Weeknotes
- A long article on switching to Linux: 1,181 words.
- Why journalism is never objective: 600 words.
- On Stage Manager and the iPad. 441 words
- Prompted by a conversation on Twitter with Matt Gemmell, I am also going to write something on using Obsidian for writing and how it can replace Ulysses if that's your thing. There are pros and cons, and it takes some setting up.
- About 750 words on a short story which has been newly renamed Abigail Harvey returns home. It's a short story about a woman's relationship with her mother. It's been fun writing fiction!
Weeknote, 23 October 2022
This has been a pretty busy week at work because I HAVE A WEEK OFF THIS WEEK. I've promised myself that I'll spend a major chunk of it writing, as it's my writing group next week and I really do want to have something completed to share, even if it's only a bit of flash fiction. Obviously I've started something much more ambitious than that (see below).
Something happened in politics this week. Not sure you saw it. The only thing I can add is GENERAL ELECTION NOW.
And that's about all that's gone on this week, other than some vague discussions on what to do at Christmas (other than read ghost stories).
Writing
I've put other stuff to one side this week and started working on a ghost story for halloween. Except that I've called it A Christmas Ghost Story, as that's a MUCH more likely deadline. Sorry.
Reading and watching
I've finally dived into Becky Chambers' A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, after it's been sitting on the top of the pile of books to read for quite a while. I adored A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the previous story in the Monk and Robot series, for its gentleness and calmness. I'm already a quarter of the way through (these are short books) and it is of course lovely.
If you haven't watched it already I would recommend The Art of Japanese Life, which is available at the moment on iPlayer. James Fox's documentaries on art are always excellent. Also well worth a watch is We Are England: Trouble at Sea, which is a documentary on the struggle of a northern fishing community to get to the bottom of why thousands of crabs and lobster are washing up dead on their beach. Really well made stuff.
Weeknote, Sunday 16th October 2022
I spent a lot of this week being ill, with the really noxious head cold that Kim had been poorly with finally getting me. Bad head colds are one step up from the flu: Imagine having flu, but take away the fever, and you have it. They are annoying in part because you never feel quite as ill as you think you ought to while not being able to do much, as they really sap your energy.
I recovered enough to have my annual flu jab on Saturday, and as they had some spare, they gave me the COVID booster too, which I'm really glad about. Living on a campus of thousands of students is a good way to get exposed to a wide range of exciting bugs, particularly at the start of term when everyone brings something from all over the country, like the world's worst party.
The only downside is that I've got mild side effects today, similar to what I get with any vaccination: a bit of tiredness and a mild headache that just won't shift even with paracetamol and ibuprofen administered.
(That, by the way, is a trick a nurse taught me: if you have a fever or bad aches, you can take both paracetamol and ibuprofen simultaneously to knock it dead. Because they work in different ways, it's not dangerous to do both.)
So here's to next week… and hopefully not being sick.
Writing
Unsurprisingly, I haven't written much this week -- I just didn't have the focus required for it till today. Just a couple of hundred words scattered across some of the work in progress. There are a few things in the "in progress" folder at the moment:
Reading and watching
We had two finales this week: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power lived up to its name by actually including the rings of power, and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law which broke the fourth wall in spectacular fashion. I enjoyed them both.
I'm halfway through Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism, and it's a good -- and shocking -- read, particularly if you're into the politics of technology. For many reasons, breaking the stranglehold of monopolies (and monopsonies!) is an important battle.
For a bit of light bedtime reading, I'm also going through Ian Hunter's Diary of a rock and roll star. Hunter was (is?) the lead singer for Mott The Hoople, and this tour diary comes from the era when Mott were hanging out with David Bowie, who adored them -- Bowie, learning they were about to break up from lack of success, gave them his song All the Young Dudes so they could have a smash hit. And hit it was, too -- it was one of Bowie's finest. Diary is one of the best first-person books about 70's rock, and much more honest and truthful in conveying the boredom of touring than anything else.
Weeknote, Sunday 9th October 2022
OK PEOPLE I got so excited doing some other writing I nearly forgot to write this. I'm slightly tired so I'm not going to write much.
Writing
First draft of a micro-short story, called Like a mother’s love. 1199 words.
Continued work on Abigail Harvey returns home, which is now 4422 words. Someday I will finish this.
Link post with Meta's Metaverse, Graphene and more: 358 words.
Musk! Twitter! And why Google is a bit cheeky over RCS: 279 words.
Does my alien have a penis and other interesting things for today: 719 words.
Reading and watching
Decentraland is valued at $1.3bn. Decentraland has just 38 users per day. But sure there's no bubble around this nonsense.
Weeknote, 2nd October 2022
It seemed like a good idea at the time. Go down to Brighton. Kim doing a drawing group with some Proper Art Friends(TM) while I have a mooch around, see old sites, and generally enjoy sitting around and doing some writing. Then do something fun in the evening and back on Sunday.
HOWEVER… we took one look at the prices of the hotels and decided to cut it a little short, staying only on Saturday. That meant setting off at 8am to get there for 10. Plenty of time. It's only an hour and three-quarters drive.
Except the M2 is closed, and there is a diversion. A diversion and a queue. A long queue.
Three hours later, we're finally there. I'm pretty good in these circumstances because once there is nothing you can do about something, I relax about it all going horribly wrong. And Kim wasn't too late.
With no hotel to check into, I spent the day wandering around, going back to old haunts and sitting around. I got a decent chunk of writing done, too -- over 1200 words, which doesn't sound like much but is more than I've been doing for a while -- and managed not to drink myself into an over-caffeinated mess.
I met up with Kim after her course had finished at 4pm for a quick pint with a couple of her artist chums. Which turned into three pints. In fact, as I had sneaked one while I waited, four. I am not the kind of man who can drink four pints. More important, Kim couldn't drink three pints and drive us to the hotel, which was out at Preston Park. Hence we ended up walking back this morning in the rain.
Of course, I also had no change of clothes and no charger. So my first, slightly hungover stop was the car to pick both up, then a nearby Costa to charge my phone.
All of which makes me realise how much I have come to rely on smartphones. Instead of trusting that when we arrange to be at a place with people, we will be there, we want the belt-and-braces of being able to send a message to someone, to check where they are and if they're still coming. And it opens up the possibility, too, of not coming: if you text someone beforehand, you can just rearrange.
Reading and watching
Stephen Baxter released The Thousand Earths this week, and I have already finished it -- one of the benefits of being around for a weekend without much arranged to do is the speed at which I read (something I should remember). Like some other Baxter works, this one involves a plot that revolves around the far history of the universe, in this case, trillions of years. It's a decent read, with some good ideas, but the end feels rushed, and as with quite a few of Baxter's novels, the secondary characters feel like caricatures designed to nudge the plot in the direction he wants to go.
Also started, Chokepoint capitalism by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. If you have been following Cory's recent blog posts about monopolies and how they come to dominate the creative landscape, you will find this familiar territory -- but of course, with a lot more detail.
