Katherine

The Good Old Days   Pity the poor children of today, with their calendars stuffed with chocolates,   never to know the thrill of opening a small cardboard door and discovering behind it   a picture of a bell. Brian Bilston

This poem is dedicated to anyone making a start on their advent calendar today.

I’m so looking forward to reading this, I feel the same kindred spiritedness about her writing in general.
And she has recently posted some of her beautiful bookshelves on Instagram…

Bella Hull was excellent on #HIGNFY, so funny, and brilliant timing.

The Ballad of Wallis Island on Instagram: "The Ballad of Wallis Island is a WINNER of three British Independent Film Awards, including Best Screenplay, Best Joint Lead Performance, and Best Original M... 1,012 likes, 45 comments - balladofwallis on November 30, 2025: "The Ballad of Wallis Island is a WINNER of three British Independent Film Awards, including Best Screenplay, Best Joint Lead Performanc...

www.instagram.com/p/DRsptdAEjh...

This is such a lovely tradition, thank you!

Wake Up Dead Man in Gothic font (film poster) the cast peering into a grave (shot from below) with Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc feeling at the foot of the grave.

Wake Up Dead Man is really good fun - great performances from Josh O’Connor and Daniel Craig (would love to see more of their double act). And Rian Johnson knows his Golden Age crime. They don’t make many like this any more!

A winter lights trail through trees light up in pink, red, green and purple

Helmingham Hall lit up in red with white hearts, statue of a woman in front, a corridor of red heart shaped arches leading down, all through a window in a hedge

Helmingham Hall in Suffolk.
Their Christmas lights trail is always beautiful.

*seen

Radiohead at the O2, very blue, stage in the middle, circular screen around projecting Thom Yorke singing

You can try the best you can
The best you can is good enough

Radiohead
O2

That is quite something.

🔥 Shostakovich’s thrilling Symphony No. 5 with Santtu! 🎶

Santtu Matias Rouvali is back on Sun 30 Nov for Dvořák, De Falla and Fazıl Say, performing the UK premiere of his piano concerto 'Mother Earth'. 🌍✨

🎟️ See what’s coming up & book now:
philharmonia.co.uk/whats-on/

Mafia stuff is SO dull. Just don’t understand all the fuss about The Godfather, and so on.
I did enjoy the brothers in Only Murders though, some welcome light relief!

The inside of London County Hall, red benches, in the foreground a programme for Witness for the Prosecution, a 1940s woman looked concerned and clutching towards her throat

Everybody’s probably see it by now, but Witness For The Prosecution is beautifully staged at County Hall.

So pretty!

559: Jonny Greenwood On His Score For One Battle After Another

open.spotify.com/episode/1o7r...

The modest Jonny Greenwood on his brilliant score for One Battle After Another.

Don't Panic - for at least 12 years! An article about 'The Making of Hitchhiker's Guide', a retrospective documentary I wrote and directed for BBC Video in 1992.

My second substack post is another archive article, written in 1992 about the retrospective "Making of Hitchhiker's Guide" documentary, then in production.

#DouglasAdams #thehitchhikersguidetothegalaxy
#BBCTV #television #behindthescenes

substack.com/@kevinjondav...

Ooooh

Two different views of life…. #urbangaze #graffiti #streetart

The River Thames at night, London Eye lit up pink, a boat on the river, Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament on the far bank.

London doing its thing tonight.

I say read whatever you fancy. Especially in times of stress or sadness.

🫡 and thank you!

I have 7 and was pretty happy with that as it took me about a month to get them all last year… I do have the monster slippers though…

Stevie Martin’s face behind a list of her 2026 tour dates in bright yellow

Lamp with a cream shade against a blue background, carrot leaning against it.

Highly recommend the very funny @5teviem.bsky.social on her (clout) tour. Really fun night out at Colchester Arts Centre. Absolutely not “too weird”.

Unbelievable! So weird.

Crooked Cross by Sally Carson For a novel first published in 1934, Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross feels remarkably timely, charting, as it does, the rise of Nazism in the early 1930s, the falling apart of a country’s fundamental …

"Occasionally a whole town would be implicated. Quiet, non-political, peace-loving people waited behind closed doors for the shooting and the hurrying footsteps to cease; the streets were unsafe; the very nights were restless." #BookSky 💙📚

jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/11/09/c...

The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith paperback cover, gold lettering, dense pen and ink illustration of a wood, tree roots very prominent, silhouette of two children at the top in a clearing

The Haunted Wood by Sam Leith
Interesting and engagingly written, and is leading me back to the books that I loved as a child.

The Best of Everything by Kit De Waal Top half Red, with circular patterns, yellow strip, purple stripe, two children running separately towards the left

The Best of Everything by Kit De Waal
The main character, Paulette, has just stayed with me since I read it.

What a perceptive small niece!

Excellent, looking forward to it!

Thank you!
They are quite satisfying to do, aren’t they? Might have to pop one like yours on this year’s Christmas list…