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mordant.bsky.social
morag
@mordant.bsky.social
340 followers 190 following 310 posts
Nobody loves me and the sun's going to kill me.

Dilettante, raconteur, connoisseur of human folly
Guaranteed 0.5 or less of the author @mkhardywrites
The Needfire, Solaris 2025, out now
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mordant.bsky.social
REMINDER FOR MY FRIENDS IN UK ACADEMIA
If you're Unison, Unite, UCU, EIS, PLEASE POST YOUR BALLOT BACK by tomorrow. We're balloting for amounts to a general strike in HE. This EXISTENTIAL for the sector. Please, please get your vote in as we need to make quorum.
A black and white illustration of a group of men carrying tools raising their arms into the air, forming a single upraised fist.
November 25, 2025 at 1:57 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Tfw you realise belatedly that you've dressed like an extra from Man In The High Castle...
September 3, 2025 at 3:02 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Nobody actually cares about this for their own sake, Keir. Nobody is actually personally worried about this. You know why? Because it's not a real problem. When will you stop dancing to Farage's vicious racist little tune and start paying attention to the stuff that matters?
September 1, 2025 at 2:14 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Fml. Note the battery % for extra Fml.
A screenshot of an eta showing the RAC will be with me in four and a half hours if I'm lucky. Also my battery is under 50%.
July 15, 2025 at 9:31 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Welp.
A broken down red car at the side of a dual carriageway
July 15, 2025 at 9:25 PM
mordant.bsky.social
I was not NOT drunk before I made a very alcoholic chartreuse cocktail.
A close up of a light green cocktail
June 27, 2025 at 9:07 PM
mordant.bsky.social
That time of year in Scotland where every time you're at the shops you're all "BUYING LOCALLY IS OBJECTIVELY VIRTUOUS."
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries.
June 24, 2025 at 7:04 PM
mordant.bsky.social
There goes the neighborhood.
June 18, 2025 at 11:03 PM
mordant.bsky.social
The lengthy letter I sent that this was responding to:
A letter, part 1 of 4: I am writing to you to beg for government intervention into the crisis at the University of Dundee. Taking into consideration the jobs already lost or open positions not filled at Dundee University, the job losses outstrip the 630 announced and are in fact more like 850. This matches the losses at the Michelin Factory in 2020. That mass redundancy was announced with two years’ notice, and was met with multilateral support for those who lost their jobs going far beyond statutory redundancy, including significant intervention from the Scottish Government, as you will likely  remember. By contrast, after months of secrecy and silence, the Dundee uni exec propose to execute their ‘plan’ over a period of just 45 days. The staff primarily affected by this are as you’ll know mostly professional services staff. These are the people who live in the city. They earn average salaries and pour every penny of them back into the local economy. They are locals with families and friends and lives here. They are also disproportionately women. What are they to do? Up sticks with their families and move? Where? How, with no money and a sector contracting across the board? As you’ll know, Dundee is not a large city, and the university is one of its largest employers. I am genuinely unsure what the impact will be of a further loss of over 600 jobs in a city already struggling to get back up off its knees economically following Covid, but I feel sure it will be significant. A letter, part 2 of 4: I realise I have already written at some length here, but I hope I still have you, because I'd like to tell you a little about my own situation. My wife Erin and I both work at the University of Dundee. I've been here for 13 years and my wife for 12. We moved to Dundee in 2011 from Edinburgh, where I previously worked at the uni there. Erin is a schools outreach worker in Life Sciences. She's been in and out of pretty much every secondary school in the city at one time or another - and a good half of the primaries - supporting the science curriculum. She's worked with partners across the city like Dundee Contemporary Arts and the Dundee Science Centre to deliver programming that’s impacted thousands of kids. She now also teaches science and health communication to undergrads and postgrads alike, helping to create the science and public health educators of the future. I’ve worked in the university’s digital and communications space since 2012 and have in that time been restructured or moved from one team to another at least five times (you eventually lose track). A bit of a jack-of-all-words, I now work in communications and engagement within the directorate responsible for industry and community collaboration with research, fostering the university’s relationship with our local region. A letter, part 3 of 4: We aren’t earning the big bucks, you know? We’re middle-of-the-pack: skilled professional services staff with a tonne of experience, not