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.
Just why did a company owned by a former UKIP leader pay Andrew Bridgen £500?
Here's an interesting one. According to the register of members' interests, on 17th November 2020, prominent Tory MP Andrew Bridgen received £500 for writing four articles from a company called "Open Dialogus Ltd". "Open Dialogus" now has almost no presence on the Web.
It's website appears to have been taken offline earlier this year, and its Twitter account has vanished. Fortunately, the Web Archive exists, so you can get a flavour of the kinds of content it published: criticisms of lockdowns, support for various flavours of Trumpist nonsense...
And Andrew Bridgen, writing about "The Legacy of Greville Janner"...
"Open Dialogus" had no employees; its one and only filing showed it still managed to lose £30,000, yet still paid an MP £500 to write, or at least put his name to, four rather dull blog posts.
The sole director of Open Dialogus is Daniel William Emmerson, and it took a while to track him down. But it looks like he is, in fact, the former chair of UKIP North West Hampshire, who was suspended from the party after some kind of disagreement.
Since then - like most right winders, Emmerson has taken to YouTube. Here he is talking about Open Dialogus, and it certainly doesn't sound like he's changed his political views since his UKIP days (he openly called for Johnson to go because he's not right-wing enough):
Of course, Emmerson has plenty more videos on YouTube - and here he is saying that he knows Brigden and Mark Francois, and they are "the only true conservatives":
In other words, it appears Andrew Bridgen MP was paid £500 by a company run by a former UKIP local leader who promotes policies at odds with those of his party and doesn't actually consider any of his Conservative colleagues to be real conservatives (other than Mr Toad).
And - perhaps most importantly - there's another question: how did Bridgen come to know - and get paid by – a former UKIP local leader? Where did they, and presumably Francois, meet? Perhaps he can tell us.
The New Victoriana
In 1997 I wrote a piece for the long lost and much missed Rewired about a cover story from Wired. It was one of the first pieces I wrote which appeared online, and it's probably one of the angriest things I've ever written. Although reading the Wired piece back I think I might have been a bit harsh, I think I on to something.
Originally published on Rewired, July 7th 1997
Wired 5.07 arrived late in Britain, a couple of weeks after it had first hit the streets of San Francisco. When it did make it, when I finally got around to reading Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden's cover feature, my reaction was that if they wanted to print a piece of science fiction, why didn't they get Arthur C. Clarke to write it?
The biggest problem with the feature is that Schwartz, whose well-known views frame the article, only wants to think to one level of difficulty, and his determination to be optimistic makes him refuse to think beyond that. For example, technology will save the environment because "infotech... makes much less impact on the natural world." And yes, at the simplest level he's right -- the environmental impact of sending something digitally rather than via FedEx is lower.
But this ignores the environmental cost of creating the infrastructure in the first place. Where do all those plastics used in PCs come from? How much water is wasted and polluted in the process of PC and chip manufacture? Problems like these are simply ignored by Schwartz, who would presumably just wave his magic techno-wand and make them go away.
Another example is transportation; Schwartz sings the praises of the hydrogen cell. He ignores the technological problems that need to be solved -- fair enough, within the boundaries of this work of "speculation" -- but then claims that "the only waste product [is] water." Yes, at the end of the line -- from the car itself -- that's true. But what are the waste products of producing the hydrogen cells in the first place? What is the environmental impact of all that additional water in the atmosphere?
An even worse error is ignoring the impact of the simple production of more cars. When the combined populations of China and India are rich enough to afford the Western standard of a car or two (or more) per family, then you have an awful lot of steel, aluminium, and copper to find somewhere. What's the impact of the additional mining, smelting, more factories, and so on? These issues, the less obvious ones, are the most important of all -- and Schwartz ignores them.
To add insult to injury, the cover line, "We're facing 25 years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world," doesn't even reflect the feature. Schwartz's approach to Africa is typical of this; while the developed world gets ever richer, Africa gets biological warfare, ethnic conflict, and increased poverty (except, of course, in 'enlightened' South Africa). The only solution is the eventual intervention of the rest of the world.
