Microbiologist, novelist (as H.K. Hillman @hkhillman), part-time janitor and smoky-drinker. Not necessarily in that order.
Joined September 2014
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A silent Halloween from Leg Iron Books -
underdogsbiteupwards.wordpre…
Legiron retweeted
Human rights groups like Walk Free and the House of Commons Library estimate that over 2.3 million to 4.5 million people live in modern slavery in Pakistan.
A welcome step from the PM.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was one of history’s most heinous crimes.
We must be honest about how the horrors of our past have shaped the present - because only then can we begin to build a fairer future for everyone.
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
Our government is about to issue a formal apology for Britain's role in ending the slave trade.
A welcome step from the PM.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade was one of history’s most heinous crimes.
We must be honest about how the horrors of our past have shaped the present - because only then can we begin to build a fairer future for everyone.
theguardian.com/world/2026/o…
Legiron retweeted
Two tier housing. Tenants get loads of rights, home owners get nothing. Its difficult to remove tenants who fail to pay rent but banks can easily kick out a home owner who defaults on their mortgage.
Are you a landlord? 🏠
From 15 December, if you’re a landlord of an assured or regulated tenancy in England, you must register yourself and each of your properties through the new service on GOV.UK by the deadline for your region. Letting agents can’t register on your behalf.
You’ll need to give details of your properties, like:
• the address 🔑
• the number of tenants and bedrooms 🛏️
• the amount of rent you're receiving for a property 💷
• gas and electricity safety certificates ⚡
You may be asked to provide energy performance certificates (EPCs) if your details can't be found on the EPC register.
Slow cooked mutton is a good meal.
Waving a flag at British culture is not the same as having any, so here is what the flag is supposed to be standing in front of.
It is five in the morning on a fell above Buttermere, sleet going sideways, and a Herdwick standing in it looking mildly inconvenienced. Her breed has been on that hill since the Norse landed. The weather has never once won.
It is a shepherd behind her with a crook and a collie, counting yan, tan, tethera in a language the Romans heard, and not stopping to explain it to you.
It is a drove road through the Welsh borders, worn a foot below the fields on either side by four hundred years of cattle walking to London, and mud in October that still has an opinion about your boots.
It is a dry stone wall with nothing holding it up but a dead man's judgement, keeping sheep in on a slope you would struggle to stand on.
It is a hedge laid by hand, a hay meadow cut late for the flowers, and a village with a livestock mart in the middle and a pub called the Shoulder of Mutton beside it.
It is leaning on a gate waving at a field of Herefords who do not wave back, and the silence afterwards, which is the real national anthem.
It is a farmer who answers "how are you" with "not bad", a vet who has been up since three and will not mention it, and a woman doing the books, the calving and the WI cake in the same afternoon.
It is complaining about the weather while standing in it on purpose.
It is a Cornish pasty out of the paper on a harbour wall, pastry thick enough for a miner's hands, gravy down your wrist, a herring gull watching with intent. The crust was for throwing away. The gull knows that too.
It is a Yorkshire pudding that rose because the dripping was spitting when the batter hit it, and the Sunday beef behind it with a crust of fat, the potatoes roasted in what fell off.
It is mutton, slow, dark and tasting of heather, the meat that fed this island for five hundred years, and a butcher who has to go out the back to find you some.
It is a pork pie eaten cold on a train with a flask of tea, and the man opposite pretending not to be jealous.
It is a pint of full-fat milk on a doorstep before six, cream in the neck, and a blue tit who got there first.
It is a wool church in a Suffolk village of ninety people, big enough to seat a thousand, because the fleeces paid for it.
Every bit of it was made by a farmer and an animal, outdoors, in the rain, slowly, over a thousand years.
And every bit of it is being taxed, rewilded, rebranded and Deliveroo'd into a museum while the flag goes up another lamppost.
You cannot wave a culture. You eat it, wear it, walk it, and keep the people who make it on the land. The rest is bunting.
Buy the mutton. Then wave whatever you like.
Legiron retweeted
I'm not 67 YET but getting closer, but ALL of this is true!
I need to make a very PUBLIC announcement on behalf of those of us who are 60-something.
If you see a 67-year-old who seems a little boring now, understand something…
WE ALREADY GOT IT IN.
Like…GOT. IT. IN. 😂
We’re not sitting home on Friday night because we never knew how to have fun.
We’re sitting home because WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FUN FOR THREE LIFETIMES.
We went to parties in farmhouses, machine sheds, gravel pits and cornfields. Nobody sent a location because THERE WERE NO CELL PHONES.
Somebody just said, “There’s a party out at Johnson’s.”
Which Johnson?
Nobody knew.
But somehow 75 people found it.
We cruised Main Street for hours with absolutely nowhere to go. Gas was cheap, the music was loud, and somehow 11 people fit into a car made for five.
We drank Boone’s Farm, cheap beer and mysterious concoctions somebody handed us in a plastic cup.
Nobody asked what was in it.
You drank it and trusted the process.
We closed down the bar and instead of doing the responsible thing and GOING HOME…
somebody would yell:
“RED ROOSTER!”
