Watching My Cousin Vinny, for reasons. Oh my god…Marisa Tomei. Joe Pesci and Fred Gwynne knocking it out of the park and she steals every scene she’s in.

“Spurn”? Wouldn’t that rather imply they had a choice?

as promised (or threatened): your snowboarding vocal exercises for today sorry

The Inside Aardman exhibition at the Young V&A is an absolute delight (opens 12 Feb). 1/ Early concept drawings for Wallace and Gromit. 2/ Ship from The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!

Saw Wuthering Heights this morning. Or “Wuthering Heights”. Comment embargoed till this evening. 😳

Luuuge! Jelly on a plate, jelly on a plate. Wibble wobble, wibble wobble Jelly on a plate.

Watching the Olympic Shouting: “Curl. CURL! CUUURRRLLL!!!!”

I don’t want to impugn his steadiness of hand, but isn’t this rather obviously an AI image?

Good job I invested *my* money in a sure fire winner - digital certificates saying I own a cartoon of a monkey

$27.2m for Michelangelo’s foot at Christie’s. That’s $1.15m per square inch.

It’s not the most important thing but the world being plotted like bad television is making it pretty confusing for those trying to write good television

What a piece of writing from Marilynne Robinson.

“Hello…Picture desk” “Hi. We need a picture of Mandelson and his partner…Umm…ideally….quite weaselly?” “On it.”

Even the *thought* of this is making me itch. www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...

Torn. Does my absolute boycott of all Traitoriana have a carve-out clause for a stage version written by the excellent John Finnemore? www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Wonderful helmets from the BM’s upcoming Samurai exhibition.

Currently a queue of 90,000 plus people on the Natural History Museum Online shop -- because they've just unveiled new Pokémon items. Which I guess answers the question of why on earth the Natural History Museum would do a collaboration featuring a fantasy ecosystem.

Weirdly appropriate ⬜🟩🟨⬜⬜ 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Villains in The Night Manager: 'Come. Let us discuss our incredibly illegal arms deal in the hotel lobby using our outdoor voices.'

I've done My Week: Donald Trump (again) for tomorrow. My first draft genuinely had a joke about Trump thinking there were penguins in Greenland but I took it out because it seemed too stupid.

Was it a spelling bee..?

"By threatening to set off a bomb in his local McDonald's, Trump was able to persuade them to sell him a Big Mac. This is The Art Of The Deal at its most sophisticated!"

I’ll catch up with the Davos Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui later. Not sure I can bear it live…

Facebook reminds me that on this day in 2017 a woman turned to me in the veg section of Sainsbury's and said "hopefully now we've left the EU we can have loose carrots that aren't wet"

I don’t know what The Seven Dials Mystery is like as a book, but as television it’s just Enid Blyton isn’t it?

Is it an offence to *know* that the President is deranged and do nothing about it? I mean if you’re in a position to do something about it, obviously.

He could wake up one morning and announce that a pink hippo had told him he was the rightful King of England and we’d STILL be hearing from thoughtful analysts of international affairs that there was method in his madness.

Just for the record, and it’s insane that the mad king made me look this up, there is documentation of the US giving up all claim to Greenland to Denmark when we bought the Virgin Islands from them in 1916. history.state.gov/historicaldo...

If FIFA was actually capable of embarrassment they'd have died of it years ago...

Watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry. I mean obviously it would have been much more believable if those lads had got themselves into shape before filming started.

We used that phrase about living in the stupidest timeline waaaaay too early… apnews.com/article/trum...

What was it John Major said? I'd rather have people outside my tent pissing in someone else's tent than inside my tent pissing in? Something like that anyway...

I like this: Benjamin West’s painting of the delegations to the Treaty of Paris (which formally recognised the USA). The British had a hissy fit and refused to pose. (From Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack)

subscriptions >>> shop.viz.co.uk/viz351bs

CONGRATULATIONS CAROL x.com/WestgateVega...

Currently wheezing and hacking through yet another bloody cold. I think the viruses should offer a loyalty card. Collect the whole set and win a spittoon…

Start the Week at 9 on BBC Radio 4. Three absolute crackers: Daisy Fancourt’s Art Cure, Tom Service’s A History of the World in 50 Pieces, and Chekhov’s youthful comedy, with Rosamund Bartlett. We bring the joy in dark January.

If Mandelson was so innocently unaware of what Epstein was up to, why did he use inverted commas round the word ‘interesting’ in the phrase “ ‘interesting’ friends” — alongside a picture of him with two young women in the birthday book? If that’s not a nudge and a wink I don’t know what is.

This irritated me the other day and I thought “Oh let it go”. But it’s just irritated me again. So, what is “cheerful” or “breezy” in this headline? And yes, I can easily imagine the BBC, or a contemporary newspaper, asking such a question after the invasion of the Sudetenland.

Just love all of this, the gulls, the fishing boat, the ... pigs, the massive dog and him grunting, "Oh!" 10/10

Watching The Night Manager. He’s a *terrible* night manager. Always bunking off.

I think one of my least favourite kind of posts on here is the “This headline does not sufficiently express my moral outrage at the event it is trying to squeeze into a single line of type” post.

Treacherous conditions reported on today’s Wordle and Connections. Procrastinators are advised to seek other routes.

Feeling a little guilty that I’m not making better use of the time I don’t spend watching Traitors.

How’s that going then?…

Delighted to have received a grant from a submerging writers foundation, which supports mid-career authors while they age, procrastinate and feel their early promise ebb away. Grants like this are essential to the production of unmarketable work of limited appeal.