What a great piece of writing. Not just about closures, but also about the reality of the food business, the 'hospitality industry', money, and work. And: the glimmer at the end. Lots of feels, all at once.

"All this to fit in, to belong." Alex is good people; this is excellent on all the little things to like – or not – about here, and yet to still love it. And – a reminder how little I know about having had to fit in anywhere else. I hope the gods of paperwork smile on her too. I'm still angry she's even had to go through this. I am still ashamed of all this Brexit nonsense.

"The small institutions, public figures and spaces that I lament might all seem insignificant but, collectively, used to and still could make a difference, despite capital's determined attempts to neuter their efficacy via co-option and divide and rule. I've often felt elements of the atheist left wing ought to tone down their strident hectoring and remember that social justice is at the heart of many Christian movements, especially Methodism. Similarly, many Christians should consider that Jesus told them to care for the poor, not peer judgementally into people's bedrooms." Amongst other things in this thoughtful, cogent article – which made a nice alternative from the yelling on social media and the yelling on media platforms from, well, pretty much everyone. (Also: Ramsgate Music Hall looks great; I did not even know).

"Some of the best field naturalists I know grew up in working-class rural communities, skipping school like Billy Casper to practise forms of natural history that bent or broke the law: they ferreted rabbits, collected eggs, broke into quarries, kept pigeons, reared finches, climbed fences to poach for fish. Today they can still spot a linnet’s nest in a furze bush at 50 paces and possess fieldcraft skills that would put many a birder to shame. There’s little room for them in today’s culture of nature appreciation and even less so in nature writing, which tends to entrench a sense that the correct relation to the landscape is through walking and distanced looking." From the section on 'Landscape and Englishness', which sounds excellent.

Rather wonderful interview with J G Ballard in 1984, in the Paris Review; effusive, head-screwed on, but god, his working process is hardly something you can emulate: such absolute control and certainty!

Its fragments like this that make it easy to explain why I love Harrison's writing.

"That is how the internet first appeared to me: as shared experience of make believe and dreams. And while much has changed in the decade since: that slipperiness, those mutable boundaries, the capacity for experimentation and imagination still is here. The internet is made of dreams."

"But – and here’s where every single one of these cuts affects us all, even people who live in gated communities and have second homes in the country – I don’t personally want to live in a society where the worst-off are treated with corner-cutting contempt. This is the seventh richest nation in the world. In the world. And yet a report commissioned by the TUC predicted that by 2015, almost 7.1m of the nation’s 13m youngsters will be in “homes with incomes judged to be less than the minimum necessary for a decent standard of living”." The whole piece is very good indeed; Andrew Collins, excellent as ever.

'Together with Caper I have also been working on a small art project for the RSC. We’ve been interested in working with the building itself… We wanted to explore the building as a whole, the total sum of effort and action that makes experiencing the performance possible; some of it behind the scenes. To do that, we wanted to put together an app that would analyse, visualise and display activity in the building as it happens." Lovely stuff from Natalia; this is another piece of work commissioned at the same time as the piece I'm doing for the RSC (more of which anon).

"The fascinating thing about the New Aesthetic could be that it was never new — it went from being unknown to being ubiquitous and thoroughly banal with barely a blink. The frisson of shock or wonder one experienced at seeing an aspect of the New Aesthetic out in the wild comes because that is the only time it will be noticed; afterwards it will pass unobserved. The New Aesthetic is not about seeing something new — it is about the new things we are not seeing. It is an effort to truly observe and note emergent digital visual phenomena before they become invisible." This is a really solid, careful piece from Will Wiles.

"Millions and millions and millions of people also love Gregory's Girl and OMD and Brookside and Underworld and Evelyn Glennie and the shipping forecast and that is deeply joyous and important." Yep, that.