This also happened today:

• 17:05 Oooh, extra snow has fallen on steggy the snow stegosaur's back plates, makaing them EVEN MORE impressive. Also, my feet are cold.

... and I shall now break the internet with cuteness. Sorry about that. Kitten didn't like snow at all, had to be rescued. Also, it was almost up to her nose. Poor little thing.

Good kitten. She held off on waking us up until 7.10am today, perhaps understanding the precious nature of a snow day. I was having a dream; we had been brought in to see if we could help a catatonic woman. I was a shadowy woman with dirty blonde hair and a forgettable face. My partner was Matthew Horne, who was acting like someone in the throes of violent PMS and wearing a badly buttoned labcoat. We discussed the accident; she had fallen over on rocks at the beach and not successfully regained consciousness. "Where was this?" demanded Horne, shoving his hand into a complicated gauntlet. The woman's partner, who was distraught, named a seaside town on the Welsh coast and it flickered into view on the floor, in faint 3d tracery, initially slightly abstracted and iconised in LED red/green, but as he guided Horne to exact spot of the accident becoming better rendered and more accurate until we could see the texture of the rocks, grains of sand, and the man's partner sat on a high rock, gazing blankly out to sea. Horne (visible in the abstraction in his travelling body as an angry labcoat with a big green glowing glove, held out like superman ahead of himself) could not see her, and said (again and again) as he examined the area, "she's not here!". For her part, she neither moved nor spoke but sat there, eyes on the horizon, as if waiting for a ship. "She's there," I said, "She's right there, on the rocks beside you." Horne, impatient, waggled his glove. "OK, OK," he said, "I'm downloading some updates which might fix my range." There was this strange moment of waiting, the woman staring out to sea, icon Horne fiddling with his glove, and the three of us stood in her bedroom, silent, the only sound the steady even breathing of the stricken woman. Then, "I've got her," he said, and started to run off into an explaination of how he'd downloaded a small-time seasonal search module that he was fairly sure she wouldn't be hidden from, though whether he thought she'd been hidden or had deliberately hidden herself I wasn't sure, anyway, she was coming back now, for what that was worth.

A kitten jumped on my head right then, but I woke up thinking about this very common fictional trope. Mine was dressed in up in Web 2.0 sci-fi pop culture drag, but there's a very similar scene in Lord of the Rings, among many, many others. As I got up and checked the snow (about 10 inches) it was in my mind as pipe dream nonsense, wish fulfilment for those left holding a breathing corpse.

But then I remembered S, a childhood friend who really did wake up three weeks (or was it a month and a half?) after a car accident. Obviously this is only true some of the time, and there's a raft of problems, and the better your medical intervention is the more likely it is you'll be able to save the person, and they may not come back the same, but there's a basic lesson in the story; before you give up on someone, find a person who knows what they're doing, ask them if anything can be done, and wait.

This also happened today:

• 09:57 Someone has left their narrowboat apparently moored to a huge, enormously furry dog. The complexity of the knot suggests a waggish game.
• 10:00 But all the same I suggest he renegotiate the terms of his ownership. He opens one dozy eye, dismisses me as no threat, goes back to sleep.
• 12:16 On Bonn Square a tourist asks a passer-by to photograph her and her children reading the bronze books bolted to the benches. Cold fingers!
• 17:09 Two pretty tourists photograph three young traffic wardens hugging each other in the falling snow against a municipal backdrop, buses.

I tried the frost underfoot today and decided it was worth trying the towpath on the way into work. By way of reward I didn't fall into the river, but I did see:

Magpies and magpies and magpies.
A mixed flock of Blue Tits and Great Tits.
Two winter flocks of Long Tailed Tits.
A cheeky Redwing.
A pair of sparrows foraging in a leaf-choked gutter.
That thrush again, ducking into the ivy.
An explosion of woodpigeons as I passed six foraging too close to the path.
Assorted gulls, mallard, geese, blackbirds, coot and a swan.

After that I wasn't expecting the walk home to stand out, but I was wrong. It was both brought forward a little and made enormously more exciting by the presence of snow!



Falling snow fills the negative space of the urban environment, making what is usually air a mass of exciting whirling particles, suddenly visible in all its glorious three-dimensionality. This usually invisible and ignored space is suddenly given turbulent life and I see now that it is full of current and eddies, gusts and breezes, particles around which ice can form and fall. The disturbances to the flow caused by vehicles, trees, buildings is suddenly revealed, and as if someone had dropped dye into a wind-tunnel, the air becomes suddenly visible, tangible and real.

