That’ll do. Pub?

Watching John Mulaney's bit "There's a HORSE LOOSE in the HOSPITAL", and my wife breezily said she'd once worked with someone who'd been called upon to deal with a horse being loose in a hospital. This was, to say the least, unexpected. Further reading: youtube.com/watch?v=JhkZMxgPxXU&themeRefresh=1

Lyric of the day: “They weren’t burning witches, it was women on those fires.” Katherine Priddy, ‘Matches’ youtu.be/3hw604WrlzI?...

#AtoZofTunes Rose's Turn (Imelda Staunton) My first exposure to Gypsy was in the movie Airplane!, where the real Ethel Merman has to be restrained from singing 'Everything's Coming Up Roses'. Great joke, until you realise the real thing is madder. Staunton is incredible. youtu.be/0F28IYnEqKY?...

#AtoZofTunes Rollecoaster Ride (Belle & Sebastian) I want to make a video for this song, with someone lip-syncing on a rollercoaster, completely sanguine while everyone around them is screaming, using hi-speed cameras for slow playback. Hit me up if you can make this happen. youtu.be/BTfzPxph5xY?...

The Last Kings Of Hollywood, about Lucas, Scorsese, Spielberg, etc. brings home that what these innovators brought us — Jaws, Star Wars, etc — were the reconstructed remains of what they set out to do. This lends them a vitality that’s lost when new generations come along and intentionally mimic it.

I wonder if needy companies still bother contacting Kevin Shields asking him for feedback.

Kurt Cobain, Ian Brown, Angelica Skyler and Yours Truly 🥳

My boy is not asking any of his pals (boys or girls) if they want to hang out in town today, just in case they get laughed at for being together on Valentine’s Day. And THAT, let me remind you, is the degree of self-policing of an early teen. I have advised him to Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway.

I’m 90% reluctant to attempt to pass on cultural relics to the younger generation, but I indulged in showing my boy, 38 years to the day since my dad allowed me to stay up past midnight to watch it, 12 Angry Men. It went well!

It's rubbish that Kirsty MacColl has been gone a quarter of a century. But check out this joyous tune to brighten you up, where she affectionately says of her boyfriend "he's appalling, it's true". Give me that. #KirstyMacColl

We have this morning recorded the 11th instance since 2020 of my mum asking for a cappuccino and being served with a cup of tea. "I even said 'with chocolate sprinkles'!"

I’ve been waiting for this level of insight from Madness for decades. For many complex reasons they get very self-conscious when reflecting in any chin-scratchy way about their tunes. But no one better than @sodajerker.bsky.social to tease out Suggs’s love of reading, history and chord inversions…

EPISODE 306 // Madness frontman Suggs talks about their new Hit Parade compilation, balancing joy and pathos in songwriting, and serendipitous creative moments. Platforms: linktr.ee/sodajerker Direct: www.sodajerker.com/episode-306-... Playlist: open.spotify.com/playlist/3bT...

Advent calendar torn open. All contents eaten. No we don’t have a dog.

“The bigger the mistake, the harder it is to see”: discuss.

Reading Middlemarch for the first time. I am enjoying it. I like the very peceptive observations about internal motivations between Celia and Dorothea. What do any of you Middlemarch heads like about it? (This is not engagement bait, unless it’s of the doomed betrothal kind)

Just laughed out loud at Terry Jones's summation of Monty Python: "We never really stopped being friends, but I'm not sure we ever *started* being friends..." (from Robert Ross's affectionate biography 'Seriously Silly: The Life of Terry Jones')

Grand Designs opening and closing interview shots, an occasional project.

The bathroom’s free! Unlike the country under the Thatcherite junta…

My first festival. Look at those bands. I didn’t even set foot in the comedy tent, which would today blow my head off.

I have read both Ben Elton’s and Nigel Planer’s memoirs back-to-back, and they both mention being inspired in the 1970s by the music of, among others, Nick Drake, and while not impossible, that is also the lie I would tell.

Guy Fawkes' signature before and after hearing Paul Shane's You've lost that loving feeling on Pebble Mill at One

#AtoZofTunes Roam (B52s) Putting this in to annoy B52s gatekeepers. I'm fortunate enough to bloody love this tune and album, as well as all the previous ones, all the way back to Planet Claire, and all the way forth to Keep This Party Going. Some of it's shite, but NOT MUCH. youtu.be/iNwC0sp-uA4?...

Two lessons from today: (a) obey distance recommendations on seed packets (b) don’t leave picking, peeling and chopping the veg until the last minute.