Yeah, of course what Africa really needs is more intervention from white men. As if the West's interventions in Africa for the past 300 years haven't been damaging enough. Schwartz appears to see the problems of Africa in total isolation from the rest of the world, as if the exploitation of African resources by the West wasn't continuing to damage the African economy -- and, incidentally, provide us rich folk with some of the cheap commodities we take for granted. As if the problems of Africa could be cured by a quick dose of Western culture. As if "enlightened" multinational companies didn't continue to prop up oppressive dictatorships in order to ensure that business continues smoothly -- without the troublesome peasants complaining about the destruction of their livelihoods and environment in the race for "progress".
Schwartz is just as dumb about Europe, and is particularly naive about Britain. Yes, Britain's official unemployment rate is much lower than much of the rest of Europe's -- but that has more to do with the way that successive governments have massaged the figures, rather than any huge reduction in unemployment. School leavers, people on training schemes, anyone over 55 -- all are excluded from the figures, which makes our level look marvellous. A better measure might have been the OECD's economic rankings, which Britain has been sliding down for two decades, or that the poorest 10% of Britain's people are poorer in real terms than they were 20 years ago (while the richest 1% are much, much richer).
But Schwartz evidently doesn't keep up with European news. Far from Britain being the only "laggard" in the race towards the single European currency, it looks likely that no one will be ready for 1999. Even Germany and France, the two bulwarks of the Euro, are set to fail to meet the economic criteria for entry into the single currency. Schwartz would claim that this is due to their welfare state systems; others, perhaps less ideologically committed to the destruction of welfare states, might point to the crazy cost of pan-European initiatives like the Common Agricultural Policy.
But all that can be avoided by that old fashioned panacea, "strong leadership". Yes, the people of Europe must suffer when their welfare systems are dismantled, and if they complain strong leaders will push them forward. No matter what they want, this is good for them. This is where Schwartz starts to turn the stomach, but it gets worse.
The crisis in China caused by the difference in wealth between the city dwellers and the peasantry is avoided, by authorities "occasionally using draconian measures". This offhand way of describing torture and oppression sickens. I wonder whether Peter has ever read an Amnesty International report about China, where one of the favorite "draconian methods" is to insert an electric "crowd control baton" (read as "cattle prod") into the vagina or anus and turn it on, full blast?
Perhaps in the big picture world that Schwartz lives in, such oppression doesn't matter. After all, if you can convince yourself that utopia is just around the corner, that all we have to do is be optimistic, then it'll all be worth it in the end. Sure, this Long March will have some casualties, but what revolution is bloodless? The fact that, once again, the casualties will be the poorest and weakest people in the world doesn't appear to matter to him.
In the "Goofy Leftists Sniping at Wired" topic in The Well's Wired conference, I called Wired's revolution "a nasty Victorian counter-revolution". Schwartz' feature typifies that new Victoriana, with its attitude to Africa with its calls for "strong leadership", with its optimism about progress, and ironically, given the "global" nature of Schwartz' vision, its flag waving for a particular nation. Yes, the dear old USA, the country that's "first among equals" must lead the way into this techno-utopia, guiding those backward folks in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere.
Just as Britain saw itself as the guardian of the world's affairs in the last century, a shining beacon of civilization that would bring order and good conduct to the world, so the strong leadership of the US will enlighten us all.
Well excuse me, Peter, but some of us want no part of another age of Victorians. Some of us "just don't get it"; and don't want it, either.
Dipping my toes into Linux (again)
I'm no stranger to Linux. I went through a phase in the noughties of running it, partly inspired by the moves from Mark Pilgrim and Cory Doctorow, and for a while, I used a boxy fat Dell Inspiron running Ubuntu. That wasn't a great experience: Ubuntu was renowned at the time for its ease of use and friendliness to non-technical users, but all too often, I found myself having to dig into command lines and tweak drivers. Unlike Cory, I didn't have a hotline into Canonical.
