Some work. I made a thing go made faster so that a line on a graph went down. The Brighton & Hove bus company publishes an unusual amount of timetable data – I’m not sure, but I think it’s to keep their passengers abreast of even small diversions etc – which was causing me some technical problems – it’s like when Justin Bieber was the biggest person on Twitter and they had racks of servers dedicated to him, but on much smaller scale. But the problems are no more, and I don’t have time to go into great detail so let’s leave it at “I reduced the cardinality”.

Bicycling along, I passed a big bright piece of moulded plastic, like an abandoned children’s toy, perhaps something from the Early Learning Centre or Little Tikes ranges. A bit later I was going the other way, it was getting dark and my rear bicycle light had run out of power, and I passed the plastic thing again, and it turned out to be a ConeLITE, Britain’s best selling roadworks lamp – you know, a battery-powered light that goes on the top of a traffic cone. (Not a toy at all, but you could still have hours of fun with it.) What a remarkable bit of luck this almost was – I could attach the light to the back of the bike to get home safely, if only I had a way of attaching it securely, and of keeping it switched on, and was sure it was the right colour. (In the end I switched the bike light back on, and it worked after all.)

Like last year I went to wave and grin at the convoy of honking trucks taking disadvantaged children for a day out in East Suffolk. Felt stupidly self-conscious about waving for so long in a queenly/papal way, but of course no one looked sillier than all the trailerless tractor units.

Last week I returned to a stack of letters from two banks thanking me for opening an account and stuff. But I haven’t opened any accounts. I am a former customer of bank a, and bank b has recently agreed to buy bank a, so it could have been an innocent computer system cock-up. But fraud seemed more likely.

A while ago, a neighbour pinned a message on a noticeboard about identity and mail theft, and I dismissed it as kooky hysteria, but I should have taken it seriously. The letterbox is downstairs, outside, some way from my front door, and I think some letters have been nicked from it – the postie doesn’t always push them in fully, which let’s say is the result of privatisation and ultimately Vince Cable’s fault. But the letters that hadn’t been stolen yet allowed me to notice the problem, and perhaps the slow and sporadic nature of deliveries these days actually worked in my favour there.

• Is it my fault at all? I’d inexplicably left some junk mail in there, which may have made it look like I was away (and I was away for a bit, like many people during this summer holiday time). And I have a goodish credit rating, which I even thought might be cute to brag about on a dating profile once.

  I’m not as careful as my da about destroying letters and envelopes with names and addresses on – he still burns them, despite having moved to a built-up area, dads are mad. But there are easier ways of obtaining names and addresses than fishing through bins.

• Recall that I used to have a sensor that would detect and send me a text when post was delivered or emptied. Alas, it died after succumbing to the effects of rain getting into the not-perfectly-watertight box, and they don’t sell them any more.

• Is there a way of laying a booby trap that won’t end in me or an innocent postal delivery worker getting covered in glitter?

Oh well, I phoned the banks – one was interestingly quicker and easier to deal with than the other – and it will probably all be fine, and now I know what a Cifas marker is.

I went on a lot of trains this week, and remembered a thing about the free Wi-Fi on a lot of trains: various endpoints like http://www.ombord.info/api/jsonp/ that return the location of the train etc. With that I spent some hours on the train trying to use Swift Playgrounds to make a live map, because it’s nice to know when to look out for the Angel of the North (south of Newcastle), the field of polar bears (south of Ipswich) etc.

Some more pleasant days in Edinburgh. On my final evening there, I managed to see two fringe shows which weren’t sold out: Ivo Graham’s Orange Crush and Adam Riches and John Kearns ARE Ball & Boe. And I saw Ray O’Leary crossing the road.

To Woking, to take in a terrific work-in-progress preview of the Elis & John tour. A long way to come from Edinburgh for 20-ish hours, but I have no regrets.

I liked Woking, although the lack of vegetation and abundance of concrete felt oppressive on the hottest day of the week. They’re big on the HG Wells lived there thing, but what about all the other notable people associated with the town?

Took a series of local buses to get back to London, and it was a bit interesting to glimpse the McLaren Technology Centre – the fastidious spectre of Ron Dennis was there to see in the manicured grass and neatly arranged trees, definitely no wildflower meadows, someone doesn’t like pollinators :(

I arrived back to something shit and annoying. I’ll write about it next week unless some better news draws attention from it.

