Toby Miller

Find your ideal career by combining the videos the YouTube algorithm feeds you - me, I'm destined to be a stop-motion animator, working from my home studio deep in the haunted Venetian Lagoons. I can only collect craft materials by boat.

Find your ideal career by combining the videos the YouTube algorithm feeds you - me, I'm destined to be a stop-motion animator, working from my home studio deep in the haunted Venetian Lagoons. I can only collect craft materials by boat.

So much moon on my walk; I passed a house with the top window reflecting the near full moon, while the window itself giggled - the sound of a child being sent to bed with a story. Another house and the family were all outside on the pavement, taking turns to look through a telescope at the moon.

Hunters Moon and the lunatic dogs - Danka and Bertie. dogs belonging to neighbour’s sister, which I walk. They are both lovely, but Bertie, with his strange eye, is wonderfully sweet. He rests his chin on my legs and stares up at me like I’m somehow important to him..

My neighbour has her sister - and her 2 dogs - visiting. So 2 of my neighbour’s cats are sheltering here, asleep on my bed. My partner is also asleep. There is no room for me (if I move the cats they just sleep on top of me), so I’m going to crash on the sofa. My ridiculous James Bond lifestyle.

Sigh….and now the spirit of autumn is at the back door. Wants acorns and rockets and all my Robyn Hitchcock LPs.

Idiots, the pair of them… oh no, here’s a third. Soaking wet, and wandering in like a new law of physics.

Posted about this a few years ago (last time I was in this tin chapel), but there’s a fascinating beauty in how the stained glass - Victorian colour transfers laid across the windows - deteriorate. A style of William Basinski / Bill Morrison erosion.

Despite the sign being left inside the tin tabernacle chapel was open. Purchased 100 years ago from a manufacturer in Euston; built over six months, in a spot that had known worship for 400 years. It was always reminds me - all the flat pack wood and echoes - of the ice skating rink in Heaven Gate

The Arachnid Aeolian harp. This shimmer isn’t a ghost on the path, but a single spider thread, attached to the forest floor and reaching up into the darkness of the trees. It vibrates, but doesn’t break, in the storm.

At @bugshaw.bsky.social’s house, as we work out how my life of belongings is going to fold into her life of belongings. She has - and this is one reason I am hers - made a list of all the useful measurements. But, as she has Long Covid, and I have an exhausted hernia, this is tough going.

It is the month for Ghost Sports. This is Poltergeist United vs a Ysbryd eleven from Swansea.

Geologist Harold N. Fisk’s famous map of the multiple and desperate shapes a human body takes in order to find sleep in a bed with two cats sleeping on it.

This is wonderful for many reasons, one of which is that it offers Dracula a mirror reflection. He usually has no idea usually that he's forgotten to pop his jacket collars down.

the audio thrill of the radio commentary of today's cricket match from Pakistan, with the Call to Prayer in the background - crackling sound through crackling sound, the beautiful singing with "that's been turned carefully to short leg" alongside - like an outtake from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

My first ghost story of the fall is this figure, passed on an uphill road in the gloaming, who I wasn’t entirely sure wasn’t a real figure until I was very close (It was darker than the camera lets on)

A strata of crows after the storm has passed by.

The exquisite corpse between farm and forest. A pinhole taken two years ago, and a Polaroid - taken this evening as the sun set and a storm moved in. Double exposure - a photo taken but not ejected by the camera. I turned the camera over and took a second photo, creating an in-camera mirror image

As I again leave the site of the ancient burial mounds there is a cry. “Leave it” A second time: nearby, but somehow also distant, as if from within one of the mounds. “Leave it” I then realise the voice is that of a dog owner the next field over. Relieved, I slip the Saxon crown back into my bag

Crossword in leaf litter. Pleasing juxtaposition.

Meanwhile, there’s a miniature forest growing from the frayed edge of the full-size forest.

Charity shop purchase, partly because I like that it was owned - and presumably used for the purposes of exploration and discovery - by Hilda Swann, of Perse Girls School, in 1927.

As ever the variety is thrilling; what a world. I love that some pears get a whole container to themselves, like they’re a Mr Big gangster, or a walrus sunbathing on a pier.

Famously, Jean Cocteau made a short film all about this...

The cat curled up on my side of the bed. She moves when I sit down; I place my hand on the cat shaped hollow in the duvet, feeling the warmth dissipate - a unit of time that feels like it should have a name.

stones remember

Face, probably of one of the locust Martians from Quatermass and the Pit, on the side of a 15th Century pew.

St John’s, Duxford - empty, preserved, and a theatre of shadows. Double exposure Polaroids, with a single exosure playing gooseberry in the middle. The grand west window shadow, overlapped with close ups of red flowers left on a window sill. They work, but composition lessons to be learnt here.

The splinter of light at 4.30pm, St John’s, Duxford.

Hadstock Church, and the shadows of the hanging lights cast across the north wall - finding their shape from west to east.

Lovely cross section of Cavlo Nero at the market today. “Come and see a lovely cross section of Cavlo Nero!” bellowed the market trader. “Wonder at how the calm reservoir of the root makes the fractal entanglements of the leaf!”

So I sent this Anne Carson poem to my mother, who replied with this anecdote from only this morning. About my father and his shelves and shelves of books.

The line “your little toolkit” - the familiarity and security of that - reminded me of the moment in Klute when Jane Fonda’s hand gently clutches the back of Donald Sutherland’s jacket. Just marvellous, how you can turn a few words over and over in your mind, and they attract meanings like a magnet