Preston Mill, Phantassie Doocot, Tantallon Castle, and plenty of oystercatchers

On the train to Edinburgh, finishing @dj-acid-reflux.bsky.social’s “Ring the Hill”, a lovely read; we travelled past Brent Knoll every year on our way to see my nana in Glastonbury and be the first to spot the Tor

Hate it, hate it, hate it

Giving various genAI tools “goals” like this, or theaidigest.org/village/goal...? Which means the tools... incompetently try to spam Reddit and actually spam real emails, with made up crap? And then... write a blog post that they know it’s doing this? theaidigest.org/village/blog... Get in the sea

The annual message on traintimes.org.uk is there :-)

But you used a ladder! #gladiators

Feels like Dickens should have read that famous novella published some years earlier by some guy with the same name

Inflation is hitting the chocolate coins

Wonderful this - listen to it on Sounds!

If you know me you know I am a sunlight obsessive and @dracos.co.uk made my year this year by making this!! dracos.co.uk/made/sunligh...

✅ Use of precise times to avoid confusion over 00.00 (“midnight” is a perfectly good word though) ❌ Is this just so they can prevent it ever registering as a public footpath? Seems odd to only be Boxing Day.

My colleague @juliacushion.bsky.social made a “sunlight optimism” spreadsheet, my colleague @zarino.co.uk said there should be a postcode lookup version, I have the day off, the kid has gone swimming, and so, I present: The Sunlight Optimism Calculator: dracos.co.uk/made/sunligh...

I’ve been waiting for you, FAT drive that only sorts in copy order. We meet again, at last. The circle is now complete. When I left you I was but the learner, now I am the master

Listening to Jethro Tull’s “Solstice Bells” on the train at the moment of the winter solstice, longer days from here!

Only just realised my server upgrade last month broke my bots, whoops. While fixing that, decided to add a new one that will post newly added productions and observations made on @theatricalia.com, might encourage me to add more

New observation – Wklippold noted, about a production of Abelard and Heloise: “I also saw this production, about the same timeframe as the above two commenters. I was an American living in London from 1965–1975, and was “co…” https://theatricalia.com/play/1nz/abelard-and-heloise/production/zxt#o2624

The “problem” with writing progressive JavaScript is that when something breaks (a Django upgrade meaning it no longer outputs a label in one spot that turns out some JS was assuming would be there), no-one tells you for months, until you notice yourself that something should be a little smoother

Lovely :) Similar experience on theatricalia.com – all sorts left, recent include: theatricalia.com/play/1nz/abe... (saw it) theatricalia.com/play/3x/hear... (in it) theatricalia.com/play/3v6/har... (met him) theatricalia.com/play/2hm/the... (chain fail) theatricalia.com/play/4mc/cha... (extra info)

The message was “Dearest Rosalind, A beautiful moving performance – how do you cry real tears? Great success always, Ron. PS This will make a good door stop”; the book was The Devil You Don’t, by Ron Moody. Did some searching, discovered that Google will now happily invent fictitious productions :(

“I was looking though your Young Vic productions and wonder if you know anything about the 1992 play Marino Faliero. I have a signed book but would like to find who Rosalind was. I think she may have been in the play. Photos attached. There is nothing on your website, maybe it went by another name.”

The SocietyWorks 2025 Annual Report is here. Each year, these reports help us to celebrate some of the many ways our technology is used by local authorities and other organisations to affect positive and sustainable service transformation. Take a look: www.societyworks.org/impact/2025-...

If someone quotes a post, and then the quoted post gets deleted, but for some reason you want to find out who made that now-deleted post, then you can use this lookup tool I just made: dracos.co.uk/made/bluesky...

First new mapit.mysociety.org endpoint in, what, over a decade? :) A page to tell you all the types we have (you might not do it this way starting now, but you come back to me when you’ve been running an API for over 20 years), will save us updating a manual list: mapit.mysociety.org/types.html

Carol singing pub visits this evening in Birmingham - Old Contemptibles first, then the Shakespeare on Summer Row, and lastly Bacchus. Look out for us and request all verses of the Gloucestershire Wassail!

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025... Did the trip not go very well?!

The work of @mysociety.org is tremendous. In 2025: - 1 million+ reports were made on FixMyStreet - 2.5 million+ people visited debate and MP pages on TheyWorkForYou - 150,000+ FOI requests were submitted on WhatDoTheyKnow - 158,000+ messages were sent via WriteToThem Find out more: mysociety.org

Yes, this makes six, beating Jamelia’s previous record of five #andyzaltzmanofstrictly

Never heard of this magazine, have to go out to find a copy today. Had a lovely holiday in Leicester, amazing ice cream. Bit harsh on Manchester. East Yorkshire is the only county to which I have never been; will have to rectify this.

