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 me 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.

I’ve tried some of the different supermarket gooseberry fools now. Of course they have the same ingredients, the same sort of packaging, and they’ve all decided that exactly 114g is the correct amount of gooseberry fool. Unlike the others’, Morrisons’s gooseberry fool was positioned in its premium The Best range … but now, and I think this might be a leading economic indicator, it’s been discontinued and replaced with a cheaper-looking version, and dextrose has been appended to the list of ingredients.

Weekended in London. It was nice and all that. Then I found myself in possession of a rented Brompton and some hours to kill, so did some pointless bicycling around and used the Silvertown Cycle Shuttle. The SCS was fine, underwhelming but what did I expect? On the two journeys I made, there was on average one other passenger. The system for securing non-folding bikes looked complicated, too much like shibari, so I got to practice folding and unfolding. It’s a shame that the timetable doesn’t appear in TfL’s open data, so it’s a pain to log on Busmiles – but they don’t want passengers to mistake it for a normal bus service, and that’s more important than the concerns of a silly website for weirdos.

While I was away I missed a dramatic thunderstorm, and also a fire in a neighbouring building. The cause of the fire was slightly interesting: some neighbours were perhaps defrosting their freezer, and put the freezer drawers outside on their balcony, and the sun shone through the transparent plastic and set fire to some cardboard, like a sociopathic child burning ants with a magnifying glass.

With remarkable efficiency, the management company has updated the list of things not allowed on balconies, and its mixture of specificity and broadness is a bit like the tenth commandment, something like: open containers of petrol, soft furnishings, or any items at all. I’m a touch indignant, but if I have to get rid of the landlord’s horrible naff fake plastic topiary, lest it bursts into flames, then that’s good.

I swear that a Google AI Overview told me that the problematic soft drink Kia-Ora was invented by the singer Rita Ora’s father. But I don’t have photographic evidence, and now I can’t reproduce it.

(I’ve been finding large language models useful, sometimes, but you don’t want to know – it’s boring and cringey, and one should keep these things to oneself. The worst thing about them, apart from all the draining of the aquifers, is the sullying of the ✨ emoji, and I’m not convinced that the sometimes-usefulness is enough to make up for those downsides.)

🎦 The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025). Charming, notwithstanding its glamorisation of sky lanterns which can cause fires and pose a choking hazard for animals.

To Kemah Bob’s show at the arts centre.

To Danny Baker’s show at the Ipswich corn exchange. I’d forgotten about my tepid review of last time. The old man talked and talked for three hours, which passed quickly and represented good value.

There was a boxing match in town, so handily there were extra trains running. The train was three trains coupled together, and the rear three-tenths of the train was so suspiciously empty that, due to behavioural science, I too squeezed into one of the seven crowded carriages like sheep.

Had some dandruff. I’m not sure I’ve ever had dandruff before, and at first I wasn’t convinced I had this time – surely it was flakes of ceiling landing on me, coincidentally whenever I touched my hair. After just one wash with Head & Shoulders it’s much better, and it serves me right for being disloyal and sometimes using Herbal Essences. (I’m going to look into plastic-free solid shampoo bars.)

Went a-bicycling with half a view to snatching a glimpse of northern lights (no chance, too cloudy and southerly) and made a detour to see if a shed on a farm selling eggs was open (of course it wasn’t) and ran over something. The thing scampered into a field, then stopped. I think it was a rabbit and the field was a church car park. Perhaps the rabbit was OK, I’d only grazed its tail, the what looked like a trail of blood on the road was something else, or perhaps not. If I’d had a plastic bag and a can-do attitude this could have been my chance to learn butchering skills and make a curry, but I did not and I’m sorry.