A trip to the cinema while in Brighton to see Moonage Daydream, a documentary about David Bowie. I love Bowie with all my glam heart, but this was an incoherent mess that went on too long despite jumping from 2000 to Bowie's death with virtually no mention (and how could you miss out Tin Machine… ok, well, that was one good thing).
Episode six of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power delivered in a big way. I can't wait for the next one, and I wouldn't count myself as much of an LOTR fan.
Weeknote, 25th September 2022
Today was a bit of a double art extravaganza, as we went down to Folkestone to see Sara Trillo talk about a project she is currently working on about dene holes. Deneholes are interesting earthworks dating back to the bronze age, and consist of a shaft dug down, usually between 50-100ft, meeting the chalk. Whoever built them then excavated, mining some of the rich chalk, probably for use as fertiliser. There are estimated to be around 10,000 across Kent and Essex and very few anywhere else. Sara has been researching them to do some kind of artwork.
Also, we looked at our friend Judith's piece, A Square of Time: Prelude, which features Kim's voice reading.
Folkestone is a fascinating place for art at the moment. It reminds me of Brighton when I first lived there, with the kind of cheap semi-derelict spaces artists can afford to use and has a proper creative feel to it.
And we'll be down in Brighton next weekend. Kim is attending a two-day drawing event. On the other hand, I will be hanging about somewhere and hopefully getting some writing done.
Writing
Ah, writing. I have been putting off writing more of my short story. I hit a wall with it: I have a beginning. I have an end. I have an idea for a middle. But when I try and write that middle, it just doesn't seem to work.
Of course, the only thing to do is to keep writing it. As Cory Doctorow wrote:
What I realized, gradually, was that the way I felt about my work was about everything except the work. If I felt like I was writing crap, it had more to do with my blood-sugar, my sleep-deficit, and conflicts in my personal life than it did with the work. The work was how I got away from those things, but they crept into the work nonetheless.
You can't get away from the work. Part of my thing is that I haven't yet established the habit of writing coherently. I don't -- yet -- show up at the same time, every day, to write. It's still something that I do as and when I can. But that can change.
Reading and watching
I've started reading An account of the decline of the Great Auk, according to one who saw it by Jessie Greengrass, and crikey, it's good. I love short stories -- I've always preferred them to novels -- and Greengrass can really write.
In parallel (yes, I have a problem with this), I have been dipping into Words are my matter by Ursula Le Guin. Le Guin's non-fiction is as good as her fiction, and I recommend you read it.
I'd recommend you read Kaspersky's report on How smartphone makers track users, as it's a real eye-opener. You probably won't want to use the version of Android you get with your phone once you have done it.
We are still watching Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and enjoying it. The one thing to note is that the various strands are currently a little ungainly and uneven. You'll care about some much more than others.
Deep in the depths of the satellite channels, on Talking Picture TV, you will currently find some repeats of The Outer Limits from the early 1960s. One episode they showed this week was the classic Demon with a glass hand written by Harlan Ellison. Set your devices to record.
Weeknote, Sunday 4th September 2022
I spent yesterday at Interesting 2022, organised by the redoubtable Russell (Not T) Davies. Of course, the talks were all great, but it was also nice to bump into friends I hadn't seen for a while, including Phil Gyford, Nick Ludlam, Zelda Rhiando, Matt Jones, John Willshire and many others. And it was great to finally meet Purplesime too.
This was the first time I've been out to any conference-style event since before the pandemic started, and it was a reminder of all the things that COVID robbed us of. Seeing friends, listening to talks, having fun -- all the kinds of social stuff that previously were part of everyday life just vanished for a while. And, worse: it takes time to get used to doing them again. It's not just a case of returning to normal, as the "new normal" was something we all got used to.
Afterwards, we took a long stroll down to the South Bank and went for a drink in the Royal Festival Hall. It wasn't the first time I've been to the RFH since the "official" end of the pandemic, but it was great to go up to the member's bar and look out over the Thames, something I used to do a lot when I worked just across the river.
I've been trying out Obsidian for my writing. My favourite writing app is Ulysses, but it has two issues: it's only available on Apple devices and stores its files in an opaque way on iCloud. I would like something that's cross-platform and which uses plain simple files in a regular directory -- and Obsidian fits the bill for this. I tried it out a couple of years ago and didn't like it because of its lack of a proper live preview as you write (unlike my friend Jason Snell I don't want to see the Markdown all the time).
The way I tend to work involves a lot of quick note-taking. I have always been a jotter, writing down descriptions of people, places and events and quickly putting down any ideas I have. This is mostly out of necessity: I have a terrible memory. I always have thought it's one of the reasons I made a good news writer because my bad memory meant I had to quickly get into the habit of writing everything down.
This means a good mobile client is essential, and Obsidian has one. It lacks Ulysses' integration with the share sheet, but I have other tools I can use to save items, which means they end up in Obsidian.
Out of the box, though, Obsidian is a pretty poor writing environment. It lacks things I have come to rely on, like focus and typewriter writing modes, the ability to export as Word documents, and even the ability to break down a piece of writing into sections, dragging and dropping them into the right order. This last one is absolutely essential for fiction, where I tend to write in small discreet scenes.
The good news is that Obsidian is infinitely extensible using plugins and has a great community behind it who have built almost everything you could want. There's a Longform plugin which lets you write and reorder scenes. There are typewriter scrolling and focus modes and Pandoc for exporting in virtually any format you could want. There are even plugins for footnotes and activity trackers so you can keep an eye on writing progress.
One thing I definitely like is the way you can use templates in Obsidian. It's a very powerful system that, with the addition of the Templater add-on, lets us use things like variables in a template.
If you are considering using Obsidian for more than just note-taking, I recommend Curtis McHale's site. Curtis has done a huge amount of work digging through the plugins and has many videos recommending the best stuff for writers, whether you're creating long or short form, fiction or non-fiction.
Writing
Reading and watching
We finally got around to watching the new Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series on Amazon last night and you can see where the money is going. It was, in almost every sense, epic. And that might be why I found it a little hard to engage with: it's all a little overwhelming at this point.
I'm still reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, a wonderful exposition on writing and life that I would highly recommend.
Weeknote Sunday 24th July
“The hottest day of my life so far” is an event which should cluster in your childhood. I suspect that for the next few years we will see quite a cluster for most older people too. The long stretches of time when the weather stayed about the same and very hot days were exceptional look like they’re over.
It’s really been a week where, if you’re paying attention, you’re likely to get quite depressed about the state of the world. Climate fucked, politics fucked, climate even more fucked because the politics is fucked. War in Europe… Roe vs Wade in the US. You name it, it looks like humanity is in a bad shape.
Normally the best advice for the kind of depression all this engenders is to get into the outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. But when one of the reasons for your depression is the parlous state of the climate, even that advice is hollow.
It’s tough. The only thing to do is look after those close to you and do what you want you can for the world.
This week though we have at least had the pleasure of a dog’s company. Laika, who has now become a regular house guest when her owner is away, is a two year old spaniel, which is quite a contrast from our old dog Zoey, who was a sedate 16 year old rescue dog. There is much more licking of feet and (if she can get to them) noses.
