Caring about the planet is out of favor with the administration, but climate change skepticism is a lot less common than you probably think.

Protect authors’ livelihoods from the unlicensed use of their work in AI training

This is your proverbial stitch in time: I got to it before the worn patch wore right through, and have consequently got away with a honeycomb darn. I like doing these: they are comparatively quick; they take no set-up whatsoever; the technique is easy (it's just blanket stitch, with each stitch of each inside ring catching the bar of the one before), and when the worn patch inevitably gets broader you can add another round or two. I probably shouldn't have used pink; it's going to look like my heel's bleeding. Oh well.

This is a needlecord tunic sort of thing, from Fat Face via a charity shop. The colour of the photo is way off: it's actually navy blue. I am not the first person to mend this. I think I did a neater job, though. (Mine's the one on the right.)

Twelve Words for Moss (Elizabeth-Jane Burnett) was a Christmas present from one of my brothers. It's uncategorisable: poetry, (family) history, memoir, nature - it takes as its starting points the author's grief at the death of her father and her enthusiasm for mosses, and weaves a narrative between the two. I got a few chapters in before I noticed that the last sentence of each becomes the first of the next, and went back to the beginning to see what else I'd missed.

Everyone else seems to have been talking about January going on forever, but that wasn't my experience. In fact, it just seems to have disappeared. Between recovering from surgery and recovering from a cold, with a party in the middle, I haven't been waiting for January to be over so much as for myself to be well enough to enjoy things regardless of the calendar. I shall not complain. The days are getting longer, the snowdrops are out, and everyone suddenly seems much more cheerful.

We want the government to: Remove loopholes that allow wealthy foreign individuals to make donations into UK political parties (e.g. by funnelling through UK registered companies). Cap all donations ...

I missed last year's Big Garden Birdwatch because I was in hospital. The year before that I was in Avignon. In 2023 I diligently sat in the conservatory for a whole hour and saw: One unidentifiable Little Brown Job One wood pigeon, which sat for a very long time on my neighbour's chimney and never came into my garden, and could not therefore be counted.

It seems to be a day for deacons. I'm listening to Choral Evensong from St Lawrence, York, and this morning the Daily Prayer app told me that today is Vincent of Saragossa, Deacon, first Martyr of Spain, 304 . Wikipedia tells me that this martyrdom took place under Diocletian, and notes that according to tradition it involved roasting on a gridiron, a detail which may have been carried over from the hagiography of St Lawrence.

This week I've been transferring photos from my phone onto an external drive. I've had this phone for nearly five years, and there are a lot of photos on there. Fewer than there were on Monday, though. As luck would have it, I hit January 2022 just as some online friends were discussing preferences for funeral music. My father died on 8 January 2022, and the pictures from that month are a jumble of memories and plans - beloved objects, photos of photos, and important documents - some taken by me, some shared by family members and friends.

Saturday was ridiculously beautiful, and also ridiculously busy. It concentrated almost all the busyness for the month of January into one day. I went to a Cursillo training day in the morning (I'm not on the staff this time; I was just showing up to show support) and a party in the afternoon, and in between I practised two duets and made a chilli.

Another cold day, but clear and sunlit, and all the trunks and branches of the trees glowing - the silver on the birches, the golden lichen on the hazels and oaks, and the moon between them. I walked - not as far as yesterday, but further than I've managed on other days - and kept going further than I strictly needed to because it was too beautiful to stop so soon. It's so good to be able to do that again.

This will not be remembered as my most successful knitting project. However, it's finished; it used up one annoying little ball of yarn; it will keep small feet warm, and I am no longer scared of the cable needle.

I took a slightly longer walk today, long enough for my legs to stop feeling wobbly and then start feeling wobbly again. I came out from the corridor of trees and stopped at the road for longer than I usually would, noticing the pull of the flat land beyond the A10. It was cold, and there was no sun so it felt colder, and I would have liked to cross the main road and walk out under the grey sky towards the band of pale pink.

My writing brain started up good and proper yesterday. I don't know why. Maybe it's having managed to post here every day for a month and more. Maybe it was having a day in which I'd promised myself I'd do no work and only minimal Cursillo admin. Maybe it's because it's almost eighteen months since the baby was born and that's just how long it takes for a brain to get going again.

The earth tips back and the light reaches back out to the north, stretches, spreads over us. The sun stays past four o'clock, just a little bit more than eight hours now. The solstice marked the turning point; now I begin to notice. It's cold, though. I walked out earlier, just a little way. My loose silky trousers, practical for a healing abdomen, are not so practical for a January walk; I am grateful for my brother's long-ago recommendation of long-john base layers.

We awoke to find a crust of snow outside; it decayed rapidly over the course of the morning and now it's disconcertingly mild outside, and raining. And well, that's one to the pathetic fallacy, because this Christmas season does feel like a bit of a washout. I've spent too much of it feeling ill, worried about making myself ill, preparing for my operation, or feeling wiped out or (damn it) almost as sick as I used to, to have managed festivity for more than about an hour at a time.