Monday: getting off the train from Folkestone to London, gazed admiringly at the French touring bicyclists with their Rapha kits and immaculate touring bicycles. I wished I was them, the preening tossers. Had some time to kill and walked around leafy London with an inflamed lower leg.

The Zedwell Hotel is rather a bit of marketing genius – it’s not just a collection of windowless cells in a former underground car park, they’re distraction-free cocoons that are actually optimised for a good night’s sleep. I didn’t know about the building’s history at the time, but come to think of it, it explains why stumbling lost along the corridors felt so much like a poorly lit version of the The Parking Garage episode of Seinfeld.

Notwithstanding the wastefulness of washing so many towels and bedsheets so often, a hotel is probably Better than a car park. But given that the fellow who owns it is a bit of an arse, I will probably never return.

Tuesday: was mildly inconvenienced by whatever they were filming in Trafalgar Square. Missed a train, and the later train got held up and eventually curtailed by signalling problems, stranding us in Stowmarket. But the shared experience engendered a sense of camaraderie and/or blitz spirit, and people started talking to each other. A pretty boring story, sorry.

Hot cross buns 2025. In a bizarre bit of wanton disorganisation, I had to go back and forth to the shop to get flour, then a lemon, then table salt. (Actually I used the salt grinder instead of going for the third time, which was fine, well the salt was quite coarse but you know what I mean.)

A long Easter weekend in the Liverpool City Region. Got sunburnt in Bootle, and stuff.

One of the best things about the bubble of AI bollocks is the aggressiveness of the crawlers they use to steal content to “train” their models, and yet some of us have the temerity to complain about them generously load-testing our websites for free.

For a while I was using robots.txt to discourage these creeps from scraping my things, but it dawned on me that a more effective sabotage is actually to let them crawl as much of my useless rubbish as they like, and it’s arrogant to think otherwise.

A long weekend in Folkestone. Lovely, but maybe the splendid weather is skewing my judgment.

Somewhat illogically, caught the number 10 bus from Ashford, a slow meander that I warmly recommend. (Embarrassingly, I asked for a ticket to “folk stone”, even though everyone knows it rhymes with Hindolveston, Fulmodeston, Gorleston etc. No one appeared to notice the boob, but I will carry the shame for a while.)

The hotel. There’s a sea view! I didn’t pay for a sea view, so I can’t complain that it’s a sea view obscured by bird shit and blown double glazing. They serve breakfast cereal out of hoppers, so it can’t be a Top Class Hotel. At least some of the money they’ve saved by not updating the decor for 40 years has been passed on to the consumer in the form of lower prices.

Joan as Police Woman (Folkestone Quarterhouse). Not quite worth going to Folkestone for, but Folkestone was worth going to Folkestone for.

Happy Django 5.2, the latest and greatest version of the web framework I chose on a whim ten years ago. Among the sweet improvements there’s a bug I found, which was an engrossing nerd-snipe, and I’m kicking myself for not bothering to engage with the pre-release (alpha, beta and release candidate) versions so I’d’ve noticed the bug earlier, but never mind.

My body clock has fallen impractically out of whack again. I think if I travelled to Brazil it would be great and I wouldn’t experience any jet lag, but… I’ll snap out of it, I’m sure.

To Rachel Fairburn’s show at the arts centre, a good decision. She walks on to She’s Electric, the first ten seconds of which, incidentally, became a slight I-wouldn’t-say-obsession recently and might be the best thing ever invented in Manchester, forget graphene.

So much wisdom in this conversation with Sam “Cambo” Campbell. “When you go for a ride with a cowboy, you might fall off the horse, but don’t forget the sunsets you saw along the way.”

Watched the two thirds of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy I hadn’t seen before. Obtaining and eating the corresponding flavours of Cornetto ice cream cone dessert (raspberry, classic) is probably a thing people do, but as previously discussed that’s hard.

I might try adding some meaning to my humdrum life by trying every supermarket gooseberry fool.

Gave myself a haircut, and gave the (bustimes.org) website a sort of one too. The urge sneaks up on you and the lead time for appointment-only hairdressers is too long, although yes I know plenty of barbershops allow walk-ins – one I saw had illustrated this with a picture of Christopher Walken, but I can’t remember if the text beneath read “Walkens welcome” or “no Walkens”.

In the following days, I found and snipped some wisps of hair that had escaped the buzz of the electric clippers, and similarly there were bits of website that needed further attention to look right depending on the size of the viewport and the content.

Roll on April: not only is it the start of a new financial year, but it’s permission to turn the page on the calendar on the wall. So is every month, but this month I tried to erase something I’d pencilled in and the rubber made a terrible smear over the middle of month, and I’m looking forward to not having to look at it any more. (I just peeked at April and, troublingly, the picture – it’s the Buses magazine calendar, so it’s a picture of a Duple Dominant II–bodied 1982 Leyland Tiger – has acted as a sort of carbon paper, leaving a faint carbon copy of the month before’s appointments – mainly where I’ve ticked off each sans cans day of Lent.)