Realised just now that the Literary Review’s ‘Bad Sex in Fiction’ award has quietly gone away. (Five years ago). The joke got old, maybe.

Coffee time research: I have just discovered my great great great grandmother was named Hannah Hannah. (If you're now thinking '🎶Batmaaaan', have a word with yourself.)

Shuddering at Oliver Hardy’s This Is Your Life… “I remember him as a very brave boy. He went into the Oconee river to save his brother Sam from drowning. He pulled him out and he gave him artificial respiration but it was too late, he’d been in the water too long.” “Thank you, Mrs Althea Horne!”

Coffee time research. If we accept no pain = no gain and we cancel out the negatives, it should be: pain = gain But I contend that is NOT TRUE. They are selling us on a negative. Similarly: If you don’t show me yours = I won’t show you mine. NOT TRUE. 🍤

“Jason Epstein at Random House has produced a telephone-directory sized tome, that makes 49,000 books available — a personalised bookstore that gives you backlist as well as current. By the mid-90s, computer owners will be able to buy everything from their home offices…” —Tina Brown diary, Jan 1990

My wife just said “how come we run out of paracetamol so quickly?” and I said “because the parrots eat them all” and she did not find it at all funny, because she, perforce, had a really bad headache, and that joke is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Paul McCartney’s life must, on a bad day, feel like he’s Charon, just waiting for someone to come and relieve him of the oar.

I wonder if we will start to have AI forecasts, like “And we’ve got a strong front of cancer research sweeping over from the west, slowing as it runs into the anti-vax front west of the Pennines. Still some power outages after last week’s storm of 4k Miffy meme creation, so do wrap up warm…”

Famously, between the first and the second act of Waiting for Godot, the only difference in the stage set is that a previously bare tree ‘has four or five leaves’. So what’s the main note to self I found in this copy which seems to have belonged to a stage manager called Nigel...?

I prefer to think of the news not as ‘relentless’, but ‘relent-free’.

Lines that are covering throbbing plot-holes (an occasional series): "Of course! I’d forgotten about the House of Lords! The Lords will never let the bill through!" [Blackadder The Third, episode 1, rendering the previous 20 minutes of plot almost completely redundant]

I have once again watched a two-part documentary beginning with part two. I refuse to bear full responsibility for this.

@sarahefranklin.bsky.social We narrowly avoided another "Aisles of Tesco" debacle today when Our Hero deftly corrected a hitherto unnoticed typo at the very moment she read it out, to avoid calling the deceased "the hostess with the moistest". "I had actually started *saying* the word", she reports.

I’m on a scene in final stages of current Work in Progress and I simply cannot settle down to it. I will do ANYTHING else. I’ve been full of adrenaline about it for days. It’s only a simple scene, but I cannot stay in my seat to get it down. I am trying to tell myself something, clearly 🙄

Coffee-time research: 1920s stage direction(?) of the day.

Okay. I've calmed down a bit and can now proof read. Aidan just got the World Record for Megaminx the twelve sided "cube". He's worked so hard for this. Immensely proud. Happy weekend. #SpeedCubing youtu.be/zuHohBhaXZ0?...

#AtoZofTunes Quiet (Tim Minchin) Quite apart from all the words and movement and standing on a box in front of a packed auditorium and millions of TV viewers, the interval between "everything, everything is..." and "quiet" seems like the most enormous chasm in music. www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-Lx...

Little peek behind the curtain… I haven’t done anything today

Loretta Swit, delivering one of my favourite moments in all TV. I must have thought of her delivery of the line “Did you ever once ever offer me a lousy cup of coffee” once a month for thirty-five years.

#AtoZofTunes Puttin' On The Ritz (Irving Berlin) If it's tunes you're after, there are some days when I would contend that this is the most perfect melody ever written. I couldn't decide on my favourite version, so I just chose the hands-down most memorable one. www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab7N...

#AtoZofTunes Private Idaho (The B52s) I've learned that they've removed the apostrophe now. Anyway, I last heard this song in the Minecraft movie a couple of weeks back, and it was a decided high point. The B52s at the top of their vocal and metaphorical game. A joy. youtu.be/BxHyliIspkA?...

#AtoZofTunes Polar Bear (Ride arr The Jims) For years I felt that the Oxford accent on Ride records would suit the New York accent of They Might Be Giants, so I eventually arranged and recorded a Ride song in as close to a TMBG style as I could. (I also did vice versa) youtu.be/EUGEkphNqcU?...

Brian Harvey's Lament

It’s an extraordinarily gripping and atmospheric book. Highly recommended.