We love @oliviadeano's cover of "You've Got A Friend"!

Highly recommend taking a random Wednesday off work and taking your mum to watch the film adaptation of a book she read you when you were little, and that she read when she was little before you. Bonus points if there’s a lovely Q&A after. @hatewhistling.bsky.social

How much all your kiddos love one another is always so clear from your posts, but that Freddie wanted Isabelle to keep of his bunnies – oh gosh. Lovely that he's now got two again, and another means of always keeping Isabelle close to him too. Holding you all in my thoughts, as always!

Aware of @alcs.co.uk for ages, but thought my work would be too niche to qualify for the cash they distribute. A Medical Journalists' Association blog persuaded me I might be mistaken and so I signed up. Nothing to lose, right? Er, correction: lots to gain! Thanks, ACLS, for the very welcome cash 🥳

I realised after I finished that “Toucan do it” would’ve been an even better pun but, still, here: have this if you’re in need of encouragement this Sunday.

Ha! I am a test child, then, as well as a maker of test pancakes 😄

I’ll happily own brand it on the lemon juice, and will always take the lazy and unskilled option on the pancake “making”, but if we’re getting jam involved then we’re doing it properly.

(Yearly update on my pancake skills: first was so awful I feared I’d lost my skills, but I pulled things back 💪🏻)

Send help – the scaredy cat’s watching a horror film.

Someone on the train has put Netflix on without headphones and is watching, of all things, the Letby documentary. She’s also dropped litter on the floor and put her bag on the seat next to her.

I can call the British Transport Police, surely?

You wouldn't know it from my whinging, but I actually have Xero 😆 The problem this year was that I couldn't figure out why it was spitting out slightly different numbers from one I had recorded elsewhere. The fault was, certainly, with my poor-at-Maths self 😀

I’ve flirted with the idea of handing it all over to accountant, and then realised their ability to help will only be as good as the clarity of my records – which brings me back to the initial problem 😄

My favourite part of #Hamnet? When Shakespeare’s Mrs watches the first scene of the play he’s written based entirely on their recent lives and, even so, yells: “What are they talking about?!”

Yeah, love, we’ve all been there with your husband. I’d pop out and get the York Notes if I were you.

There are only really two times I hate being freelance:

1) When I'm ill
2) Tax return season

January, cursed month, has brought both. The sinus infection is done with, and now the tax return – which brought me to the brink of tears on five separate occasions – is too.

I want a nap. And a hug.

a cardboard box with a face on it ALT: a cardboard box with a face on it

Struggling with a misbehaving feature article for the past three days, and the answer has finally come to me: a pull-out box.

Of course it's a pull box. The answer, my friends, is ALWAYS a pull box. This glorious truth has revealed itself to me time and again over the past four decades.

#amwriting

Please can the next major secret revealed on #TheTraitors be that Tom Basden used James as the model for Robin in #HereWeGo? Put me out of my misery. It's bloody uncanny.

Dig Dug x Sweetcorn x All Snuggled Up

In the final picture he’s captured mid lip lick. Note how he’s already gazing up at me to enquire if another kernel might be on its way. (No, Diggy Dug. Two’s enough.)

🌽 🐹

Dig Dug moonlighting as one of Santa’s little helpers 🐹

Christmas and Hanukkah, Trafalgar Square 🎄🕎

Seen seven so far, only three of which I fell asleep in 🤘

Very pleased that "Sorry, Baby" – one of my favourite films of the year – makes the top 10.

One of my favourite films of the year too. So pleased to see it do so well here.

Friday night aims:
Home, pyjamas, sofa, blanket, latest episode of Pluribus, bed, 14 to 16 hours of sleep.

Obstacle:
Lengthy article I could really do with getting finished today and which stubbornly remains only a quarter written.

Usual Friday chat with the owner of my fave local coffee shop turned to Crimbo plans. She explained she's not going away this year as it's her mum's 50th soon after Xmas.

And that's how I discovered I'm only three years off being old enough to be the mother of the local coffee shop owner 👵

Rainbow over St John Street, consolation for a generally dark and rainy day 🌈

You can ask me to watch pretty much any film and I will enthusiastically do it. Just not horror, because I’m a jump scare-hating scaredy cat with permanently shot nerves. Sinners with a Q&A has made me pluck up my courage however… plus put on my comfiest non-PJ clothes and pack three fidget toys 😬

One of my clients needs me to complete IT security training. The online course has repeatedly assured me poorly written content is a way to spot any suspicious activity. On the basis of this end of module question, I should now apparently whether the education provider itself is a cybercriminal 🤨

Even I have to concede that it was a *deeply* strange film 😄

Reviewing Joachim Trier's credits off the back of growing eagerness to see "Sentimental Value" and longstanding intention to watch "The Worst Person in the World", I suddenly realise that in 2015 he made the film my mum still talks about as the weirdest and least satisfying I've ever taken her to 🫤

Well see now I'd *thought* you were a massive Christmas fan, so I was bemused by the fleeting belief that you might have come over to my no-Chrimbo-music-in-November team 😆

Of course completely with you on the chocolate front.

Ha!

That's boycott-worthy behaviour.