while feeling less complacent / echo-chamber-y than here on Bluesky, which I still find slow and rather dull. (With honourable exceptions of course!) Substack really seems to reach quite a range of readers, which is very satisfying as a writer.

But it's also pretty easy to use and access for newcomers or those who only want to read your particular site / newsletter. Recently they've been trying to push the social network side of it which I'm neutral about, but that aspect of it is certainly very civilised in tone (compared to Twitter) /2

I really like it, I think it's a great medium for anyone who wants to write medium-length or longer pieces fairly regularly. The community / internal audience element of the platform is beginning to take off too, so a larger proportion of readers now come from "within" the system as it were. /1

The term they use seems, rather prosaically, to be "protège-dents".

Re: the teeth, at his very first practice two kindly (and gigantic) men attempted to explain to me how to "mould a mouth-guard", somewhat thwarted by the fact I had no idea what they were talking about and didn't yet know any of the relevant vocab.

Hilariously, the website for the French rugby association stresses how the game teaches team spirit and "le fairplay" (for which there's no word in French . . . honestly, the jokes write themselves). He got his team strip at the weekend and was incredibly proud going home on the bus in it.

It's interesting how trochaics in English tend to be either comic or supremely stately.

He'll be thrilled! He absolutely loves it, he even likes it when it rains.

A lovely read, this - I was just talking about "Walking Away" this week with @badlilies.bsky.social Lots of poetry in rugby - sometimes trochaic - rarely very tasteful - "Sing a song of rugby - buttocks, booze and blood / thirty dirty ruffians, brawling in the mud" etc.

Ha yes I should have mentioned the whole rugby song tradition. Mildly dirty songs and locker room humour is absolutely my son's thing, I have to admit. In fact, he's just been chosen for his first match -- I'm waiting for him to get home from school so I can tell him.