Years ago, the consistency of Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade changed and glucose-fructose syrup appeared in the list of ingredients. I was going to share the uplifting news that they’ve gone back to using normal sugar now, but the website lists glucose-fructose syrup and I don’t think it’s out of date, I think it means they’ve regressed to using the cheaper cornstarch-derived gloop again. The sainted Wayback Machine confirms that sugar was listed as recently as April 2025 and as long ago as December 2023, so I must savour the last good jar in my cupboard.

(I know that the original marmalade was originally made by Frank’s wife Sarah-Jane, but it was named after Frank’s shop where it was sold.)

Spent half of the week in Liverpool. The train home was delayed by 90 minutes, and I was pleased to have hit the Delay Repay jackpot. But they’ve only awarded me £6, because the system/a person is confused by split ticketing and has also inexplicably mistaken one of my single tickets for a return; I can appeal, but maybe it’s better for UK plc if I don’t bother.

When I was a small child, we were shown around a local church by the churchwarden who showed us his staff/stave/wand, a sort of ornate stick. Apparently, as well as having a ceremonial use, it could be used to break up fights or to prod sleeping churchgoers. Later, in a classroom I noticed a long wooden pole with a hook on the end, and I deduced that the teacher must be a part-time churchwarden, but no it was just a tool for opening high windows. What a funny story.

Last week I went to Screwfix for the first time. (Quick explainer: Screwfix is like a more intimidating version of Argos, where you can buy various hardware from a catalogue.) Recall the lamp I broke last year, which I fixed with glue but it soon came apart again, but the broken part turns out to be a standard part that you can just buy. After buying the part, I realised it was the wrong size: I’d mixed up GU10 and MR16, I might have yelled “we’re better than this” at myself. (Screwfix don’t actually sell the right-sized part.)

A little work. It dawned that sometimes it’s better to have one big database server than two of half the size, not just because of complicatedness but because of the benefit of one big shared memory.

As a treat, I wasted some time trying to move this blog from Cloudflare Pages. A roadblock – to that, and to previous abortive goes at using static site generators other than Jekyll – is that I’m locked in to the contraversial way that this blog post’s URL is /2025/10/week-345 but the file on the server is /2025/10/week-345.html, and why should my cherished URLs have to end in a slash?

To London’s glittering Union Chapel.

Left my AirPods charging case on the train – yes, I forgot to take all my personal belongings with me; if only the noise cancellation was less effective, I might have heard the announcement about remembering to do that. Fortunately, AirPods cases famously have some features to help you find them: I might have gotten a “AirPods case left behind” notification, if only my phone wasn’t in Do Not Disturb mode; the next day, by the power of the Find My network, I could see they were somewhere in the train station, but I dumbly filled in the online form as instructed on the website instead of going there immediately in person.

After a day or so of nothing, the pin on the map moved to an industrial estate in Welwyn Garden City, apparently in the car park of a plumbers’ merchants – had a travelling plumber accidentally been given my AirPods case? No, Greater Anglia outsources its lost-property warehousing to Pakex, a supplier of cleaning and packaging supplies with a warehouse on that industrial estate. (They also sell railway-ish things like whistles and dispatch batons.) The location isn’t that precise, but I think it was in a van outside and later moved inside the building.

What the fuck does “granular”, as in the phrase “more granular”, mean? Because to me, granules are coarser than a fine powder, but finer than coarse lumps – you know, granulated sugar is between icing sugar and sugar cubes on the spectrum of granularity. If I ever use that word, please know that I’ve been replaced by an impostor.

I was haunted by some more beeps, and this time it couldn’t be people exhaling carbon dioxide – it had to be another appliance with a hitherto undiscovered ability to make noise. (I remember when I was small, somewhere in the single figures, the unexpected delayed gratification of discovering that a toy lorry had a hidden switch that would make some lights flash and possibly a sound.)

I wondered if it was a smoke alarm trying to warn of a low battery or something. Shamefully, I tried having ChatGPT interpret the colour of the little status indicator light, but I was told I’d need to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus to upload pictures of all three alarms in the place, and I decided I’d rather burn to death. No, but seriously, instead I read the manual like a proper person, and pleasingly the red, green and amber LEDs are separate like traffic lights so it doesn’t matter if you’re not sure of the colour.

Anyway, it was the kitchen scales.

🎦 One Battle After Another (2025). ! Shamefully, I had to pop out for a wee at, to be fair, as opportune a moment as any.

Last week I saw a James Bond pastiche advertising an electric motor car that’s a sort of cousin of a Volvo, in which Alexander Skarsgård’s accent was slightly uncanny. I checked, and it was exactly a year since I’d been distracted by the same accent in Lee (2023). Maybe that’s just his voice, I’m sorry for bringing it up.

