Toby Miller

And back seat of the bus, throwing wads of gummy paper at the heads of the other passengers.

There's some Pedro Almodóvar in the way this film's plot unspools, never quite going where the genre usually goes.

a great big ocean liner of a bumble bee just flew into and then out of - my office. In a decade they'll have replaced Robins on Christmas cards.

The Traveller community’s London Christmas drive – in pictures Photographer Jill Mead joined the Traveller community’s London Christmas drive on Saturday – a 14-mile trip by 200 or so horse-drawn carts and carriages through the capital, stopping at Buckingham Pal...

Fantastic joyful photos of the Christmas Drive through London. A wonderful wild chaos, & the music of travelling hooves. Bravo Jill Mead photographer & @theguardian.com for such a positive piece! www.theguardian.com/world/galler...

There’s a horror story in the blades found after a millennium in the earth still having a cutting edge on them.

A Google Maps image of fen scrubland being developed by out of town business parks - with a large white tent half erased by a new road running over the top.

Watching a BBC4 repeat on the Bronze Age village found at Must Farm. Found the location on Google Maps and poetically it is half buried digitally - the vast tent over the dig (which finished 10 years ago) being reburied by a newer satellite photo of the site. Layers of burying.

YouTube video by Mystical Magpie The Box of Delights (1995) by John Masefield, starring Donald Sinden and Lionel Jeffries

The 1995 radio adaptation of Box of Delighte is now on YouTube. I had this, recorded off Radio 4, on cassette for years, and would listen in my unheated rooftop flat, baking bread in my tiny two ring stove, watching the popping lights of the Llanwern steelworks on the horizon.
youtu.be/SqKkbvzVchI

Herzog voice - "I see only the overwhelming need of nature to perform. To me, there is very much a secret world of the bears, as demonstrated here by their canny comic timing and large box of props"

The whole ‘this was our planet and we can take it back’ is giving them ideas.

The black fleece giving them the look of a funeral shroud you’d use to float a fallen warrior over a waterfall.

I’m reading a book on Krampus history at the moment, and find it comforting that the 17th Century Lucifer masks - for Nicholas plays that would tour villages, and which helped influence the later Krampus masks - are not unlike the Lucifer puppets in Jan Švankmajer’s Faust.

The moon, two days past full, from within a wood.

(iPhone on tripod. Exposed for moon atop hill, then long exposures while I lit each tree, and ground, in turn with my torch. Blended on my phone)

Oh, that could be it. I must admit I wasn’t entirely comfortable with my opening line.

Still, most of it is a joke about Japanese action films, and that genre isn’t reposting me.

“this is the running of a man who recently has been cleared of any possible lingering heart issue. See here….he is positively carefree. I think, Inspector, you should ask around the local GP surgeries”

Tomorrow the farmer will wonder why there are several tracks - a running man - out into his field. And then steady tracks along the brow of the hill. Then a running back to the starting point, where three small indentations can be just seen in the mud.

“As if a tripod stood here”, Holmes announced

A dark field edge, with trees a smudge on the right hand side, and the long exposure making a mess of the left hand side. In the perfect middle I’ve added the silhouette of myself striding along. Two photos mixed in iPhone Photoleap, while still in the field, a few miles from home, in the dark. Isn’t technology amazing sometimes!

Walking the field edge.

On my evening stroll. While messing about I took an accidental photo, on iPhone long exposure, of the horizon line - lopsided, fuzzy and, serendipitously, atmospheric. So then, with the phone on the timer, I took various takes of me walking along a field. And blended the two

It was probably Krampus mischievousness. They are known for taking furniture out of a house and leaving it in the snow.

Apparently Bridget has spent the year with a measurement scale on her, so any item she spotted and liked she could doublecheck it would actually fit inside the calendar boxes (this being a 2024 Hot Chocolate advent she got half price and emptied out).

I feel wonderfully crushed by her kindness

Oh yes. I do like this sort of visual echo and connection. :)

In some defence, I do believe Stokes’
method is partly down to knowing how much depression haunts former players, and he aimed for a more generous dressing room. And we were terrible terrible under Root.

But this team, they just don’t seem awake half the time.

Not sure these cricketers should be let back into the UK. They should be forced instead to roam the world as Ronin, offering their bat or bowling action to any franchise war lord desperate enough to listen. Disgraced, they mumble their names in shame, while children taunt them and steal their pads.

Yes, you’ll (including me) need to up your advent calendar game. Behind door 6 was a ring of paper, with a clue to ‘Look in the tin’, a reference to a cat tin I keep by the sitting room door. Inside the tin a book voucher. So Bridget is turning Advent into a (small) treasure hunt!

A marmalade cat, caught in fluid motion as she leaps from one item of furniture to another. She has somehow become an elongated taffy of orange, 6 feet long, her feet almost on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Originally invented at the turn of the 16th Century, Leonardo da Vinci's self-supporting bridge design makes a sudden appearance in my front room -

as Rula leaps from the sofa to the chair, her bed until morning.

Footballer during the day.

My partner uses a wrist device to keep track of her resting and active heart rate, so she is aware of the line with a Long Covid relapse on the other side. I just need to find and manage my stress triggers - I go from 0 to 60 in worry without a pause.

Thank you. All is fine. I am lucky.

ECG and other tests clear and normal. I am just stressed. NHS - rushed off their feet this afternoon, were still caring and kind. I was listened to properly. They remain wonders.

rushed Doctor's appointment this afternoon, after stress aches had me worrying about my heart. Before I left I pulled on - over the socks I was already wearing - my fancy striped Christmas socks Bridget gave me. For luck.

Wired up for an ECG. The nurse rolls up my trousers.

"that's a lot of socks"

Chuck Norris in his under-sung Top of the Pops graphics era. Excellent.

My hand holding a small box of matches. Little House Matches, says the box, and a small cosy home is painted on the box. The top of the box is just ajar, showing the heads of the matches waiting expectantly. It is made by Laura Skilbeck

Behind today’s advent door. Now I don’t smoke, but this tiny box of matches from my partner is perfect. Look at their little sulphur heads, sleeping in one bed like Charlie Bucket’s grandparents and great grandparents.

Gradually I am becoming a mantelpiece, my pockets full of the items gifted to me

Sleeves rolled up so my chicken arms make a better shadow. Otherwise you would not be sure it was me or Mr Potato Head