Yesterday we went down to Folkestone to see a friend’s gallery exhibition. I like Folkestone: it has the same feel as Brighton had when I first started going there in the early 90s, and when I moved to it in 1998. Empty buildings, ripe for use for culture. Art thrives in the liminal spaces at the edges of things, which is why towns on the physical periphery of the island often end up full of art. Artists are the flotsam that the land washes up on the borders of the sea.
Meanwhile I have been transferring documents from the cloud on to the local drive of my ThinkPad. I have mixed feelings now about cloud services. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but when your documents exist only on a hard drive elsewhere in the internet they cease to be yours in some intangible but undoubtedly real way. I should write something about it: this is part philosophical, part political and part purely practical.
Weeknote, Sunday 26th June 2022
This has not been much of a week. I missed last week's week note because I was sick: I had been coughing for a few days and generally felt tired and run down. I managed to work through it from Monday to Wednesday, but Thursday decided that I had to take a day off work in the hope that a bit of rest would set me back on my feet. In fact, Friday was worse. The cough continued and I felt absolutely exhausted.
This has been affecting Kim too and at one point on Friday we had decided that this might be something which only antibiotics were going to clear, and so we would call the doctor today (our doctor doesn't work weekends, but there are emergency services in place). I even looked up what the symptoms were of TB. That's how bad I felt.
On Friday night I had a terrible night's sleep, unable to sleep until about 2am, but on Saturday morning I woke up and for the first time in a week felt vaguely human. I am still not entirely well, but I don't feel the kind of levels of awful that I didn't. I am still coughing, but instead of being a long, hacking thing it's now, as the doctors say, "productive" – a sign, I'm told, of being on the mend.
And that meant that finally – after what seems like but probably wasn’t a whole week of being cooped up – I got to go out, down to Whitstable for a couple of hours. First coffee in Blueprint, which has both good coffee and the kind of tiny collection of well-curated books which makes me whimper with delight, and then to Harbour Books.
Harbour is probably my favourite bookshop in the world. Its collection is incredibly well pieced together, with particular prominence to women writers of all kinds. It’s the first general bookshop I’ve seen where there are more women authors on display than men, and that’s incredibly gratifying. What I love about it is that I’m absolutely certain to find a book in there I have not heard of but instantly want to read, often from a new author.
All this lead to a couple of hours of pleasure: sitting in the garden on a bright evening, with a cup of tea and a book to read.
Reading
Buyer Beware by Sian Conway-Wood. There are lots of slightly hokey books that I’ve read about consuming less. This is the first one which I’ve seen which not only tackles how to consume less, but looks at both the psychological tricks which manufacturers and retailers used to get you to consume more and takes a view on the way that capitalism itself is structured.
Next in the never-ending book stack is Julian Barnes’ Elizabeth Finch, which I’m actively having to stop myself from diving into instantly (“finish the book you’re reading first, Betteridge!”). You probably already know Barnes is a great writer, but if you don’t, then you really need to know it. There’s an old phrase from Clive James who wrote “all I can do is turn a phrase until it catches the light”, and although James was writing about himself (writing about himself was really most of what he did) it could have been about Barnes.
Writing…
Very much curtailed this week. Writing is one of the things which suffers badly when I’m ill, particularly when I’m trying to fight through it and work. If I work when I’m ill, which I did for the first three days of the week, then I don’t have any energy at all to write in the evening.
What I did manage to write on Saturday was a small wall of angry social media posts. The demise of Roe vs Wade in the US affects many friends and hundreds of millions of women, and it fills my heart with anger and sadness. It put me in mind of Peggy Seeger’s Song of Choice:
In January you've still got the choice
You can cut the weeds before they start to bud
If you leave them to grow high they'll silence your voice
And in December you may pay with your blood…
The weeds are all around us and they're growing
It'll soon be too late for the knife
If you leave them on the wind that around the world is blowing
You may pay for your silence with your life
We – I – believed for far too long that the progress we had made on women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, the rights of minorities was part of a forward march of progress which could never be revoked. Roe vs Wade is the first large-scale unwinding of that, the literal cancelling of a fundamental right for women. We didn’t cut the weeds of fascism early enough, and now we have to work harder to clear them before, as Peggy wrote, it’s too late for the knife.
Watching…
Pistol, Danny Boyle’s utterly brilliant and completely batshit story of the Sex Pistols. What Boyle has done is great: taken fragments of Steve Jones’ book Lonely Boy and turned them into poignant little moments in motion.
Weeknote, Sunday 12th June 2022
One of the many useful things about writing a week note is it give you a regular reminder that life is as much about doing as thinking about doing. But this week has been a lot of watching and tinkering: with WWDC happening and new releases of iOS, iPadOS and macOS, my inner nerd has emerged like a raging hulk.
Every year I tell myself I won’t race to install the first developer releases of all the new operating systems. Every year, within 24 hours, I’ve become too excited to wait until the public betas. This year was no exception, particularly because the new version of iPadOS offers the feature which I have been wanting for years: proper support for second monitors.
And Stage Manager for iPadOS really will be that most clichéd of things: a game changer, at least for me. I have preferred using the iPad as a device over the Mac for years. However, I haven’t been able to do use it as my main machine because it doesn’t work on a screen size that I’m comfortable using for a long time.
I’m not going to write in detail about iPadOS 16 just yet — I think it deserves a post of its own — but this year might be the one where I finally give up on having a Mac laptop and just use the iPad as my portable Apple device. There are drawbacks, even though the software is almost in the right place, but the advantages now eclipse those drawbacks.
Reading
I’ve gone back to one of my most annoying reading habits: being unable to settle on what book I want to read next, so bouncing from book to book without really feeling I’m achieving much reading. So this week I’m going to settle on A. L. Kennedy’s On Writing, which I have been flirting with for a while.
Writing
In a massively mediated society, understanding how media works is incredibly important if people are to avoid being controlled by what they read, see and hear. I have worked in publishing now for 27 years, which always feels weird when I say it, so I have picked up a lot about how media works.
This is why I’m on a bit of a mission to educate people more about publishing in general and reporting and editing in particular. It struck me when reading Twitter that most people don’t understand what an “editorial line” is and how it interacts with what you see and hear. So I wrote something on what an editorial line is, to hopefully help people understand it a bit more.
Watching
If you haven’t watched the first episode of Ms Marvel, you are missing out on a treat. I think of it and Wandavision as the opposite ends of the scale for how Marvel treats its TV shows. Wandavision was incredibly clever and genuinely frightening, with an impact across the whole of the MCU. Ms Marvel is funny, smart, and endearing. After the mess that was Moon Knight, it’s a great comeback.
Meanwhile, on the internet…
The situation at the Washington Post with reporters attacking each other on social media sounds like an absolute mess. I have an elementary rule about work and social media: I don’t talk about work on social media. I don’t even mention the business I work for on social media. Same rules here: I’ll never talk about my work.
