“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
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?
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.
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.
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
‘Manipulated in our darkest hours’: Henry Nowak’s family say police misled them.
Shocking revelations from our interview include:
- Police originally called Henry the aggressor
- They asked the family their political views
- The IOPC said there was *no misconduct* before Henry’s family saw the video of the way police treated their son
- The family were only played the video on the first day of the trial
itv.com/news/2026-11-02/mani…
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
A whole different world used to exist, as AJP Taylor wrote about in his Oxford History of England:
"Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state beyond the post office and the policeman…He could travel abroad or leave his country forever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter a foreigner could spend his life in the country without permit and without informing the police…All this was changed by the impact of the Great War…The state established a hold over its citizens which though relaxed in peace time, was never to be removed and which the Second World War was again to increase. The history of the English people and the English State merged for the first time."
If you want to learn about what the world was like in that era, if you want to know what sort of world used to exist, 1913 by Charles Emmerson is by far my favorite
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
‘Post Catholic Ireland will be much more rational and less superstitious than a priest ridden backwater’
‘Being a witch is being confident, powerful and an immovable force’ — why modern Irish women are turning to witchcraft buff.ly/Ljm9QAf
Eleanor Nicolás 🐈⬛ retweeted
I don’t understand why anyone in the West fundraises for missionaries to go overseas, when they are clearly much more urgently needed closer to home