When you’ve a bank account or mobile phone contract that comes with “free” “perks”, it’s often a rush at the end of the week or month to spend the vouchers before they expire. (Sometimes I don’t get around to it.) On Sunday afternoon, heading towards Gregg’s to claim my free sausage roll, I paused to rummage in my rucksack when a fellow called me “buddy” and offered me the paper-bagged Gregg’s sausage roll he was holding. I politely declined, but what a mildly interesting coincidence, and of course I was touched by the kind gesture.

There are loads of more deserving hungry people around, but is it relevant that I looked more dishevelled and unwashed than usual, so this pastry philanthropist didn’t recognise me as a fellow posh bank account holder?

• Months ago, in Lidl, I looked pityingly at a hunched old man buying some wheat bisks and maybe one other item, then he drove off in a Mercedes-Benz E-Class All-Terrain. I suppose that by forgoing expensive branded Weetabix, he was able to afford such a sweet car (in a frugal non-metallic paint option).

I couldn’t watch a whole episode, but I’ve been finding myself watching clips of Dragons’ Den, the programme where small entrepreneurs pitch to “dragons” who are some fellows who have lots of money. (It’s a bad title, but worse some international versions are called Shark Tank – sharks aren’t even known for hoarding gold and stuff like dragons are.) Over the years, they seem to feature fewer wacky inventions – there was a device for keeping half-used cucumbers fresh, which the rich investors sneered at because a cucumber is a trifling expense to them – and these days it’s more stuff like two ex-bankers have started an ethical jam subscription service.

To Edinburgh. An unfortunately long train journey, mostly spent in various vestibules, but I don’t mind a vestibule. Waiting at Peterborough, I realised I’d forgotten an important charging cable, and thought I might have to buy one from Marks & Spencer – paying over the odds for a luxury cable enrobed in Belgian chocolate – but instead I found a very reasonably priced one at Flying Tiger Copenhagen. Moments later, I realised I hadn’t forgotten the cable after all, so now I had a surfeit of cables – what a funny story.

I haven’t been to any festival/fringe things, nor to an Oasis concert. (Respect to the tourist tat shops that usually sell tartan wigs, who’ve have pivoted to selling Oasis T-shirts.)

Some work.

• The big bustimes.org news is that now I can tell, using open data, when certain (Arriva and Stagecoach) bus journeys are cancelled, and even when some (Stagecoach) ones are part-cancelled, skipping certain stops due to roadworks or something. Something like this has existed in Ireland and London for some time, but now it exists in a few more places, and it’s another step towards solving the problem of ghost buses.

  I thought I’d be more enthusiastic, but there was a weeks-long delay between the data becoming available and my releasing anything using it, and even now it’s unfinished and slipshod. Maybe I’ve lost some joie de vivre, but also I’d’ve felt more motivated if it covered any buses in my local area yet.

• A few weeks ago, the Information Commissioner’s Office communicated some concerns about the cookie banners. Of course I was happy to make the changes requested, grateful for the clarity, and flattered to be on the list of top websites they’re focusing on. I was only a bit bemused by the form they sent me to fill in, which was in the form of a Microsoft Word document containing form components which I don’t think it’s possible to fill in really properly without buying and installing the desktop version of Word?

  (Yes cookie banners are bad, the industry needs to give its heads a wobble, and most websites should simply not use cookies for the purposes that require consent … the only half-acceptable excuse is needing the money from programmatic advertising, which conveniently happens to be my excuse.)

  Now my eyes have been opened, I keep noticing other websites with non-compliant cookie banners, like mine used to be. I’m not indignant, but rather smug that they (for example the hated Spectator and also the New Statesman) are apparently not top enough to have been prioritised by the ICO yet.

🎦 Bring Her Back (2025) was the most horrified I’ve been this year, well done everyone.

Bicycled to the seaside and to a walled garden. Despite the other, pejorative meaning of “walled garden”, we weren’t stopped from eating the sandwiches we’d brought. And of course all the plants flourishing in the microclimate were fantastic.

