amazing, if dispiriting.

“Nice jumper” praised a stranger as I passed, the fourth such compliment this winter. This jumper obviously casts a shimmer of greatness over me, and I now think I should run for PM. I would be great and adored leader. But the moment I took the jumper off people would shout “this man’s a fool!”

The rain is tiresome, but yesterday I found the Fulfen Slade, usually slow ditch water between fields, back to being a babbling brook, over a bed of pebbles and flint. This is one of of the tributaries that feed the River Cam (and, eventually, the Great River Ouse) What is the etymology of Fulfen?

Bumped into my neighbours - now in their 80’s and still part of the antique trade. A week of rising at 5am to drive to an unheated venue to set up their wares. They don’t need to do this now, but it’s been their trade for half their lives, and it’s an important and a comforting rhythm.

Walking in yet more drizzle. But taken with how the orange yellow light at the railway crossing is reflected in puddles and becomes a running stitch of much needed colour. Alt text - looking up a lane to a level crossing. The flashing light is reflected in puddles in the road.

Oh yes, passing the English Heritage house, in the drizzle, the mist, and the incoming night. No ghosts abroad last night, they were all here at the Ghost AGM. Ghost lanyards, and ghost networking, and a keynote by the ghost of a fitness instructor who’d written a bestseller on positive thinking.

I like both these people, so I’m not throwing shade, but I laughed at Charli XCX in her fabulous Wuthering Heights dress, stood next to Martin Clunes. You can move to LA, you can write hit songs and define a summer with your most experimental work, but you can’t escape English Sunday evening TV.

The Children of the Hydra’s Teeth, plus sleeping cat.

Snowdrops in this endlessly watery weather are like characters from The Bed Sitting Room: ragtag remnants of a West End theatre troupe, putting on half an Ayckbourn to a land sodden with fallout.

well past closing time last night, walking past this hairdressers, their windows fogged up after a day of talking, the hanging lights looking like a New York night rather than a north Essex housing estate. The umbrella handle the only solid shape, and evidence of a last remaining customer.

There's a new doc on Disney+ on the frantic year to build the first Disney Land. 1954, when the past looked like science fiction. So much craft and engineering, but the footage also shows a culture just starting to eat itself. Fascinating: part documentation of dying crafts, part Adam Curtis warning

Made myself sad with something, then recalled a happy thought that I couldn’t pin down: something comforting, on the tip of my memory, just out of the corner of my eye. What was it…oh yes, I’d decided it was chilly enough to make myself a hot water bottle tonight.

Heading out earlier, on a long rainy walk, sneaking a look back through my window to see Rula fast asleep on my sofa. The house to herself for a couple of hours, she’ll probably bake a cake, scoff it all, tidy up, and I’d be none the wiser when I returned. Or she’ll dream of doing just that.

Caught up with Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby on MUBI, and the film’s soft, trapped light (the house is staged almost as a moth trap Rachel Sennott bounces around) again had me wishing I could live my life again as a cinematographer. Or an archeologist. Or a dancer. Or a way to combine all three.

Sorry. another cat photo. But I like it when one of them (in this case a rather unsettled Lucia) decides to stand on my lap, behind the book I’m reading, and they look like a bit of stage magic where their two halves have been separated by a wobbly saw and mirrors. Or they are half cat/ half book.

The manufacture of handmade scissors - the blades are ‘dried in a warm bath of maize and walnuts’. That just seems wonderful. How would you even find out this was best combination (and just for scissors. I don’t believe other blades require this Cleopatra style luxury in their bath water)

A forlorn walk, shadowed by the cracks and whistles of a shooting party - from the wood to wood like a pub crawl. But I liked this weather vane traction engine, on a pole over an abandoned shed, almost lost to the overgrowth, finding a way through the bracken, building up ahead of steam for spring.

Got this record for my father for Christmas (and myself, as it came with a download) and he’s texted his response. 16th Century Polyphony, but from a Convent, and it’s that change in voice that has helped my father (and also me) pick out how the harmonies work together. Bits of this move me to tears

January ending on a day of “Lets have a look at what you could have won!” blue sky and sunshine.

It’s all pretty miserable, sad and desperate. But Rula has been to the vet for her annual checkup (her actual owner, my neighbour, took her) and has been told she is in excellent health for her age. “Can’t I just be in excellent health”, she answered, somehow quoting from Brian Eno’s diaries.

They could have made The Beatles movie where each actor plays their Beatle from a different era (like the photos) together at once. Set in the hollow house from Help. Cavern Club Paul McCartney faced with the disillusioned Let in Be George Harrison. The band exploding and imploding at the same time.

Again, from James Fox’s CraftLand - from the chapters on bell casting and stone letter cutting. This isn’t a connection the book is making, but I’m struck by the similarity between finding the tuning in a bell’s cast form and finding the correct serif for a letter. Both a voice of the interior.