I headed back to using the Mac because there were just too many rough edges around using Linux, and the applications available weren't as good as those I was used to. For example, I hated OpenOffice, which looked like an old and clunky version of Microsoft Word. In fact, most of the software I was using looked like something from the late 1990s, the time before user interface design was done by designers, rather than coders moonlighting with a copy of Paint.
Times change. An awful lot of what I do on a day to day basis can be done on Linux. The application I do most of my writing in (Typora) has a Linux version. Firefox has recently become my primary browser. Microsoft has a version of Teams for Linux, which means I can use a Linux machine for my day job.
When I recently bought a new Windows machine, I bought a ThinkPad X1 Carbon because I knew I wanted to try Linux out again, and it's a great laptop to run it on. You can buy the model that I purchased with Ubuntu pre-installed rather than Windows (and I was pretty tempted at the time). It's massively over-specified for a Linux laptop, with an 11th generation i7, 32Gb of RAM and a 1Tb SSD, but this means it's also a computer which could last me a long time, especially if I'm not being driven along by the endless hardware upgrade cycle which Microsoft and its partners would love to see you on.
With all that in mind, I decided that the time was right to dip my toes back into the world of Linux. So, after watching a few videos about the various distributions available, I downloaded and installed Zorin OS, a pretty Mac-like experience. It's also very beginner-friendly: it even includes an ingenious way of handling Windows applications by installing Wine and any required supporting files when you first click on a Windows installer.
The installation experience was as smooth as you would expect: Linux distributions are now mature and stable enough that installing on anything but peculiar hardware will be easy. It lets me quickly partition my drive, splitting it between Windows and Linux. It was then a quick task to customise the interface to look more Mac-like, install the applications I wanted, and away I went.
Then two days later, I changed my mind and decided I wanted to use the latest Long Term release of Ubuntu instead. Canonical issues a new long-term support version of Ubuntu every year, which guarantees five years of updates and support. LTS releases tend to be stable, which was also a selling point.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS uses the latest version of Gnome, which has an updated display engine which is smoother than previous versions. I also wanted to work on something as mainstream as possible. I was sold on using just Linux on my ThinkPad and getting rid of Windows altogether. The overall experience had been more than good enough, and I've fallen out of love with Windows 11. So I installed Ubuntu, taking the whole 1Tb SSD for it. Goodbye, Windows 11.
As I had expected, I've had no problems at all with hardware. In fact, some of the hardware that I had expected to have to do some fiddling and driver installation with worked immediately. For example, the fingerprint reader, which I used to log in to the machine, works just as well with Ubuntu as it did with Windows. My CalDigit Thunderbolt dock, which I use to connect to the webcam, display and a few other peripherals, also works perfectly.
The only place where I tripped up a little was adjusting the display to get the UI sized correctly. The display on my ThinkPad is a 16:10 panel which runs at 1920x1200. Running at the native resolution makes text and UI elements a little small; I enabled fractional sizing and bumped it up to 125%, the same as Windows runs. That works, but it leaves the text blurry - not enough to make it unusable, but annoying. The answer was to leave it running at 100% but turn on Large Text in the Accessibility options. The text was now crisp and large enough for me.
And that is all the interface tweaking I've done, other than moving the dock to the bottom and making it look a little more Mac-like, all using the built-in options with no additional software installed.
Operating systems should get out of the way and let you get on with the actual work you do. If you're worried about and twiddling with the OS, you're playing rather than producing. There's nothing wrong with that if you enjoy it. But for people who want to do some real work, the OS shouldn't be something you think about much.
So far, for me, Ubuntu is doing precisely that. I'm writing, not computing. I'm creating, not being bamboozled by a thousand different options. I'm delighted with it, so I really can't write much more about the experience. It's just been simple.
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.
On the prospect of Keir Starmer resigning
The pressure from Conservatives on Durham Police to investigate Keir Starmer - and their jubilation when Durham agreed - perfectly illustrate why the Tories have lost their way on strategy. There is no outcome of this where their position is improved.