Or…
“LET’S GO TO THE BOONDOCKS!”
And suddenly at 2:30 in the morning, the whole crew was sitting around a table eating eggs, hash browns and greasy breakfast food like we’d just finished a hard day’s work.
Then somebody would say:
“Well…might as well stay up now.”
😂😂
There was no Uber.
No GPS.
No Life360.
No Find My Friends.
There was just somebody saying:
“Follow me. I know a shortcut.”
And for reasons nobody can explain…
WE FOLLOWED HIM.
We made entire weekend plans without sending ONE text message.
“Meet me there around 8.”
That was the plan.
And somehow everybody showed up.
We did stupid things.
We did REALLY stupid things.
And the greatest gift our generation ever received was:
THERE WERE NO CAMERA PHONES.
There are events from approximately 1975 through 1985 that exist only in the memories of the people who were there.
AND THAT’S EXACTLY WHERE THEY NEED TO STAY.
So yes…
Now we’re 67.
We like our recliners.
We like comfortable shoes.
We like restaurants at 5:00.
We like being home by 8:00.
And if somebody calls at 9:30 and asks:
“What are you doing?”
The answer is:
“Why the hell are you calling me this late?”
😂
We’re not boring.
WE’RE RETIRED FROM ACTIVE DUTY.
We’ve already closed the bars, stayed out until sunrise, made questionable decisions and somehow lived to tell about it.
So when younger people see us peacefully sitting at home and think:
“Man, you guys are boring.”
Sweetheart…
YOU’RE NOT LOOKING AT BORING OLD PEOPLE.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT RETIRED LEGENDS.
And thank God there isn’t much photographic evidence.
Legiron retweeted
Visitor: Who shears all these?
Farmer: Lads from New Zealand. Every summer, since before I was born.
Visitor: Why not British lads?
Farmer: Two hundred sheep a day, bent double, for six weeks. We stopped raising boys who'd do it.
Visitor: So they fly in.
Farmer: They did. The Home Office turned them down this year.
Visitor: Why?
Farmer: Visas.
Visitor: So who shears them?
Farmer: Whoever's left.
Visitor: And if nobody's left?
Farmer: The flies.
Visitor: The flies shear them?
Farmer: Blowflies lay in the fleece. The maggots hatch and eat her alive from the skin in. That's what an unshorn ewe is by July.
Visitor: And if that happens?
Farmer: I'm prosecuted. Neglect. Same government.
Visitor: They stop the shearer and charge you for the sheep.
Farmer: And the lamb from his farm lands at Dover tariff-free under the trade deal. The New Zealand sheep's welcome. The New Zealand man who'd save mine from the maggots isn't.
Visitor: Who signed that?
Farmer: The same hand that'll sign my summons.
Legiron retweeted
1774: they blew tobacco smoke up drowning victims' backsides to revive them, and the kits hung along the Thames like lifebuoys.
1863: they sold cocaine wine as a daily tonic, and a pope pinned a gold medal on it.
1898: they sold heroin as a cough medicine, and spooned it into coughing children.
1918: they sold radium water as a health drink, and the millionaire who drank 1,400 bottles was buried in a lead-lined coffin with most of his jaw gone.
1921: they put lead in petrol, and Britain kept it in the pumps until 2000.
1930s: they X-rayed children's feet in shoe shops, and kids queued to watch their toes wiggle on the screen.
1940s: they rubbed mercury teething powder into babies' gums, and about 1 in 500 of those babies was poisoned.
1946: they sold cigarettes on the line that more doctors smoked their brand, and put a man in a white coat on the advert.
1949: they gave the lobotomy a Nobel Prize, and doctors went in through the eye socket with an ice pick.
1952: they sold a cigarette filter made of asbestos as the greatest health protection in smoking history, and smokers drew it into their lungs with every puff.
1957: they sold thalidomide to pregnant women for morning sickness, and around 10,000 babies were born with missing or shortened limbs.
1960s: they sold margarine as the heart-healthy fat, and spread trans fat on a generation's toast.
1996: they sold OxyContin as barely addictive, and started an overdose epidemic.
1999: they sold Vioxx for sore joints, and pulled it five years later after tens of thousands of heart attacks.
2026: they're selling seed oil as the heart-healthy fat, and it's in almost every packet in your kitchen.
Every one of these came with an expert's blessing and the same total certainty.
The people telling you which fat to fear today sit in the same chairs as the ones who put radium in the water and a doctor on the cigarette packet, and they're every bit as sure.
"The experts recommend it" has the longest body count in medicine.
Legiron retweeted
funny how this movie came out in 1993, yet almost everything it predicted is slowly becoming reality
Legiron retweeted
Nobody in the Ice Age lived on berries, and nobody chased rabbits for a living, and if our ancestors had followed the evidence-based diet none of us would be here to be told about it.
It's northern Europe, 30,000 years ago, October. Grass to the horizon, a wind off the ice sheet that hasn't stopped since the summer, a line of willow along the river. The healthy-eating poster says five portions of fruit and vegetables a day. The berries were three weeks in August and the birds had most of them. The roots are the size of a thumb, bitter, and an hour of digging gets a handful that needs cooking before it stops trying to poison anyone. The grass is grass, and a human has one stomach for it.
