The TikToker appears to have no concept of the potential real-world impact of his uploads, instead considering everything in terms of view counts and pieces of content.

He had originally found he could make money through posting videos on TikTok but 'TikTok immediately deleted his account because he was just stealing other people’s videos and reposting them'.

There seems to be just a total disconnect going on in the guy's mind (or he's just ethically vacuous) and generally he does not appear the sharpest blade in the drawer:

Despite fostering online hatred, the man recorded.... insists he doesn’t personally share the views expressed on his TikTok account. Instead, he suggests his fake anti-migrant house tour videos were just a way to game the algorithm, build an audience, and hopefully make money.

baffled. He can’t understand how London Centric traced his anonymous hate-filled London TikTok account back to his employer by geolocating the wheelie bins in his videos.
“I thought no one’s gonna notice that,” he says. “Why would someone?”

What I read

Finished Cakes and Ale, which is partly that early C20th litfic convention of a first-person narrator who just happens be around to hear a lot about the actual protags and the plot or at critical moments of same, but actually complicates it with Ashenden knowing that Rosie is not actually dead as everyone else supposes. Not sure the ending really worked.

I then, having got into an Edwardian/Georgian novelist rhythm, went 'ah! time for some Arnold Bennett! the one about the hotel', except I picked up The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), which is 1900s thriller hijinx mode with European royalty shenanigans, false identities, etc etc (though I was wondering whether it might adapt into a screwball comedy movie?), and wasn't actually the one I'd read many years ago that I was thinking of.

Which was Imperial Palace (1930), which struck me as, although lacking the highspeed thriller plot element, remarkably like D Francis in its fascination for infrastructure (in this case, running a luxury hotel in London) and competence porn. The running-the-hotel bits and the trials posed for the new supervising housekeeper are, perhaps, at least these days, more interesting than the bits involving Hotel Manager and Rich Man's Daughter Gracie. To give her (and actually, Bennett as author) her due, she is not, whereas she would be in a lot of novels by his contemporaries, an unmitigated bitch (Aldous Huxley's Lucy Tantamount) or a tragic bitch (Michael Arlen's Iris Storm), she has some good points and was a competent racing driver, but she is still annoyingly entitled and egocentric.

I took a break from this because I suddenly had a whim to re-read Mary Renault, The King Must Die (1958) for the first time in absolute yonks. You know, Mary, the sexism and misogyny is not entirely just being Accurate for Period, is it, hmmmm? There is some great stuff in there, but.

On the go

Imperial Palace is very long, and still on the go.

Up next

I think I am up for some Agatha Christie, seriously.