This isn't hard to plot because there are only two things that could happen. So let's take what they probably think is the best first: Starmer is given a fine.
What happens then is that Starmer resigns, and one of a whole swathe of capable leaders takes his place: Cooper, Rayner, and probably half a dozen others. Labour is the party which acts with honour and cleans its own house, while the Tories refuse to follow the laws they set and don't accept the consequences.
The Tories, though, obviously think Starmer won't resign. He will - because it's the right thing for the party and the country. The Tories are so used to having a leader who cares only for himself they don't believe any other leadership is possible. Think about that for a minute.
Starmer resigning loses some Labour voters. But they don't go to the Tories: they drift to the Lib Dems, and as we saw at the local elections, that's a real threat to the Tories in their heartland. The Lib Dems are the more significant threat in many Tory seats, and Starmer being fined would aid them, not the Tories.
The other option is Starmer is cleared. In this case, the investigation has strengthened Labour even more. No need to dwell on how bad this would be for the Tories.
What all this shows is that Tory strategists are just not thinking ahead. They are only thinking of the next few covers of the Daily Mail, Telegraph and Sun - all of which will move on to the cost of living reasonably quickly either way, either hammering the government (Mail, Sun) or simply lying about it (Telegraph AKA Pravda).
The best Tory strategy would be to dump Johnson. Still, the party has become so infiltrated by extremists because of Brexit that it, unlike Labour, has few talents to turn to. So they are, in political terms, fucked.
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, 24th April 2022
A brief note this week: we have only just got back from Oxford so there’s not much time to write.
We were in Oxford in part to see Jesse Darling: No Medals No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford. It’s on for another week, and if you’re in the area I’d really recommend it. Darling’s work is playful, but also fragile, beautiful and sometimes uncomfortable too. Gravity Road, the biggest piece which dominates an entire room, has notes of flight, escape and roller coasters.
Reading
A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. The fact that I read this in less than a day tells you two things: One, it’s short; Two, it’s an absolutely fantastic book. I’ll have more to write about it in due course once I’ve sat on it but this is a story which is filled with delight and wonder and optimism and it’s probably exactly what you need to read right now.
Watching
Dune again. It’s probably sacrilege to say that Villeneuve has created something that easily exceeds its source material but he has with this. There’s hardly a frame in it which isn’t some large degree towards perfection. And boy are there some good battles.
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: 3rd April 2022
It's a week since I tested positive for Covid which means it's been a week when not much has happened other than a large amount of lying in bed and feeling sorry for myself. Having done exactly that on Monday, I tried doing some work on Tuesday, only to collapse back into bed in the afternoon. Friday was the first day where I could actually get through an entire day without feeling so drained that I had to retire and I still feel ill. Bearing in mind that I am vaccinated, boostered and have had it before I dread to think what I would have been like without the essential jabs. And let no one tell you it's "just like a cold now", because it isn't. It's like the worst flu you've had, but lasting longer and being far more infectious.
All of which means I'm in isolation, possibly until Wednesday. Legally of course I could just completely ignore the fact I'm infectious and wander around maskless giving every vulnerable person I meet a disease, but I have more morals than the government so I'm not going to do that.
Annoyingly the enforced isolation comes at precisely the moment I was feeling like emerging from the wintering I've been going through – getting the bike out, travelling more (we are supposed to be down in Brighton next week, but with Kim also now isolating there's no guarantee we can). The past few weeks I have finally started to feel like life is getting moving again, and enjoying it.
Being sick, and so being unable to do the amount of energy-sapping meetings (virtual) as normal also meant I had time to do more writing, and it's underlined for me how much I miss it. It's really only in the past five years that my work has moved from writing words to doing spreadsheets/presentations/management and having some space and time to write made a huge difference to how I feel. All of which means I need to carve out time (and protect it) for writing.
