We interrupt your regularly scheduled doomscrolling for this "the more you know" timeline cleanse. #DoomscrollingBreak

I can’t decide whether Branwell Brontë would be the best or the absolute worst kind of poster. Possibly both, often simultaneously.

The sheer delight of seeing the look on the Kid’s face when he (thinking himself edgy) played Gravel Pit through the kitchen speaker… and we, his agèd parents, KNEW ALL THE WORDS

One of only three known flags to have survived the Battle of Trafalgar, made and maintained by the sailors themselves, has been put under an export ban until March in the hope of finding a way to stop it permanently leaving the country. www.museumsassociation.org/museums-jour...

As it’s going to drive me nuts if I don’t say it, for the record there are broadly three Arthurian traditions: Celtic (Welsh), Heroic / Insular (Anglo-Saxon) and Romance / Continental. What we recognise as “Arthurian legend” is - again, broadly - a descendant of the Romance or Continental tradition.

The Kid turns 18 this week, so if anybody needs me I’ll be sitting alone in a room and staring wistfully into the middle distance while ABBA’s “Slipping Through My Fingers” plays on a loop

finally, someone has tried to make a revisionist Robin Hood with a famous Australian actor

1963: The Big Freeze on BBC Four is fascinating. "When electricity failed, everyone turned to gas." Brits could transmute at will, back then, when we were a proper country.

She is herself a haunted building, and that will save her.

I know it’s the nature of modern fandom and I’m old, but good grief I’m finding the trend of people simultaneously babygirling and massively objectifying men in the public eye who are in their 30s and 40s a bit depressing. There was a line somewhere and wow has it been crossed

I love a good rock star story, and this was the perfect start to the year’s reading. Twisty and clever, and left me wanting to look up whether Nereus Forbes ever hung out with Bowie & Bolan. www.penguin.co.uk/books/462626...

I think it's a shame kids aren't exposed to boring old black and white films on TV at Christmas any more. If you're younger than me (an ancient man of the hills) BBC iPlayer currently has Bringing Up Baby, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Third Man & Suspicion. All bangers!

2026 is making an early start to a “Hold my beer, 2025.” play, and I don’t like it.

I have put away all the Christmas decorations and I hate it. Everywhere looks just a little bit sad now.

Somewhere in France, Amal Clooney starts sharpening her pencils

Just call this one the War Mayor and keep the mainstream numbering clean.

FYI all six episodes of Heated Rivalry will be on Sky and NOW from January 10th.

Wanting to do the “introduce yourself as what almost killed you” thing going round in a silly and lighthearted way but as soon as you start typing, realising it’s enough separate things to be actually quite depressing - and even worse, it won’t scan

An extraordinary, brilliant line.

Unsure about the Secret Traitor, tbh. Unless, of course, they smuggled Linda back into the round table while everyone was blindfolded, in which case: chocks away. #TheTraitors

Well begun etc etc

A message for you all to carry through the year

Absolutely not

There’s a small wood just outside town that over 2025 somebody has filled with painted stones and shells and seeds. They hang from branches, hide among roots, and cover fallen trees like army ants. It’s not twee, and don’t sense its secrets are meant for social media. But here is the eye tree.

2025 in summary:

An absolute banger of a book to end the year on (cat hair: model’s own)

Harvey Price time then. In 2016, I had an ill fated stint as the Social Media Producer on Loose Women on ITV. It was a disaster, I should never have applied for the job, I certainly shouldn’t have been given it. I could do the actual job standing on my head, but the politics of the place…woof.

This has been a long time in the making. My new radio play, ‘The Goblin King and Me’ goes out on Radio 4 on Thursday 8th January. I’ve just seen this wonderful preview in the new Radio Times! I’m so pleased they like it and I hope everyone else will. Please do listen! What a brilliant team!

Again,

Haunting festive presence.

Reminder: tomorrow is Monday. Is it your post-Christmas bins?

In-laws have left. Lying down in a darkened room with headphones on. I am spoonless. So out of spoons that we’re now using the forks and we’ll pay for that when we have to eat soup Or something

A gentle and lovingly-meant plea from your writer relatives. You want to give us something useful, and that’s very thoughtful. We appreciate it. But please, if you want to give us notebooks, make them anything but those handmade ones with rough paper and the stiff leather cover with a tie round it.

This is the best news I’ve seen in a while. Fingers crossed for speedy progress to approval and adoption

It does feel like there’s a danger in making Mark Gatiss the Keeper of the Ghost Story. Not because I don’t like his work - I really, really do, and I admire him a lot - but because he has a very specific voice, and our collective ghost stories risk becoming permanently Gatissified.

Bad: my family - quite unprovoked - made me watch the Minecraft movie Good: I told them they owe me, so now we own a 4K hard copy of The Thing which I will be rewatching very, very soon

How I’m walking out of 2025

Belle: hey Scrooge: sup Belle: left the house again Scrooge: lol Scrooge: did they do the song Belle: 🫠

A quick check: is this the ESPECIALLY cursed Venetian palazzo, currently up for sale? Because I feel like it might be www.instagram.com/p/DSvUTWlCHld

Everyone I know seems to be reading Wild Dark Shore right now - and rightly so, because it is PHENOMENAL. I just refused to move until I’d finished it (I was halfway through when I sat down, so that’s quite something) and it arguably contains one of the most casually powerful lines I’ve ever read.

Boxing Day walk. I didn’t take any photos, but we saw: a heron flying low across the river (like watching a dinosaur in flight), two swans on the canal and another two- juveniles- preening their feathers on the towpath, my favourite narrowboat (the one I’m sure I could live on if I had fewer books).

Today, thoughts inevitably turn to a man whose life and death will always be associated with this time of year – a man whose purity of heart and good works alike contain, I think, the true spirit of the season.

gentle reminder you can always be put in the bird tube without warning

Watching THE GREEN KNIGHT again

2 x the taste that returns you to your summers in Nantes. 1 x flightless bird's regular produce if not in love 4 x symbols of your willing supplication to capitalism