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.

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.