The poster says wholegrains. There's a wild grass seed the size of a flea, four months off, and a day of threshing it with a flat stone makes a cupful.
The poster says choose lean protein. So the hare. Two hours of running for a kilo of meat with no fat on it, and a fortnight of hares leaves the body sick, weak and hungrier than it started, because protein with nothing to burn it with makes the body eat itself. The poster, read faithfully, has killed the tribe by December, and the dietitian who wrote it would have been eaten first, on account of being the only one with any fat on him.
Across the river there's a herd of bison, and behind them horses, and twice a year the reindeer come through in their thousands, and now and then a mammoth that is, on its own, a village's winter. Big, slow in the cold, walking the same path to the same water every evening, carrying a layer of fat on their backs that renders into something that keeps in a skin for months. The marrow keeps in the bone. The brain is fat. The hump is fat. One kill feeds forty people for weeks and the fire does the rest.
The people who lived there looked at the bitter roots, the hare, and a thousand kilos of dinner strolling to the river at the same time every evening, and they made the choice that put a brain in your skull. Nobody who ate the roots left descendants to write guidelines.
The diet that would have wiped us out by Christmas is now on a poster in every surgery in the country, with a government logo on it, and the people handing it out are descended from the ones who ignored it.
Legiron retweeted
That’s mighty big of you.
Tonight, Cardiff Castle will light up green to mark Dwarfism Awareness Day. 💚
The illumination celebrates diversity and helps raise awareness and understanding of dwarfism. orlo.uk/S4Qel
ALT Cardiff Castle illuminated at night by bright green floodlights against a dark sky. Caer Castell Caerdydd wedi'i oleuo wrth nos gan fflachlysau gwyrdd disglair yn erbyn awyr dywyll.
Legiron retweeted
Between 1930 and 1933 the Soviet state ordered the Kazakh nomads to stop moving, took their animals for the state's meat quota, and drove the herds to collection points where there was nothing for them to eat, and a people that had lived on milk and meat for three thousand years lost nine animals in ten and four people in ten.
The Kazakhs were not farmers. They were herders of the steppe, moving with the seasons between pastures with their sheep, horses, camels and cattle, living on kumis, mutton and the dried curd of the summer milk, with their wealth on four legs and their houses on carts. Moscow's man in Alma-Ata, Filipp Goloshchekin, who had organised the shooting of the Tsar's family in a cellar, called them backward and announced a Little October: the nomads would be settled on collective farms, their herds would be pooled, and the meat procurement quotas of the five-year plan would come from the animals.
The brigades came and counted the livestock and took it. Herds were driven hundreds of miles to railheads and state farms that had no fodder for them, and died there in heaps, of hunger and the winter, uneaten. Families were ordered to stop in one place on a steppe where staying in one place kills every animal by the end of the season. The quotas were set on paper and enforced with guns, and a Kazakh who slaughtered his own sheep to feed his children was prosecuted for destroying state property. The numbers are the whole story: forty million head of livestock in Kazakhstan in 1929, four million by 1933. Sheep from nineteen million to under two. Camels, the animal that had carried the nation, from a million to seventy thousand.
With the animals gone the people had nothing, because the people were the animals. They walked. More than a million fled, into China, into Siberia, into the towns where they died at the stations, and a million and a half stayed and died on the steppe, something like forty percent of all the Kazakhs alive, the highest death rate of any people in the Soviet famine. Whole clans vanished. The party in Alma-Ata reported that collectivisation was proceeding.
Goloshchekin was shot by his own side in 1941.
A nation built on milk and meat was converted by decree into a nation of grain farmers on land that grows no grain, and the state's ledger had the herds on it as a quota to be delivered, by the ton, dead or alive. The animals had been feeding the Kazakhs for three millennia. The state fed them for three years.
Legiron retweeted
Currently we seem to be told that we are seeing
Heaviest rains
Blowiest winds
Hottest summer
Coldest winter
Worst drought
They want you to see extremes….. but us baby boomers remember
Heavier rains
Blowier winds
As hot summers
Very cold winters
Worse droughts
So… what’s new?
Legiron retweeted
This is the best explanation between left and right I have heard in a long time! #RepublicanValues #democraticvalues
Legiron retweeted
A fine example of a man who reads some duff info somewhere, converts it in his own head into a fact and then spends eternity bleating on about it, completely ignoring different views or the people who are simply fed up of hearing the waffle.
Legiron retweeted
here we go again
🇫🇷 France has recorded the world’s first human case of Shamonda virus
The patient died.
Health authorities said the virus, which normally infects farm animals, was detected in a person for the first time. It was previously believed not to infect humans.
The patient is thought to have been infected in eastern France, where the virus circulated among animals in spring and summer 2026. Spread by midge bites and mainly affecting cattle, it was first identified in Nigeria in the mid-1960s and is now spreading in several European countries.
Authorities called the case “exceptional,” noting the patient had a severe immunodeficiency and was being treated in a Lyon hospital for a serious illness.
