Steven Bamlett
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stevieb.bsky.social
Steven Bamlett
@stevieb.bsky.social
660 followers 720 following 1.2K posts
Retired ex-teacher in HE and social worker. Cis gay white male, (like queer as a rejection of norms). Link to Green 🍏 & Black Lives Matter and anti-exclusion. Lover of visual art, the written and spoken word & theatre, ballet, and opera. Left in politics.
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livesteven.com/2025/11/27/t...
The fifth, or ‘confession’ stage of the Alcoholics Anonymous programme of steps to recovery from addiction is that the addict has: ‘Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact ...
The fifth, or ‘confession’ stage of the Alcoholics Anonymous programme of steps to recovery from addiction is that the addict has: ‘Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another h…
livesteven.com
November 27, 2025 at 10:41 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
Guide to Imagined places
livesteven.com/2025/11/26/w...
Where is my favourite place? It is a ‘place’ we construct by inviting (perhaps even willing) the senses to respond as if there were elsewhere – in some other space and time than the present, rather th...
Daily writing promptDo you have a favorite place you have visited? Where is it?View all responses Where is my favourite place? It is a place we construct by inviting (perhaps even willing) the sens…
livesteven.com
November 26, 2025 at 12:33 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
See the new play
livesteven.com?p=32188
“Boo only comes out at night”, so says Jem Finch in the 1962 film of ‘To Kill A Mocking Bird’. What does it take to make ‘darkness visible’. This is a blog preparing me to see the touring production o...
Daily writing promptAre you more of a night or morning person?View all responses Thrown to the pit of Hell, Satan in Paradise Lost looks around him: At once as far as Angels kenn he viewsThe dismal…
livesteven.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:39 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/23/w...
Why plan a day trip to Manchester, I ask myself?
Manchester is not a favourite city of mine to visit, although in part this is because I have worked so hard to neutralise its effects on me as past blogs on visits contingent on some great art even…
livesteven.com
November 23, 2025 at 1:36 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/22/w...
Wear colours as if they were things and contained emotion as well as expressing it, or, ‘if I were a fairy queen, I’d wear red and green’.
Daily writing promptWhat are your two favorite things to wear?View all responses Wear colours as if they were things and contained emotion as well as expressing it, or, ‘if I were a fairy que…
livesteven.com
November 22, 2025 at 3:14 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
It is almost as if Rachel Reeves and Kier Starmer were consciously laying g the ground for fascism on the model of 30s Germsny
richardjmurphy.bsky.social Richard Murphy @richardjmurphy.bsky.social · 7d
Rachel Reeves is presenting a budget built on assumptions that simply cannot survive the world we are about to enter.
We're facing a financial crisis, and that is not in her plans.

youtu.be/O_6AdrMLWbw?...
Why Rachel Reeves’s first budget cannot survive the coming financial meltdown
YouTube video by Richard J Murphy
youtu.be
November 22, 2025 at 2:45 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/20/c...
Considered from the abyssal plain, beaches are but stages of plateaus’; ‘raised beaches’ becoming remoter from the sea that defines them, on the ascent of a mountain to an unreceptive sky. Considered ...
Daily writing promptBeach or mountains? Which do you prefer? Why?View all responses Considered from the abyssal plain, beaches are but stages of plateaus; ‘raised beaches’ becoming remo…
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November 20, 2025 at 4:21 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
Iris Murdoch's queer Poetry
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This is a blog on Murdoch’s Queer Poetry. Is it a layer of Queer History or the record of  a Psychosocial Anomaly? It is based on Iris Murdoch (ed. Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson, Rachel Hirschler & Frances ...
One line in a poem of complicated love between women, written to Brigid Brophy, by Iris Murdoch reads: ‘Don’t  make of sex a basic category’. To her journal she committed the following reflect…
livesteven.com
November 19, 2025 at 9:12 PM
Reposted by Steven Bamlett
saulstaniforth.bsky.social
Whatever Labour does won't be enough for Reform, and why would it? All it does is legitimise Reforms rhetoric and policies, shifts the narrative further to the right, and makes a Reform government more likely.
November 18, 2025 at 7:40 AM
stevieb.bsky.social
Iris Murdoch
livesteven.com/2025/11/16/r...
Reading ‘right now’ or reading forever!
Daily writing promptWhat book are you reading right now?View all responses Reading ‘right now’ or reading forever! In truth I am reading a newly published book of poems by Iris Murdoch,…
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November 17, 2025 at 9:34 AM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/14/m...
Most of us favour only one animal – humans, and pretend to enjoy instead the slavery of the animals we willingly harm and subjugate to our will and to feed, in every sense, our needs! Why are we so wr...
Daily writing promptWhat are your favorite animals?View all responses Most of us favour only one animal – humans, and pretend to enjoy instead the slavery of the animals we willingly harm and…
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November 14, 2025 at 3:10 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
A stunningly great book
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‘A pervasive pattern of instability of relationships, self-image, and affects and marked impulsivity, …’: Are DSM-5-TR Categorical Criteria means of describing a person, a character, an author, or a r...