I did my usual chore-bundle today, but it left me feeling kind of meh. Possibly it's an art hangover from Seizure and Pop Art at the Tate, or maybe it's some sort of capitalism exhaustion; one sale sign too many. But I think on balance it is becuase my plants are dying and there's little point in getting more; it's dark all day and barely above freezing. Nothing will grow. I drew a plan for the front garden, and chopped back the fir and the laurel but the beds look desperate and it's impossible to tell what is making it through the winter, and what is rotting, cells blasted open in the chilly freeze-thaw dampness.

Anyway, I made stew and it tasted good enough to be worth recording the recipe. ( Venison with fruit and flowers )

And then, to bed.

This also happened today:

• 09:30 On the London bus to try for Seizure. Fields white with frost, thin pale winter sunshine, pompoms of old mans beard, skeletal black hedges.
• 10:55 At the elephant and castle shopping centre for the first time in about 10 years. She's let herself go a bit but the loos are still nice.
• 11:37 Just out of bright blue wonderland seizure. In the queue a child panics. His imaginary friend orlando! they chase him up concrete stairs.
• 12:48 At the statue of the unknown artist we are confused by the whir-whir-whir of servos until he starts to move, jerkily, dances with cranes.

Seizure Flickr set.

I made an absolute mass of resolutions last year and kept quite a lot of them, including serveral from the previous year. There were fails, however; eating out more and eating more (should have been less), sending more letters to friends and family (I sent a lot of wedding invites, but feel they don't count), wearing ear-plugs to gigs, and so on. I also signed off by saying, "I've really outsourced resolution to 43 things, anyway. I'm sure New Year's resolutions will be in as a feature for next year -- doubtless with slightly annoying functionality!"

Well, I was right about that...

( copied here for personal convenience )

But, as ever, these are the resolutions that really matter:

...as you can see, mine started very well, on a vast Ikea sofa, with champagne and plastic dinosaurs and silver shoes (although I'm not wearing them in this shot). Well, if you ignore the little issue with the computer, that is. It froze and failed to start on me on NYE and I left it running back-ups as I headed out into party city, and I'm still running diagnostics and back-ups as we speak (came back to find it had frozen again) -- and using Internet Explorer, as Firefox has been on for all the freezes I'm aware of. Bah, humbug, etc. Does anyone use Chrome? Is it any good?



Anyone in Oxford who likes chocolate and hasn't visited Hotel Chocolat's post-xmas sale yet, you should go. There's something called a champagne sparkle in the xmas mix which is very special.

Happy New Year!

On the way across the bridge today, I spotted a shopping trolley in the river. The water was goose-turd green, angry and high. We're on flood warning, and the Thames is fast and brutally cold at the moment. A human would be foolhardy to venture into that mess to fish it out. So there it stays, for a while, becoming part of the river.

Which brought the thought that it would rapidly be colonised by fish and weeds and riverine invertebrates. By the time it was removed, it would be sheltering species, well on its way to becoming its own tiny ecosystem.

I'm not the first person to think such things; meet the Bath Marine Preservation Society's Trolly Reef, and follow on down the comments for the eerily beautiful Original Abandoned Shopping Trolley Project.

All of which leads me to wonder how much of conservation is about returning an area to an idea of appropriate wildness. The plants and animals don't especially care, they will happily grow through concrete, tarmac, old bikes and shopping trolleys. You could argue about rust, broken glass, sharp edges but moss and murk will happily cover all of that, given time. And the wildlife would probably appreciate being left in peace.

I've just been googling "Primeval Drinking Game" and "Jonathan Meades drinkng game". No luck, just some people being sarcastic about Hannah Spearritt's pants and opinionated bloggers skipping lightly between Meades and binge drinking -- Off Kilter at work, I suspect. Ah well, I'll just have to watch the christmas box sets and make them up myself then. I'm feeling the need for another eating-and-drinking party, perhaps Primeval will provide.

