Time is strangely stretching. When I started writing this post I had to check my calendar to see what I have done this week, and found that events I thought have happened the previous one had, in fact, been within the last seven days.
That's partly down to Kim being away, and partly due to not working. When you don't have the rhythm of work, you lose one of the main things which anchor you in time. There is a pace, a way of being, which is set for you and that you don't have to consider. All of which is a challenge to me: while I am not working, I need to reestablish that pattern.
And yet this week has been pretty full. Monday, of course, was a bank holiday -- and what do you do on a bank holiday other than go to the seaside? Myself and my friend Edward headed down to Margate for a bit of a mooch around. It was surprisingly quiet, much more like a regular Sunday than a Bank Holiday Monday, which is probably not great for the local traders. I have heard that the great post-pandemic British seaside boom was over, but this was the first time I saw it with my own eyes.
On Tuesday I went into London to catch up with an old colleague, deep in the heart of News UK. It's an impressive building -- and it was good to have a chat to someone who was both a big influence and a good mate.
After that I went to the V&A to see the Diva exhibition, which I would absolutely recommend. And it's the first exhibition I have been to where I think there's a benefit to having the proffered headphones: divas definitely need a soundtrack, all the way from Victorians to today.
The V&A is one of my favourite places in London. I became a member there quite a few years ago, and would occasionally sneak off work for an afternoon's "inspiration" there, sitting looking at lovely things, clearing my head and writing stuff in my notebook. It's one of the things I miss about London: there is space like that in Canterbury, and few enough in Kent as a whole.
The rest of the week was taken up with bumbling around, washing, and generally wasting of time. I spent a chunk of time working on setting up Obsidian to make it a better environment for writing, experimenting with plugins which let you do things like post directly to Micro.blog, make your use of Markdown and punctuation more consistent, and so on. It's now pretty plugin-heavy but it's really coming together.
The three things which most caught my attention
- Primary documents in "Making the Macintosh" is a brilliant collation of documents about the early Mac. I could spend a month reading this stuff.
- An absolutely fantastic interview with M John Harrison, who remains my favourite writer. With bonus almost-retelling of the story of how Iain Banks made him write another space opera.
- An interesting report from 2020 on the ownership of shares on the stock market. What's fascinating is how this has changed from (in the UK) largely pension funds to foreign investors, and what that means for the governance of our largest companies. the shift from mostly individual investors to mostly pension funds had a big impact on the way companies saw themselves, and who they saw as the important people to serve, and this change to being owned by people who largely have no particular interest in the health of UK society is also an important one.
Things I have been writing
I'm writing a big blog post on how I have customised Obsidian for writing. It's currently about 1,500 words and I should finish it off in the next day or so. This post was written in Obsidian, as are most of my weeknotes, because one of the best things about it is the ability to create and use templates very easily. That means it's brilliant for articles like this.
Things I have been reading
I've been REALLY enjoying – if that's quite the word – Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, which I highly recommend to anyone remotely interested not just in clothes, but also anti-capitalism.
