• This week has felt unusually long – great, good value! – and I don’t write these notes over the course of the week like some kind of swot, so, more than ever, I can’t remember much from the start of the week.

  Today: did some laundry and I think I forgot to put any detergent in the washing machine – I think, I don’t remember, but then it’s not the sort of thing one remembers. Here’s a funny story: a while ago I thought “these new dishwasher tablets aren’t very good”, then the penny dropped and I went from thinking that to being impressed by how well everything had been cleaned with just water. What a funny story.

  Apparently clothes retain a bit of residual residue from previous washes, so forgetting to add detergent may actually be OK once in a while; that doesn’t apply to plates and forks etc.

• Work: I’m stuck, blocked, haven’t achieved almost anything. And that’s OK for now – I’m glad to have some more healthy blank squares in my contributions graph – but also dispiriting and unsustainable.

• Walked a long way, to a small nature reserve and then a bit further, while listening to a playlist of everything I’ve Shazamed in the past year or so. Of course the most notable nature I saw was just a stone’s throw from the front door (a cormorant).

• 🎦 Heretic (2024). Hugh Grant plays a sort of more-of-a-comment-than-a-question bore. Nobody says the name of the film at any point.

• 🎦 Obviously I thought Conclave (2024) was going to be about something being the opposite of convex. (And, if you think about it, it is.) It was cool to see so many of those fish-faced Sitcar Voyager mini coaches (the cardinals’ shuttle buses).

• Twice back and forth to glittering London for the last time this year, surely.

  • Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf. The werewolf costume is quite special. Sat adjacent to none other than Chris Morris, who arrived wearing a yellow bicycling jacket similar to the one I use, which we could have bonded over and become friends.

  • Remi Wolf, a fine young woman making really exciting pop music.

  That’s an anomalous number of things with wolf/wulf in their name. The contrast between Lee’s uncomfortably tight jeans (a man who’s mocked the Top Gear audience’s “supermarket denim” before) and the baggy pants of Wolf and her band was, somehow, notable.

  The second train home was delayed by signalling problems, and then further delayed by waiting for some police to arrive (to discipline a naughty passenger, or perhaps arrest a flange or bogey or other bit of the train). So £2.24 of sweet Delay Repay money is mine, should I choose to claim it.

• It’s the worst time of the year, but less crummy than this time last year maybe, I can’t really remember.

  I keep doing my walking, cycling, errands, etc. in the dark evenings, which is daft – what’s stopping me doing what I want in the daylight, and doing all of my important work after sunset? But I suppose doing it this way round saves a bit of the cost of electric lighting.

  Every year I think of doing a socially medium advent calendar of photos of fly-tipped festive disposable coffee cups, but I never do.

• Those Japanese nail clippers are good. Maybe it’s just the dazzle of their sharp newness, who knows how quickly they’ll grow blunt and horrible … but let’s be positive!

• Hard to believe that, in all my years of coming across things, I’d not come across the principle of least astonishment before.

• This week I was mostly cold and doing front-end web development, swimming in a knot of complexity of my own making.

• The National Express coach slogan “if you know, you go” is sound advice: go (to the loo) beforehand so you don’t have to use the centre sunken toilet cubicle on the coach. The Stagecoach bus slogan “we’ve got you” has sinister undertones and/or overtones: I’m sure it’s supposed to connote cosy “we’ve got your back” vibes, I think there’s even an advert with the Sonny & Cher song in it, but it reads a bit “gotcha”, you know, no one likes “getting got”.

  On my occasional visits to the Merseyside region, I’ve had trouble with the Stagecoach ticket machines declining various payment cards – it’s frustrating, why won’t they take my money? On the first occasion the driver mumbled something something “get off”, not sure if it was “you’ll have to” or “try again when you” but I did neither; subsequently I used a different card until that stopped working. But it’s good to know I’m not alone – see this Railforums thread which bizarrely quickly descends into someone accusing someone of deliberate fraud. I feel like there might be a bug that’s causing false positives, wonder if they’re using a Bloom filter or something.

• To leafy London again. What a lot of people ganning about with umbrellas there were, they’ll have someone’s eye out if they’re not careful. Fell asleep on the train home and said “crikey” upon being politely awoken.

• Sometimes, when one goes to some bustling place on one’s own, there’s a mishearing and before one knows it one’s accidentally bought two pints of refreshing local cider, and one wouldn’t want to make a fuss and back out of the transaction. And although one is not enough, two is one too many.

