Richard J
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preachypreach.bsky.social
Richard J
@preachypreach.bsky.social
3.6K followers 560 following 19K posts
Tax nerd, still atrocious at amusing profiles
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preachypreach.bsky.social
Only a timely punk single saved me from being named after my dead grandad, Gordon.
November 11, 2025 at 12:09 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/lyrics/all-a... this is giving me a massive earworm btw
Goodbye Sam, Hello Samaritans — Lyrics and Discussion
The lyrics to 'Goodbye Sam, Hello Samaritans' by Half Man Half Biscuit, still banging out the classics in 2025 with the album 'All Asimov and No Fresh Air'.
halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
preachypreach.bsky.social
I was very disappointed in it given Once Round the Block is a lovely bit of whimsical folk pop.
November 11, 2025 at 11:28 AM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Though tbf, our country failed at its first attempt at this track
November 11, 2025 at 10:10 AM
preachypreach.bsky.social
They got his ass
November 11, 2025 at 10:09 AM
preachypreach.bsky.social
“Tom’s putting all of it in now”
November 11, 2025 at 8:51 AM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Absolutely not the family background I’d have expected to be fair
CONTESTED SPACES: GROWING UP IN IRELAND, WALES, AND ENGLAND The spaces of William Johnston's early life were fraught with conflict from before his birth. When the new Irish Free State was established in 1921, Johnston's father, a civil servant who was also named William, doubted its viability and remained in the north, where William Jr. later recalled that Protestants "held the money, the property, and the good jobs, while the Catholic minority were hewers of wood and drawers of water."' In 1921, the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Belfast was intense, and his parents came to believe the space where they lived in a Protestant neighborhood in Belfast was too dangerous for Catholics; they found a Protestant man who lived in Falls Road and who similarly thought his space was too dangerous for a Protestant. So the Johnston family traded their house for that of the Protestant man, giving each side at least a perception of relatively greater safety. Johnston was born four years later in 1925, during a time of intense conflict in Irish society. Johnston's birthplace in the Falls Road was the center of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) district, and his family strongly supported the IRA. He described his mother, Winnie Clearkin, as "something of a feminist before her time," both a member of the woman's division of the IRA and a member of the Third Order of St. Dominic; she was proud that an IRA leader had once spent a night in her home? As Johnston was growing up, the spaces around him were chronically charged with conflict. Protestants regularly expressed hatred for the pope, and on one occasion Johnston's father was watching a crowd of Protestants singing and dancing in the street to an anti-papal song; suddenly there were three gunshots, and three Protestant dancers lay dead. The crowd dispersed. In 1932, when Johnston was seven years old, his father was transferred to a position in North Wales against his will, and the family had to move. In this new space y…
November 10, 2025 at 10:50 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Yes, I joke facetiously but focusing on his duties as a medical professor and focussing on providing immediate medical care to those around was clearly the only way the author could process and handle the experience he just had.
November 10, 2025 at 10:45 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
You weren’t having this discussion literally the day after a nuclear bomb fell half a mile away from you though
November 10, 2025 at 10:39 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Something unusual in the translator’s bio too
WILLIAM JOHNSTON William Johnston was born in 1925 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He ined the Jesuit Order in 1943 and after completing his studies at the University of Dublin, travelled to Japan in 1951. There, he taught English literature while earning a PhD in Theology, and later wrote a number of books on religion and mysticism. He died in 2010 at the age of 85.
November 10, 2025 at 10:38 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
I’m genuinely not sure what to make of it, but it is a fascinating companion piece to the works of Japan’s other most famous Catholic 20th century writer.
November 10, 2025 at 10:35 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Without wanting to spoil it, the last chapter of this book, someone who was literally less than a kilometre from Ground Zero from Nagasaki and had his wife and over 800 of his colleagues killed in the blast, is not what you would expect.
November 10, 2025 at 10:33 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
They didn’t believe me until I dug out the newspaper article with his name on
November 10, 2025 at 9:34 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Still I had the experience of telling the eldest the other day that their grandpa supported Black Sabbath. That was fun
November 10, 2025 at 9:33 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
“A litre, papa?”
November 10, 2025 at 9:32 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
A lot of people (absolutely not me) will be in pain at this image.
folded over book corner
November 10, 2025 at 8:25 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Actually tell a lie, this is more you

store.steampowered.com/app/994730/B...
Banner of the Maid is a mix of turn-based strategy and JRPG. Set in an alternate French Revolution with fantasy elements. As the young officer Pauline Bonaparte you will have to lead your troops to battle and play a role in the political vortex of Paris
November 10, 2025 at 7:49 PM
preachypreach.bsky.social
Just for you
By focusing on choice, Spears and Geruso are trying to resist depopulation determinism. There is an argument that female education means an inevitable decline in birth rates (the British historian Lucy Worsley once said she had been 'educated out of the natural reproductive function'). It is certainly true that countries which increase educational opportunities for women also see a sharp decline in the TFR; high TFRs exist only in societies with very limited female education. This is both cause and effect: educational access means more reproductive choice; more choice makes it easier to access education. But when a society's fertility falls below replacement level the story gets more complicated. There is some evidence that women with PhDs are more likely to have children than those who have undergraduate degrees. This is presumably because having an academic career, though far from ideal, has become a more child-friendly option than some other professions. A recent report identified British women who were the first generation in their family to go to university as the cohort least likely to have children. That means second and future generations might be different: to be the child of a woman who went to university shows it is at least feasible to do both. The direction of travel is not only one way.
November 10, 2025 at 7:46 PM