Some of that writing – shock, horror – was actually fiction, which is an area that I don't normally delve into at all. It started with a simple writing prompt and ended up as a solid couple of thousand words in a couple of hours. I'm not saying they are good words, but they're words.
Reading...
Astounding Days by Arthur C Clarke. This is Clarke's "science fictional autobiography", packed full of anecdote about the mid-century science fictional London and his own work. I've been listening to a lot of Clarke short stories lately, as I have all five volumes of them via Audible, and they're great to fall asleep to. I have heard the first half of "The Sentinel" many times: its end, less so.
Writing...
What will it take to change people's minds about Brexit?
Watching...
Picard: it's getting good.
Meanwhile, on the Internet...
Terry Pratchett pockets a palmtop PC: A short video clip of Terry being interviewed about libraries caught my eye and thanks to some super-sleuthing from Rob Manuel and Jay Grooby I was able to identify the device that he was using to write – an Olivetti Quaderno from 1992. This was a pretty unique mini-laptop which had no pointing device at all, and a really weird placement for the numeric keypad. It also has one of the most weird promo videos of technology history, which is an hour long. The first minute is entirely composed of a women's gym class and the camera's focus is mostly the instructors breasts. If any Italian speakers can tell me why, I'd love to know.
Neil Cybart wrote about how Apple is now in a league of its own, and looking at tech at the moment it's hard to disagree. A great example of this is Universal Control which is an absolute game-changer, and something that only Apple can do thanks to the degree of work they put into underlying technologies and integration.
Jason Snell reviewed the Apple Studio Display and like everyone else loved the display while hating the webcam. Apple really messed up with the software for this.
What will it take to change people’s minds on Brexit?
I do wonder what the level of poverty and misery is that Brexit supporters are willing to inflict on their fellow citizens before they start to think “hang on, I might have made a bit of an error here”.
I suspect the answer is “quite a lot” for a couple of reasons. First, for many, winning the referendum was the first time in maybe a decade they had felt like they had any control over their lives, and were on the “winning” side. Once you have had that feeling, it takes a lot to shift you away from the position of winning: you’re emotionally attached to it in a way which is very, very deep.
Second, though: Brexit was largely delivered by the old, the conservative (small c) and less well-educated. None of those demographics are known for changing their minds often.
What’s also interesting is how the number of people who believe we were right to leave is remarkably consistent. Yes, as of today, 49% believe we were wrong to leave compared to 39% who believe we were right, and the gap has been widening since the middle of last year, but the gap widened in 2020 to about the same amount and then bounced back.
I would love to understand more about the factors moving those polls, because I think it’s almost certainly less obvious than most people think. But it’s clear that there is a rump of probably around a third of the country which believes Brexit was right no matter what the consequences they have seen so far, and are likely to believe the same in the future.
While it’s tempting to think that people are sick of hearing about it and tone down the anti-Brexit rhetoric (I’m looking at you Keir) it’s clear that the underlying attitudes and issues which are driving that 39% are going to be influencing British politics for a long time.
“We survived”
You see a lot of this: “we survived”. It’s called “survivorship bias”, and it’s the error of focusing on those who got past an event while ignoring those who did not. It’s VERY common with people who want to make out “the good old days” were great.
The classic example is in war, of course. You’ll have seen this image on various Twitter threads, from WW2 research: The bullet holes on returning aircraft show areas where a plane could take damage and still fly well enough to return safely to base. Engineers were smart enough to then reinforce the other bits. Clever engineers!
So how about our survivor of poverty? Well we all know that mortality rates for children under 5 have fallen dramatically, as you can see from this graph.
In 1800 in Britain, a whopping 329 children failed to survive their first five years of life. Today that number is four. And the progress is global: since 1990, the number of child deaths per 1000 has fallen from 93 to 37 - still far too high, but a huge improvement in a short space of time.
What does this have to do with Sylvia and her indoor toilets? Well, as you can see in the graph above child mortality rates declined massively from 1900 - 228 per 1000 - to 1950 (44). So those post-1950 boomer births benefitted massively from improved sanitation, vaccination, and living conditions. When Harold MacMillan said in 1957 “you’ve never had it so good”, he wasn’t lying.
