Thinking of you in these awful circumstances. I hope the inquest will finally bring some answers.

Any journalists interesting in covering/following can DM here or contact me at pdkmitchell at gmail dot com. The most recent BBC and ITV coverage is here (CW: violence, femicide, suicide):

www.bbc.com/news/article...

www.itv.com/news/tyne-te...

Traces of him online are all patents with names like 'EXTRACTION MACHINES'... How times change

My dad tells me he did his first tests for the in seam miner at Donisthorpe. I wonder now if that could have been the circumstances for the photo, perhaps explaining why he's at the centre, consciously looking at the camera. This is all speculation, though - I have no idea.

The photo makes it look like he was down the pit, which isn't strictly true, so in that sense it conceals class differentiation within the group. Through adult education he made it to coal board R&D, a level of social mobility now barely imaginable.

Always glad to read your writing!

thoughts after a battle with basic PDF editing and a perennially hostile printer, following a summer wrangling spreadsheets for Gaza

Thanks for sharing, interesting read!

teeth are nothing but trouble

I just did some reading about this and it was not a very edifying use of my time

Oh no what happened here?! 😬 As a book prize judge, I would agree that many feted authors cannot write, but I wouldn't be so bold as to claim a single cause, and if I did, it would certainly not be this one

big fan of a sandwich with fresh onion bhaji, crispy and still a bit warm, with plenty of pickle

Wow... & yes, ultimately it's not about the actual number, but the desired one. Presumably this is relevant to the financial troubles at Hallam of the past few years.

They should also list the fees these students pay when they note seemingly small numbers enrolled. A more useful % would be these students' fees as % of total student fee income, since 73 students @ c. £30k p/a is well over 2 million, not an inconsiderable sum.

Think this was the best film I watched all year - harrowing, though!