It’s Budget Day! The OBR publishes its latest outlook once the Chancellor has completed her statement in Parliament. My all-time favourite cartoon on the subject, by @mooseallain.bsky.social:

Just look at this beauty we see on one of our walks! We always stop for a chat.

What the internet was made for. Delightful.

First try at madeleines turned out well! Flavoured with orange blossom water.

@katebevan.com Hi Kate, wondering if you or any of your techy friends have any tips re home printers that will work with an ASUS laptop running Windows 11 on Snapdragon? Having problems finding ARM compatible machines (for my dad). Thank you!

‘Have you heard of Zohran Mamdani?, asks my dad. ‘Of course!’ ‘I knew his dad, met him a few times in Dar es Salaam’, he says, and pulls this book off a shelf.

Summary of French PM Lecornu’s post-resignation address just now: ‘I can’t work with these clowns’.

Reading Atwood’s The Testaments. Check in on Bluesky and see someone’s posted a State Dpt tweet about moral virtue and steadfast faith in God being necessary preconditions of freedom. The book has seeped into real life.

Chanced upon an exhibition of Quentin Blake drawings at the weekend. This one is ‘Balancing with the Birds’.

It’s like we‘re living in an Armando Iannucci script.

Zohran Mamdani saw a cat do a big stretch without saying “big stretch” on at least four occasions: source

Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille

Heard on Radio 4: ‘A man has been jailed for three years for robbing a post office in Bradford, armed with a banana.’😳🧐

Halfway through this, on how Western leaders need to call out Trump’s authoritarianism, there was an ad with a clip of a nice lady making berry pavlova. I admit to clicking on it, as a brief escape from a terrifying reality. Excellent as ever by @rafaelbehr.bsky.social.

Probably thinking they’d come up with a clever pun, the Austrian rail company chooses ‘Railaxed’ as the name of their magazine…🧐 Always run it past a native speaker! 🚅🪓

How do I find the entrance to your flat? Got a little picture of a fox outside- you’ll know it when you see it. #foxoftheday

Still haunted by this snippet from ABC News during the recent floods in Queensland. 😳🕷️🕷️🕷️😱 (The apostrophe mistake is pretty unpleasant too.)

It’s been only four months. Four months! And we’re supposed to put up with four years of this? At this rate, that’s more than enough time to make the US completely unrecognisable. Just terrifying.

for @prospectmagazine.co.uk

Am no fan of this grass-coloured carpet the neighbours have put out, but the local fox seems to like it, so who am I to quibble? #foxoftheday

Loving the hardiness of these wild London poppies growing in an actual brick wall.

OK what is with Americans pronouncing ‘Qatar’ like ‘cutter’?

Oh god, the Americans are up and their President has been giving another interview…🫠

An excellent, excellent result! 😀🇦🇺

Ordered some stuff so we’d be ready for the election count night/day here in the UK #AusPol

Some place actually elected Andrea Jenkyns to something.

Der Spiegel notification (mistakenly?) illustrating the item about the FBI arresting a judge with a photo of Witkoff shaking Putin’s hand is right on the nose.

Turn on the radio. Woman’s Hour, today all about decluttering. First guests are two women who’ve started a podcast on declutterring and are on episode 306.😄🧐

Catching up on the cringey girly space flight from the other day

While the world burns, I’ve discovered a super easy recipe and now can’t get enough of making this nut and seed bread.

Christ it gets dark when the Americans wake up and start posting on here.

Hearing Sarah Montague read a Trump tweet on #wato is a strange experience: makes even her sound unhinged.

These people have no shame. Comparing her ‘struggle’ to that of Martin Luther King - give me strength!

Is The Atlantic now the official opposition in the US?

What do you mean, ‘follow live’? Watch as they tell lies, make up excuses, and then just send their army in one day and take it over, like Putin did Ukraine? This is so alarming.

‘It doesn’t walk in saying, “Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”’

When the neighbourhood chat gives talking about cars a rest, it can be really rather charming. 🦆🦆🦆

News is very heavy, so in case it briefly helps anyone else, here’s a wild wombat I saw a few weeks ago.

How, how do we get through four years of this??!

This is like Brexit all over again. What do you do about people being fucking idiots?

You carried your full plastic bottle up the mountain, is it really too much to ask that you carry it back down again to dispose of, once it’s empty? I despair of people.

I had not clocked that one of Trump’s executive orders was to end the requirement for government employees to report gifts or investments. Amazing. All just happening in broad daylight.

Does this cat capture the mood of the start of 2025 or what?

The extraordinary flower of the cannonball tree

The milk bars of my Australian childhood are gone - all that’s left is the occasional old sign where they used to be, like this one.

Just in case anyone else might be as cheered up by seeing a yellow-tailed black cockatoo as much as I was.

Echidna in the backyard today!

Merry Christmas! We’ll be at the beach…

bsky.app/profile/sabi... There’s decorating for Christmas and then there’s the bus I took in 30° heat in Faulconbridge, NSW

Why don’t we have this on European trains?!