Toby Miller

I think some of the dutch tilts are just one leg of the tripod sinking into the mud and snow of the impossible filming conditions.

Many thanks to everyone who's shared and followed this (unexpectedly lengthy) walk-in-progress over the past few days. It's much appreciated. The full thread (128 posts) is below.

Walking. There’s a new path - signs and gates of pale fresh wood- that runs along the railway line, turns left and then…vanishes.

I retrace my steps and pop out onto the road. A lady walking her dog spots me.

“Did you try our ‘footpath to nowhere’. That’s what we call it around here. Cost £1000’s”

A green hardback of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Inside the book an inscription, in beautiful swooping cursive penmanship: To Major R.C. Miller For those moments while you’re waiting for the forecast to verify - a few meditations of another misunderstood genius. Lt. Mac August, ‘56

My father, rooting about his shelves, found a book he’d inherited from his father. Opened it for the first time. Inside an inscription.

My grandfather, Robert C Miller, was a US airforce metrologist. He developed the first tornado forecast. The inscription is during the development of that forecast

I should go to bed, but here on the sofa I’m bookended by sleeping cats, one running down her purr, the other making the gentle sound of a cat that can’t catch the object in her dream. This feels an important moment to hold onto for a while longer.

A cat flap. Outside, on the rim of the flap, a big frog. Glistening with rain. Sheltering from the storm. An enormous cat face watches from the other side of the cat flap. Pawing at the locked door. Desperate to play or devour. This is perhaps how our TV see’s us.

Same shot, only now the cat - Tiffin - has looked up at me, her big eyes full of this evening’s disspaointments

I went to my neighbour’s back door to drop one of her cats off (I’ve permission to open the door and drop the cats inside).

Our gardens are a rainforest after today’s downpours.

At the cat flap a drama, with a surprise (enormous) frog and a locked away Tiffin desperate to sell it a timeshare.

This is all new to me. I seem to be catching up on a great chunk of my childhood reading.

The collection I am reading is on eBay.

because we didn't have him last time she came," Arabel went on anxiously, looking at the raven, who had piled a foot-high mound of tea-bags on the lid of the washing-machine, and was trying to stand on his head on top of the pile. He was the wrong shape for standing on his head, and, each time he tried, he fell heavily on his back, and the tea-bags flew all over the kitchen floor. They were getting rather dusty. Mr Jones supposed he ought to stop Mortimer, but he had too much else on his mind.

A lovely Quentin Blake illustration of a raven standing on its head on a pyramid of tea bags atop a washing machine.

Because it made me laugh - from Joan Aiken’s short stories (written in 1983 and cosily evocative of the time*) about young Arabel and her pet raven, Mortimer.

First the Joan Aiken prose, then the brilliant Quentin Blake illustration.

*Arabel’s mother is temp secretary at a pirate radio station.

you can see why Danny Thompson started his career with a tea chest bass. Though now I expect tea chests are £4,000 a pop.

Oh, I'd be tempted by that Lute, despite already having several musical instruments I can't really play. But a Lute!

At the surgery to have my flu jab.
Any allergies?
No
And you’re ok with eggs…?

I’ve never been asked this before, and my mind immediately goes to the boxes of eggs my neighbour leaves me (from her sister’s hens) and for a split second I think the nurse is going to give me a box of eggs as a reward.

So long September. Poor show. You are no longer my favourite month of the year.

October walks in, smoking. A Penguin paperback performatively just sticking out of a pocket.

Wait a minute, you’re just September in a bigger coat!

Doors doors doors leading into light.

The Victorian vinery at the local big house. Spent quite a lot of time just with these shadows. There was also a Mushroom House (a long room with soil shelves and no windows, and a good name for a story)

The shadow of an old fashioned round door knob, on the cold stone slab floor of a vinery. It has a halo of light around it.

Took a (freelancer) afternoon off to use the last day of my English Heritage membership to wander around the gardens of the local big house - which I am doing whilst thinking and worrying about work.

I do like the strong shadow of a doorknob though, like it’s the entry to a secret door in the wall

Top 10 vampire death, which I won’t spoil here. It’s silly, and then a little eerie.

The vampire’s henchmen scout out a basement locale for Dracula’s coffin. A bare room, save for arms and the body of a woman - but they’re discarded wax dummies from the museum upstairs.