I’ve been mostly listening to the What Did You Do Yesterday? podcast, so much so that I’ve even ordered the Lululemon underpants that feature heavily, although I haven’t heard the episode in which they’re introduced yet. What Gary Lineker has for breakfast will shock you (but also I wondered if, as he owns a rival podcast empire, he was deliberately boring on his episode). Unfortunately, now my internal monologue has taken to narrating my humdrum life as if I’m being interviewed on WDYDY the next day, which is ridiculous but also annoying and boring.

📺 How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge). I’m distracted by Alan’s L322 Range Rover with clear glass, in a lovely paint colour, which I reckon might be Coogan’s own car – connoisseurs agree that newer models have succumbed to enshittifcation, and the more common gangster-spec tinted windows make it look too much like a van. On the one hand, such tastefulness feels a bit out-of-character, but on the other, caring about the opacity of glass is quite Partridge.

Read something about the beloved actor, broadcaster and national treasure Tony Robinson being aloof to some front-of-house staff. It must be hard, as a well-known person, to be on your best tits-and-teeth behaviour all the time – just the other day, someone held a door open for me and my “thank you” came out so quietly that I must’ve seemed like an ungrateful knob, thank goodness I’m an ordinary nobody – but it sounded about right because I’d misread it as the hateful ruffian Tommy Robinson. Which raises the question of how many confused people have conflated the two different men etc.

Happy October. I haven’t switched on the heating, or upgraded to macOS Tahoe yet.

You know those refillable natural deodorants like Fussy and Wild. They admirably avoid the single-use plastic of normal deodorants, but there’s also some hard-headed business bastardry at play: after buying one of one brand’s reusable cases, you’re likely to remain a loyal customer because the other brands’ refills are a slightly different size and shape etc.

I had a subscription to Fussy, so they’d post me a box of refills every few months. I kept pausing my subscription, not wanting to build up a stockpile, but then the drawbacks of my lean, just-in-time approach to armpit hygiene caught up with me: I tried to resume my subscription, my payment card expired, the website is a bit horribly broken, delivery is slow (fair enough, it shouldn’t need to be fast) and I soon ran out of deodorant. Never mind, many supermarkets sell refills these days.

In a fit of impulsiveness, I tried the other brand, Wild. The Wild refillable case feels nicer, and they’ve helpfully printed some how-to-refill instructions on its bottom, which I wished I’d had when I first tried to use the Fussy one. I don’t know which smells better.

I appear to have shingles, which I’ll take over the bedbug bites I thought I had last week. It feels like an embarrassingly Bolsonaro-coded disease, but a mild case of it, and I don’t feel much worse than usual, just sore and tired which I could kid myself is the result of strenuous work.

Chana masala

Some work. The coordinates (49.766807, -7.557159) crop up from time to time – there’s a bus stop in Leicestershire there, sometimes served by Edinburgh trams and buses – and I’ve only just noticed why. It’s a location west and a bit south of the Isles of Scilly, and it’s the false origin of the Ordnance Survey British National Grid, what some are calling the British Null Island.

(For a while there was a weather buoy at Null Island [where the equator meets the prime meridian]. Could we put a little something, an upside-down nylon flag, at “our” equivalent?)

For some time I’ve been puzzled by the coordinates in Highland Council Buses’ “network data”, coordinates like (0.843686, 0.265425). Today I finally realised that they’re eastings and northings, from off of the aforementioned grid, but divided by 1,000,000, of course they are.

My back has become itchy. I think it’s acne or “bacne” – it’s aberrantly hairy back there – or a reaction to some different laundry detergent, but I slightly worried that it might be bedbugs. There’s no evidence of bedbugs, but just in case I the-opposite-of-postponed (fast-tracked?) the changing and washing of some bedding, not that it would make any difference. Isn’t it interesting that there are many more synonyms for “postpone” than for the opposite.

Happy new Apple operating systems. My chosen watch face was rudely replaced with a different one with some crude number-shaped blobs of sputum, translucent like the window on the envelope containing your divorce papers. But then I rebooted my watch, what a sentence, and it went back to normal.

I’ve been trying making hummus a bit. Someone wise once said you should always at-least-double the amount of garlic (and onions if applicable) when following a recipe, well I did and it was maybe a bit too much garlic.

Some months ago, I was walking along a pavement when a man bicycling in the opposite direction held out his hand to signal that he was turning left, or was it to high-five me? I didn’t return the high five, but I wish I had, and I want to try it the next time I’m signalling left near some pedestrians.