My e-reader wasn’t connecting to the internet, so I put the “worry free guarantee (two-year limited warranty)” to the test, and the next morning a gleaming “new old stock” Kindle was at the door – sickeningly efficient. But the replacement wouldn’t connect either, and I realised that I – or rather the quirkiness of my Wi-Fi router – was in fact at fault. In the end it was a boring but ultimately soluble problem, which I’d made more complicated by dicking about with a Pi-hole a while ago, so really it serves me right for such ad-blocking hypocrisy.

I feel bad about the e-wastefulness of it all. I slightly wish the Amazon people had been a bit less customer-centric about it, treated me with suspicion, maybe asked me to try a different Wi-Fi network. And I bet the new new Kindles have USB-C, and maybe they’ve moved the power button somewhere less stupid so the thing doesn’t switch off when you prop it up on a surface (moaned about previously), but this has delayed the point at which it would be acceptable to upgrade.

Resigned myself to having lost my MP3 collection. (I think that’s a synecdoche for a collection that also contained MP4s and FLACs and probably even a WAV or two.) It’s not a big deal – this wouldn’t have happened if it mattered, I’d’ve had backups and a copy on my computer – but I feel like I’ve fallen short of the glory of God. While I was distracted by Spotify, bits rotted and hard drives got wiped and Google Play Music was sunsetted and I stopped subscribing to iTunes Match. (At least I did manage to recover a few albums from an old MP3 player.)

To London’s glittering Palladium to watch another podcast like a loser. Enjoyed it more than some of the critics on Reddit appeared to – guest Julian Clary treated the endeavour with the contempt it deserved, and it finished (quickly) in time for me to easily make the second from last train.

To the medium-sized local venue to see Richard Herring’s show, and several days later to see Ania Magliano’s. Bicycling home, I felt invigorated and stuff, but I don’t know if that’s the effect of emotionally hefty stand-up, or cycling.

🎦 Opus (2025). It’s not about the permissively licensed audio codec. One of John Malkovich’s character’s sobriquets is “the wizard of wiggle”, which is hardly “the nabob of sob” is it. A highlight was perhaps the nicest-looking bread I’ve ever seen on screen.

Anora (2024) was certainly the best film I saw all week.

📺 I had no complaints about the last episode of Severance.

Oops, it was a fake spring wasn’t it.

I’m no chicken – I do the SPF and the DKIM, and now the DMARC – but it seems that some of the emails I send get marked as spam or “junk”, particularly by Microsoft products. This could explain some things, and maybe I haven’t unintentionally offended various people into ignoring me after all. But the possibility that (because they don’t check their spam folders for false positives) they think I’ve rudely broken off contact with them feels actually worse.

In the course of investigating, I logged into my extant Hotmail/Outlook account and caught up with all the misdirected emails intended for other people who have the same surname and initial as me – John, Jason, Jennifer, Jeanette. They seem like cool people with more interesting lives than mine. What if they’ve been getting emails intended for me?

Snagged a buttock on the sharp corner of a drawer, days after I’d similarly injured a big toe. As an increasingly fleshy population living in cramped conditions, more of our furniture ought to have rounded corners.

A man repaired the leak (see last week) by tightening two bolts, which I could have done. Ah, but the man knew which two bolts to tighten. But so would have I. (But the man also serviced the hot water tank, to be fair.)

Spring! The heating’s off and the crocuses are out.

Whatever mistakes were in last week’s dispatch were a final straw that reminded me I’d read something about getting the computer to help with proofreading – “my PhD advisor rewrote himself in bash”. Then I set up pre-commit with proselint, after consulting Boost Your Django DX for help with remembering how to use pre-commit (even though there’s no Django involved here).

Noticed some little puddles of water indoors, and was strangely unconcerned – passed it off as ghosts or a miracle or something. Then it became clear that the hot water cylinder was leaking when it heated up. This clarity came as a relief, because my other theory was that waste water from the shower – sometimes including pee – was somehow defying gravity and coming up through the tiled floor, which is a bit like the olden-times scientists who theorised that maggots etc. could “spontaneously generate” inside rotting carcasses etc.

Landlord suggested using a tray to catch drips, which I found patronising and stupid cos the actual base of the tank seemed to be leaking and there’s no space between it and the floor.¹ But I could Wim Hof it and keep the immersion heater switched off, enjoying progressively colder showers as the hot water ran out, or I could use newspapers (the Daily Star and the New York Times International Edition) to absorb the leak. I recall that someone wise recommended keeping sanitary products around for just such an eventuality, but the relative advantage of newspapers is they’re exempt from VAT these days they’re exempt from VAT just like newspapers.

Had to phone HMRC. Why did no one tell me the hold music was such a bop? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have been so reluctant to call before; and now that I do, I’m almost looking forward to the next time. (It’s still admin and annoying, but it’s right that this stuff is complex and secure because otherwise a criminal might hack in and pay my taxes for me.)