bigshot managers or anything. But we were happy and comfortable, rounding the corner into our 40s content to be paying our mortgage, tightening belts as energy bills and cost of living spike, but basically getting by not badly. Erin’s the co-lead of the uni’s LGBTQ Staff Network. I help out with the uni music society - singing in the graduation choir, that sort of thing. We’re part of the university community. Our friends are at the uni. Our hobbies are at the uni. Dundee is that kind of place. Erin’s from the USA, but she’s called Scotland her home for 17 years, and considers herself Dundonian. I’m originally from the west coast of Scotland, but I’ve lived in Dundee longer now than anywhere else, and I will defend this city to my last breath. This city - this institution - is our home. In ‘restructures’ like this, people with words like ‘engagement’ and ‘outreach’ in their job titles are often, as I’m sure you know, the first to go. There is a very good chance that as things stand both my wife and I will lose our jobs in a couple of months, reducing our household income by two full salaries in one fell swoop, instantly rendering us members of the precariat in a job market that takes no prisoners. 25 years of our working lives, flushed. 25 years of combined knowledge, lost. 25 years of loyalty, cast aside. This is the human face of these cuts. And we aren’t the only ones. We, at least, are lucky enough to have no dependents (beyond a dog and cat). There will be numerous dual income families with children who are sitting at home right now worried that both parents may be about to be made redundant. A letter, part 4 of 4: There has to be another way through this. It’s clear that there has been mismanagement. It’s clear that some measure of restructuring is necessary. But not like this. Not in less than two months, with NO consultation beyond the exec and a few token votes at Court. Not with a voluntary severance package run concurrently with compulsory redundancy. (How does that even work? As far as I can see, it doesn’t.)  Not without the opportunity for staff to put forward alternatives. We haven’t talked about job sharing schemes. We haven’t talked about the option of moving to a four day week to instantly cut costs with the pain genuinely shared between all of us. Surely we at least deserve the chance to put these plans forward? Surely we deserve some say? Why are we being punished the the executive’s negligence? And why is the load falling so disproportionately on the average-to-low salaried workers who keep the city of Dundee alive? I believe that education is a human right and a public service. I do not believe that universities should ever have had to operate like private businesses chasing revenue. I don’t know whether or not you and I are aligned in that. But I hope that we ARE aligned in the understanding that staff cuts on this scale would be ruinous for the university and devastating for Dundee as the vibrant, up-and-coming wee city it was pre-Covid, and I believe could be again. Please don’t let this happen to my home. Please, step in. Please help. Please save us from our own executive, who seem determined, having run us into the ground, to shift into reverse and back up over us to make sure we’re really dead.
March 13, 2025 at 11:55 AM
mordant.bsky.social
Truly rancid response from Tess White MSP to my heartfelt letter begging for government intervention into the crisis at Dundee University. Callous to the point of malicious. Read the room mate.
An email reads: Dear Morag Sadly Dundee is the YES City of the SNP. Education has nosedived under the SNP. Nicola Sturgeon said to judge her on Education. This is her legacy. Education and Health should be our top priority. It breaks my heart to see emails like yours. We have to keep chipping away but until the Scottish people see what is happening and wake up to all this nothing will change. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Thank you however for writing to me. You can do something. Find out which candidates support education and support them locally. I would forget the SNP. They have got us into this mess. We judge them by what they say .. education and we give them ‘F’. Thank you again for writing to me. I hear you. Tess From Tess White MSP Am email reads: Speaking as an unaligned socialist I would have loved a response from you that didn't harp on tired old partisan rivalries and attempt to shrug off all blame for a landscape in which Labour, the Tories, and even the LibDems have ALL instrumental [sic] through central policies across over 30 years of successive regimes up to and including the current Labour government in Westminster. Disappointed that you are trying to score political points off this local crisis. Clean your own house please. But thank you for the reply, I appreciate that you responded. Morag Text: The irony is that as I wrote my reply I couldn't recall whether White was Tory or Labour but I didn't really need to: the response could have come from either because around here the only thing they know how to do is blame the SNP for everything. Even, apparently, for decades of punishment of the HE sector by successive Westminster governments.