‘A pervasive pattern of instability of relationships, self-image, and affects and marked impulsivity, …’: Are DSM-5-TR Categorical Criteria means of describing a person, a charact…
livesteven.com
November 12, 2025 at 8:42 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
Kinski makes a mark
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Making your mark from the offset: the fallacy of control. This blog is a reflection on Benjamin Myers’ new work, ‘Jesus Christ Kinski: A Novel about a Film about a Performance about Jesus’.
Daily writing promptWhat’s the first impression you want to give people?View all responses Making your mark from the offset: the fallacy of control. This blog is a reflection on Benjamin Myer…
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November 8, 2025 at 3:37 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/07/m...
My favourite subject was ‘Fainting in Coils’, of course!
Daily writing promptWhat was your favorite subject in school?View all responses The saddest character in Lewis Carroll’s repertoire of tragi-comic characters is the Mock-Turtle. While his fri…
livesteven.com
November 7, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Steven Bamlett
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November 6, 2025 at 8:47 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
John Burnside’s final poems are beautiful
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To the memory of John Burnside and in dear friendship for Joanne, I contemplate. the poet’s posthumous lines: ‘and everything they loved / is erstwhile, in the empire of forgetting: /  …’
Daily writing promptWhat book are you reading right now?View all responses To the memory of John Burnside and in dear friendship for Joanne, I contemplate. the poet’s posthumous lines: ‘and e…
livesteven.com
November 6, 2025 at 8:51 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
Next blog. Just read his posthumous poems.
November 4, 2025 at 7:23 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/04/a...
‘Anticipating time with starting courage’. Lines from ‘Troilus and Cressida’ Act 4, Scene V woven into a dialogue between an old man and his son.
Daily writing promptDo you need time?View all responses ‘Anticipating time with starting courage’. Adapted lines from ‘Troilus and Cressida’ Act 4, Scene V woven into a fant…
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November 4, 2025 at 2:32 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com?p=31730
In a historical novel, you can ‘meet’ people supposed in those fictions to be famous AND those who are or ‘were’ so in ‘real’ life simultaneously. In Neil Blakemore’s 2025 novel ‘Objects Of Desire’, t...
Daily writing promptWho is the most famous or infamous person you have ever met?View all responses In a historical novel, you can ‘meet’ people supposed in those fictions to be famous A…
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November 3, 2025 at 5:03 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/11/02/t...
This blog documents reflection on a visit, and reading afterwards about, ‘Gilbert & George: 21st Century Pictures’ in the London South Bank, The Hayward Gallery on 22nd October 2025 at 10.30 a.m.
What might Gilbert & George mean when they said in 1986 in What Our Art Means (and republished by them in the catalogue of this exhibition in 2025) that it is intended ‘to speak across the barr…
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November 2, 2025 at 5:08 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/10/30/t...
The ubiquitous phenomenon of the unreliable narrator in the novel is an admission that the only truth in human hearts is its tendency to ambivalence; knowing, feeling and sensing opposite ideas , emot...
Daily writing promptWhat’s something you believe everyone should know.View all responses The ubiquitous phenomenon of the unreliable narrator in the novelin the novel is an admission that the…
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October 30, 2025 at 1:23 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/10/28/i...
Innocence is not the condition of childhood- rather it is inability to control the heart or stop it from being overwhelmed. This blog is an attempt to prepare myself to see a revival of Chekhov’s ‘The...
Daily writing promptWhat does it mean to be a kid at heart?View all responses Innocence is not the condition of childhood- rather it is inability to control the heart or stop it from being overwhel…
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October 28, 2025 at 3:14 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/10/26/a...
A Tale of Two Theatres [mainly]: from October 22nd, 2025, day 2 onwards of the birthday treats.
A Tale of Two Theatres [mainly]: from October 22nd, 2025, day 2 onwards of the birthday treats. The ‘[mainly]’ is there to show I’m focusing – as much anyway as a sloppy wri…
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October 26, 2025 at 2:57 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
My London trip to Lee Miller & Picassi
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October 21st 2025: The first day of my birthday treats ends earlier than planned: Mea Culpa!
October 21st 2025: The first day of my birthday treats ends earlier than planned: Mea Culpa! I started this blog on the 21st October and its now the 24th and so backlogged with diary like blog repo…
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October 25, 2025 at 3:05 PM
stevieb.bsky.social
livesteven.com/2025/10/19/s...
‘… stood kind of hyper’ and ‘itching for some … some fucking … ‘action.’ You know. “Drama”’. Another play to see and to make Geoff think his birthday present to me takes me and him back to Nottingham....
‘… stood kind of hyper’ and ‘itching for some … some fucking … ‘action.’ You know. “Drama”’. Another play to see and to make Geoff think his birthday present to me takes me and him back to Nottingh…
livesteven.com
October 19, 2025 at 8:48 PM