To London town to take in a live RHLSTP.

To the larger local venue to see the Selecter and Steel Pulse; I was more excited about a but b turned out to be marvellous.

What a lot of important work I did this week. Realigned the navigation on this website – I sometimes forget that flexbox is so damn nifty and is a thing you can just use these days – I liked having the “archive” and “search” links deliberately hard-to-find, due to embarrassment at what lay beyond, but then sometimes I wanted to find something from my past and it was annoying.

Looking at the App Store screenshots for Hyperspace reminded me that one can set a custom icon for a Macintosh’s internal storage device, and indeed any file or folder. So I whimsically applied a picture of Lee Mack – you know, because it’s a Mac – then immediately regretted it and couldn’t undo. (Eventually managed to replace the grinning funnyman with the floppy disk icon, phew.)

My most contentious opinion is that plastic recycling isn’t real and is a displacement activity for tackling climate change. Yes I’m fastidious about recycling metal and glass, and even plastic bottles etc., but not plastic that’s dirty or the “recycle with bags at larger supermarket” soft kind – better stashing it safely in landfill, surely, than it mouldering in a flammable warehouse or falling off a boat into the sea. But something’s changed, for some reason I’ve become more optimistic, I’ve gathered some bags and film lids and by Jingo I’m going to recycle them at larger supermarket.

A while ago, they stopped having proper lids on the 450–500g pots of yoghurt. You could send off for a reusable lid in the post, but I missed the deadline. This week, I found that the lid from a small tub of trout pâté fits perfectly on a 450g yoghurt tub, what a game-changer. Does it make the yoghurt taste of trout? No of course not.

Cooking highlights: leeks vinaigrette (leeks were a bit gritty), two big sandwiches.

I heard a beep. A while later, another, then one every five minutes, and it drove me restless. Beeps aren’t distinctive, especially when a lot of devices probably all use the same off-the-shelf piezoelectric beepers – this beep reminded me of the robot vacuum cleaner, but unplugging that didn’t stop the beeping. I accused all sorts of things – the smoke alarm, my houseguests’ Bluetooth headphones, etc.

Eventually, after a lot of beeps, I realised that it was the carbon dioxide sensor – I can’t find the blog post that convinced me to buy one back in 2022. Incredibly, I’m such a sad little hermit that I’ve never before had enough people exhaling in my home to raise the CO₂ level above 1400ppm. (By the by, I wonder if any/how many orgies have been ruined by carbon dioxide sensors.)

In my defence, the app refers to a “buzzer”, which is misleading – a buzz is different to a beep. And hermitude isn’t the full story – in warmer weather I keep the place better-ventilated. And perhaps I didn’t always have the “beep every 5 minutes” setting switched on.

Some things I’ve done on the computer recently:

• Applied this desktop wallpaper, with the Reduce Transparency setting to stop the menu bar being all yellow.

• Started using Ghostty for my terminal needs. The only snag has been finding myself instinctively ⌘ + F-ing, which doesn’t work.

• Tidied my RSS feed subscriptions, which is how I learnt why one of the blogs I subscribed to had posted nothing new recently (prison for strangling his wife).

I’ve been suffering from my shoelaces coming undone recently – there’s a particular pair of shoes with particularly slippery laces. In a recent podcast episode, John Robins mentioned the Ian Knot, which has been on my radar since 2005 and I’ve been using since 2012, but it made me think I should check that my knotting technique hadn’t gotten sloppy. It hadn’t, but I’d been missing out on the extra security of the Double Ian Knot (which is actually what JR mentioned) – it’s just like the single Ian Knot but with an extra step at the end – and since adding the extra step at the end I haven’t had my laces come untied once.

Bought a showerhead from Lidl just over a year ago – incredibly, I didn’t write about it here at the time. (I have some complaints about the Lidl Plus app – ambushing me with an updated privacy policy when I’m in a checkout queue, no thank you – but I’m jolly impressed by the receipt history search feature, which I used just now to check when I bought the showerhead.) This week, I noticed that showerheads are back in season, and also the button on the year-old showerhead – you know, for toggling between the three spray modes – has stopped working. Coincidence?

I could return the showerhead for replacement under the three year warranty – of course I’ve kept the warranty information – but what am I supposed to do while waiting for my claim to be processed, have baths?

Sunday. Had lunch and a small seaside walk with some cherished loved ones, taking in various liquids – cider, soup, Earl Grey (the three main liquids) – and then it was time to go home. I could have caught a train and enjoyed several opportunities for peeing – while waiting for the train, on the train, etc. – but my espousal of the bustimes.org brand values is so strong that I chose to spend 90 minutes on a bus, in growing discomfort, cursing every time an inconsiderate passenger delayed progress by getting on or off the bus. But the great relief I felt at eventually relieving myself, in better facilities than a train toilet, almost made the suffering worthwhile.