Occasionally, that makes writing these week notes challenging! I spend 37.5 hours of every week working, none of which I will talk about here. That, at least, means I have to push myself to talk about the more personal side of my life.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, Londoners don’t particularly want to return to the office. I’m not surprised at all — the notion of going to a place to work is weird unless your work physical requires you to be there. For any kind of what we used to call “knowledge worker”, who spends their life on a computer all day, the internet makes that pointless. Rethinking the role of the office is vital, but the government can also play a part by improving and cutting the cost of public transport.
Weeknote, Sunday 29th May
Three days in the office this week! THREE WHOLE DAYS. Commuting is such an odd thing: spending an hour on a train to get to a place where you do the work that — mostly — you could also do at home.
One positive thing is that it means I get to cycle down to the station, which is both physical and mental exercise for me. The physical bit is when I come back –– uphill all the way –– and the mental part is mainly on the way down.
I changed the setup for my desk (again). Having a monitor in front of the windows on my desk is efficient, but it feels like I’m blocking out the view. And what is the point of having a window if you don’t enjoy the view?
Next weekend we are off camping with friends so obviously we had to go out today and buy about £200’s worth of camping equipment to replace the things we have either lost or broken since the last time we camped. That was for a festival… four years ago. FOUR WHOLE YEARS.
Reading
I finished Tripp Mickle’s After Steve,and I have a lot of thoughts about it which I’ll save for a longer post. It’s slightly strange reading history that you were there for.
Next is a change of pace: Eversion by Alastair Reynolds. Reynolds has been one of my favourite SF authors for a while, but the last couple of his books were a little disappointing, so I’m hoping this gets him back on track.
Writing
Mostly just journaling this week. Of course, I say “just journaling”, but it’s probably the most essential writing. So I’m happy with that.
Watching
The first whole week of no Sky TV meant that we watched a lot less TV, perhaps predictably.
We waited until today to watch the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobiand it was a treat — I’m already looking forward to the next episode, which we can watch in a couple of hours.
Weeknote, Sunday 22nd May
I spent some time restructuring my setup in Ulysses for writing. It had spiralled completely out of control, with countless filters, folders, workflows and who knows what that I had developed – and promptly abandoned – over the years.
Instead it now has a clean structure which focuses on what kind of writing it is; Blog posts; Books; Newsletters; and a catch-all bucket for other kinds of creative writing, whether that is short stories or exercises. There’s also a single bucket for Ideas, and I use tags to annotate those ideas according to kind. Some are observations, where I’ve seen something and attempted to capture it. Some are fragments: a line from a character, something that just pops into mind. And then there’s blog post ideas, which range from a single line to a few half-developed paragraphs.
This is all part of a move to try and have less-but-better tools, and to stick with them and use them consistently. I’m an absolutely terribletool hopper, moving from software package to software package depending on mood. This is a very destructive habit if you want to make things, and one that I want to get out of. It’s hard: half a lifetime of playing with new software and hardware for a living makes it awfully tempting to try new things.
Reading
I have temporarily put other books on hold while I wade into Tripp Mickle’s After Steve, which is an excellent account of the post-Steve Jobs era at Apple. I’m about half way through and really enjoying it. The level of research is excellent, although I don’t think that the structure Mickle has adopted – which bounces between Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive as point of view characters – actually does the narrative of the book any favours.
Writing
Nothing completed this week but I have been hammering what I think are three good ideas into shape.
Watching
Friday was our last day of Sky subscription, which meant a desperate race to watch all the hundreds of hours of content we had recorded (we didn’t make it). It’s odd going back to just the thirty or so channels, but also pretty refreshing: I can’t lean on the crutch of just diving into whatever’s on the Sky movie channels as a default option.
If you’re my age, 2 Tone will have been an influence: the documentary “2 Tone: The Sound of Coventry” is well worth a watch, not just for the great music but also for the fantastic background. It does not, though, answer the most important question about 2 Tone: why did Jerry Dammers never get his teeth fixed?
Meanwhile, on the internet...
Elon Musk continues to be an ass. This interview with his first wife is really interesting, and one passage from it really stood out: Musk telling Justine that her grieving for the loss of their first child was “emotionally manipulative”.
Speaking of assholes… anything Musk can do Ellison can do better.
Weeknote, Sunday 15th May 2022
Yesterday we went to London (a trip into the big city!) for the Art Car Boot Fair, held in Kings Cross. There was some decent work there, and it was nice afterwards to look around the various shops and food places around Coal Drop Yard. Unfortunately, it's not that long since that part of Kings Cross was, to put it mildly, less than pleasant. I remember going to a warehouse event there and feeling pretty threatened when walking back late. And while "gentrification" gets a bad rep, this does feel like it's made a shitty bit of London much better.
On Friday, we saw Everything Everywhere All At Once, an incredible movie. One of the few pleasures of lockdown was when cinemas were open, but no big blockbuster films were being released. Because of this, and because people were understandably reluctant to go and spend an evening locked in a small dark room with others, we sometimes had the whole cinema to ourselves, which was actually rather lovely.
Canterbury is getting another Curzon soon, a larger newly-built cinema, but the current one is staying open to focus on arthouse movies and more minor releases. It will be great to have more movies on. Even though I love a big dumb science fiction movie, I've rediscovered my love of smaller films in the last couple of years.
Reading
Context by Cory Doctorow. I haven't read much of Cory's fiction, but I'm a massive fan of his non-fiction work, and I'm also a sucker for collections of essays. So this is well worth a read.
Writing
I did a lot of writing last weekend…
Just why did a company owned by a former UKIP leader pay Andrew Bridgen £500?: There are quite a lot of connections between UKIP and Tory MPs. Almost as if UKIP became the Tory party.
The New Victoriana. This was a piece I originally wrote for Rewired back in 1997. Sadly Rewired went offline a while ago, but it's in the Wayback machine, and I thought it would be good to bring it back to life. It's one of the articles that I'm most happy with, although the writing is a bit juvenile in other ways.
Dipping my toes into Linux (again). When I bought my ThinkPad X1 Carbon last year, one of the thoughts behind it was to start using Linux again -- and I finally got around to installing it a couple of weeks ago. I liked it so much that I nuked the Windows partition altogether, and since then, I've been using the ThinkPad much more. In fact, it's probably become the device I use more than any other.
Watching
Everything Everywhere All At Once was our Friday night movie at the Curzon, and it was easily the best film that I've seen this year. It's a fantastic movie: there's so much to it that it's tough to encapsulate. Just go see it.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
Google I/O has been on. It's a much less focused event these days, as Google has moved away from an approach of big fixed calendar announcements and releases towards drip-feeding more though the year. So instead, they talked about Android 13 and a new cheaper version of the Pixel 6 and teased the release of a Pixel Watch and a tablet next year.
Of course, Google's focus on the tablet has been seen before. From the Nexus 7 to the Pixel C, the company has tried -- and failed -- to create hardware but has been unable to get traction for Android as an operating system for tablets.