Got so annoyed at the bus service or lack-of-service – it’s not FirstGroup plc’s fault that some gnarly temporary traffic lights were causing a big jam, but their uncommunicativeness can make it seem like they hold their passengers in contempt – that, somewhat illogically, I went to King’s Lynn instead of waiting for the next direct bus. Had a life-affirming hour or so in King’s Lynn.

To the Anglia Comedy Allstars show in Ipswich, which was less life-affirming but does everything have to be? The next day, to Urooj Ashfaq’s show at the Soho Theatre. Maybe there are still some depraved and disgusting corners of Soho, but it all seemed to be people queuing outside pizzerias. A couple of fantastic walks between the train station and the theatre.

It’s boring to go on about it, but I’ve had a slightly injured foot for a month now. I think I twanged it by impatiently rushing past some people who were walking a bit slowly, but not slowly enough to overtake easily. Now I’m stuck walking a bit slowly, and I wonder how many people have injured themselves overtaking me.

Wasted some time plaintively, arrogantly wondering why I’m not in the list of most active GitHub users in the country. After several times changing my profile’s location string and waiting for the list to update overnight, I finally read the small print and learnt that, to avoid hammering the GitHub API too hard, it doesn’t count people with less than a certain number of followers, it’s a heuristic innit. I could try moving somewhere smaller like Luxembourg, but I’m more likely to start using Codeberg or GitLab more or something.

Bicycled to the big Tesco. They unaccountably had no greengages, but the largest range of Jason’s Sourdough products I’d ever seen.

On the way there, I noticed the chain slipping and began to dread the bit of bicycle maintenance I needed to do. On the way back, I heard a concerning noise and a spoke had broken on the back wheel, which thanks to this diary-keeping I know last happened near-exactly two years ago. Again it felt like a harsh reminder of my clinical fatness, but mostly I was delighted and relieved to now have enough reasons to employ the services of a professional mechanic, instead of getting my own hands oily.

Not for any good reason – maybe the age I was when I first encountered it – I don’t like the phrase “the sticks”, as in “out in the sticks” meaning “in the countryside”. This week, I learnt that it’s originally an Americanism, despite now being more popular in British English (see the Google Ngram Viewer), and the closest analogy I can think of is (the band) the Killers.

What a lot of things I saw this week: mist, butterflies, etc.

I bought the expired domain name travelnortheast.co.uk a bit ago. The process was a whole thing – I didn’t take kindly to the seller seeming to accuse me of not having paid the invoice, but then I displayed some bungling incompetence so we were even. Maybe I take a certain pride in not understanding the domain name transfer process, because I’m not a sort of parasite who buys and sells lots of domain names all the time? (I know parasites serve an important role in ecosystems.)

Now I’ve some redirects in place, so I’ve rescued, for example, one link in this Telegraph article to http://www.travelnortheast.co.uk/downloads/bustimetables/arriva/X15-ncl-ber-TBD.pdf which now redirects to the relevant page on bustimes.org. Recall my previous abortive attempt to do such a “good stewardly” thing. It’s not a selfless act – I deludedly think I’ll somehow benefit from the ugh link equity, and that it will have been worth the small to medium-sized effort.

(I used Cloudflare Workers to do the redirects. I know Cloudflare is probably Bad, but it’s also free.)

Last week I had a tyre slashed and a top tube bag stolen off my bicycle, and I must be so inured to crime that I forgot to mention it, even though mending the puncture left my hands unusually calloused. If I was a better person, it wouldn’t have happened, because I’d’ve had time to walk to the train station, instead of having to cycle hurriedly and leave the bike there for a few days where it was set upon by people from broken homes probably. Above all, I’d like to know what sort of blade they used, because it must have been a good one to pierce the Continental Gatorskin tyre with its Duraskin cut-resistant layer.

Had some abdominal pain, and tried all the usual tricks for dealing with trapped wind, but they wouldn’t work. It seemed to be in the wrong place for appendicitis, and it subsided eventually, but not before I’d tidied the place and cleaned the toilet just in case I was about to die.

My shoes have started to squeak like they’re farting as I walk, and I remember some advice to ask oneself “what would John Cleese do?” in this situation. But of course, these days, what Cleese would do is accuse the shoes of being politically correct snowflakes or something.

