Two peacocks in a cold wood, their pompous finery in a bleak world making them resemble two masterless samurai about to quietly duel at dawn.

I’m stuck in ‘fright and flight’ this Christmas, but as usual draw comfort - not from churches, but from the light trapped within. This small rural church. I’m possibly the first visitor today, and yet the Christmas Tree was waiting all aglow. And the late light on the right side of the alter.

“These are cool” was the Christmas morning response.

“It’s perfect for drifting” reassures @bugshaw.bsky.social, after I ask her how she’s managing on this first morning with her new sweeping dressing gown. “The ideal garment for the speed of my life”

They’ve had an exciting day. More ribbon and scrunched up wrapping paper than you can shake a stick at.

The clatter at the edge of the wood was indeed the moon in its snare.

A warning to the curious. (Photographed where found, though I did straighten it out a little)

Christmas Day, as witnessed by the corners of a gifted clutch of maps of Essex.

Santo the wrestler off to wash the breakfast dishes.

Merry Christmas one and all. Had a new Christmas image in mind, but time rather got away from me. So here (again) is Edward Bawden’s marvellous linocut of a cat at Christmas / the same design replicated in pixelated news print for a sales notice / my version featuring Rula and some finger mice.

Behold my gibberish stocking!

1am Christmas Day cab ride home had on Radio 4. Pitch black Essex lanes set to Midnight Mass from Liverpool cathedral and then The Shipping Forecast.

They found me. All tests fine. A couple of things to keep an eye on - not out of the woods yet - but being sent home with pills. Don’t wish to tempt fate, but a lot of possible worrying issues haven’t materialised. The NHS have been terrific. Kindly and endlessly professional. We are so lucky.

Now in a ward. One doctor reassured me that after a second set of bloods I could probably go home, then a second Dr had me summoned upstairs, to a dark ward full of sleeping men. I think they’ve forgotten about me; I believe this may be when I begin my drift over to becoming the hospital ghost.

Christmas Eve in A&E, as a week of odd health felt even odder today. BUT a moment of Jacques Tati style slapstick as a waiting room chair ended up in the middle of walkway, a new patient sat in it, and for several minutes everybody just walked around him - like water round a brand new island.

A food delivery truck parked outside an alleyway into town, giving the impression of a portal from the drab to the magical - only open for 15 minutes on Christmas Eve.

Tasked with feeding the neighbour’s four cats while she is away, and have spent the last 20 minutes carrying bowls of food down the gardens, singsong calling “Tiffin..Gina…Lucia” only to see Cinnamon - the enormous tomcat from the last garden - barge in like gravity, and gobble everything up.

Seeing out the year documenting wild animals queuing for something.

Field edge on a rainy rainy walk. 3 second iPhone exposure, while shining a torch on the raindrops turns them into a shower of Neutrinos, passing through the earth on the shortest day. (Three photos - same view - combined)

Shortest day means baking. For my neighbour to take away to her family I’ve baked Polish (as my neighbour is half Polish) poppy seed buns (and fruit bread, still in the oven. And St Lucia rolls) I do like the way they look unbaked - those dark magic circles of honeyed seeds. Pleased with these.

I've read three Jane Austens in a row and I would like to see Autism and Audacity, where our heroine is just trying to intuit social rules and means to behave normally not audaciously, but her acquaintances are like: "Marjorie -- so bold!"

Winter at the back door this morning, looking in trepidation at those longer days, who have been to a Christmas party and are being rowdy in the street.

Coffee today at Townhouse in Spitalfields. They’ve an exhibition of affordable prints if you’re looking for a last minute Christmas gift. (Small talk with a Saffron Walden market trader this morning - “I avoid London if possible” he answered me. But today London was friendly, vibrant, and musical)

Singing in a 900 year old stone building; walking home under Jupiter and a clear as day Orion. To misquote Eno, this is the Evening of the Long Now.

Candles snuffed out at the end of the carol service at St Bartholomew the Great, 20th December.

Simon Callow read from A Christmas Carol, and there was a way in how he said the simple “A merry Christmas, Bob” that I found quietly moving. Also, I’d long forgotten the important note at the end of the story that people laugh at Scrooge and his sudden change of heart, and he doesn’t care a jot

Though the highlight has already been finding (which everybody else seemed not to notice, so keen were they to find seats) the huge, possibly 12th century, door behind which you could - like voices beyond the veil - the choir practising.

