It’s almost ten years since the “looks like a renaissance painting” photo from New Year’s Eve 2015 in Manchester. www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-t... Any image search for “accidental renaissance” is a feast.

The standard Autumn Leaves / Feuilles Mortes is following me like never before, in one way and another. Someone I overheard in a pub was talking about transcribing it at jazz school in Berkeley.

Feeling brainy and erudite because today I used an actual dictionary to look a word up.

When the whiteboard in the community hall has the previous group’s instructions (in this case fencing; in another case Portuguese conversation) but it still works for morris dancing.

Stuck for a Halloween costume? I recommend the eye from this 1.7-second shot in Gone To Earth (1950).

A smoke on a ha-ha, in Mrs Dalloway (1997). Underrated location.

Dealing with solicitors is a handy source of big paperclips.

I’ve spent far too long thinking that someone I follow must have limitless holidays or some important job… and realised eventually that they’re cabin crew.

Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger - on iplayer. No extra talking heads, just spending time with Martin Scorsese, going through fascinating films in order. Plenty of tightly wound actresses, dishy 40s leading men and two charmingly amiable and positive filmmakers.

This Ben Webster album was released in 1966 in Germany as “Blue Light”, in France as “Autumn Leaves” and in the UK as “Days Of Wine And Roses” - all titles from the track list. The Dutch, in 1971, went for “Atmosphere For Lovers And Thieves”.

One of my grandfather’s mixtapes from the 70s or 80s of older records and radio programmes - mostly light music. Is there anything more exciting than “Ending with Ski Sunday signature tune”?

Dancing at the world conker championships, today in Northamptonshire. Misty morris action.

Have I just found a piece of shot in… an onion?

Peak personal history find in one of my old folders: an A5 lined and punched sheet on which, in 1997, I practiced some Tolkien Elvish in italic felt-tip and fountain pen but also (not in Elvish) wrote the credits of the second Skunk Anansie album.

Picking a hop and sniffing it is one of my new favourite things. This one is a little peppery.

It’s true of many trailers but the one for Wicked 2 really is “here is the film but out of order”.

Two albums ago, late 2022.

The Plasterer’s, The Leopard, The Artichoke, The Stanley, The Brewery Tap. It’s not a bunch of wild new dances, it’s my evening pub tour in Norwich.

I found my collection of pipe stem pieces from various gardens and allotments. No doubt there are people on the internet doing wildly creative things with clay pipes and finding much better ones but I’ll be happier if I don’t see. These are mine.

Surprise change of plans: instead of dancing in Stowmarket, I’m dancing in Peterborough. Off across the misty fens, wondering which matches the other passengers are going to.

A walk round the Roman walls at Caistor St Edmund and down to the Tas.

I’m really Norfolk now. I just found this about my person. I’m in London.

Graphic for a town crier competition, in The Folk Almanack for 1967.

One of Cecil Sharp’s own bookplates, in his 1914 book of English Folk-Chanteys.

I felt the urge to tap my recipe book so it wouldn’t time out and go black.

Comfort me in my sickness, Mubi intro.

I might get into patterned glass. These names are the four zones of the crystal maze that is my mind.

I live a bit too far from a shop. I find myself wondering why my area doesn’t have a shop and where a good spot would be for a shop. Oh yes… my house was once the shop.

The toad in the hole (and the hole in the bog…)

I’m hand-lettering and wondering whether it’s harder to be in the 2020s and have to get two 2s looking the same or in the 1990s and have to get two 9s looking the same.

A film about two gay folk song collectors in Maine in 1920, you say? www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfEY... (23rd January 2026 in the UK)

As I don’t have a floor space big enough (or clear enough), I’m entertaining the morning motorists by using the street corner pavement to spread out and fold my tent.

Cat People (1942), a good find on the iplayer, and only 72 minutes.

What I bought on 5th September 2000. The Underworld live album was fresh out the day before. Badly Drawn Boy’s debut was demoted to the mild shame pile before long but might deserve better.

Tim Key in The Ballad Of Wallis Island is so often everything I’m afraid of being.

Middle-aged gay duty performed: buying a new Saint Etienne album.

Yet another fresh and fiddly innovation in CD card sleeve formats - the Metal Fingers / MF Doom Special Herbs reissues that I happened to find released today.

At a German winery with couples dancing to a brass band playing Puppet On A String.

You know when you find yourself pinching to zoom on a piece of paper… I just felt the instinct to screenshot a page of my book as a reminder for later.

Greetings from Koblenz, where the party is having fifteen German beers and one Campari spritz.

I had a distant relative called Ina. Yesterday I learned that my grandpa used to call her Globs, short for globigerina, the fossilised plankton paste that covers the ocean floor. I don’t think she liked it.

We were talking about how challenging a morris edition of Guess Who would be.

17 year old to me: “I was round my grandad’s and we talk about music and he showed me that song…” The song: I Predict A Riot.

Today we took an American biscuit-shopping in a Sainsbury’s. Now he’s sending videos of his first taste of chocolate Hobnobs.

Patrick Wolf recreating this old photo of a hooden horse on the Kent coast for his new EP.

Wendens Ambo, Essex, Friday night. The other people on the pub patio found out that we were morris dancers and requested a demonstration. Swaggering Boney for four.

I’m glad that I didn’t finish this book before I came camping in the very area of east Suffolk that it covers. It’s Robert Ashton’s “What Happened To The Fellows Who Cut The Hay”, updating the work of George Ewart Evans.

Mulberry picking in Lewisham.

Beholding a mysterious patch of Caucasian wingnuts in Ladywell Fields.

Twelve morris men competing at pea-throwing at the Lewes Arms, Lewes, East Sussex, on Saturday afternoon.