I hope that this isn't yet another false start because if it is, then I think it's the end of the line. And this time, Google must get enough developer support to build apps optimised for larger screens.
Weeknote, Sunday 8th May 2022
With the demise of the ivy on the back fence came the discovery there wasn't much in the way of a back fence left. The ivy has grown over it; it's evolved through it. In fact, the ivy was really all that was holding up the fence. So technically, the fence isn't ours: it belongs to our neighbour at the back. However, our neighbour at the back is a student house where the landlord really hasn't done much to maintain the garden (hence, of course, the demise of the fence). There's already one fence panel which has collapsed which he hasn't replaced. I suspect getting him to replace these will be another long, drawn-out affair.
Two days in a row in London left me feeling drained. I'm not sure if it's post-covid effects or just a combination of getting older and my body not being well looked after, but I have much less energy now than I had even a handful of years ago. So the only thing to do is try and push through it as gently as possible and be more active.
For me, that means gentle walks and making more of my bike. I miss cycling: it's something that I never really took up in London but had done a lot of in Brighton and before that in St Albans. I have to keep reminding myself that it was long ago. It's about seventeen years since I moved from the coast to the city.
Adventures in Linux
I have converted my ThinkPad into a dedicated Linux computer. I always had half a mind to do this -- it is one of the reasons I went for a ThinkPad rather than a more exciting Windows laptop -- but I was surprised by how much improved Linux was since the last time I used it in anger. Then I remembered that would have been about fifteen years ago; I would be surprised if Linux hadn't improved.
At first, I just partitioned the drive and left Windows on there, but after a day of tinkering, I realised there was absolutely no need to keep Windows about. For emergencies, I have other Windows laptops (my gaming machine may sound like a jet engine, but it's a more than capable computer), and Linux was running more than smoothly enough.
At first, I installed Zorin OS, an excellent distribution if you are coming from Windows and still want to run Windows apps. It has a nice feature which lets you just double click on a Windows application, and it will install Wine and any other bits and pieces you need to run it. You can also make it look like Windows 10 or 11 if you want, and it comes with plenty of software pre-installed.
When I decided to nuke Windows entirely, I also saw that the latest long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu is out, 22.04. I like LTS versions of open source software. You're not at the cutting edge of things, but it will work well for a very long time. Canonical supports LTS versions of Ubuntu for at least five years.
Hence, I'm typing this using Typora, my Markdown editor for Mac and windows, which has a Linux version. I've shifted to using Firefox as my browser across the board, and there's even a version of Microsoft Teams for work. So far, so good.
Ubuntu took a bit more tweaking to get looking how I wanted than Zorin did. In particular, fractional scaling (which bumps the size of the UI up and which is needed for me on a 14in 1920x1200 screen) made text annoyingly fuzzy. The answer was to keep scaling at 100% but use the accessibility features to switch to large text. I wouldn't call it large, but it's definitely bigger (I'd say about 125% of normal) and sharp.
I will write something longer about why I wanted to start using Linux again. The short version is that I'm not thrilled about the direction of travel of either Apple or Microsoft is building in more and more integration which ties you into their software and services stacks. Just using Apple or Microsoft or Google is incredibly convenient, but there might come the point where switching costs become so high that it's really impossible to do. Using Linux and open source software as much as possible is less convenient -- anyone who pretends otherwise is wrong -- but you are paying a long term price.
Related to this, I'm shifting my saved web reading from Matter to Pocket. That's no criticism of Matter as an app or a company, but I do not want to convert reading into another platform, yet another social network. Pocket is now owned by Mozilla, and I trust them to do the right thing. Also, I pay them, and I'm generally favouring paying for services rather than relying on generosity (or, more likely, advertising).
Reading
I haven't done enough reading this week, partly because I've been tired (see above). As a result, the book stack gets ever higher. However, there have been a few long reads online which have kept me reading.
The first was this 1998 interview with Steve Wozniak. Woz, as always, comes across as just a gentle soul. And speaking of tech, this interview with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger suggests there is still life in the old dog.
Writing
I wrote a piece on the prospect of Keir Starmer resigning and how this being a story driven hard by the Tories shows how much they are failing to think strategically.
Watching
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was good, but not excellent: so far, of the latest phase of MCU movies, I think only Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings has been an out and out success. Next week it's Everything everywhere all at once, which I am looking forward to immensely.
Timey-whimy universe bending stuff is all the rage right now. The season-ending episode of Picard managed to bring all the parts of the plot together in a satisfying way, but it still felt like there was far too much going on. And, of course, you can now watch season two of Russian Doll. If you haven't watched season one, you're a fool, just go and watch it now.
Meanwhile, on the internet
Blah blah blah Elon Musk blah blah Twitter blah blah clueless.
Weeknote, Sunday 1st May 2022
A wedding! Friday evening saw the lovely betrothal of an old friend and his darling in Kew Gardens (which has to be one of the loveliest venues to get married in). It was first due to happen in April 2020... and obviously that couldn’t go ahead. Third time’s a charm though.
At first it was a bit strange. This was I think the first big event with friends and family we have been to since lockdown ended, which means the first after an interregnum of two years without the kind of regular clockwork rhythm of social events which, even in my season of life, are like the heartbeat you barely notice until it’s gone. At felt at first like I had lost my cultural mojo: what do you do at these things? How do you talk to people you don’t know?
Normally I suspect the answer to this would be “alcohol” but I’m not the drinker I once was. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve drunk more than a single glass of anything in the past few years. If you imagine that you have a set number of alcohol points in your life before you can no longer drink, mine ran out in about 2008.
However after a while an odd thing happened: we just started talking to people, and somehow the ice was broken. We ended up chatting to a lovely older couple who live not a million miles away from my sister in Norfolk and who I would like to stay in touch with.
At home we finally got the enormous hedge that the council had complained was blocking a street light cut back. It was too high and too thick for us to do it ourselves, so we hired in a lovely tree surgeon to do the work. He also cut down an old silver birch at the end of the garden which had died last year. While it wasn’t in danger of falling – it survived the last storm – sooner or later it was going to go and probably fall straight into one of the neighbour’s houses.
There’s some more work to do in the garden, trimming back a huge chunk of ivy which is gradually dragging down one of the neighbour’s fences towards our side. In theory, it’s not ours to fix. In practice, getting that particular neighbour to replace a fallen fence is such a long and arduous process that it’s just easier if we take care of it. We also need to clear back some slightly overgrown parts of that garden near the now-gone silver birch.
And once that’s done, there’s the vegetable garden at the side to deal with. For those who don’t know our house (which is almost all of you) we have three gardens: a small front garden with the standard English lawn and beds; a larger back garden with a lawn that’s mostly made of moss, some nice mixed beds and several trees, with greenhouse; and a side garden which is about large enough to put a bungalow on. This side garden was where vegetables and fruit were grown many years ago, but it now mostly grass and shrubs. It also houses Kim’s dad’s old shed, which is probably reaching the end of its working life (we have barely touched it).
