Studio in the hills

British artist sick of British politics.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@GabyLob Evil walks amongst us

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@AndyBurnhamGM You are part of the problem. Socialism doesn't work.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A farmer dies in April 2026.

His son inherits the farm. The farm has been in the family since 1847.

The farm consists of: 300 acres of grazing pasture, a farmhouse built in 1892, a barn, a milking parlour, two tractors of varying ages, a Land Rover that runs about 70% of the time, and a herd of 180 Hereford-cross cattle.

On paper, the farm is worth approximately £3.2 million. This is because land near him has been bought recently by a London hedge fund looking for carbon credits, which has dragged the comparable value of every field within forty miles upward to a number nobody local can justify.

In cash, the farm produces a profit of about £28,000 a year in a good year. In a bad year it loses money. The son also works as a fencing contractor three days a week to keep the operation viable.

The inheritance tax bill on a £3.2 million estate, even at the reduced 20% rate, comes to approximately £140,000 after the increased threshold is applied. The son does not have £140,000. The son has never had £140,000. The son has £4,200 in his current account and an overdraft.

The son sells 60 acres to a developer to pay the tax. The developer puts solar panels on the 60 acres. The remaining herd cannot be sustained on the reduced land. The herd is sold. The barn becomes a holiday let.

A different family eats Brazilian beef this Christmas without knowing why the price went up.

The Treasury collects £140,000.

The land never produces British food again.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@lewis_goodall Because the migrants have been dispersed across communities making them harder to track and trace. Unfortunately more of our talented and bright young people are leaving than ever before ads they can't see a future here.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@ShabanaMahmood because British people are leaving - including lots of young bright minds.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@Keir_Starmer because Brits are leaving in droves - especially the young and talented

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@educationgovuk @bphillipsonMP Wtf? As tone deaf as you could get - what about teaching by kids to aim high and have aspirations? I hope no payer funds were used to make this.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@blazeduncle @HadleyFreeman You do know that that is physiologically impossible? Why do you fall for this idiocy?

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@Keir_Starmer I think you only know your little corner. Regardless of what one thinks of Robinson et al, you have clearly taken a two tier approach and let the pro-Hamas/ Intifada/Anti-Semitic marches go on with faces cover, chanting horrific words. An appalling, undemocratic government.

[Pub Maverik @PubMaverik]

When considering Andy Burnham as prime minister.. just remember his wife always seems to be perfectly placed to gain from any of his projects, firstly she was connected to the company that marketed all the failed clean air zone in Manchester, and now she sits on the board of Be.Ev,
The car electric charging company that is winning contracts all over Manchester..
Cronyism at its finest..

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@WasAcop Just follow the money. The newly formed donor company (sole director Paul Jordon using family trust money it seems) has a strong connection to Jordon Group who were bought by Bellrock who is now owned by the rather controversial private equity firm Sun European Partners.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@WinstonLBrown1 @MarkStretford @BoobooPriestess Bellrock is owned by a huge European private equity company. It stinks. Follow the money

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@trussliz Let's not forget: Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards the £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Abhorrent.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@PatrickChristys Let's not forget: Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 m- money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. 'On the take'

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@afneil Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Typically 'on the take'.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@GuidoFawkes Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle. Abhorrent in government.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@AngelaRayner It looks like you bumped up your Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k. Then sold your 25% share to your son’s trust for £162,500 - money used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales at the time prove it was heavily overvalued. Classic paper shuffle? Abhorrent in Gov.

[Studio in the hills @studiointhehill]

@JuliaHB1 @AngelaRayner Angela Rayner bumped up her Manchester home’s value from £487k to £650k.Then sold her 25% share to her son’s trust for £162,500 - the money then used towards an £800k flat in Hove. Local sales prove it was heavily overvalued at the time. Classic paper shuffle.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

I’ve written and researched the whole seven front war since 7th October. It has been my whole professional life. I’ve written many papers and have just finished my book. I have written both positive and negative critiques of the war.

All of that feels irrelevant in this context. The most meaningful thing I have done since 7th October is bear witness and relay the horrors done that day. I have seen part of the sexual crime evidence in this report (above and beyond the 47 minute reel) and it remains the most horrific thing I have seen in my life. Nothing Israel has done in Gaza comes remotely close to the horrors of 7th October. The Gaza war and 7th October don’t deserve to be in the same conversation when it comes to atrocity. No comparison.

The rapes are the thing Hamas and their supporters are most scared of being exposed to the world. Every time I have written about what I have seen, 5x the usual amount of bots descend upon my replies. Abuse and outright denial.

Now, the evidence I have seen, and more, is out there. When Yoav Gallant said Israel was fighting human animals in Hamas, he was absolutely correct.

Read it for yourself: https://t.co/IxWkDeLxMV