Top Withens, West Riding, Yorkshire, 1945, by Bill Brandt. www.moma.org/collection/w...

*le sigh* Waiting at the school gates for my kid. It’s cold and dark and a bit boring, and I’m listening to some fado. Which, as it turns out, has a track where she f***ing whispers in your ear and they’ve set it up like she is *right* behind you. I screamed. I am now that dad.

Weston-super-Mare, 2019.

Discovered via the Mal Evans book... in 1965, when the Beatles were undoubtedly the biggest band in the world, they were still touring the UK crammed into an Austin Princess driven by Alf Bicknell. George's guitar fell off the roof rack near Berwick-upon-Tweed and got crushed by a lorry.

Found my old iPod in a drawer, hasn't been turned on in over twenty years. Fired it up, works perfectly. Sounds great. Future proof indeed!

Rapping dog PaRappa the Rapper, ‘90s PlayStation game character, in Tokyo

‼️ POETRY EVENT QUESTION ‼️ I've got a poetry book out later this year and I'd like to do some events in the autumn. do you run, or have some involvement with, a poetry night in your area? or do you vaguely know of one from oblique mumbles on the wind? let me know! I'd love to collaborate! thanks :)

It would be really cool to see some of this *actually* being used like library music in a film or on TV. 'Jaunty Jack' is my favourite.

Our show Eerie, Indiana was Stranger Things 25 years early, sez here: dangerousminds.net/pop-culture/...

Now my kids are a little older it's lovely that I can introduce them to the classics, AA Milne, JM Barrie, E Nesbit, and together we can enjoy the experience of not having the first fucking idea what anybody is talking about.

Another for my collection of descriptions of haunted houses, from ‘Mr Jones’ by Edith Wharton: “The house was too old, too mysterious, too much withdrawn into its own secret past, for her poor little present to fit into it without uneasiness.”

“Snow is the master of subtraction. Its arrival is heralded not by a sound, but by the death of it. As the flakes begin to fall in earnest, the world goes quiet.” sightlessscribbles.com/the-acoustic...

I haven’t had time to write this up properly, but it’s the 31st anniversary today of the bank robberies which gave the world the Dunning-Kruger effect, when two men concealed their identities by the brilliant method of smearing their faces with lemon juice. Anyway, here’s a press cutting:

Braved the chill and went to Tyntesfield House, Somerset, the other day. Chapel by Arthur Blomfield, 1870s. Garden by the NT rulebook.

Back in 2011 I was thinking about how planning and design benefit from the unexpected, the accidental, and understanding limits. Still am really. Here is a visual essay from that time, commissioned by Sam Jacob and featuring some vintage (2010) phone photos. knightdavid.substack.com/p/experiment...

Editorial processes are sometimes hard when you're dealing with reality. Actual note for an autobiography: "In this chapter, everyone seems to be named Jimmy. Is there anything we can do about that?"

Listen with Other is back with a new short story for the new year. Join me to discover how a 1970s family Ouija board session comes back to haunt our narrator in the present day. That's The Ring O'Bells, series 3 of Listen with Other, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify & at listenwithother.co.uk

Sandy Park, 8am. 📷

Put down your phone, your book, turn off the TV and go and put a hot water bottle in your bed.

Contains endless shots of windmills in bleak, flat, marshland landscapes. Lovely stuff. And I'm definitely nicking the title for a short story. youtu.be/e5m4TALNvog

I'm halfway through Municipal Gothic and it's such a masterful collection of varying terrors. The Curse Follows the Seed is darkly amusing. Thou Knowest My Sword is brilliantly unnerving. Protected by Occupation made me ill with unease. Exquisite stuff.

I wrote a whole thing on the subject of AI in the creative industries last year, BTW. www.linkedin.com/pulse/future...

boyfriend told me last night of a yoga class he briefly attended in New York where the instructor - again, the yoga instructor, of yoga - was a really ripped, aggressively Italian-American guy from south Brooklyn, and I just refuse to believe that's not an SNL premise

Pitching hard to the brutalist demographic.

Counterpoint.

One reason I'm not too worried about AI-created writing, visuals or music is that I know it's almost impossible for *humans* to get anyone to pay attention to the stuff they make, even if it's really good. People might accidentally or passively consume AI stuff but they're never likely to love it.

Nintendo's already been doing stuff like this for years in various ways, such as auto-playing levels or invincibility options. People get stuck sometimes and use walkthroughs, solutions, lower difficulty levels or accessibility options; what's described below is no different, nor is it compulsory

Do I know anybody who knows anything about British maritime law? I've got a stupid question to ask.

I'm in New York. Climbed up the Statue of Liberty yesterday. Here's the inside of her face.

Wodehouse does gothic

Misty church, from just before Christmas. #ThePhotoHour #Photography

German here. I regret to inform you that we have no word in our language for the twee thing you just thought up.

Wandering… The Parrot, Scotland Road Liverpool. January 2026.

The Rising of the Moon. 📷

Great to see all the regulars back on my walk this morning: tiny BMX man, massive hair gym lady, person who is always running the opposite direction to me when I go for a run, the coffee couple.

“Barr begins his data collection at precisely 7 a.m., logging overnight precipitation. Precision and timing matter to him, so he does most of his measurements by hand. In the winter, he trudges outside to check new snowfall against a board he’s set up a couple dozen yards from the door.”

god help me someone asked what i'm looking for in short fiction. how do i say: horror but not like that, questions without answers, short, and fucking weird. the thing that makes good short fiction to me is that the final act of the story is in your head, not on the page

Geez, another beautiful poster from the ‘30s.

If you ever go to Taco Bell, you simply MUST try the tacos.

If you like playlists by people called Paul (+ an extra Roy) this is for you: open.substack.com/pub/thenewcu... Picked a 25 4 25 alongside @paulheatonsolo.bsky.social for @thenewcue.bsky.social Mine feats Nada, St Et, Rainy Miller, Tony Njoku, some great vault discoveries by Four Flies & more.

I have my finger on the pulse, as it were. Behold the latest from Dior!

Signal Man. A cheery new drawing for January.

It's Hayao Miyazaki's birthday! Celebrate by running very fast in the countryside after learning something weird has happened to your parents.

I still enjoy a good needle drop but I’m less a fan of CONSTANT music beds in modern film and TV. One of the joys of watching old movies is how well they use silence for emphasis, punctuation, tension and dread.

LinkedIn (where I quite like hanging out, sorry I'm not as cool as you) has one of the weirdest, most opaque algorithms around. One thing it does is penalise people who post too often -- as in, more than about once a day. That makes it harder to game by flooding the timeline with stuff.

As I'm sure you're aware, the fifth of January is the day of the Schnabelperchten, a creature of Austrian folklore who will check your house for cleanliness. If they decide you haven't done a good enough job, they'll slit open your belly and fill it with straw. Happy New Year..!

One from just before Christmas, in the mist - my favourite weather to photograph in I think. #ThePhotoHour #Photography

Show notes and links for further reading for today's episode; The Prestonville Horror!

Do you live in or near SE London? Is one of your goals to get out more and meet new folks in 2026? Join us @itspuboclock.bsky.social Turn up any time from 6.30pm, drop in or stay all eve. I'll have a tiny whiteboard with an incendiary question like "What's the best and worst biscuit?" #ItsPubOClock

Browsing the BFI Player library and, crikey, what a selection. The horror category alone is worth the monthly subscription fee.