So I wandered up to St Bartholomew’s to have a casual look inside. Surprised to find a queue. I joined the queue, and now I’m in a special Dickensian Carol service and reading. I just wanted to take some photos.

In a queue for a thing. People in front are talking about tackling, one after another, London’s Carol services in the way students talk about taking on a pub crawl.

Almost immediately ruined my London cool cred by laughing too loudly at the science fiction rush of air from the new hand driers in the Liverpool Street gents.

The market cheese stall has two people serving all year round, except today, the last Saturday before Christmas, when there’s four - and the two extra are so similar to the owner in age, height, and white coat, that it’s as if they took a hair from his head and whispered a splitting spell over it.

St Peter’s at the end of the day. Central Cambridge. Prism under the lens / half fish-eyed lens held in front of that (hence the circle framing and the blotting paper distortion of the avenue of trees Plus a detail from a different take, where more colour has leaked through. All in-camera.

It is said that if you stand in a certain place only two days from the shortest day of the year, the church will shimmer - and another, smaller, church will be revealed inside. (St Peters, Cambridge. Prism glass, wide angle lens taken on and then off during a 12 second exposure. All in-camera)

And Tiny Tim, who did NOT need a wheelchair full time but could not manage the walk all the way across the airport onto the plane...

On the way to the bus stop. Closed now for the holidays. Once quite familiar to me, but now so alien looking I was taken aback. There’s an eerie regimentation to having a classroom’s chairs all sat upon the tables.

Bus to Cambridge this morning: Two teenagers on their first day of holiday, eating chocolate and drawing hearts in the window condensation. Two women in last day of work party clothes. A different condensation heart in their window, which they brushed away with a sleeve so they had a view.

Town church making its surprise entrance as main villain in a film noir. You thought it was the nightclub owner, but no…this is Mr Big!

Emma Bolland presents The Tower Dreams the Tower, a text image scroll-as-artist-book performance, at the University of Sheffield's Centre for Poetry and Poetics, Monday 15 December 2025.

Everytime I go out to the shops I pick up a cheese for Christmas. Even if the shop doesn’t sell cheese - the bookshop for example - I demand they find me a cheese they can add to my order.

With these power stations, and last weeks Doctor Who stickers, it’s possible to begin compiling your own 1970’s Doctor Who adventure.

God, I love cycling in December. Sure? it’s cold, it’s muddy, the wind knows your name, and there’s only 2 and a bit hours of daylight, BUT the world has the soft grainy look of Super 8. Everywhere looks like a Sunday.

My mind also snagged on this - it’s both seeing ‘Barrow cemetery’ written in the box usually reserved for something more civic in nature, and that, after 1500 or so years, the words ‘burial mounds’ have finally met the phrase ‘like for like replacement’.

Traditional pre-Christmas cycle to the Bartlow burial mounds. A short adventure which almost always delivers a small visual reward - and today it was this beautifully cartoonish horse walking through the scrub (off harness, following a farmer out of shot) “You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet…”

Bought my nephew (I think he’s 12) vintage French aviator goggles for Christmas, so he can look like Roland Toutain in La règle du jeu.

For the 15th day of advent @bugshaw.bsky.social gifted me a small gaseous planet in its own cloud nebula. I shall govern them wisely, but also cruelly….cutely, I meant to say cutely.

Bought cheap and cheerful dinosaur / sea monster stickers, and cheap and cheerful Christmas stickers, and a happy evening combining the two to make gift tags and card envelopes. (It’s not Christmas until the floor is covered with tiny bits of paper)

….but inside an eight piece baroque octet were rehearsing for a free concert of Vivaldi, Purcell, and more. So at 4pm Bridget and I wandered back, took a pew with strangers, in a city closing down for the night, and had an hour of wonderful music. A blessing.

St George Tombland, barely a distance from Norwich cathedral, and a wonderful lumber room of a church: storage for the Morris Dancer Hobby horses, the snapdragon, and a cracking skull over the Stone Bread Table. We ventured in believing the small church empty…

The Norwich Cathedral Cat, on the pulpit, drinking from the glass of water left for the Reverend. “He lives here” we were told, as if the church had had no say in the matter and his presence pre-dated the building. “He’s named Budge because he doesn’t budge. He thinks the water is left for him”

Norwich Cathedral, just after Eucharist and when tourists are allowed to wander. Spotted the candle wreath being lowered (with the sound of a dockyard winch) and, after asking permission, caught the last candle of the morning service being blown out.