Rich Thomas

@richpthomas.bsky.social

253 Followers 191 Following

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈 Dysgwr Cymraeg yn Llundain. Witty alt text makes my day

The weather forecast for four days next week. It is hot but not *that* hot
A big box of Lego, set 6399: the airport monorail of dreams
A sad error-404 robot is sad. Their head is, adorably, a cassette tape
A small twin-engine propellor plane comes into land somewhere sunny. It does not, in fact, look like an otter
A netted Christmas tree, being held outside a beautiful local greengrocers. The beautiful local greengrocer can be seen in the background
A tweet from Lewis Goodall that says NEW: Nathan Gill, Reform’s former leader in Wales, sentenced to 10.5 years in prison over pro-Russia bribes. It’s immediately followed by a tweet from Susie Dent, posted one minute earlier, that says Word of the day is ‘quockerwodger’ (19th century): a puppet politician whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else. Obviously Susie is being v timely and current-affairsy with her word of the day, but to see it *immediately* next to said current affairs is delightfully chef’s-kiss
A man in a vest and glasses sits in a cosy corner, holding up a small paperback book called ‘Seats of London’. The cover has a photo of a load of tube seats in different upholsteries—that’s ‘moquettes’ to you and me—and the man, dear reader, is me
A nut at the end of a bolt, inside a circular recess on a wooden bed frame. The recess is helpfully too small to get the head of a spanner inside to tighten it. Presumably when we assembled the bed a decade ago it came with a little tool to get inside here, that has since been lost
Three phone app icons, each both simple and straightforward, and yet blurred as if someone just jogged your elbow as you were squinting to look at them, and now you wonder if you’ve lost your optic nerve
A balcony covered in protective sheeting and much, much scaffolding, giving the appearance nay the ACTUALITY of living in a building site. What you can’t see from the image is that it was taken through a 5cm gap in the window, as this was all we were able to open any window in the flat for a year. A YEAR. Oh the photo was taken on film so it’s got a lovely subtle grain and colour
A sign saying LORD PARKER’S BINGO sits on a stand behind some chairs, those ones with the sort of rattan/woven backs like you might find in a hotel in a sixties Mediterranean hotel, and by a cloth-draped table with some bits and bobs on it on it. Oddly, there’s a black thing with a big white question mark on it (think the handle of Sylvester McCoy’s brolly in Doctor Who) and a metal bucket, but no bingo machine tombola thing. Anyway, the whole scene is delightful and charming and yet everything has slightly odd proportions, as if designed to match some miniature people with outsized heads
A green-hued copy of 1984, the cover of which is a pair of eyes staring out as if into the lens of a CCTV camera. I’m holding it up in front of my face so the eyes are my eyes, all creepy-like
The author-signed frontispiece of a paperback copy of One Hit Wonderland by, if you can read the biro scribble, Tony Hawks. I forgot to take a photo of my copy before I turned it out, but someone on eBay had a photo of the same edition with the same surprise author’s signature, so here we are
A paperback copy of Les Enfants Terribles, sitting on a wooden bar with a glass of wine behind it. Someone’s about to have tapas
A colourful patchwork quilt, laid out in three large strips on the floor of the cavernous Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, as seen from a balcony above. People are walking slowly alongside it, taking in the monumentality and the detail. Each panel is a personal commemoration of a friend, family member or other loved one lost to AIDS in the nineties. Quite a few people were moved to tears, including your dear author
A quartet of flamenco performers strum their guitars and are generally virtuousic under the glow of spotlights shining on a giant mirrorball suspended from the ceiling
My brother loads the boot of the car outside a large detached suburban house. He is being as sensible as befits a forty-nine-year-old
A slightly knackered paperback of Lord of the Flies, gloriously late-90s in design with an oversaturated full-cover photo of the platonic ideal of a desert island. Balmy waters, bowing beachside palms, idyllic sunset—it’s basically a Sandals ad circa 1997 (back when they were properly homophobic, anyone else remember that?)
A paperback of Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw by Will Ferguson sits propped up in the green velvet corner chair. Its cover design is graphically plain and bold, a yellow background with a photo of what the foreword to this UK edition helpfully tells us is what Canadians call a ‘toque’, ie. a woolly beanie. This one has a pom-pom on it, although it still looks more like a beanie with a pom-pom than a bobble hat to me
A black cat sitting directly outside our balcony door, looking in through the glass. It’s a void of a kitty, a silhouette with only eyes visible
A chunky paperback sits on a coffee table next to a cup of coffee. The graphic design of the cover is bold, striking, and very late-90s
A line diagram on the tube, half ripped off. On the ripped-off part someone has made an annotation in cute lil’ red pen
A weathered paperback of Brave New World, with stylish and colourful cover art that’s maybe cubist-adjacent? I dunno
A pair of feet poke out from the hot bubbles
A paperback of Cathedrals of the Flesh, its cover illustrated with a photo of some people lounging in a majestic 19th-century-looking indoor swimming pool, all grand proportions and marble and tile. The book’s being held in front of the rather smaller bath in my flat, filled with bubbles
