Love my new Christmas gift tee-shirt inspired by the movie THE VVITCH.

Portrait Gallery today.

I was looking at life and death masks in the Portrait Gallery today. I did not expect Voltaire to look so cheerful. Maybe it was all that coffee!

Whenever I go to the Scottish National Portrait gallery I have to go and look at the powerful painting of the three oncologists retrieving people from the darkness of cancer.

Starting the second set of brown butter cakes for the good lady psychotherapist her indoors’ birthday. I managed to curdle the batter first time round but feeling more confident this time.

Smoke me a kipper…

Today’s Daily Art is Our First Tiff by Scottish painter John Walker Macbeth. When I first looked at it, my immediate thought was they could have got away with a jpeg!

Huge mistake! I bought a wall calendar for the kitchen that has weeks starting on Sunday.

I don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. This is just wrong on so many levels.

Over on the big blog, a year-end reflection about Maggie’s question about the best and worst of times in the year.

I don’t like giving-up on books but I’m not making any headway with Lucy Wooding’s mammoth history of Tudor England.

Maybe I read too much about Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I this year. Or maybe if you’re tired of Tudor England you’re tired of life.

I watched The Life of Chuck, adapted from a Stephen King short story tonight. It was wonderful and ★★★★★

My favourite Christmas present of 2025 may just be these ‘loyalty cards’ from daughter no. 2.

Updated my ‘now’ page.

Well, I think yesterdays’s Christmas lunch dealt with the “I don’t see the point of stuffing” bombshell¹ from the day before!

1. After all those years together she still surprises me. 😂

I thought it was sad to see news.individual.net displaying a large drawings saying “The era of Usenet is over”.

It’s almost certainly true though.

A calm day at low tide on the River Forth on the winter solstice.

Last night we were talking about Analog Tools and end-of-year traditions. One of the things I do around this time each year is publish the list of 52 things I learned (and verified) this year.

Here is 2025’s list.

Updated my ‘now’ page.

I was reading a guide to making a Manhattan cocktail and I really liked the little side-note “stir until a melancholy thought occurs to you.

Attempted murder at the farmers’ market today. 😂

Here in Edinburgh last weekend

I’m currently refreshing the website for my wife’s bookgroup while keeping to my self-imposed rule that it’s a very basic HTML file.

Hopefully moving from this very basic table into something a bit more fun.

One for the Analogue Tools community. Over on the big blog I’ve written about my new change of notebook/journal.

As today was a day off from work, I thought I should set aside some of the fun time for book group homework. 🍺📖

Updated my ‘now’ page.

I finally managed to declutter and reorganise our important paper files today. I got rid of old stuff and created new files appropriate to where we are now.

There’s one new file labelled “death” that no-one has noticed yet!