I wasn’t expecting much from The Vampire’s Coffin, the quickie 1958 sequel to Fernando Méndez’s Mexican Dracula film. But it’s brilliant. Full of creepy images; I especially like that the Vampire ends up living in the basement of a wax museum, which is littered with wax arms and legs and torsos.

A calico cat on a knitted rug. She is staring at the camera with eyes like the moons of Jupiter. One paw has a single claw still sticking out - it may not get better, but she is to have rest. Imagine telling the mad scientist in a movie, or an eccentric uncle, to have rest - that is how well this idea will go down.

Poor Lucia (neighbour’s cat, but one of the two who think my home is also their home) has a pulled ligament in her toe (you can see one claw won’t retract) and is walking with a limp and rather sorry for herself. This evening, straight from the vet, she came to my house, jumped on the sofa and slept

A long photo looking at a horizon line of fields. It is nearly night. In the far left corner there is a single light - a solitary tractor ploughing a field by headlight. In the far right, but on the same line of you were to draw one across the photo with a ruler, just the last orange and pink of the sun. Between the two light - a farmer and the centre of our solar system - brown fields in dusk, and a faint pale line which shows where a railway embankment once cut through the hill. A single star hangs in the sky.

Always draw a little comfort, on these earlier and earlier evenings, of the will-o'-the-wisp lights of farmers putting fields to bed in the dark. Tonight a tractor worked in near dark, while way over on the other end of the horizon the sun was just vanishing. I liked the wide screen story of it.

Interpol (1957) with Victor Mature chasing a surprisingly seedy Trevor Howard across Europe. It starts in a studio bound NYC (Sidney James as a bar owner), but is great when it moves to location.
This is almost Spielberg: the line of agents, the monkey warning, and the chaotic fall down the stairs

'Age yourself by showing yourself getting into a Dodge Automobile in the era of Watergate'

A B&W photo, little contrast, of a family binding into a worn out Dodge. The world is snow. It looks very very cold, almost medieval in its coldness, like this is a world - mid-west Nebraska in the very early 1970’s that hasn’t yet discovered heating.

My mother texting over a parade of family photos this morning (it was, near literally, my life flashing before my eyes)

This is a mid-west winter in possibly 1972. My mother and brother and me. I can’t really connect this world with the rest of my life. That I’ve sat in a Dodge seems remarkable.

last post of me being amazed by weather. I shot this video to send my @bugshaw.bsky.social, but it does get across how topsy turvy this microclimate mist was. I could have stayed here for hours.

And, just as I was heading home
through the pages of this gothic novel the moon popped up and went “nudge nudge….” like that Eric Idle character.

The top field of a local water meadow, with a large tree silhouetted like a gunfighter against a sky of sun kissed orange and pink clouds. But at the feet of the tree, and running the full width of the meadow, a stage show of a mist. It looked, like bats and owls and sunsets, more impressive in real life. A mist dogs could surprise you by running out of.

The clock of the water meadow has ticked over into ‘low mist’. This is the first I’ve seen this season, and it always resets my heart to its factory setting of “oooh”.

And this is the first time I’ve seen it with an Aladdin Sane colour to the sky. It made the meadow seem upside down.

Saturday steam fair. A superhero silver locomotive that chugged up and down a spit of grass, and steam fire engine from 1905, which used a coal fire underneath to draw the river up and spray it out - back to the river as rain.

Lots of noisy rhythm and hisses. A motor bike gang came over to watch.

As I’ve aged I’ve become more interested in places that just patiently wait for people to pass by. They had flurries of activities, but most of the time they’re just stone given a human face.

I didn’t get across what was nice about this: for a brief few moments the tiny church was busy. I turned up (to look at the light. I am not a religious man) and then a married couple turned up (to pray). And the church, just off the ancient Ickneild Way, was waiting, with fresh flowers and silence.

Yes, it was. I immediately left, as I was only inside to admire the light and enjoy the quiet.

A standard photo down the nave of a church, with the stained glass of the chancel in the background. The light is whispered. But it’s a tiny church, prepared to sit 30 people at a push. It’s a peaceful place, lonely near a wood, serving a village two field walks away. Despite this there were fresh flowers in the church and in the porch, which moved me towards tears. They have carols here on Christmas Eve, and I’d love to attend.

I visited a favourite church. On the Icknield Way. Spotted a couple walking, still a hill away. Inside the church fresh flowers, anechoic stone, underwater light in the chancel.

I realised the other walkers were waiting for me to come out before going in themselves, thinking me lost in prayer.