A side view of a New York subway train. It’s the very latest model, introduced in 2023 so Wikipedia tells me, but with its stainless-steel sides, tiny clunkily-framed windows, small inset doors and random assemblage of boxes and pipes underneath the floor it basically looks like what you imagine a New York subway train from the grim, grimy, dangerous days of the 1970s and 80s looked like
A side-on view of a Japanese commuter train standing at the platform. It’s all very new and pristinely clean—I’m sure you could eat your dinner off it without ill effect—but with all its stainless steel and 1980s graphics it looks quite a lot older than it actually is
A model of an anthropomorphised tug boat called Ten Cents. His face, and indeed the whole look of the model, is *very* Thomas the Tank–adjacent
Irama stands illuminated by a spotlight, standing between two deuterium tubes or plasma conduits or bioneural gelpaks in the hydroponics bay. Or maybe it’s airponics now
A cheery bunch of daffodils in a green glass vase, sitting out on the naughty step, aka a bit of balcony/wintergarden outside my flat
A paperback copy of Battle Beyond the Dolestars, all Jetsons art with an adorable anthropomorphised continuous-feed printer, a Grand Day Out-style rocket, and an I Dream of Jeannie-type cat. (Was there a cat in I Dream of Jeannie? I don’t know actually. But that typeface is defo Jeannie-inspired.) Oh and it’s held in a hand in front of a cocktail on a table on a poolside terrace in front of a delightfully evening-lit hotel did I mention I went on holiday?
A bright and airy poolside terrace, with a crosshatched pergola featuring some mirror balls and dark blue tinsel floating in the breeze
A traditional gofio-milling windmill sits at the top of the ridge overlooking a garden full of cacti of all different shapes and sizes
A field of volcanic rock stretches way off into the distance, all dry browns and greys and beiges; in the background are the telltale conical hills of extinction volcanos, all rust-coloured and enigmatic. The sky is bright blue with wispy clouds; otherwise you could be convinced you were on Mars. Okay I said the moon in the tweet, but all these rusty reds are quite marslike
Rich takes a selfie in the sun, with sunnies on, standing in front of some salt pans in the background. It’s a sunny day and he’s being a slut in a vest
A paperback of Battlestar Suburbia, the cover art for which is Jetsons-spectacular, held up in front of what look like palm trees and gardens and a swimming pool. Friends fear she’s on holiday again
A paperback of A Year of Living Danishly, complete with bright and jaunty yellow text in a big bold Helvetica, held against a bright and jaunty yellow wall. Perfect for brightening your mood in the middle of winter
Some daffodils in a pale green glass vase, in front of a happy yellow wall. The wall is bringing more brightness than the daffs, some of which are just about half-open and some of which are still in their buds
A paperback book, Parallel Lines by Ian Marchant, resting on a green velvet chair
Paperback of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, sitting on my parents’ kitchen counter
A map of Honshu, Japan's biggest island, with shinkansen lines from Wakayama through Osaka to Tokyo coloured in, plus quite a few slower trains and, if you squint, plenty of smudges of urban rail in Osaka and Tokyo. But there's plenty of empty space left for future exploration
A map of mainly England & Wales, with lots of lines coloured in. There's a solitary route going up to Edinburgh, and a smudge of tram in Dublin, and the rest of Scotland and Ireland are cropped off the map because I haven't yet been there
A map of western & central Europe with a few rail lines coloured in, showing where I've travelled. Lots of England & Wales, a few major axes through France and into Switzerland and Italy, and several little smudges of metro travels in various cities. Lots and lots of empty space, as unlike everyone else doing this, I've yet to go interrailing
My brother, in flat cap and checked shirt, and sister-in-law, in cosy coat and dog on a lead. In the background my teenage nephew is looking over a wire fence at some sheep. We’re in a country park and the sky is BLUE. It’s wintery and crisp and really quite lovely
A captcha login test designed to stop bots from logging in, only humans. Except this is the most ridiculous login hurdle you’ve ever seen. It instructs the user to “click the image matching an object shown in the example image”. It’s unclear which image is the example image, and which one you should be clicking in, as there’s a row of three small black-and-white images at the top with a single large colour image below. The three black-and-white ones each have a cartoony drawing of a bus and a cartoony drawing of a chicken (or is it a cockerel? I dunno.) The main, colour image is a weird collage of little photos pinned to a yellow pinboard-type background, across which also run fragments of different-coloured lines, all hither and thither, for no discernible reason. And then you look at the little photos and realise OH GOD THEY’RE ARTIFICIALLY GENERATED. Each one is a little AI slop of a guitar, or a sheep, maybe, or actually that one looks like a chicken I guess I’m meant to click that one? This example I’ve screenshotted is actually significantly clearer than the other one I saw, which made those muddy AI images of gently deformed people with six fingers look a model of clarity and beauty.
The wooden table is set with a red festive runner. On it are some dipping bowls of oil, soy sauce and wasabi, and a tray of gyoza. And there’s an adorable little jug full of sake, and two tiny bowls to sip said sake from
Eleanor, Seiriol, Nick, Xavi, Kyle & Rich sit around a table and take a photo, selfie-style. Everyone is happy. The table (which is midcentury and rosewood don’tcha know) is groaning with gorgeous food made with love by Eleanor. Candles gleam candle-ly. Life is good.