Baking some sticky apple cake in case The Rapture is anything like the time my brother joined the local cricket club and my mother suddenly found that once a month she was expected to make the Match Tea.

Been worried about a possible missing cat all morning - Lucia, still not, according to her owner, home at midnight. The awful 1am fireworks. Then no Lucia visit for her usual 2nd breakfast. But she's just strolled up like a dandy with family money. So relieved I feel like I'm suddenly on holiday.

Have moved into ‘rug over knees’. There is no ‘putting the heat one’, just a geological layering of rugs and quilts and heated blankets, until I resemble an Andy Goldsworthy art piece of gathered hillside wool.

I am enjoying having the wind whip around the house and hammering at the windows. If magic existed I’d have a home with a garden, neighbours and nearby shops during the day, and then at night it would be, at the flick of a switch, a lighthouse, pummelled by weather, alone on the edge of things.

Sheltering in a church porch from a cloudburst advancing across the horizon. I do like how they’ve let the daises smother and soften the stone. Such a comfort. Blue sky now. Best carry on.

A sheep that’s been catching up with old Time Team episodes on YouTube proudly showing me an embankment it’s discovered. “Possibly ceremonial” it bleats, before going back to chewing the grass of the ancient earthwork.

Yesterday I took Bridget for a cafe coffee and - due to her Long Covid relapse - we used her occasional wheelchair. A builder moved aside to let us pass. On the way back, Bridget walked a bit. The builder looked confused. “I’m cured”‘ she joked “I must get my coffee there” replied the builder.

Set exercises by my GP (to counter a trapped nerve which is causing my right eye to track a little slower than my left eye, triggering dizziness). These will be easy, I thought. 20 Shoulder Shrugs - utterly exhausting! This come from not shrugging enough in my life; I should have been more apathetic

I know it’s silly, and I shouldn’t be so fragile, but at this time where everything is in flux (both global and small personal things) I really didn’t want an article saying ‘Eno, he ain’t always all that’. I know it’s true, but I sadly seem to require a couple of uncomplicated Gods.

The vampires at the back door. (back from my evening walk, and instantly the neighbour’s cats, with their swoosh of capes and cackle of wolves, are at my kitchen door. Lucia on the left, Cinnamon on the table. Different households; Lucia, with good reason, loathes Cinnamon)

Also both ancient & modern. On my walk tonight, two men talking. One lifts his phone and is bathed in magic light. “So far blackbird, robin, rook, I hope to hear an owl later” Reading from his bird identification app, listing the dusk chorus, but it reminds me of the shapeshifting in TH White.

At the laundrette. An elderly man is shuffling the floor, opening secret doors that lead to the innards of the washing machines. He is the mechanic for every laundrette in this business: all of East Anglia; Kings Lynn one day, Halstead the next. The main breakage: people put the coins in too fast.

A favourite cover version? Listening to this just now and you hear so many of Andy Partridge's interests collide - his pop voice, his dub experiments, his spitting Edward Lear synesthesia, even his later ambient work in how he spaces himself out. Plus Barry Andrews! www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qXx...

And a few pages later. I like this, the quiet notion that the speed of the modern world makes it less likely that ‘malign influences’ will snag you as you pass. As a cyclist regularly on the roads on Christmas Eve, it’s good to know I’m safe, as long as I don’t pause to post a witticism on Bluesky

Something a little unnerving from a Joan Aiken short ghost story. On Christmas Eve a cyclist wheels his broken bike along a path towards a farm that perhaps will offer shelter…

back in stock!

Yesterday I only had a fleeting interest in the genre of Mexican Lucia Libre cinema, but today I just want to watch box sets of the films (though I imagine that would be like eating a bucket of Halloween candy). This is fascinating. Everything is fascinating - how do people find time for hate?

Shadow pointing directly back down the path I’ve walked. Long taffy legs make me a beast of folklore. My head, very suitably, in a puddle.

Tonight’s movie. ‘A female wrestling tag-team takes on a shape shifting coven of witches’. Pulp horror doesn’t, I think, hold quite as many hidden gems as Film Noir. Flatter direction, broader performances. But still, wrestlers vs witches!

Footpath walking. Greeted by a mystery Labrador, so sopping wet that I suspect it was a river given legs by a spell. A river deliriously happy to have found there’s another way to run.

This is great. Like a lot of Oren Ambarchi there’s a complexity that creeps up on you, like cloud watching a sky that eventually fills up with a storm. (there’s an echo of Eno & Lanois’s Apollo score in the gleaming chiming guitars)

I quote or paraphrase this tweet at least five times a day. Properly lodged in my head forever

Last of the One Mile Telescope. Having a proper scan of the pinhole photo means it’s easier to blend over iPhone images I took at the same time - images through a glass decanter lid, which shatter the dish into a Queen like harmony of interstellar eavesdropping. Blended using the Photoleap app

I know I only posted these Pinholes on Monday, but those images were the damp photos stuck on a bright wall and photographed. These are scanned, so have much more detail. The west end of the One Mile Telescope just south of Cambridge. Two pinholes as real life, two pinholes with prism distortion.