Sunday. To London on the early morning FlixBus coach. I could have paid an extra £4 to reserve the seat next to me, but I hadn’t, and after an hour it was occupied by a brazen manspreader. The driver drove exuberantly and was playing a too-short playlist of bad music too quietly.

In London I found a blocked pub toilet. With no hesitation, I rolled up my sleeve and reached into the horrible water to unblock it just as I have before (seemingly always in London) but, for the first time, I was not successful. Not having a plunger or anything to hand, I left it and gave my hand and arm a thorough wash.

I knew I should buy something to make up for not having left the toilet in a better state than I’d found it – I promise I hadn’t caused the blockage, but I’d made it slightly more gross. But at the bar there was a queue, you know, a single-file line, which for some reason feels like a modern aberration in which I can’t bring myself to partake, but I daren’t rudely ignore the queue either.

(A Month of Sundays for MAP (a))

The letterbox motion sensor idea may be a busted flush – the sensor is intended for sensing motion in big rooms, not little letterboxes, and I think the letterbox is too far away and the signal won’t go through so much wall and metal. What a waste of having things shipped back and forth overseas.

Some things I am grateful for: I am free of seasonal lurgy, and I can make a passable shortcrust pastry. Twice I have tried to make a small apple crumble but accidentally made a pie.

To the Three Bean Salad live show in London. Days later, I finished catching up with listening to all the free episodes of their podcast, a process which sent me a bit loopy at times and affected my dreams.

In London, of course, the tube was on strike ✊ I was happy to walk, would have anyway, although it was rainy and I was wearing biodegradable shoes that are dangerously slippery in the wet. And umbrellas are an eye-poking menace, but maybe my real problem is I’m jealous of everyone who manages to use one without it blowing inside out – it seems that you must be involved in golf or investment banking to get a really good umbrella.

🎦 The Roses (2025). A waste of this month’s free* cinema ticket but never mind.

I think the custard slice might be the new gooseberry fool. It’s some custard between two layers of pastry, the toppermost of which has some pretty sweet icing on it. Sometimes only a “cream slice” is available, which I refuse to be associated with. Sometimes it’s called a vanilla slice, which reminds me of the confusion about where (if anywhere) the apostrophe goes in millonaire’s shortbread, which can be avoided by calling it a caramel square.

Of course I’ve never posted anything on TikTok – I have a face for radio and a voice for print – but I sometimes look at things on it. (I recommend following the fellow who reviews tinned fish, and, believe it or not, Michael Barrymore.) This week, chillingly, I was banned … for an hour. As I’ve never posted anything, I guess I was consuming content with such listless voracity that some systems flagged me as an abusive robot, which is hard to believe.

I bought some boots a while ago, and soon they’ll be in season, and they need breaking in. It’s often recommended to do this by wearing them for light duties around the house, but they feel too heavy for that – the clomping might disturb the neighbours downstairs. So now I have some blisters.

I’m surprised by the difference in quality between two different brands of blister plaster, or maybe being stored for too long makes them less sticky – as I’ve found by way of things falling off the walls, this is a problem with 3M Command™ hooks, damage-free hanging my arse.

I’ve nothing against autumn, but the passage of time gives me the willies and I feel like summer’s slipping through my fingers and I’m wasting my life. But after a good night’s sleep I feel much better and the dread is forgotten.

After hearing some podcast nerds gushing about YoLink smart sensors for detecting water leaks and fridge temperatures etc, I bought a hub and a motion sensor to put in the letterbox, to try to detect when letters are delivered and/or stolen. Today, I wasted some time being frustrated, and it turns out that I’d got an “EC” (European) hub and a “UC” (American) sensor, and the two aren’t compatible of course, because of different wavelengths and stuff, so that’s a pity. (Thanks to a years-old Reddit comment for being a bit more helpful than the proper documentation.)

I’ve become a bit fond of Vichy Catalan, a brand of slightly salty sparking water. I know, I hate what I’ve become, it’s so wasteful compared to the convenient supply of safe-to-drink water that comes out of the tap in the kitchen, and the heavy glass bottles may be even worse than plastic. But I suppose there are worse vices, it’s cheaper than wine, and I’m not getting a fucking SodaStream.

🎦 The Naked Gun (2025).

I also watched The Thursday Murder Club. I know, the grey goo ubiquity of Richard Osman, the second-hand embarrassment of remembering his old tweets calling for a witty, kind centrist party and a British Beto O’Rourke, and so on. The cosy crime film didn’t have my full attention, and the bit I experienced as audio, while I was looking at an oven or something, was interestingly more unbearably twee than the rest which I watched with my eyes. It makes me wonder if that’s the problem with The Archers.