A tree full of birds, including redwing blackbirds, song sparrows, a brown creeper, some warblers, pine siskins, chestnut backed chickadees, and i could've sworn i saw a cedar waxwing.

I’ve managed to get to my fifties without ever visiting Liverpool. So I went yesterday- and what a beautiful city! The Walker Gallery has to be one of the best public art galleries outside London - especially now Birmingham’s appears to have been purged

Three Long-tailed tits on winter wild clematis. Watercolour

Bum-barrels twit on bush and tree
Scarse bigger then a bumble bee
And in a white thorn’s leafy rest
It builds its curious pudding-nest
Wi hole beside as if a mouse
Had built the little barrel house

- John Clare

Long-tailed tit (Bumbarrel) painting - by @johnwalterswildife.bsky.social #birds 🪶🌿

The Severn in flood again - turn a corner and the road becomes river

On Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ On Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’. In recent days, I’ve found myself turning to Hardy’s bleak, turn of the century meditation. These are dark days, literally. It’s the Winter Solstice tomorrow and f…

pabwriting.wordpress.com/2024/12/20/o...

I love how the river in flood transforms my town every year - even if it must cause a heap of anxiety and misery to the people who live in the flood plain. These street lights illuminate a path nobody can follow.

www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44122/...
This is a year in which night with all its connotative weight has fallen on me. Still, there’s light to be found - Donne was da supernova

New Christmas lights just went up in Clacton.

(Farage is still the MP who makes most money from second jobs. By a long way.)

“When Lake Annecy began deteriorating ecologically in the 1950s…community pressure led to the decision to completely renovate the sewage networks. It’s now known as the cleanest lake in Europe.”

On the devastation, defence & possible salvation of Windermere:
👉 eu.patagonia.com/gb/en/storie...

YouTube video by Carolina Eyck The Flight of the Bumblebee performed on the theremin

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZE_x...

Music sector workers to lose nearly a quarter of income to AI in next four years, global study finds AI boom will enrich giant tech companies but creators’ rights and income will be drastically reduced unless policymakers intervene, report warns * Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates * Get our breaking news email, free app or daily…

Music sector workers to lose nearly a quarter of income to AI in next four years, global study finds

‘A kitschy wonder’: inside Holy Land USA theme park – in pictures Photographer Lisa Barlow was intrigued by the miniature replica of Jerusalem she found in Connecticut. Then she fell in love with the people who lived nearby Continue reading...

‘A kitschy wonder’: inside Holy Land USA theme park – in pictures

Looking east from the Dyfi estuary at a winter sunrise.

Winter sunrise in the estuary of the Afon Dyfi, Ceredigion, Wales, UK.

A stoat racing over grass, mid-leap with back feet still in the air, carrying a vole in its mouth

Stoat still on the move, with back arched reafy for another leap, vole still in its mouth

A stoat! 😍 Racing for shelter with its brunch so that the magpies don't confiscate it 🐀
Liberton, Edinburgh #ukwildlife

One of the best things about winter's minimalism is the way deciduous trees focus attention on form, texture & the relationship between branches & shards of sky. I'll be sharing some that warm my cockles in winter over the next few weeks. Have any of your favourites bared all yet? #trees #winter

YouTube video by Lotte Lenya - Topic Lost in the Stars (From Lost in the Stars)

Can’t be many songs that cut quite like this youtu.be/QgG0gMszOqY?...

He’s Rupert Murdoch, essentially, only Rupert Murdoch doesn’t own all your data & hasn’t convinced you that the freedom to do immoral things trumps the immorality of the things themselves

Ah. Another hole in the ‘free speech absolutist’ position

Populist movements have a habit of turning in on themselves, don’t they? Musk can keep bellowing that ‘the people’ want this or that - sooner or later they’ll want his head on a pole (metaphorically, of course)

Looking forward to this event organised by @monorailmusic.bsky.social at the Glad Cafe on Tuesday talking about The Secret Public - come on down. Great poster by Stephen Pastel from a Polaroid by Linder Sterling

A colorized photograph of the French poet, playwright and novelist Guillaume Apollinaire. He would have been in his mid-thirties at the time it was taken. The top of his head is visible and his hair is closely shaven and dark. The top part of his head is bandaged as he had been injured at the front line during World War One and had suffered a shrapnel wound to his temple. He sports a reasonably well trimmed goatee beard and looks at the camera or just beyond it with an uncertain expression. His eyes look curious but perhaps wary and his mouth is slightly open as if he is about to speak or exclaim rather than pose. He wears the pale blue uniform of the French infantry of the period. An epaulette is visible but nothing is visibly indicated on it. At the tip of his collar is the number 96 which may indicate the regiment he served with. He died a couple of years later on the 9th of November 1918, two days before Armistice Day which ended hostilities on the Western Front.

The poet Apollinaire in 1916 after he was wounded during Word War I. He coined the term Surrealism in 1917 to describe that new art movement
“When man resolved to imitate walking, he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. In doing this, he was practicing surrealism without knowing it.”

It’s big of him to come out swinging for everyone’s favourite grifting race baiter too. The richest man in the world likes Yaxley-Lennon. Time to switch off x

The only thing dark & absurd as a man who makes an entire film dedicated to ‘proving’ that insidious forces have stopped him ‘exposing’ a 15 year old boy as some sort of rapacious sexual bully, is the American billionaire who thinks he’s right

Milosz www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49457/...

“The ability to start out upon your own impulse is fundamental to the gift of keeping going upon your own terms. . . . Getting started, keeping going, getting started
again in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm."

- Seamus Heaney

lannan.org/media/peter-...

Good for you - I sort of wish some of the people I followed on x could maybe stop showing x content - really - I don’t miss any of the accounts sharing toxic crap all day and we know who they are

Harpo Marx (with Amelia Earhart) - BOTD

Word of the day is ‘librocubicularist’: one who loves nothing better than reading in bed.

(Not easy to say, but I’m glad to know it exists).

Another thing I don’t miss about x - how many reposts did that get? Two thousand? That means that two thousand people endorse Sharron’s magic honesty box vs ‘the WEF’ plan