Oh, and I went to see Avatar -- quite an eye opener, especially in 3D. I hear some people have been finding it hard to empathise with the big blue sexy cat people, perhaps comparing them to the vastly cheaper but somehow more intensely engaging prawns from District 9. Well yes, but all you've really got to empathise with is the planet, as it's clearly a Deathworld. Sorry, it's not a planet. It's a low gravity moon orbiting a gas giant. And that huge chasm full of floating rocks? My guess is that's the remnants of the previous invaders, their antigrav drive still sputtering away after thousands of years. I see the faint marks of someone thinking it through, under the layers of glitter, render, flying debris and mood lighting.

Shame it's not going to be a trilogy. No, scratch that. Shame it won't be the trilogy I'd like to see which would be (working titles, obviously) Revenge of the Earth Men and Green Hell Planet Unleashed. It might well become a trilogy, but it'd probably just be a rehash of the noble savage/Gaia theory nonsense the humans kept using to describe the ticks/gardeners/interface species. Not sure why they did, really. If it's real, you can just say what's happening.

This also happened today:

• 10:55 Gently touched my knuckles to the screen while listening to a youtube piece about a service I had occasion to need, once, and never again.
• 13:53 I linger over taking off new christmas woolly hat in cafe both for warm ears and to increase impact when it comes off to reveal blue hair.
• 14:46 Something keeps making swannee whistle noises in the office. No idea what but I'm thinking unattended mobile phones can meet with accidents.
• 18:55 Just ate while shepherds watched... pie. Like regular shepherd's pie, but with cranberry and parsnips. Mace and thyme for seasoning. Yum!

Happy christmas, I hope it was good, mine was. Having watched Charlie Brooker's screenwipe review of the year last night, astonished as ever by his bottomless well of irk, it now seems the right moment to have a poke around my year.

I also watched Pirates of the Carribean at World's End last night. I'd forgotten how astonishingly incoherent it is. The BBC, perhaps as commentary on said incoherence, are showing Pirates 2 on new years day... anyway it's just an excuse to drink pirate's punch, really...

( the year of things and stuff )

--- and here's a kitten, for those not bored enough to go under the cut:

This also happened today:

• 16:26 Cassie cat demands hugs, wolfs food, has something big to tell me, perhaps about a rat that got away. Charlie cat almost cracks a purr.

Xmas: I'm watching Life on Earth. Oldschool Attenborough. I'm on amphibians and the photography is stunning. Forget this christmas nonsense, I'm celebrating Newtonmas like all good Scientific Rationalists. Experimenting to see how much I can consume. Falling over in recognition and celebration of gravity.

My sisters gave me owls for christmas. Tim gave me a playmobil fairy garden. I gave him playmobil Ghengis Khan. The Fairy Queen and Ghengis are getting along like a small isolated village on fire, details on Flickr. The box turned out to be kitten sized. Play the video to see.

We also gave the cats toys. Harlequin got two small hairy pink balls which sadly turned out not to be quite colorfast. Then mr_snips unwrapped his most glittery present in such a way that the wrapping paper formed a kitten-sized bag. So now I have a slightly pink, glittery kitten.

Music The new slimline spaceheroes of the people played the winter warmer and were well recieved. Personally I like the new track where Tim sings like a girl robot made of electric strings and science, but mileage may vary. A mention also goes out to Jimmy Cellar's new band, Comrade Rocket -- this website is the pretty one, but the myspace is what's actually being updated -- they are also called Komrad, or Comrade. Anyway, well worth a look if you're that way inclined and in the area. Guitars and noise, songs with words, a drummer with glasses, more guitars. Ace.

Boooze I fear that I may be drinking too much. No, it's more tragic than that. I'm drinking about the same but my body is crying, poison! poison! do not punish us! I'm familiar with the drill, having observed older friends. For a while you drink less, eventually you drink nothing at all. The process takes about 20 years, so no need to panic this christmas. If I'm on a regular painkiller regime in the new year (the knee continues to annoy) I may de-booze entirely. Not detox, I refuse to call it that, although YouGov (I just did their festive survey) seem to have decided it's the standard term. For goodness sake. I eat toxins, breathe toxins, every day. I'm made of them. You might as well ask me to de-carbon.

Sister Brother-in-law has done his usual thing of buying a christmas tree too tall for his building site front room library. We visited on Sunday, and had the first properly interactive meeting with new neice, now coming up to her first birthday. She's a lovely little thing, full of wonder at everything, although apparently she'd just come out of a round of winter vomiting virus so may just have been full of wonder at not feeling rotten. Nephew had just been to a nativity x-factor, the local inclusion (and I've heard some good ones this year -- one school had dinosaurs and robots!) was a Haka (his weekly sport is rugby)! Nativity plays seem a lot more creative than they were when I was a kid. If anyone's wondering, I was angel Gabriel. Best bling, just a few choice lines.