New host, but this was reassuringly about the same. If anything it felt a little less rushed. Very interesting, especially the more casual podcast extra 15 minutes, which ends with the traditional producer popping in to ask if anybody wants “tea or coffee?” www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

A man’s view of his book. As ever the responsibilities of the modern world keeping me from acquiring the freeing power of knowledge

Well, I was reading James Fox’s book on Lost Crafts.

Edit deadlines delivered and Self Assessment paid, I’m taking today to read more of James Fox’s book on Lost Crafts. And I’m fascinated that river rush cutting happens on the Great River Ouse all the way down past Bedford. That that far past Bedford can still sense the escape of the North Sea.

Hilltop path this afternoon. The flint cairn on the right has been accumulating for years, probably the farmer stacking stones his plough churns up. But the cairn on the left is new, and its arrival marks this as a doorway. That’s all it takes - it’s the folklore version of ‘jumpers for goalposts’.

plus…I like how the long exposure catches me walking around the wheel to keep spinning it, first I show up looking resembling the circulatory system of a nascent Dr Manhattan, while another digital long exposure merges my head and hair into a cloud bank.

Sun setting behind this playground’s giant spinning bead maze. Two drums, a rattle of beads inside. But if you spin both sides at once, clockwise and counterclockwise, with the sun behind, on a long exposure, then add a fish eye lens - the universe dissolves and you fade into cosmic dust.

Nothing in the first third or so of life really prepares you for how poorly company bosses read their emails.

Neighbour - are you leaving your window open? Me - always open. The damp stops it sliding shut. Neighbour - if it’s ok I’ll put some apple crumble through later. I’m baking tests tonight. The joys of living two doors down from a home economics teacher.

This masterpiece also acts as a companion piece to the scene in Fellini's Roma, where tunnels workers under Rome discover a 2000 year old Roman house (and the air they let in destroys the murals in front of their eyes) Also this scene, from 1972, I bet influenced Ridley Scott's Alien. (& Spielberg)

The days of January passing us by, then running around the back of the month, putting on a fake moustache and an accent, and coming back past pretending to be a different January day.

Really enjoyed Truffaut’s ‘The Bride Wore Black’. Bernard Herrmann’s score - deliberately out of scale to what’s on screen. The child turning to watch the stranger following. and I really liked, and understood well, the scene where Charles Denner gives up trying to make a light summer scarf work.

Top of the water meadow, where the view resembles a painting on a spider web. Except the bright flash of the solitary egret, who looks like a time traveller, or somebody wearing white denim to a rodeo. A dog does something foolish out of view and his owners laugh. A big laugh, like they’re at home

The man at the market making me a new belt. “I had to make it”, when asked about his portable anvil of wood, with its handles and holes for tools. “It’ll also be good to open doors in a riot” suggested Bridget “I am a bit of an anarchist” he replied, as he rummaged in a big bag of eyelets.

Making new movie monsters from items found down the arm of the sofa while looking for the remote control. This beast is the alpha predator of its planet. Usually hunting in pairs, it’s rare to see one alone. The other is probably behind me, it’s great snoot rolling back to reveal endless teeth.

Joan Greenwood on the Isle of Barra in Scotland during a break from location filming for Whisky Galore! (1949)

Somebody posted the YouTube link to Harry Hill’s spoof TV documentaries from 2020. I’ve watched just this bit on police tape six times and each time my head hurts from laughing. But also the uneasy music at the start, and the edge in the voiceover. I fine an element of the eerie in Hill’s comedy.

The stone anchors keeping the house in place in all this rain.

I feel one of the many poisonous and insidious effects of his existence is just wishing him dead and gone. It's rational and right, but it leaves a scar. It's not natural to be this angry all the time.

National Hug Day

I like that the Doctor's expression captures the moment when he too falls victim to the Master's devilish plan to make everybody on Earth into a sticker. "I shall keep the inhabitants of this annoying little planet in a sticker album, all except you, Doctor...you I will stick to my fridge"

4.15 and still enough light in the sky to give me a fighting chance if I come up against a surprise bear.

Not for the first time I’ve carried a neighbour’s cat home for the night, dropped her through their back door, returned home, made a cup of tea, and out of the corner for my eye seen the same cat dash back into my house to carry on sleeping. Cats think that when they run they’re invisible.

Well, this has opened up a whole new area of early and unsung Hollywood to explore. Fascinating.

"Everything is narrowing. To a distant point." 'Point Zero': a night walk from Thorne to Goole longbarrowpress.substack.com/p/point-zero

Watched Hell’s Angels, which I don’t believe I’d ever seen. The big dogfight is famous, and the second shot here, of the planes swooping into formation, is like Hermes Pan was behind the camera; then the edits: medium, suddenly on the wing, suddenly in the cockpit, closer in on a pilot.

Walk though the park. Two boys had climbed the high wall and, filmed by two girls, were jumping down. One boy had second thoughts, and instead lowered himself half down - and suddenly, as I turned a corner and they vanished from view, it was Harold Lloyd hanging off a clock face to impress a crush.

Watching the Monty Don tour of the Rhineland’s gardens - the happiest people I see on television are either gardeners or archaeologists.