“But there is no bargain, for here, what is, is what must be.” - Watership Down Catholic(a), Pilgrimage & Shrines • Folklore • Literature • ✍️ • The 🌊
…this realm, this England
Joined January 2022
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Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
A. N. Wilson in today's Times: "whenever we hear [the King] speak, demonstrating that he is well-informed and well-read, it is an uncomfortable reminder that almost none of the cabinet or the shadow cabinet are capable of expressing themselves without cliché...
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Next Zoom talk
9th November – Sylvia Soberton- Scholars, Mothers, Rebels: Women in the Family Portrait of Sir Thomas More
Saying Tolkien had an unexciting life is antagonising to me. Perhaps because the man was so profound but also because we don’t make men like him any longer.
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Tolkien was at the Somme. His life and work mingle: “They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, and noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, and weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead.”
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
A group of fluffy king penguin chicks chasing a feral cat in the Falkland Islands
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
If his life was "unexciting" what does that make a journalist who has done nothing with their life?
I found a bouquet of roses discarded at my bus stop early this morning. They are now safe in a vase at my home.
"After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses. I will spend my heaven doing good upon earth."
St. Thérèse of Lisieux
I know someone who regurgitated what I’d spent years researching and writing about. She told me my own revelations and opinions. All with a smug smirk.
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
There’s an easy cure for this and it’s called medieval peasant-maxxing. You need to be building fires and playing festive carols. You need to be taking long walks, learning crafts and listening to stories read aloud. You need to be loading up on cheese and breads and pies.
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
This is why you need to embrace seasonal living - the dark evenings roll round and you've gotta be making soup, reading ghost stories, working on a nice jigsaw puzzle, and generally cosy maxxing.
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Who would have thought Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars would have been the 8th most borrowed book in the London Library in the past 20 years. No impact metric for that, I suppose
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Tolkien lost his father at at 4 or so years old and was completely orphaned by 12, when he lost his mother. He was born into the second part of the Industrial Revolution, and during his lifetime watched much of the world change in ways he hated, destroying and permanently altering the beautiful things he loved. He lived through 2 world wars, fighting at the Somme and losing many of his friends, and having his sons fight in the second. This was not a good time for man in many regards. The world was changing rapidly, many men who fought in WW1 became very lost and cynical about the world, they were left damaged by trauma that no one knew how to deal with and often didn’t care enough to help them with. Young men were shamed by women giving out white feathers if they were not seen in uniform during The Great War, marking them as cowards or shirking their duty. There was not much to be optimistic about during this time period for young men. The ones who didn’t die in the First World War would have to watch their sons die or risk death in the Second.
Tolkien wrote an optimistic book not because he lived through an optimistic time, but because he had faith in something beyond the dire circumstances of the time. He saw great evils, not just from the enemies, but from men on all sides during this time. And the Lord of the Rings, as hopeful as it may feel, is set in a bleak time in a waning world, where once great civilisations have been reduced to crumbling cities and ruins covered in foliage. But instead of going the route of many of the authors of the time, he did not fill his world with cynicism, but filled it with something to aspire to, something to encourage you towards doing what is right in the bleakest of times.
People who say “yeah but Aragorn had this and I don’t” are missing the point. You aren’t supposed to compare yourself to these characters as stand-ins for your exact situation in life, you are supposed to be inspired by the ways they handle adversity they face and the ways they decide to do what is right. Your life isn’t going to be as epic and your circumstances aren’t going to seem as high and noble, but that’s not the point of fiction. Fiction takes concepts and turns them into something tango. LotR encourages us to do what we can to press forward with the circumstances given to us, that is the point. Not that you are in line to be king and have a beautiful love interest. Not that you get a big inheritance from your uncle, but that whether you are an insignificant gardener or the heir to the throne, you are still responsible for playing your part to the best of your ability and that it is worth it even if it seems futile in the moment.
In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a character asks her mother;
“But I do not want this child to grow up just to work hard. What must I do, Mother, what must I do to make a different world
for her? How do I start?”
“The secret lies in the reading and writing.”
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Our application to become your favourite Christmas TV Ad of 2026 🥹
Follow Jack on a quest to find a loving home for Dogs Trust resident Kira. Her happy place is closer that he first thought… 💛
Learn how your support helps dogs find their happy place: bit.ly/3UU6upF
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
Reading David Walliams’ book “The Boy in the Dress” made me realise that, against the odds, I still have it in me to be naive on matters of gender identity.
I imagined the book (aimed at 8-12-year-olds) to be a clumsy celebration of so-called gender non-conformity. I imagined a boy who likes pink and princesses, perhaps facing some pushback from classmates and family, ultimately being at peace with wearing a dress and embracing his feminine side. I imagined a book that I’d have some issues with, but which I might not dismiss entirely. After all, gender incongruence/gender non-conformity is a marvellous and often natural thing. Boys can like pink. Maybe the book had something positive to say, even if I had to overlook some nonsense, I thought.
The book is so much worse than that…so much worse than I imagined possible for any book aimed at kids. It’s creepy as anything.
Here are a few extracts…
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
The 1979 British series Sapphire & Steel (starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley) has a storyline where a malevolent spiritual force, called The Darkness, feeds on the trauma of the First World War.
And that's how it feels to research WWI; there is a sense of it being such a great cosmic trauma that the echoes ripple back and forth through time. There is such a great cosmic wound that it's one of the few topics I find difficult to research, because I am so conscious of this consuming energy.
