Mosaic images of Paris. Why didn’t we think of Pirates of the Caribbean back in the UK? OTOH three quarters lion, one quarter woman, and missile launcher breasts not so great.

Art Nouveau doorway and the name of the rightly proud architect. Paris, 1904 and today.

We report: mid-morning, the moon is firmly past its upper culmination, and on its way to the horizon. It is waning, a week away from the new moon. In the nighttime, it is a late visitor we see when we should not be awake; in the daytime, it is a wild cryptid we stumble upon.

Folks in the US might like to know that despite Musk and Trump's lies London remains much safer than US cities and is getting safer. It hasn't required out of control ICE agents to shoot anyone to achieve this. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Khan: "[London is] one of the safest.. cities in the world when it comes to homicide. We're safer than Paris, Milan, Rome, Brussels, Berlin.. two and half times safer than NY, 5 times safer than LA, 12 times safer than Chicago.. those that spread lies have a problem with London"

Paris is quiet this- morning. But dinner at Allards on a cold night was wonderful. Especially iles flottantes. May never eat again.

Elvis and David Bowie and Shirley Bassey all share my birthday. So it’s sing along, mostly as I have had a brilliant card! It’s actually sewn from fabric!!

Hard to believe! So much effort put into diversity and equality and then, this. www.theguardian.com/education/20...

JOB ALERT! 3-year postdoc at @girtoncollege.bsky.social - research anything you like in History, Archaeology or Anthropology in a wonderful, welcoming scholarly community. PLEASE SHARE! Closes 12 January www.girton.cam.ac.uk/job-vacancie...

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/91395/... “The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it.” Louis MacNeice (yes, peonies here!)

Morning freeze but cat fascinated by overnight snow. Insists on sitting outside front and back doors, alternating them, but going no further than the doorsteps.

Good morning, Happy Friday and Happy New Year, dear friends. May this new year bring everyone peace in hearts, strength for every challenge, and hope that lights even the darkest days. Lviv, Ukraine 🇺🇦

Bell Cottage, the new addition to Hosking Houses Trust for women writers. Looks out to St Helen’s church ( here, at dusk). The bells sound every hour but after ringing twelve on 31 Dec, the bells played a pretty new year’s chime. Excellent double meaning of bell at the cottage’s front door.

Ice and sun through mist on a Warwickshire morning. A landscape of stillness but the blue sky emerges. Hens with plumped up feathers and the River Stour goes on to Stratford upon Avon. In summer I have swum here with a dog, but today even the boat is frozen.

Spectacularly beautiful Nativity by Federico Barocci. Saint Philip Neri was moved to spiritual ecstasy by Barocci's works, and we see why.

Baby J in super-uncomfortable manger. Joseph attending to the doubting midwife. From a 1440s Book of Hours.

London, 1948 Two Bobbies examine the Trafalgar Square Christmas Tree through the smog of a grey December day #Christmas 🎄

Carol of the Bells in # Kyiv subway. Voices of the Embassies of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom came together to perform Shchedryk in the Kyiv metro as a sign of solidarity with Ukraine. Thankful to everyone who stands with us!

Kyiv on Christmas Eve. I film these moments to show you our strength. We haven’t lost our spirit in this long war.

The last time we ( Vizsla and me) had a White Christmas (in Gloucestershire). Have they gone forever in S.England?

I mean yeah it’s an authoritarian takeover but can we take some comfort in the fact that the people doing it are INSANELY stupid?

“You write books? For a living? Are they published?” “No. I generally just sit on top of salt bins in town centres and bark paragraphs from them at strangers. If someone particularly enjoys a metaphor or adjective they sometimes throw me a coin or two. You’d be surprised at the way it mounts up.”

Winter solstice poem for tomorrow: “To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.” Wendell Berry

A.A.Milne’s Toad, & Trump avoid ‘I’ in speech: “The world has held great heroes as history books have showed But never a name to go down to fame compared with that of Toad! The clever men at Oxford know all there is to be knowed But they all of them know one half as much as intelligent Mister Toad”

Sasha Dugdale’s poetry has been one of the best of my finds in 2025. poetrylondon.co.uk/the-fall-of-...

Su Blackwell, UK artist who works with disgarded books to create paper sculptures often based on fairy tales and nature #WomensArt 🎄❄️

Orion nebula, M42, last night. Fairly clear sky before the next storm and no moon. Never saw this by eye. Wow

Thomas Seckford, past owner of #woodbridgetidemill and great benefactor of Woodbridge, died at Clerkenwell 438 years ago tomorrow, 19 Dec 1587, aged 72, and was first buried there: but afterwards transferred to a vault in a chapel at the north-east side of St. Mary's Church in Woodbridge.

An extraordinary, cruel and shameful story. A Revelation Tore Apart Her Fairy-Tale Marriage, and Shocked the Nation www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/m...

Alas. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/c...

Good news at last. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/d...

I love this. Joshua De Schutter is a young poet. I found him on Instagram (joshuaspoetry) or maybe he found me? The socials at their best.

Today marks 250 years since the birth of the incomparable Jane Austen

'Winter hares in conversation' by UK contemporary printmaker Angela Harding #WomensArt #ArtAdvent

Coffee outdoors by the Deben riverside yesterday morning; the tide on the turn, a cloudless sky over the riverbed landscape of creeks and mud flats.

Early morning skies at Cambridge’s C16 Madingley Hall.

A yearly delight: the polar express at Madingley Hall, Cambridge.

“All day the rain has glided, wave and mist and dream, Drenching the gorse and heather, a gossamer stream” allpoetry.com/All-Day-It-H...

One last sprig of roses- the rest of the blooms are over, replaced by fat, russet coloured, hips. Meanwhile, outside, the camellia buds are slowly opening out.

Good morning from Haarlem. #GoodMorningFromHaarlem

Artomyces pyxidatus, the Crown-tipped Coral or Candelabra Coral fungus, was not seen in the UK over the entire 20th century, its last record in 1886 until a spate of recent findings around 2022, which is when I found this specimen (in East Kent). Where did it disappear all this time?

Most links in our paper chains never really stuck. I had forgotten Chinese lanterns and v glad to remember them. There were things (but what??) done with crepe paper which had a noticeably fugitive red dye. Back at home my father at war re tree lights where if one bulb failed, all failed.

As in cat, so in human life. To Get a Man’s Attention, Meow Harder www.nytimes.com/2025/11/27/s...

Robert Bloch books from before he was known as the author of Psycho

kind of obsessed with this custom binding for Moby dick by Susan and Chaim Ebanks at Exeter Bookbinders

Polish artist NeSpoon from Warsaw, known for her street art featuring traditional lace pattern imagery #womensart

"From about 1200, mustard seeds were ground at the table & used to disguise the rancid taste of rotten meat" 👀 (Don't worry, it gets better after that bit. 😉)