Monday: I went on a train. A man made a lot of announcements on the loudspeakers, grandly introducing himself as our “senior conductor” and going on about this and that, and kept pausing dramatically for emphasis, only slightly more normal-sounding than the viral Manchester Civil Justice Centre answerphone message. The man who walked through the train checking tickets seemed relatively quiet and normal, and I struggle to believe they were the same person, maybe they were just the normal/junior conductor.

And there was a loose connection or something, so the sound would periodically cut out mid-announcement, but alas never during the name of the train operating company (CrossCountry).

• My records show that I previously encountered a senior conductor almost exactly a year ago, and I drafted some observations about the garbled announcement “the cafe bar will be closing at Diss” which confused my tired brain – it sounded like Diss was one of these new times they keep inventing like prosecco o’clock – but in the end it didn’t feel interesting enough for that week’s notes.

  • The Sublime Text spellchecker has no knowledge of prosecco.

Thursday: I had a bath immediately after chopping a chilli pepper. I slightly worried the stinging sensation was because I’d not properly rinsed away the Mr Muscle Platinum Shower Shine residue, but no it must have been the capsaicin.

Saturday: I had to go near the coast.

Turns out the Coasthopper drivers aren’t just up against motorists who don’t know the width of their own vehicles, there are also many rowdy passengers on pub crawls and actually maybe that’s why there are no buses later in the evenings. The audio announcements they have now are a bit quiet, I wonder how their text-to-speech software copes with some of the less logically pronounced place names, and the disembodied artificial man voice sounded familiar from various sloppy videos on TikTok and Instagram – as with the train earlier, I’m sorry I didn’t record a recording.

I was delighted with all the ladybirds in a pub garden, and I learn that the collective noun is “loveliness” which is quite right.

Crikey, that’s Q2 nearly done over as it were. I bought a TRMNL wholly and exclusively for business purposes, cos it seems just the thing to display bus times on, but so far it’s been resolutely set to the Days Left This Year thing (plugin? integration?) and I’m not sure I like it.

Friday: Haim (Dreamland, Margate). Didn’t see much of the seaside town beyond the walk between the train station and the amusement park, but was excited to see an oasthouse on the train there, and that wasn’t even the highlight.

Saturday: walking towards Euston I came across a far-right march heading in the opposite direction. I shook my head to show my disagreement with the gutlords’ jeers, of course.

Narrowly avoided sitting on a turd in Tavistock Square – is that a win because I didn’t sit on the turd, or a loss because I’d sat very close to it and it put me off my sandwich? I think it was human in origin, and to be fair it looked healthy, a 3 or 4 on the Bristol Stool Chart.

Tommy WÁ and Macy Gray (Birmingham Town Hall, Birmingham), wonderful.

A while ago I was finally persuaded to start using the NYT Games app instead of the website to do Wordle, and I started doing the Mini crossword and Connections as well. It’s nice to have two new ways to pass the time until we all die, but goodness me the Americanness is sometimes baffling – “cheese” is a key component of a salad is it?

The bus times website celebrated its tenth birthday. I thought about a cake, maybe returning to where it all began (Selby), but then I didn’t do any of those things. But, coincidentally, I did feel a new enthusiasm for doing some work, so that’s good.

I have been mostly listening to the back catalogue of Three Bean Salad which is as great as everyone says. Nicely, I’ve reached September 2023, when the temperature and humidity were about the same as they are now.

Significantly, I’ve mostly stopped using the Overcast app to listen to podcasts, because it doesn’t show episode artwork. It does if the podcast’s producers embed it in the audio file, but they overwhelmingly don’t, and I so didn’t want to miss seeing the 3BS artworks that I’ve jolly well switched to Castro.

Regarding actual beans, last week I was introduced to Heinz Five Beanz, which are like baked beans but with four more kinds of bean, what a good idea.

I should have written a separate blog post about gooseberry fools instead of serialising my observations like this, but:

Some shops use the same lid design for their apricot and lemon fools, which is a problem when they’re kept on a low shelf where it’s harder to see which is which. So I’m grateful to Tesco, Asda and the Co-op for printing the type of fool on the lid, no doubt at some extra expense.

Some more minor differences in ingredients: the Marks and Spencer gooseberry fool, which is pretentiously called a “west country luxury fool”, contains spinach extract.

🎦 Mars Express (2023), a visually gorgeous French animated film. I’m bad at reading subtitles.