• Confidence Man … their star has risen and they’re playing bigger rooms than before. A nice time but I wish I’d arrived earlier and avoided the cider misunderstanding and stuff.

• Robert Popper’s promotion of his new book led me to have a nice listen to The Timewaster Diaries (since the earlier Letters wasn’t in the catalogue of my chosen audiobook provider). The diaries are sweet and Paul Whitehouse does a good job of reading them aloud. It’s an unrelated coincidence that, this week more than ever, the only things I can think of to write about here feel particularly boring and pointless.

• Started paying for a bank account, because of the “free” “perks” – a monthly cinema ticket, a Railcard, an interest rate, and go on then a weekly Greggs item from a limited selection. The other thing is they send you a subtly fancier-looking new debit card with a new number, a mild inconvenience I’d’ve preferred not to endure, but I could have simply not activated the new card and kept using the old one.

  Perhaps I will walk to a different Greggs each week, yes, that would be a nice little project to add some meaning to my humdrum life.

• Previously:

  Had tofu two nights on the trot. Not quite explicably this led me to seek out the Brass Eye–esque title sequence of the Piers Morgan programme, as I recall phrases like “woke insanity” appear in large geometric sans serif lit up by lasers, but pfft/I couldn’t find it.

  Reader, I found the title sequence, with its giant brain spinning around a globe among laser beams, and can recommend Gifski as a most excellent app for making animated short GIFs from longer videos. Yes I know that GIF is an imperfect format. Here are “the world’s gone nuts”, “woke insanity” (perhaps that could do with being shorter), etc., to use as one sees fit. But it’s hard to be unserious/ironic on the internet without being mistaken for being serious/unironic.

• For weeks/months, I’ve been being haunted/plagued by a sound. A muffled bleep, but not a swearing-on-TV kind of bleep or a voicemail “speak after the beep” beep, more like a bleep test one. (You know bleep tests, in which you run increasing-in-speed lengths of a sports hall, in time with a series of bleeps, to test your cardiovascular fitness?) Actually not really a bleep at all, maybe a cross between a chime and chirrup?

  Clearly, the sound was coming from an electronic device, but which one, and where? I began to think it was coming from next door, until I heard the sound in a hotel room miles from home, which narrowed it down to the devices I had with me, and eventually to the AirPods (Pro).

  There are YouTube videos with titles like “every AirPods sound effect”, but they’re lying. But eventually I found a Reddit post by someone in the same situation, with a video of their AirPods case making, yes, the same sound. It’s so heartening to read all the comments there, and this MacRumors forum thread, to know I’m not alone, but it’s troubling that no one’s sure what the sound means apart from some people who reckon it’s for calibrating some microphone or other.

• :( (It’s not the main thing, but I lost £9.86 – proof, if proof be need be, that gambling is for mugs. No one ever went bankrupt running a casino!)

• Ew, twice to London’s glittering West End. The second time to take in the Dr. Strangelove play in which Steve Coogan plays four of Peter Sellers’s three roles from the film … I didn’t mind it.

• A man came to replace the dribbly tap, and best of all he fitted some isolation valves for an easier repair next time (although I hope I’ll have moved before then). Actually, I’d gotten used to the maddening, interminable drip, drip, drip, so now the place feels too eerily quiet and I’m more aware of the emptiness within.

• Was I prepared to change my devices’ language settings to United States English for the sake of being able to sample the new Apple Intelligence features? Was I buffalo. But it turns out that on a Macintosh it’s just the Siri language setting that you need to change. Anyway, I hate it but I quite like the turns of phrase of some of the generated summaries of emails.

• A fellow has been tweeting some strange, legally actionable things about me and others – certainly an unexpected consequence of running a bus timetable website. I was perturbed for about a day, which is why there are libel laws I suppose, but part of me also quite liked the attention, and I remain fascinated by his barely intelligible stream-of-consciousness writing style and all of his varied political views etc.

• 🎦 The Apprentice. The more I learn about Trump, the less I care for him. It’s an unnecessary film and would have been better if it was about Alan Sugar. (Danny Dyer plays a Sugar-like character in the slightly naff Disney series The Rivals, which is mostly about a load of rubber-faced nobs.)

• The Substance. Dorian Gray for the Brazilian butt lift generation. Thirty thousand gallons of fake blood.