But this dramatic fall between 1900 and 1950 masks a further one since: the child mortality rate in the UK is now… 4. Since 1950, we have reduced the number of children dying in early childhood by 90%.
So yes, Sylvia remembers a happy, healthy childhood. But that’s partly because if weren’t healthy you were much less likely to survive to the age of five. And of course, you aren’t around to talk about it today.
Time lies
(Thanks to Lee Woodard for the title!)
This kind of attitude is only possible if you either didn't live through "the good old days" or now have lost your marbles. I was born and grew up in a council house. It wasn't a bad area when I was growing up, it was definitely rough round the edges. When I did my CSE social studies and went on a court trip, it wasn't that surprising that one of our neighbours was up for soliciting. But it was classic working class – as in, most people were working, because jobs existed. Thatcher changed that, but I digress.
When the houses were built, they were new and shiny and everyone wanted to be in them. They were replacements, further out of town, for the slums in the west end of Derby. And those were proper slums: back to back terraces in awful conditions built in the 18th/19th century where disease was rife, plumbing was non-existent, and there was a pub on every corner. When Marx and Engels wrote about the condition of the English working class, they could have been writing about Derby's west end.
The estate I was born on though was new, and offered a huge upgrade in living standards. There was running water in every house. Actual plumbing. A bath! Three separate bedrooms, a living room and kitchen. A front garden for roses, and a back garden to grow your vegetables. Compared to where my father had grown up, this was luxury. But: there was no central heating. No double glazing, and no insulation to speak of. There was a coal fire in the living room, and the family spent all their time there. There was a toilet – but it was outside, built into the house in a weird arrangement which meant you had to leave the house by the back door and go back in to the toilet. For the first ten years of my life, the toilet was outside, and you get used to checking if the water is frozen before you do a poo. The cold is still something I can feel. All I have to do is close my eyes and that cold comes back.
It was better than working class people had before. But compared to today? It was shit. Anyone who reminisces about then as "the good old days" is deluding themselves. Today I sit in a nice house with double glazing and if I want a pee, I can do it in comfort and warmth. I'm not huddled around a fire on freezing mornings trying desperately to get warm, because the blankets – no duvets – never kept you warm enough at night.
People like "Buy British" and others who harp on about the good old days would last about five minutes if you took away all their creature comforts. As of course would I - and that's a good thing!
There is this weird attitude amongst idiots like him (and we all know it is a him) that somehow increased prosperity and better living conditions is a bad thing, that people "don't know they're born". It's nonsense of course. Their parents will have said the same thing of them.
And of course it's all rosey-tinted bullshit. I grew up with the National Front marching on the streets, gay bashing being run of the mill, black people suffering terrible racism. Women being raped and assaulted and it never being reported. Paedophilia being so unremarkable that "he got a 14 year old pregnant and ran off" was a common topic of conversation (literally everyone knew a bloke who had done something like that). Families all had secrets. The food was shit too, and I could write a hole essay on how food in he old days was crap.
There are no good old days. We have been lucky enough to live in a period where the standard of living has consistently improved, where the basic necessities of life of have been met in ever-better ways. And people like Buy British, with their Rosie-tinted bullshit, conspire in excusing the Tories (for it is them) who are actually now taking us backwards, in every respect. Back to an era when "men were men and women were grateful". Back to shit housing, poverty food (or no food). Back to when being gay was something you kept silent, or you'd suffer the consequences. Back to black people and women knowing their place and being grateful to white middles aged blokes. Well, Buy British and his chums can all just do one. I don't want that world back, because I'm old enough to remember it with clearer eyes than theirs.