I have purchased a scanner - 'High Speed and Stylish', the box boasts, meaning I can both use the scanner for digitising my successful pinhole photos, and take it to Paris for the weekend.

A day later I’m still thinking about the man on my journey home, who stepped off the bus and walked straight into a pub. The bus had parked so close it was no more 3 steps - off the bus, to the pub door, into the pub. That’s almost ‘through the winter coats and into Narnia’ scene transition.

"church fair plant stall" is a very Half Man Half Biscuit phrase. I thought it was a cauli but it turns out I'm a wally when I bought a kohlrabi at the church fair plant stall.

@panchoballard.bsky.social hello.. My partner, @bugshaw.bsky.social bought me your painting for my birthday and I near fell into tears. I am genuinely overjoyed to own one of your album covers. And this is one of my favourites from the exhibition.

Perhaps these are also scarecrows, designed to keep something ‘other’ away.

As is my custom I post Robert Wyatt on this day, with one of my favourite ever songs (though it’s more a murmuration than a song). youtu.be/ZTCnkAZsl6s

The second pair of pinholes from the Radio Telescope. Understanding that exposure was steady at about 25 seconds allowed me to start fiddling about with bit of glass in front of the pinhole. More in ALT I’d like to take photos that look like what the object does, or what the object sounds like.

The first two of four pinholes of the west dish of the One-Mile Telescope at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory (MRAO), Cambridge. Very happy with these. 25/6 seconds exposure. They look better/cleaner in person, and I need to buy a scanner to import these into the digital realm properly.

It’s not quite legal to be here, though a path suggests they turn a blind eye. But as I took my first pinhole a tall chap - big headphones, fancy camera, the swagger of a pirate - walked up. An urban explorer; he’s visiting every dish, no matter how high the fence. “I did jump the ditch”, I offered

Using a day off to sneak up on the radio telescope while its attention is elsewhere

‘I stayed to see the film round’ I do like Elizabeth Taylor’s description of the young seeing a film in the early 1950’s, especially as ‘seeing it in the round’ is how YouTube shorts presents films clips, starting with the very end of a scene before playing the whole clip around back to the ending.

The best of the pinholes. Still over exposed, but I love how taking a photo with a mere thread of light turns what was a bright touristy ice cream of day (a very busy pub just down the trail) into the opening of Great Expectations or the finale of The Essex Serpent.

Craft market on the town green, plus a tarot reader. (reminded of the Johnny Vegas joke where he rants about the craft markets he attended when a potter - “you’ve studied and trained for years and you’ve got to be friendly with somebody who makes model rocking chairs out of clothes pegs”)

Yesterday church exploring on the Shotley peninsula. Small things: St Mary, Erwarton - Acrobat and a Woodwose wild man. Carved panels around Rector’s chair. Possibly a reused Rood Screen. A second St Mary’s, Harkstead. A medieval, possibly devilish, hand offers a ball/apple/seductive Palantír

Dismal day - I never found a rhythm for the real world. A body and mind made out of thumbs. Plus none of my pinholes worked; such uniform failures that I wonder if my developer mix was off. But I do like the science fiction of my tripods standing all alien in a world of back and forth water.

If ever there was an Escher of a bird. 10 minutes later a dog slipped its lead and sprinted into the River Orwell to catch all the swans. The dog swam after them, while the swans floated serenely just out of reach, like Made Men - untouchable and knowing where you live, Mr Dog.

This was supposed to be a treat of a day, an early birthday celebration. But it’s been a lot of people with £1000 cameras while I still struggle to find a suitable exposure baseline for my pinhole - and my inner voice especially vocal with the ‘you don’t fit in. Why don’t you just die?!’ monologue.

A cycle ride, two train journeys, and a second, much longer cycle ride and this is where I’m posting fr….what! There’s already a photography party here?! This isn’t fair. 15 years ago this place was known to nobody but myself* I had to get up at 5am to share! Hmph *or so it seemed.

In the bike shop. Customer in front of me - lanky, like a quick drawing of rhubarb: "Did you sort the carbon rods?" "yes..but I've also exchanged the silverware cascade for the caster balloon, which I've run backwards" "oh, that will work with the Pegasus calipers" me - Do you have bike bells?

Evening walk. For a second I thought a black cat was following me on the other side of the street, before I realised it was the shadow on my own head, suddenly projected low across the road by a triggered security light. A moment of ailuranthropy; a moment as my very own Val Lewton film.

When half the number of Sewing Bee contestants have been eliminated the following week’s challenge should be for the remaining contestants to sew together realistic fabric facsimiles of their departed comrades.

Overheard in the kitchen aisle of a local cut price shop. A teenager talking to her mother. "But will I need a jug? Am I ever going to make gravy at uni?"

“He'd kill us if he got the chance”

There seems a story in Boudicca's possible resting place being within short walking distance of a train station and the express line to the heart of London. Her and her ghost Iceni army boarding at Sawbridgeworth and alighting at Liverpool Street, swords drawn, fury in their eyes.

Silliness which popped into my head while cycling along the River Stort towpath yesterday. Like many I do like the edge of things. It’s not a romantic magic though, the edge is not the edge to those living there. (posted yesterday, but didn’t like using a meme. Today I’m not so fussy)