The vegetable garden needs some mild clearing to make it usable again, along with some beds digging: probably a weekend’s work for a couple of people, at most, if you don’t count removing the shed (which is both physically and emotionally much more tricky). One for later in the month.
Reading
Matt Gemmell wrote a fantastic piece on getting ideas for stories which should be required reading for any writer in any genre or trade.
Anne Applebaum’s article in The Atlantic on “Ukraine and the Words that lead to Mass Murder” is something everyone should read, although it makes harrowing reading. Words lead to dehumanisation, dehumanisation leads to atrocities.
Laurie Penny writes eloquently about their experience of family, and how COVID-19 has impacted on all our expectations of the people around us. And, as she points out, “a found family can break your heart just as much as a traditional one”.
And of course there’s books: I need to pick up The School of Life’s How to survive the modern world again as I’m half way through it but took a break.
Writing
It’s getting a bit embarrassing now that the only thing I’m writing and posting publicly is this. However, I have been collating together quite a few ideas: there’s plenty to write about, there just isn’t as much time as I would like to write it.
Watching
Picard and Moon Knight. I think both of these series are falling into the classic trap of over complication. Not everything has to be as complex as The Sopranos, people. And not every writer can carry it off.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
A long while ago I download Yomu, which is an iOS/iPadOS ebook reader – and then promptly forgot all about it. I recently found it again on my iPad and it’s a lovely little app if you want to read ePubs, PDFs etc and then export your annotations, quotes and comments into something else. It supports export into Markdown, which makes it really easy to use with note taking applications which support it such as Obsidian or Craft. Definitely a good one to check out.
Weeknote, Sunday 17th April
A sunny bank holiday feels like such a pleasure after the winter. Our ancestors knew a thing or two about how to break from the bleakness of the cold. Although I've always preferred the cold to the warm (my northern roots showing) there's definitely something about the spring which lightens the mood.
Every time there is a four day week it reminds me how uncivilised five day working weeks are. I never feel like I've had time to actually catch up on the rest which I don't get around to having during the week when there's only two days. And if I actually do anything on the two day weekend I'm exhausted. So thank the lord – literally in this case – for Bank Holidays.
Next week is even better: just the three days before we head to Oxford for a weekend.
I spent a little bit of time this week writing some notes for an article about the cult of productivity, inspired by am "AITA" post from a parent who talked about their child being "unproductive" for a long period of time. There's a lot of productivity gurus out there, and the core advice they have is often decent, but all too often people either beat themselves up for "failing" to be productive, or forget to allow themselves time for things which just bring them joy and aren't time-blocked, scheduled, turned into a project or worse.
Reading
Low-life: Irreverent reflections from the bottom of a glass by Jeffrey Bernard. Bernard falls into that category of "men who are a bit of a shit but life intriguing lives". What's interesting about him is the way that his writing manages to sidle away from the pub bore, despite very little ever happening to him down the Coach and Horses. Other than drinking himself to death of course.
Release the Bats: Writing your way out of it by DBC Pierre. Another fascinating character - I hope that reading both Bernard and Pierre at the same time doesn't indicate some kind of impending mid-life crisis. Decamping to Mexico, buying a boat or spending the rest of my life drunk don't feel like quite the right path.
Writing
The only things that I've written this week have been notes on articles which I might write - it has been dreadfully unproductive and I really do need to get back into the habit soon, before my brain atrophies.
Watching
Marvel's Moonknight is alternately baffling and hilarious. I have only the vaguest idea what is going on. What's interesting is how Marvel is using the TV series format to explore characters which are a little bit deeper and have more to them than the standard movie heroes. With the movies, you don't have the benefit of time to explore the character: it needs to be straight into the action. TV offers more depth, which is ironic when you consider how often TV is seen as the lesser medium.
Meanwhile, on the Internet
You might have heard that some guy called Musk threatened to buy Twitter. When a man with a lot of money gets this jollies from shitposting, the world is a worse place no matter how many spaceships they build. And of course Marc Andreessen – a man who coded a browser 30 years ago and has been coasting on achievement ever since – is just as bad.
One of Pebble's founders wrote a really nice insightful piece on why it failed. The important point for students of leadership: while he had a vision of where he wanted to go, he could never articulate it properly and never used it as a point of reference for what they were doing at the moment.
I've also been doing some reading of accounts of Steve Jobs' return to Apple, and came across this excellent piece by Tim Bajarin. I remember the return for many reasons but one stands out: the announcement went out at about 4pm on 20th December 1996, which also happened to be my 30th birthday. Cue one evening where I didn't get home in time to celebrate much. I also remember the following year's Macworld Boston keynote which Tim refers to, where the giant face of Bill Gates appeared on screen and some in the audience booed. Jobs scolded the audience, saying that we needed to let go of this idea that in order for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose.
I am very much looking to optimise my computer set up at the moment, so this post about an M1 Mac mini and iPad Pro caught the eye. My setup at the moment just feels wrong: I'm trying to do too much on too many devices and it's confusing and causing me vague angst. I need to sell a load of equipment, bite the bullet and just buy a new Mac. Argh. The one thing that's really stopping me is there are no Macs to buy: delivery dates for every single one of Apple's machines apart from the 13in M1 MacBook Pro are backed up to the end of May, with some a lot longer than that.
Related: a great quote from James Clear: ""Look around your environment. Rather than seeing items as objects, see them as magnets for your attention. Each object gently pulls a certain amount of your attention toward it."
#Weeknote- 10th April 2022
It took me a few days but I feel like I’m finally over the bought of Covid which I wrote about last week. I still have a cough, but it’s getting better and of midnight on Wednesday the “government advice” was that I didn’t need to isolate.
That was good, because on Thursday and Friday I was down in Brighton for BrightonSEO. It’s always good to go to something which sharpens my skills a bit and makes me feel connected to the industry I make a living in. It’s very easy, in any job, to become inward-facing and focus so much on your own company that you never really learn from outside.
It was also a good chance to see Brighton again. I lived there for about eight years and had a tremendous time. It cemented that I love to live by the sea, and it’s still surprises me how much just sitting listening to the waves and watching the open ocean relaxes me. I spend too much time cooped up indoors, and not enough time sitting on beaches.
The only downside was getting up at 5am to get there. Despite looking pretty close on the map, Brighton and Canterbury are between two and a half and three hours apart by train. It’s something I’ve said before, but Kent is a big place. It’s also quite isolated: once you get past the comfy commuter belt, it’s a generally poor place, with a lot of both rural and urban poverty. The countryside is pretty, but it’s largely working farmland, and as anyone who has lived in that kind of environment knows that means scrub, old buildings, and industrial-scale agriculture rather than pretty cottages with thatched roofs. Those are all owned by bankers, now, who don’t live in them during the week.
Reading
Reading has been a bit underwhelming this week, which is my polite way of saying I haven’t done much.
Writing
No public writing, either. I did though polish up a couple of short pieces of science fiction I’ve written.
Watching
A lot of sport, and the next episode of Picard.