Snow I'm tottering around like a little old lady, terrified of ice and frost and slush and melt. I suppose it's inevitable, but I feel like a bit of an idiot. The slope on Magdalen bridge where I slipped last winter has been a sheet of black ice for days now. I saw a man, with a wheelie suitcase, running across that in sneakers. I felt like shouting, Don't! It's not worth it! Miss your train! But then I remembered how much it costs to buy last minute train tickets. An arm, a leg?

On the road It's not the fact that there's snow that's causing the problem. It's how wet and sticky the snow is, and the way it's melting and refreezing into a lower layer of ice, topped with extra lubricating crystals, the way that melts into sluch, refreezes and repeats to make an icy lasagne of surpassing slipperyness. timscience gets stuck out on the road on the evening we had intended to spend eating udon and watching casiotone for the painfully alone. I wrap presents, make stew, wait, do chores. He gets home just as I'm redownloading that codec bundle so we eat stew and watch the chicken episode of Samurai Jack.

Cousin She's in town for a moment, having finished her contract in Chad. She has the look of someone who needs to sleep for three months before she does anything else. It's a look I know well, I wore it myself on my first exit from Oxfam. Unfortuntely we attract a drunk, and even more unfortunately he's obviously been listening to our (private, personal) conversation before buying us drinks we didn't want. Elderly, professorial, a talker -- obsessing about all his younger girlfriends, trying to recruit my cousin to be one. He presents her with a christmas card on the way out, which contains a proposition and his full contact details. Later that evening we use it to google him; he has a conviction for stealing a £4 bottle of wine from Iceland.

Borders I pay one last visit, with the thought of picking up christmas cards (after a few arrived for us, we decided to card the neighbours) but the shelves are picked bare. Of all the recession closures I shall mourn this the most. Fopp was always too hip for me, Woolies had long been supplanted by Wilkinsons and Threshers, well, we don't live in a time that lacks cheap booze. But Borders was an intrusion of cool into the grey British High Street -- cosmopolitan and thrilling, eclectic and comfortable, full of books and music, comics and coffee, toys and gizmos. The shop that got closest to being the internet, but failed to be bought out by it. The great experiment of an evening shop where people wanted to hang out, now dashed on the cold rocks of economic spite. Borders I shall miss; the town is poorer for its loss.

Nightmare Wore up at 3am the other morning by dream of being crushed by huge, soggy, squishy presents. Taller than me, wrapped with tough synthetic ribbons and I was somehow among them as they shifted in a huge enclosure (an ocean container?) They smelt of wet and blubber; I was sure they were full of whale meat. Every time I started to drop off the same dream would recur. It took me almost an hour to get back to sleep...

Unexpected Receive a twitter thanking me (and the far more plausible peteashton) for inspiring Glum Councillors, the online home of elected members pointing glumly at potholes, to my puzzlement. Probably mistaken for some other online witterer. Fortunately they're on tumblr, so saying thanks is just two clicks; follow, love.

This also happened today:

• 12:38 Bling your house! on Shelter's streetmap-enabled housebling toy www.housebling.org.uk/ then fail to share as privacy panic sets in.

This also happened today:

• 00:34 He returns with tales of stuck gritting lorries, pushing vans up hills and blizzards on the ridgeway, and is now bolting stew and green tea.
• 09:19 An old lady in nice shoes inches the black ice pavement. Her waiting husband releases a soft tirade of complaints about all things not her.
• 09:22 On the bus, everyone looks like (but isn't) a colleague. Perhaps some deep similarity is drawn on faces still working this close to chri ...
• 10:09 @joellaox4 May the pleasures gifted by your new machine be highly efficient and punishingly economical.
• 17:29 Just walked past a colleague in wellington boots and a very short skirt just photocopying one last thing before she left for the day.
• 19:05 @sarahdal Yes, but let it cool thoroughly first.

He has returned, is eating stew. Phew.

This also happened today:

• 23:02 Scouting traffic reports again; his snow-snarled commute steady at two ambers no reds. Feel Max Headroomish. No news to phone through, phew.