On the intrigue side, Fieldwork can be relied on to provide the spectacularly weird. Downstream from Richmond we once spotted a polystyrene takeaway tray on which somebody had placed - for no adequately explicable reason - some poo. They had adorned this with a small Union flag, fixed at a jaunty angle, and set the whole thing sailing off down the river. We watched it until it was gone from view.

— From Elegy For a River by Tom Moorhouse 📚

This, and the piece it’s based on, are well worth a read: Dorothy Thompson On Who Goes Nazi

Sad that it feels as relevant today as it did when it was written.

Man shocked to discover that two-edged sword does, in fact, have two edges.

OK, now the snow is getting serious and settling. My daughters are going to be very excited.

Futurism:

After a storm and flash flooding knocked out the power in south-east Queensland, Australia, a local woman used her electric car to power her son’s life-saving dialysis machine.

Sometimes having a giant mobile battery is incredibly useful.

I think I may have over-bought Christmas coffee. It’s past twelfth night, and I still have two bags of beans to go.

A brief flurry of snow. We don’t get a lot of this down on the south coast.

Sunset on Old Fort Road.

Sunset turning the clouds purple over the houses on Old Fort Road, Shoreham-by-Sea.

Started reading: Saltwater in the Blood by Easkey Britton 📚

This is spectacular even by crypto scam standards:Chief executive of collapsed crypto fund HyperVerse does not appear to exist.

The Festive Silence — or how exhaustion, burn-out and COVID conspired to give me an offline Christmas.

Started reading: A Countryman’s Winter Notebook by Adrian Bell 📚

Took a New Year’s Day beach walk with my eldest, and found somebody’s lost glasses on the strand line. The lenses have been ground into mistiness by the pebbles, and the string tied to one arm suggested a doomed attempt to keep them safe.

Sea-worn glasses. Found on Shoreham Beach.

Beach life, December 22nd 2023

Light shining through a crack in the clouds over Shoreham Beach.

Term finished yesterday. Today, I have a cold.

Obviously.

The single biggest thing that would improve my AI prompt writing skills: not making typos.

Oh, shit. The dolphins have had enough and are coming for us.

Fog on the Adur.

Fog over the River Adur, looking eastwards from the Adur Ferry Bridge.

What if the real X/Twitter replacement isn’t a Twitter clone at all?

When the problem contains the obvious solution:

Residential areas are increasingly unaffordable even for the middle classes, while the office districts are being hollowed out by working from home.

So, refurb the redundant office space as living accommodation, make city centre living affordable again, and rejuvenate city centres as love/work places not commuting destinations. Move forwards, not backwards.