Meanwhile, on the Internet…
Megan McArdle wrote a really good piece on why it’s time for major institutions to get employees off Twitter. It’s actually mostly a piece about why Twitter is bad for journalists, and to that extent I agree with a lot of what Megan is saying. Journalists massively overestimate Twitter’s importance, largely because all their journalist friends are on it. It’s an echo chamber for media and that leads to some pretty horrendous results: journalism is already too much of a chummy club without it being amplified online.
Something which will surprise no one who has being paying attention: UK offices are emptying as large numbers of employees get Covid. Who could have possibly predicted that bringing people back into the office in uncontrolled large groups would lead to lots of them having to take chunks of time off sick? You can see this affecting services too: I was delayed coming back from Brighton on Thursday after two trains in a row were cancelled owing to a lack of train crew.
Weeknote w/e 13th March 2022
This week I have mostly been working – which is not, of course unusual. We did manage a trip out to Sissinghurst yesterday to see our friend Jen, who I haven't had chance to meet up with since the start of the pandemic. There's a lot of friends who fall into that category and if you are one of them, I apologise and will get round to you soon!
Last weekend we ventured out to the local Curzon to see The Batman. It's long, but very, very good: a proper Batman detective story, rather than the gadget-laden superhero tale of Affleck's DC Universe version. And Robert Pattinson is always worth watching: I thought he was one of the highlights of Tenet, too.
Working on my writing workflow
I've wanted to write more for a while, but one thing which has been stopping me is that my writing workflow has been an absolute mess. I've been doing a little work this week to tighten it up.
I've started using GoodLinks to collect together all the things that I've read during the week and which I think are worth sharing. I've really struggled with how to do this well: Matter (my current offline reading app of choice) isn't great at collecting together stuff which might be quite short. I hate using bookmarks for this kind of thing. And Ulysses, which I used to use for a lot of writing, can collect links and has the advantage of using the iOS/MacOS share sheet but isn't really designed for it.
GoodLinks on the other hand, is perfect for this. Not only can it function as a simple, but decent, offline reader, it includes comprehensive tagging which makes content much easier to find. The way I'm working with it is to save everything that I might want to read later to it, short and long. If I read it later and decide I definitely want to write something about it, I add a star - and once I have written about it, or included it in a weeknote like this one, I remove the star so I know it's been used.
Posts at the moment usually start their life in one of two places: Roam Research, if it's an idea which needs a lot of fleshing out; or Typora if it's something I can start drafting straight away. Actually that's not quite true: drafts or some kinds of writing start their life on the Freewrite, particularly if I'm trying to just get down something out of my head quickly. Posts which begin in Roam get exported as flat Markdown files for editing and polishing in Typora, then once I'm happy with them they are put into Ghost or Wordpress.
Why Typora and not a Mac/iOS app like Ulysses or IA Writer? Partly that's because I want something which works across platform, but it's also because I now prefer to keep my writing as boring plain Markdown files in a simple folder structure, rather than an automatically synced iCloud location.
And Typora is lovely. It's simple, unfussy, and it has a neat system which hides the Markdown until you click in it, which means it's the best of both worlds between the "purist" editors which show you everything (messy) and the "simple" ones which hide everything (annoying if you want to edit the code). It's available for Mac, Windows (both Intel and ARM) and Linux and I recommend it.
Links
You might have noticed Apple released a new Mac. The Mac Studio which uses the M1 Ultra is nearly a kilo heavier than its M1 Max sibling. That's down to "a larger copper thermal module, whereas M1 Max has an aluminium heatsink" – in other words, twice the size equal twice the thermals.
Inside the Mac Studio is the M1 Ultra, which basically is a pair of M1 Max's connected using a super-fast bus. Anandtech has a lot of good coverage.
Ryan Britt pointed out on Twitter that the M1 Ultra appears to the Metal API as a single graphics process, which means if you're using Metal there's no need to concern yourself with rewriting any code in order to take full advantage of it.
I missed this when it was first announced, but Huawei are producing an e-ink tablet called the Huawei MatePad Paper. It looks like it ticks all the boxes: high quality e-ink screen with backlighting, ability to take notes with a pen, and it mounts as a drive when connected to a computer so you can just drag and drop files to it. Pricey – €499 has been cited in some places – but if it delivers it could be a really good device.
Substack announced an app, and Adam Tinling does not like it one bit. I agree with Adam, and it's one of the reasons that I moved my blog and email newsletter from Substack to Ghost. This put me in mind of Anil Dash's piece on the broken tech/content culture cycle: Substack has resolutely refused to think about anything but the most cursory content moderation, and yet wants to be seen as a platform, with all the future financial benefits that accrue from ownership of the audience.
Michael Tsai recently wrote about how Google search is dying, and I largely agree: Google has become much less useful than it used to be. I think this is down to a set of algorithm changes that the company made last year which dramatically favoured large general news sites and local new sites over specialised information sources. The rationale behind this was explicitlly about rewarding publishers, and supporting local sources. But the result has been two fold. First, it's crowded out higher-quality specialist information sources. Second, because local news sites are overweighted, it has rewarded them for writing generic SEO-driven articles, as their content ranks highly even for topic areas which aren't local to them. It's a real problem, but as with most thing Google-related, I expect them to rebalance it at some point.
This 14 year old post from Matt Webb reminded me just how broken the internet is. Follow the link to the formerly-excellent Atlas of the Universe, and you just got a for-sale parking domain. What is the solution to this?
Weeknote, w/e 23 May 2021
Greetings everyone, it’s been a while hasn’t it? There’s been quite a bit going on.
This week our dear old cat George finally passed on to the great mouse hunting fields in the sky. Kim took her to the vet to get her checked over before renewing her prescriptions to the wide variety of chemicals that were holding her together — she didn’t have a single organ that was entirely functional, but she was happy enough gently pottering around finding places for a snooze, so we had never had to take the tricky decision to have her put to sleep. And when you are a cat and get to 19 years of age, you deserve to go on as long as you’re not in pain.
Unfortunately, she didn’t survive the trip to the vets. After the check-up, she had what was probably a heart attack — she had had a heart murmur since she was five — and it was time to let her go on.
It’s odd not having a small creature around the place. Over the past few years she had moved from being a very independent little cat to wanting our company all the time, from hating too much human contact to wanting to be in your lap or poised on your shoulder. She’s much missed, already.
My health hasn’t been at its finest. I’ve been suffering from excessive tiredness during the day, and finally bit the bullet and saw a doctor about it a few weeks ago. Cue a referral to the sleep clinic, but routine tests also found that my blood pressure was high, and some blood tests found some minor anomalies which will need further investigation.
The worst part of the blood pressure tests is that I had to be strapped to a monitor for 24 hours, which every 20 minutes would go “beep… WHOOOSH… put… put… put… beep” as the pressure cuff inflated and checked how much of a THWACK my heart was using to slam blood down my veins.
Overnight it slowed to once an hour, but try sleeping when every sixty minutes your arm is squeezed tightly — it’s not fun, and really I barely slept at all. Then I was so tired on Saturday (no sleep, remember?) that I missed the trip into London we had originally planned.