One more thing. I've reminded by posts like these of the wonderful scene in Neil Gaiman's Sandman episode "Men of good fortune", where an old man in 1489 is complaining about how chimneys and handkerchiefs are making people soft. Plus ça change…
Paul Thurrott is very unhappy
Paul Thurrott is really unhappy with the current direction of Windows (subscriber only link, and I think he has a lot of good points:
"Naturally, this made me think of Windows, and of Microsoft’s incessant, slow boil moves to forever ruin its user experience with crapware bundling, forced telemetry tracking, and, yes, advertising. These are the times that try one’s soul, as Thomas Paine once opined of an admitted more serious historical crisis. But I feel the pain all the same. And as time goes on, and Windows 8 becomes Windows 10 becomes Windows 11, it just gets worse."
I think there's a lot to like about Windows 11, but after using it extensively for a while I tend to agree with Paul. I like Windows 11's simplicity and the way that's stripped away a lot of what I see as legacy cruft in favour of something that looks clean and modern. But Microsoft being Microsoft, you can already see the temptation to put in ads, prod you towards using Bing, make you love Microsoft News (no really that's not going to happen guys).
You can see how this happens: every team in Microsoft sees how it can "add value" to Windows and without really strong leadership this turns into a mess. It seems like the company has learned nothing since the days which Steven Sinofsky is describing in his excellent "Learning by shipping" series of emails.
An interesting little app for quick capturing on the iPhone - either text, audio or scanned text quickcapture.xyz
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?
Flotsam
I wrote this piece 17 years ago for fun as part of a series about the life I was living at the time. Some of the elements of it had completely slipped my mind. I'm publishing it now basically to put it to bed. It's waiting a long time.
On beaches, the sea delivers its bounty. Driftwood, old bits of net, occasionally even valuable items are washed up from the oceans on to the edges where sea meets land. Yet wherever there’s a seaside town, the process is reversed: human beings are washed up from the land on to the edges of the sea, attracted by casual jobs, easy sex, or the sense of freedom that inevitably comes from living by what always looks like an infinite ocean.
Wonderboy is a classic example of the kind of person that washes up in Brighton, the most glorious and transient of all British seaside towns. Escaping from a semi-feudal village in the East Midlands, that hinterland of the imagination where I too was born and bred, she moved down to live with her girlfriend after spending far too long as the real only gay in the village. That’s a common story, here. Although few other Brighton refugees have ever snorted drugs off the back of a man wearing a woman’s Tesco uniform, at least to my knowledge.
What’s less common is what happened next. She split from her girlfriend, and, returning from holiday, Wonderboy found the locks changed, her stuff in the street, and (worst of all) her prized sofa’ssofas sold. Other people would at this point have fled to parents or friends back home, but like many of those who wash up here, Wonderboy was made of sterner stuff. Instead, she slept on the beach, sharing cans with drunks; opened squats and lived with odd South American men; and sold henna tattoos to the tourists to make enough money to buy the essential Marlborough Reds.
We met through mutual friends, andfriends and cemented that friendship over pints of cider at the Earth and Stars, Doctor Brighton’s, and the Marlborough, followed by early mornings dancing like idiots at Revenge. Asking her to share a flat with me was so obvious I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to ask her if, in the vernacular, she was up for it.
She said to me once that I pulled her out of the gutter, but that’s bullshit. She needed a place to live, I needed a flatmate after discovering that living on your own is very, very boring, and we got on. The person who pulled her out of the gutter was herself, because she was always ready to move on, to jump up whenever there was a chance there to be taken. All she needed was an opening. All I did was offer a chink of light.
The irony of it is that our council has actively sought to destroy the kind of peripheries that attract people like Wonderboy, in favour of the smooth, slick, New Labour vision of a family-friendly, everyone-friendly cosy little whitewashed picket fenced Islington-On-Sea. But what they don’t understand is that, no matter how many overpriced new “apartment developments” (“CITY LIVING! BY THE SEA!”) they approve, no matter how many times they try and push out the drunks, the druggies, the detritus, they’ll always fail. Because, at the end of the day, those looking for somewhere to find a little freedom will always wash up here. It’s the sea, you see.
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.