Ooh, the Don’t Scare Claire channel has a Black Monk of Pontefract episode! Excellent (settles in to watch with a pile of toast)

Look, I know Timothy is actually old enough to drink and smoke and be a doctor but still have an instinctive reaction that he’s shouldn’t be doing that #CallTheMidwife

Spending the day with movies, starting with Duel. I’ve seen it before, incredibly tense and exciting, but I also love movies that show everyday life in America in the 70s, like this and Dog Day Afternoon and Pelham 123. For some reason I’m fascinated by glimpses of that world

Ok, yes, that one was very creepy #TheRoomInTheTower

Wonderfully creepy online story telling from @nunkie.bsky.social and @owenstaton.bsky.social this evening - I switched off all the lights, lit some candles and got very creeped out. It’s a lovely idea and I look forward to it next year! (Maybe I’ll join in and do one myself!)

Just popped out for Christmas Eve chocolate and though a couple of places are open, everywhere is very quiet and still and in anticipation of tomorrow - it all feels a little unsettling. I can see why Christmas Eve is a time for ghost stories

All sorts of weird folklore gets rolled out on Christmas Eve. Animals speak, house hobs demand apple brandy. It's the one night when the winged dogs that climb and perch in churches can change positions. Magics and strangeness always seems thick today. – Nancy Appleyard #VOH

If anyone reads the story in the latest Fortean Times about the van crashing through the barriers at Knaresborough station, I just want to add it’s a VERY steep hill and everyone living there has been kind of expecting something like this to happen

The usual town figures - you know, people who stand out, that are always seen out and about, who are known and recognised if not always spoken to. Quite shocked recently to realise I’ve become one of the town figures. Not sure if it’s my rotating hair colours or some other quality I’m not aware of.

Anyway. Back to reading my Fortean Times - I get it through my library app, Libby, which has a whole huge rack of magazines I can get for free. See the wonderful things you can get from your library?

Every time I watch Strange New Worlds I’m delighted by Pelia. An older woman! Who’s actually an engineer! Who’s led a long and outrageous life! Who insists on enjoying everything! And has no respect for authority! She is an absolute role model for me.

Time for my usual Christmas Eve tradition - sitting in a coffee shop watching everyone else frantically get ready for Christmas while I sit here and drink coffee and read. Today’s reading is the Fortean Times (why did that auto correct to Fortran? Isn’t that a programming language?)

If someone is ten minutes late, I assume they aren’t coming and descend into a spiral of self-blame (why aren’t they coming, what did I do wrong?) and then if they do arrive, I’m frazzled, bad-tempered and if I cooked, it’s burnt. So, no, Rachel, being late is rude

My Patreon subscribers should now have access to a new ghost story just for Christmas Eve. And if you’re not a subscriber you should be able to buy just this one story. There are legends of a ghostly bride that appears in the mirror to claim their love…

Saw was fantastic, actually. From what people had said I was expecting torture and gore and nothing else, but there was really good characters and plot. Got very caught up in that. Now for Troll 2. Loved Troll, so high hopes

I have a cold so spending the day in bed, instead of all the things I had planned for today. Have decided to watch Saw to cheer me up. So far I’ve been warned three times that this film has disturbing content and do I really want to watch it? So now I’m really excited to see it

Dammit, I was supposed to go to a classical music by candlelight concert tonight and I keep trying to go to them and something keeps stopping me. And this will be the second time I can’t go because I’m not well enough. Not fair

Right, is that odd sound coming from the ghosts of flight 401 video I’m watching or from somewhere in my flat? Dare I switch the video off to check? And if it’s coming from somewhere in my flat - what is it?

Oh, I have a cold - all the running around and going places, I suppose it was inevitable I’d catch something. Hopefully I can shake this off quickly. It usually passes fast, if I take some time to rest. So shall spend the afternoon watching ghost shows on YouTube

I still haven’t got my Christmas radio times. I need to get one. And a highlighter

I love Hound of the Baskervilles, it’s basically a Victorian Gothic horror with added Sherlock Holmes. It feels like ACD started off with a non-Holmes story, realised he needed a brave and clever and adventurous hero, decided to use Watson….

I’m having a podcast catch up day - I’d caught up on all the non-fiction ones and now it’s the fiction. Made a bit more difficult by podcast app insisting I’ve listened to stories I haven’t listened to…

On the day I am wearing my The Thing t-shirt for the first time. What the word when ‘serendipitous’ is not a good thing?

