Wine bottles from Queen Mary's Dolls' House currently on Antiques Roadshow.

So, last 4th January I finished a miniature working printing press from a kit (roughly 1/6 scale)

Extraordinary film about Calvin Black’s Possum Trot doll theatre, one of the most amazing lost visionary environments. Anyway, I would urge you to watch this & see for yourself the strange & wonderful world he created with the help of his wife Ruby m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqcX...

Happy new year everyone x

It’s nice to see Learning to Think pop up on people’s 2025 book roundups. If you haven’t read it yet can you get that done so we can all relax many thankyous www.penguin.co.uk/books/442390...

Looking at lots of the “how do I break in” discourse going on and let me just say that the making friends part is (and remains) key. The difference between colleagues and friends becomes exceedingly visible once one leaves/steps back/is no longer actively working at the creative thing. 1/

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DWJ is underadapted. I'd like a Hexwood, but would watch any of them. For adults, maybe Helen Oyeyemi's Mr Fox.

Sindy-scale haul this morning - kilner jars, imitation flowers and vases.

Matt makes me a doll-sized breakfast on Christmas morning. Quail's egg, cherry tomatoes, button mushrooms, toast and bacon.

Happy Christmas x

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Any advice that isn't either 1) a tailored response to a given piece of work or 2) specific examples of things that have worked for the adviser.

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Giving the blu ray Box of Delights a whirl. We also have some boar pie. All of this is good.

Authors get "dropped" when their sales go down.

Do I know a writer who is into ink? The kind used for books?

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Lewis but no Morse? Poor.

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This reminds me of the time the manager of Loco Lounge asked me why I wasn't sharing my full English breakfast with Matt (who had his own full English in front of him)

Prufrock is probably the answer outside of the Christmas period.

Who is the smiling stranger With hair as white as gin, What is he doing with the children And who could have let him in?

I'm enjoying The Marvellous Miniature Workshop but I do sometimes wish there were some craft shows that were about the craft rather than using it as a peg for heartwarming life stories

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I don't normally put our tree up till December but the weekends are funny this year so 29th November it is.

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Ian was my fiction lecturer at BCU. He was a very kind and generous teacher. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/n...

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I said "he cannae see, man" to Matt and he didn't get the reference. He has never heard of the paintballing scene in Byker Grove. I am appalled. I don't even know how that's possible for a British 45 year old.

What fictional villain traumatised you as a kid?

Be serious Anthony.

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Object 1 is in the Touch Points cabinet. open.substack.com/pub/hayleywe...

Slightly different point, but in the wave of writers responding that writers' block doesn't exist, I'm struck - as I am whenever writers' block discourse comes up - that the denials take very similar forms to denials of mental illness. They're very "pull yourself together."

Afaics he's not applying the phrase "writer's block" to actual writers; not specifically. He's implying that people who don't write at length or creatively, have never done so, or invested effort in doing so, have a "block" which AI will fix. Which says something about how he sees writers in general

There seem to be two basic claims quoted. 1) AI is good for creativity, and 2) People will turn to brand name authors because there's going to be a lot of slop. Seems to be a fundamental contradiction there, but I doubt either claim is driven by clear thinking or even belief necessarily.

1920s vampiric shenanigans, if you're on the lookout for halloween reading: uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hoke...

Completed my probation at work.

Maybe we don't go to town on a woman who has just written a book on panic and self harm. Just a thought.

Fell off a ladder face first into a book trolley. I'm... quite bruised

I wrote this down in around 2007 after having a dream about bowling with Jacques Derrida. As you can see it’s a visual representation of “The Second Coming” as a gyre composed of two cones and something about a section of a cone being parabola/parable/parole.

At one time I would have said: I'm not convinced books should be read with any knowledge of the author. No name on the cover. All books published anonymously. But this did depend on me taking for granted that anonymous writers would at minimum be human, so there goes that dream.

Remember that time on twitter when Nigella joined in and the bar moved suddenly and painfully

@silversprite.bsky.social I can't DM (no age verification), but Matt, ofc! He has all household photo responsibilities

Just to flip this on its head, for some reason locals tend to pronounce Birmingham's Alcester Road with three syllables (even though we pronounce the town name as Alster), while visitors assume two.

I met my husband on MySpace.

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Explore digitised manuscripts, notes & correspondence from the Peter Dickinson Archive on CollectionsCaptured. Dickinson (1927–2015) was an award-winning poet & novelist, celebrated for his children’s books & crime fiction collectionscaptured.ncl.ac.uk/digital/coll...