March 13, 2025 at 11:11 AM
mordant.bsky.social
Hah, ironically I JUST got done buying all the remaining Discworld novels I didn't already own secondhand. This is cool, though. Don't need a book or potato and couldn't pick just one favourite quote anyway, but here's a good one for these Interesting Times.
Black italic text on a white background: "Find the story, Granny Weatherwax always said. She believed that the world was full of story shapes. If you let them, they controlled you. But if you studied them, if you found out about them... you could use them, you could change them."
February 16, 2025 at 11:37 PM
mordant.bsky.social
My guilty secret is I love contrast thread and use it to spice up dull shirts even though Derek the suit guy disapproves.
August 5, 2024 at 11:30 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Okay I mostly regret getting into these fights but sometimes it's fun.
A comment from me quoting someone else saying: "artificially forcing companies to use people's work which is more expensive than an automated system is just wrong." I reply "serious question: why?"
March 31, 2024 at 3:14 PM
mordant.bsky.social
🙃
An anonymised Facebook comment reading: "no one complained when we started using machines in factories and all the craftsmen became a thing of the past."
March 31, 2024 at 2:46 PM
mordant.bsky.social
January 28, 2024 at 12:44 PM
mordant.bsky.social
This right here is exactly how I felt... until your article. Thank you!
January 26, 2024 at 1:38 PM
mordant.bsky.social
To be fair, "idk it looks big" is basically how the UK gov has decided breed identification works too... 2/
"Dundee pensioner John Reid was hospitalised after being attacked last July by a dog he believes was an XL Bully."
January 8, 2024 at 10:04 AM
mordant.bsky.social
Our local paper being their usual balanced selves... 1/
Tabloid headline from the Dundee "newspaper" The Courier: "Safety fears over XL Bullies rehomed in Dundee from England and Wales."
January 8, 2024 at 10:01 AM
mordant.bsky.social
When this is a "bleak prediction" we have done something terribly wrong as a society.
Clip from the Guardian morning email reading: 'Musk highlighted the potential benefits of AI, while simultaneously issuing stark warnings about “humanoid robots”, and predicted that there would be no jobs as AI would have taken them all. Despite some of his bleakest predictions, Musk also said that he believed AI to be a force for good.' "no jobs at all" and "bleakest predictions" are highlighted.
November 3, 2023 at 9:21 AM
mordant.bsky.social
Just came home with this gorgeous edition of The Living Mountain for E with a MacFarlane introduction, which she received with the words "hah I just bought a book with a MacFarlane introduction!" I then messaged her YOUR post and she's like "yes that's the book I bought."
October 3, 2023 at 3:40 PM
mordant.bsky.social
I'm sure this will be great.
October 2, 2023 at 10:30 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Back from camping with only ~100 midge bites, many from the last night when I spent an unhinged 10 minutes on my knees in the rain at 4am trying to fix a broken flysheet zip. Still, worth it (not the zip part that was futile).
A photograph of a Scottish loch (Loch Ard). Sparkling water, rolling, forested hills in the distance, blue sky, lots of fluffy clouds, and a skeletal but not quite dead tree in the foreground, growing out of a wee patch of grass right on the pebbly bank.
August 11, 2023 at 11:18 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Spent a chunk of the past few days sewing pocket extensions into all my stupid ladypocket jeans.
A photo looking down on a hand that has pulled a jeans pocket inside out. That pocket was originally stupidly shallow, as the jeans are cut for women, but has been extended with scrap fabric to be the depth of the pockets found in clothing made for men. For women plagued by stupid tiny pockets, it is a glorious sight.
August 6, 2023 at 12:35 PM
mordant.bsky.social
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a married lesbian in possession of a badge maker must be in want of EVERYTHING IS BADGES.
August 4, 2023 at 1:01 PM
mordant.bsky.social
Now with colour.
August 1, 2023 at 10:14 PM