At the start of the term, Bill Barnaby took a two-litre Coke bottle, filled it from the milk machine, and hid it next to a heating pipe. It soon soured, curdling to an iceberg of cheese in clear liquid. When Barnaby showed me, I asked how bad it smelled, and he told me there was no way he'd open it to find out.

Barnaby was lucky that his brother was a house prefect and played in the 1st XV, otherwise he would have had a harder time at school. He was bullied a little, but not was badly as Philips and Fotheringhay. They were at the bottom of the pecking order, hated and despised. And they loathed each other, because when one was being picked on, the other had an easier time.

Philips and Fotheringhay had one of their occasional physical fights during an exeat weekend when there were few other boys around. Afterwards, Bill Barnaby went up to Philips and suggested a way to get back at Fotheringhay: you see, he had this bottle of sour milk, one that he’d been saving for a prank at the end of term. Philips could use it if he wanted – but, said Barnaby, Philips could only use half of it, since he wanted to use the rest himself.

Philips poured the stinking liquid over Fotheringhay’s bedding and the clothes in his drawers before making himself scarce. The whole boarding house stank, even at the bottom of the stairs. Fotheringhay was furious when he found his things and dragged them into the showers to rinse them. Barnaby told him it was all right – Barnaby knew a way Fotheringhay could get revenge, because he’d stashed a little sour milk at the start of term…

Background

This is based on something that happened. The smell was revolting and did not clear for some time, but I remember people thinking the person who stirred up the trouble was pretty funny.

Announcements

• My friend Sooxanne has a new Substack, Wilde Volk, exploring her fascination with people dressing up as folklore creatures. She’s had some amazing adventures around this and taken great photos. She’s planning an exhibition at Rottingdean Windmill in July.

• I’ve just finished reading John Higg’s history of Doctor Who, Exterminate! Regenerate! It’s an interesting book, exploring 60 years of the character’s history. The book’s main thesis is that Doctor Who is a sort of egregore, one that is now objectively alive. Reading this book on the verge of the show’s second hiatus is a strange experience. I’m writing up some notes on this.

• And Rosy has appeared on an episode of Telling Tinder Tales, a podcast about the horrors of modern dating.

Recommendations

The way Twitter ended was sad - the site started out as fun, but eventually the investors needed paying. The decay was slow. First, it was removing the APIs that allowed people to build tools for the platform, eliminating the playful bots. Then the metrics demanded more engagement and the product teams set about encourage controversy.

I miss the old, cosy twitter. I miss the place where people you encountered were always lovely, which led to me meeting lots of them in the real world. I also miss the clever literary experiments the place fostered - things like magic realism bot, hookland and Code is Just

Another beautiful literary project is Pastoral Fantasy: short snippets of an idealised world, little pieces of reassurance, very much on a cosy theme:

• you take your nieces and your nephews out for an ice cream cone and a walk beside the water

• you sew yourself a new apron using scraps of fabric leftover from previous projects

• you admire the daffodils that grow beside the lake

See? A beautiful use of literary fragments. The person who wrote these tweets now has a substack, Pastoral Fantasies, where they've written about the experience of running their account.

All that said, something I want to share here is that being a “bot account” without actually being a bot can be pretty beautiful. People respond to pastoral fantasy tweets with inside jokes and photos of their hikes and snippets of fanfiction for media I’ve never even heard of. I get to see friends tag each other and say “this is so you” or “us next weekend!!” and I get to translate “now I’m craving soup” from sooo many different languages.