We got out to the cinema and saw Nomadland which was brilliant. Before the last lockdown, going to the Curzon had become a weekly treat, seeing movies which we wouldn’t normally have seen — with no blockbusters around, cinema became a very different experience. The blockbusters are coming back, but I hope that the weekly small film habit will stick.
This week also saw the arrival of the new iPad Pro 12.9in, with its whizzy M1 processor which makes it embarrassingly faster than any computer in the house other than the similarly equipped Mac mini. And the Mac mini doesn’t have the incredible screen which this iPad has. In theory, you shouldn’t be able to notice much difference compared to the previous generation. In practice, it just looks better every time I look at it.
It will be interesting to see what Apple has in store at WWDC in a few weeks time, when we might finally see the improvements to iPadOS which make it more of an option as a Mac replacement, rather than a powerful but slightly haphazard cousin.
Weeknote: Sunday 4th April
Bank Holiday weekends are traditionally the time when everyone piles into a car and heads for the coast, or has a big party, or has a barbecue with friends and neighbours. This time around of course things are different. Although we are out of the first phase of lockdown, there are still limits on how many people we can meet, and where we can meet them. The shops and pubs remain shut. The grand commercial part of our social lives remains under firm lock and key.
However, keeping traditions alive we piled into the car and headed for the coast, a few tens of miles down to Margate. For those expecting mass disobedience and bad behaviour, you’re going to be disappointed. It was quiet: compared to a normal Easter Bank Holiday it had perhaps a tenth of the number of people. With temperatures reaching the giddy heights of 12 degrees we didn’t stay too long, but long enough to remind me how much I love the sight of the sea.
This week has been very much like every other week over the past year, a long parade of working from home, being at home, focusing on the home and avoiding contact with the rest of humanity beyond these four walls.
Last week, though, I was vaccinated. I went along to the Odeon cinema, where I’ve seen many a Marvel epic, and in the spot where I’ve waited for a screen to open while chomping away on the world’s worst nachos I waited to be shown through to have AstraZeneca’s wonder drug injected into my arm. It felt incredibly emotional: not so much because the end of this awful pandemic is in sight, although I’m glad enough for that, but for the kindness of the volunteers, spending free time guiding us around, for the pharmacist who injected me underneath the disused Pick N Mix display. Because collectively, we have done a wonderful thing.
What Boris Johnson doesn’t want to say is that the AZ vaccine exists and was deployed successfully so quickly not because “greed is good” but when the government invested hundreds of millions of our money into making it happen faster. That we can do this kind of thing through collective action rather than fierce individualism isn’t a lesson that we should forget.
There are so many other challenges that need this level of attention, most notably climate change. The way of life we have “enjoyed” (in places) over the past 150 years is over. The kind of globalised capitalism that has spent the last forty years ignoring climate change and kicking the can down the road is over. Either we choose to change it, or climate change changes it for us. Things are not going to be the same.
Related: I’m currently reading Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. Klein, not to be confused with the COVID-denying conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf, doesn’t pull any punches and that’s absolutely the right approach. The time for gentle remedies and the equivalent of soothing lullabies about how everything will be alright in the end is long past. It was long past six years ago, when Klein wrote the book, and it’s even more long past now. The nature of the catastrophe is us.
In more personal and less doom-laden news, I had another epiphany this week – I think it’s the time of year for them – in which I realised that I spend far too much of my time focusing on tools and apps and things and stuff rather than looking after my own wellbeing. So instead of the usual cavalcade of SMARTER goals I’ve decided to keep my attention on just two things: meditation, and re-establishing my practice; and morning pages, the three page long brain dump which clears my head of so much when I do it every day. That’s all. Just those things.
Anyway, that’s all for this week.
Weeknote: Sunday 21st March
Hello again. It's been a while, hasn't it? I wish that I could tell you that I have somehow had a lot on, but in fact, the opposite is true: I've had so little on apart from the grinding dullness of lockdown that I haven't found much to write about.
This week, almost exactly a year to the day of my getting COVID-19, I booked an appointment to get vaccinated against it. There's a neat symmetry to this. But more importantly what a feat of technology and science going from zero to multiple vaccines in a short period of time is. It's not likely COVID-19 will ever become an eradicable disease in the way smallpox is, but it will be a controllable one that isn't going to overwhelm health services and decimate the population, anywhere. That's something to celebrate.
This morning was also a reminder that I've been writing a personal diary more or less daily for over 11 years. This is something that the iPad changed for me. Before its release in 2010 I was an intermittent journaler, writing occasionally in Word or Google Docs to a lesser or greater degree, and very much off and on. After the iPad was released, and once the wonderful Day One app appeared, I started writing much more. There's something about the form factor of the iPad, even then, which encouraged the daily habit of writing for me.
Writing privately is always cathartic but what makes tools like Day One more valuable is their ability to surface what you were writing, how you were feeling and where you were over time. You start to see the repetitions and rhythms of your thoughts and your life and that is what allows you to grow and develop. When you see the same themes cropping up, year after year, you start to understand the habits and considerations that have become ingrained in you, filtering out (or at least better understanding) the shorter term worries and joys.
It also lets you see the periods of your life which became dominated by the events of family and friends around you and see how for a period of time they came to define a large part of who you were. For me, and for Kim, a large part of the last ten years was defined by caring for her mother and father and for my mother. My forties were defined by caring, death and grief. So strange to think that a decade of your life can vanish like that.
The pile of books that I want to read expands with every issue of the London Review of Books which arrives. Reading more is the yin to the yang of writing more:when I don't do one, I don't tend to do the other either. Whenever I reacquaint myself with one the other quickly follows. Of the many parallel lives that someone shaped like me is living in the multiverse, I sometimes wonder if the most content of all Ians is the one who reads and writes the most.
In the garden, one of our jackdaws -- dubbed the CORVID-19 because there's so many of them -- has discovered that if he perches just so on a particular part of the bird feeder, he can happily peck at the one containing the fat balls with their delicious crop of worms and seeds. And, of course, he's also worked out that pecking at bottom one will ultimately lead to all the other fat balls dropping down: like a bottomless soft drink at the restaurant, this is the gift that never stops giving. Meanwhile the blue tits, sparrows, long tail tits, robins and occasional woodpecker also come to feed, and are looking fat this year already. I suspect a crop of chicks will be getting well fed soon. The rabbits who feed on the lawn continue to mostly ignore me, and the healthy country foxes continue to patrol every now and then, making the rabbits scatter.
Our cat, George, continues to be old. At nearly 19 and with virtually every organ having a slightly different level of wonkiness, her hunting days are over and she has taken to sleeping in my armpit. She will even happily let me cover her with a blanket, which would have been anathema not that long ago. Old cats are often anxious -- every fibre of their instincts are telling them they are likely to be eaten soon -- and so they often tend to seek the company of their owners. George will now come and settle with me whenever I sit on a sofa.
In a week and a bit, the first quarter of the year will be over. How's yours going? Or, like mine, has it just… gone?