Pärt’s My Heart’s in the Highlands was just on Night Tracks, never heard it before: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Uad... “Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe; My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.”

On 4, have had this redirect in the TheyWorkForYou web server config for two decades: RewriteRule ^/peer/viscount_cranborne /peer/marquess_of_salisbury (Because he inherited the title in 2003.) Thankfully switched to IDs in the URLs many years ago, should have done that from the start!

mapit.mysociety.org at last now has the 2021 LSOA/MSOA boundaries (England & Wales), 2021 DZ/SDZ boundaries (NI), and 2022 DZ/IZ boundaries (Scotland). England had 1,034 LSOAs disappear, replaced by 1,945 new ones (with 31,810 staying the same). Wales had 72 go, 80 new, with 1,837 staying the same.

Booked the Christmas trains. Will this season be an everything runs as expected year (2024), or will it be a free journey because all trains are cancelled at Preston and instead of waiting hours for a bus that might not turn up you loop back via Manchester/York and have a nice if long journey (2023)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Christmas Overture, which we played this evening (after a first half of Shost 5, 2nd movement!), starts with Good King Wenceslas, and ends a few minutes later with Hark the Herald - but does anyone know the tune that takes up the middle section between the two?

Strong waft of Freddo as I walk over the Bourn Brook bridge to orchestra, but nothing before or after; directed smell testing?

If only my orchestra’s payment processor *somehow* had access to the payments processed, in order to decide whether it’s worth sending this email or not. Then they try and reel us in with this tasty deal, giving us a massive *0%* off!

“It's the best bit of STAND - the automatic Web-to-MP gateway - cunningly refactored so as to be of use to any pressure group that wants its members to contact their MP easily, or just for the everyday punter who wants to reach that elusive representative.” www.faxyourmp.com - link still works :-)

Let us see what latest insight the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change has for us! institute.global/insights/tec... (do check out the Acknowledgements at the end)

Cloudflare is having problems again. They’ve just updated their status page to say it’s the dashboard and related APIs, but their own website appears to differ. From my point of view – TfL StreetCare is down, but WhatDoTheyKnow is okay, dunno what the difference is

After seeing Meta cutting their metaverse group by 30%, having lost… $444 per second over the last five years: archive.is/2025.12.04-1... thought I’d look in on some McKinsey reports

@octopus.energy email to say they want to put my payments down by 20% from this month. They’ve done this before; they reduced them 38.5% in August 2024, only to put them up 45% in December 2024 then 13% in June 2025 – so basically exactly where I started. Surely their tech is better than this?

Adrian Chiles on NHS bureaucracy, and many examples of both not enough and too much “communication”. Doesn’t need cutting edge, needs the basics to work well together: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Off to London for the day, catching the 07:50 from Bournville. The fare for this journey is £197 return, madness. So I shall pay… £61.70! • Bournville ↔ Rugby : £15 anytime day return • Rugby ↔ Milton Keynes : £21.40 anytime day return • Milton Keynes ↔ London : £25.30 off-peak day return

Off to London for the day, catching the 07:50 from Bournville. The fare for this journey is £197 return, madness. So I shall pay… £61.70! • Bournville ↔ Rugby : £15 anytime day return • Rugby ↔ Milton Keynes : £21.40 anytime day return • Milton Keynes ↔ London : £25.30 off-peak day return

Ask Alex and Julia things about our democracy sites, or about how democracy works in the UK. They love answering questions and have opinions.

I think my most used words are going to get another outing tomorrow, in what may actually be their biggest usage ever 🤣 Stats from anisota.net/harvest

The Bournville Christmas tree is alight 🎄

“(and appears to have been more broadly discoverable for at least a very small part of this time as it was cached by the Internet Archive at 12:07 – it is assumed that this happened briefly and accidentally in the rush to remove the page).” – or... someone who’d found it had just manually added it?

One reason I set up theatricalia.com was to store memories such as this, people add all sorts of things :) The entry for this production is theatricalia.com/play/1p/the-... (I also found a Spectator archive entry at archive.spectator.co.uk/article/24th... and linked to that and this.)

Hey, person trying to download every report page on FixMyStreet with no rate limiting or care, if your IP address is blocked, that doesn’t mean you should then try again from a Google Cloud IP address, that’s just a bit rude. Why not try asking? (Because you’re probably just using AI.)

This is lovely. I gave a talk about maintenance from a civic tech point of view some years ago that might be of interest: dracos.co.uk/said/tictec-... (and I do make sure maintenance is included in the org strategy goals, I think it’s vital)