• Last week, the bonce of Stanley Tucci appeared in my Instagram feed and I really thought it was Gregg Wallace. (As a phillistine I don’t really know who Tucci is but I’ve watched several episodes of Wallace’s Inside the Factory.) Days later, in John Lewis, there was Tucci again, printed on cardboard, advertising his own range of pots and pans, and I have to say that having a cookware brand is surely Gregg Wallace–coded behaviour and wonder if the pot and pan industry executives also conflated the two bald white men.

  This week on Instgram, my swiping and scrolling was interrupted by an advert for Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow Chilli Oil, a cheap video soundtracked by a looping, strangely truncated and yet still compelling bit of music (it appears more completely in a video on TikTok). Did you know that the Lee Kum Kee company, probably best known for supposedly inventing oyster sauce, also owns 20 Fenchurch Street (London’s so-called Walkie Talkie building) and has a venture capital arm that’s invested in things like the annoying proprietary geocode system what3words?

  Months ago on Instagram I saw someone doing something revolting with biscuits and tea or something, and I let out an involuntary yelp that was the same as the noise I made that week upon seeing (maybe imagining) a mouse scurrying across the carpet of a holiday rental.

• After my Megabus experience last week, it cannot be a coincidence that they’re scaling back operations due to low passenger demand.

• Felt sick for most of the week, but now I don’t feel sick and I’ve finally done a normal poo so I’m pleased about that.

• This week I was mostly in the Liverpool City Region. Lovely.

• Broke one of those expensive Serious Readers reading lamps you see advertised in print media. Then I managed to fix it – gluing a little ceramic component back together, re-inserting some little springs after finding them in the deep pile carpet, etc. – so proof if proof be need be that if you believe in yourself you can do anything.

• Saturday: back home via the Megabus from Birmingham. It seemed to be going well until the driver revealed he’d not driven this route before and needed directing to the various stops; fortunately, help was capably provided by some capable passengers. He had some kind of satnav, but I’m not sure what it was smoking as it later directed him a long way north along the ring road. (Aside: to pass the time I was experimentally using my mobile phone to track the journey, and began to feel bad about about broadcasting such lostness.) Still, it was better than the time we drove cluelessly all around Oxford.

  Then for the last hundred or so metres it fell to me to direct him into the bus station and to the correct stand, and I’m terrible at that sort of thing despite, you know, making a website with maps of all the routes and stops. My minute as navigator was enough for him to be exasperated by my “I think”s and “should be”s – and fair enough, he was having a bad day at work, as if being from Birmingham wasn’t bad enough! And uncertainty is one of my most annoying features, but then I think of the few times I’ve been certain about something – I did tick that box on the form, the London Palladium is that way – and I’ve been quickly proven wrong.

• Sunday (content warning: disgusting). Noisily and horribly sick a few times, also diarrhoea. A novel experience, really – I’d wondered whether my gag reflex was, I don’t know, either too weak or too strong, but no I’m definitely still able to vomit. Not sure whether to blame some fishy soup I had last night, or I caught something from a young relative. Anyway, the post-sick relief is great and I can almost understand why Bruce Parry’s Amazonian friends do what they do.

What a lot of cultural highlights of the week.

• To the local cinema for the first time since they yassified it, recarpeted and installed huge recliners. It would feel wrong to watch something about man’s inhumanity to man while sitting so comfortably, but that’s nothing that (I imagine) really needing a pee can’t solve.

• 🎦 Lee (2023). A war is only as good as its correspondents! The accent Alexander Skarsgård does in it is a bit distractingly weird.

• The Outrun (2024). Devastating, not a dry eye on my face.

• An evening with Adrian Chiles. Some say Chiles is a clown and a bore, but not me.

  I really thought the architects of Kings Place had named each room of the building after a different time of the day, how quirky, but no it’s not half two it’s hall two etc.

• Ms. Lauryn Hill, etc. The reputations of both the venue (Co-op Live) and artist precede them but the show went ahead!

Friday: I resigned myself to having missed a train, then realised the train was late so I could catch it if I was quick, and in the end it was even later than that so I hadn’t even needed to be quick. I the rush I forgot to pack my toothbrush, then later forgot to pack the hastily bought replacement, so that’s the shortest amount of time I’ve owned a toothbrush, what a funny story.

Saturday: Since I happened to be in the same city at the same time, I too-briefly stopped in on OggCamp which is a lovely thing. (Today I saw a toot disparaging the smell of one of, and the social awkwardness of some of the attendees, but that can’t be about me cos I wasn’t there today.)