Listening to the Sherlock & Co Hound of the Baskervilles and once again reminded that Stapleton is one of the most disturbing villains ACD ever created. A fact often overlooked in adaptions (not this one, my skin is crawling)

The camera shop down the road sells vintage cameras and they had a camera that looked like the one Lee Miller used and I stood there for ten minutes gazing longingly at it. And I could afford it. Only stopped by not knowing where I’d get film or how I’d process it

So my Patreon subscribers will get a story from me on Christmas Eve and I have set it so non-subscribers can buy it if you wish (set it as cheap as Patreon allows)(at least I hope I set this up). So just in case you fancy it…

Of course the day I’m recording my Christmas Eve story is the day the Heathrow take off flight path is over my house, the downstairs cafe are taking all their Christmas deliveries and the neighbours are running up and downstairs for no clearly defined reason

I went to buy myself a very posh copy of Dracula today and the woman behind the counter said it was her favourite book and we gushed about it for ages am how every person in the book has a distinct voice and the iconography of the characters and then I told her about Re Dracula. Her face lit up!

I went to this gorgeous exhibition at Japan House called Hyakkō - over 100 skilled makers from Japan displaying mostly cups and plates made with various material, enamel and wood and so on. Designed to be used and not just looked at. Designs from pure colour to funny drawings. Just lovely

There’s a Korean film on Netflix called The Great Flood which I’d added thinking it was disaster but it’s not, it’s sci-fi, really clever plot which I can’t tell you anything about because it would spoil but really interesting concept very well done

Strangely, watching Welcome to Derry right before bed did result in nightmares but also the deepest and longest lasting sleep I’ve had in ages. Have woken up feeling quite refreshed for a change

Found a fantastic ghost story channel called Don’t Scare Claire - good ghost stories, well-researched and presented. Currently working my way through the London Underground ghost story videos

Oh my, I loved The Artist by Lucy Steeds. I thought the story would go one way, say something that I expected, then it totally turned my expectations on their head and ended in just the way I always hope these stories will end but hardly ever do

I'm sharing this here, as I have on Facebook and Instagram, but there's no account on here to share from, and I just think this is wonderful. A really good balance of design and implementation, and appears to achieve everything it set out to do, and it *SO* appeals to my inner 'work nerd'.

You do not become a world builder by reading everything everyone else has to say about world building. You do it by the actual act of creating, the continuous and dedicated practice of the skill. You fail, you learn, you create again. This is what makes you a world builder.

All my feed is photography today which is making me even more eager to try and expand the photography I do. Got a decent camera now, need to use it more.

The Thing Itself: The fundamental principle of photography by Bill Jay. If you are a photographer and haven’t read this then you should. unitednationsofphotography.com/2018/06/16/b...

This is what those who have fallen into the trap of generative AI simply can’t grasp. Photography isn’t about making a clever image it is rooted in the subject - the thing itself - and in the absence of that all AI images are by definition shallow, transient and meaningless.

Oh, just realised I have to have The Artist back to the library soon as 27 people are waiting so reading that this morning

Ah the ‘I’m been working far too hard to be ill but now I’m on holiday’ malaise has hit. All achy and tired. Plans cancelled (not that I had much) so I can sit in coffee shop and listen to podcasts

I’m at Sadler’s Wells to see the ballet of Red Shoes (a phrase Bluesky tried to autocorrect to ball Tod). The film is so disturbing and enthralling and enchanting and unsettling, I can’t wait to see what Matthew Bourne has done with the ballet

So much fun when I spend all afternoon watching Peter Laws Into the Fog channel (which is all true life spooky stuff) and then when I turn off I hear footsteps inside my tiny little flat. I know it’s some kind of weird echo of next door or someone passing my door but it’s unsettling…

Success! Found a hairdresser that understands when I say short hair I mean French New Wave movies short. And no small talk. Perfect. (Also hair that has been white for ten years is growing back brown. That isn’t supposed to happen. Why is that happening?)

Right. Hairdressers. Time for the ‘yes, I want it that short and severe’ conversation. And then straight home to get all the product fluffing it up that they insist on putting in there combed out.

And its time for my yearly rereading of Hogfather. ‘Most people forgot that the very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood’

Every time I see some one in one of those big posh very modernist homes on TV I always have the same thought first. How do they find time to clean all that?

My two favourite podcast storytellers together

God, what horrible news about Rob Reiner. Such a brilliantly talented man who made so many of my favourite movies, just gone like that.

Time off soon which I hope means I can get some gaming on - I don’t like to play if I know I have to stop at a set time so I like a few hours. Still playing Plague, and Genshin Impact, starting Among the Shadows and Stardew Valley