Got a mattress topper. Some say that trying to fix a clapped-out, sunken mattress with a mattress topper is like putting lipstick on a pig; they might be useful if your mattress is too firm, but they’re not magic. But I’ve been sleeping slightly better since I garnished the old mattress with the new topper, and who can say it’s not a coincidence?

Solstices and equinoxes are up there with April Fools’ Day as, I don’t know, apposite days for launching things. In particular, I thought I’d add a button to bustimes.org for more easily switching between the light and dark themes, which actually no one’s been crying out for. But usually I’m too impatient to keep things up my sleeve until a special date, and this time the solstice just whooshed by.

Good news: for once, the filling of my mince pies didn’t really bubble over. But the pastry looks a bit pallid and underdone.

Escalators, as compared to elevators (lifts), are sometimes given as an example of graceful degradation and failure modes. A broken escalator is still useful as a staircase; a broken lift is of no use to anyone.

Well actually, you’ve probably all seen a broken escalator that’s cordoned off, maybe accompanied by a cute sign saying the problem has been escalated to an engineer. Apparently this is for all sorts of sound reasons: a broken escalator can be dangerous, if too many heavy people climbed on it like a staircase it could start moving and bad things could happen. But let’s not let that get in the way of a nice analogy.

Real time passenger information systems rely on data being just right, but often it isn’t – like some rascals juming up and down in a lift, someone’s inputted a wrong date and it’s the weekend and the only person who can fix it is on holiday. So a really good passenger information system should be more like escalator than an elevator, so for example if the timetable’s gone missing passengers can still see where buses are on a map.

Anyway. It’s a shame that the Welsh Bus Data Service is, in some respects, too much like an elevator and not enough like an escalator.

Sorry to say I’ve started playing SkyCards, a mobile game from the producers of Flightradar24. Maybe it’s like Pokémon but for aeroplanes, but I don’t know enough about Pokémon to know if that’s right. It’s a slightly sad way of passing time until we die, but it’s good for learning about geography too. If you live under a flight path and are often bothered by military jets – they’re noisy, which I know is nothing compared to having bombs dropped on you – being able to earn points in a silly game goes some way to making up for the annoyance.

As the proprietor of what some are calling the Flightradar24 of buses, of course I’ve wondered: what would it look like if someone made the this of buses? But I’m not going to try to find out.

Made the Christmas Dundee cake. All traditions are invented. It just occurred to me that I forgot to include the mixed peel, but it turns out that the recipe doesn’t call for any mixed peel.

Obviously I condemn “map porn”, which objectifies maps and gives young people an unrealistic expectation of maps, but it was nice that some screenshots of bustimes.org appeared on a subreddit by that name and later other social media things that nick content from there, and finally a video by the latest big YouTuber I’d never heard of. “Who put this together it must’ve took them ages” … you have no idea.

(The titular Jack has a veritable empire of Jack Sucks At channels, whose names make more sense than the The Rest Is family of podcasts and none of them are presented by Alastair Campbell.)

Since I’m of exactly average height, and assuming that my legs and torso are in proportion, urinals are exactly the correct height for me. But what do I do with this enormous privilege? I usually go into a cubicle.

I tootled to London yet again to watch a RHLSTP, which led to that thought about urinals. And I had a halloumi wrap and didn’t leave any of my belongings on the train.

Last week I took a photo to illustrate the Wikipedia article about the Apple Polishing Cloth. I have an Apple Polishing Cloth, but it was grubby despite my washing it, so ridiculously I spent another £19 just for the photo. (Yes, given the exchange rate and that it costs $19, it should cost fewer pounds.) But perhaps I can resell it – would you pay extra to own the thing that’s in the photo on the Wikipedia article about the thing?

(It’s not a very good cloth. A bit of old T-shirt or pants will do just as well.)

The Acquired podcast is a business podcast about business things. It can be infuriating, galling and partial but I’ve been listening to it a bit.

• They had an episode where they interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried before all the fraud he was doing became known. To their credit, it’s still available to listen to, but it’s pretty boring. The biggest red flag is the appalling sound quality – remarkable that a then-billionaire wouldn’t have a better audio recording setup.

• The four-hour episode on Coca-Cola didn’t touch on two of the three things I know about the history of the fizzy pop: the Peckham Spring fiasco, and the 7.5 cent coin and the “official blank” that were mooted to solve the problems with vending machines that made it hard to raise the price for a long time.

CMAT (h). Having arrived late, and then dithered at the bar – the local venue no longer has any astringent local cider on tap – I resigned myself to spending the evening with a concrete pillar in my face. But then the Dunboyne Diana herself appeared not on the faraway stage but on a fellow’s shoulders just the other side of the pillar, so that was cool.

Tuesday: I woke late, after an unusually high quality and quantity of sleep, to some troubling alerts, and what a relief it was that it was the Cloudflare outage and not my fault. Pleased to say the bustimes.org status page, excellently hosted by the great PikaPods, was not affected. And some bits of bustimes.org, like the API, which I’d exempted from Cloudflare’s bot management things, were still OK.

After an hour or so, I had the bright idea of turning off the Cloudflare proxying – I’m grateful to DNSControl and Certbot for helping me do that, and now I’m better prepared for next time. And I left it like that until the next day, when something happened that showed that Cloudflare’s rate-limiting and caching are not yet dispensable.

There’s much to feel gloomy about, but did you know that many supermarkets these days have a thing that can tell you if a particular shop stocks a product and even what aisle it’s in? No more wandering the aisles interminably looking for tahini or a member of staff to ask where the tahini is. What a time to be alive.

In the Wikipedia article about the broadcaster (and possibly next BBC director general) June Sarpong, it says:

In late 2013, Elton John performed a variation of his 1970 hit Your Song with the amended lyrics “You can tell everybody “You’re June Sarpong”” as an apparent reference to an in-joke between the pair from a charity event earlier that year.

Because they’re nested quotation marks, the phrase “You’re June Sarpong” should surely be in single not double quotes. Actually, depending on who Elton John was addressing and what he meant, it shouldn’t be in quotation marks at all. But the bigger problem is that it smells like a weird hoax. The only other source I could find is the podcast of a venture capital firm:

It would be fair to say that June is considered a ‘British Icon’ and has broad cultural influence. Not everyone can claim that Elton John has performed a special edition of the hit “Your Song” with the amended lyrics “You can tell everybody, You’re June Sarpong’”!

There’s some more dubious punctuation there, and also literally everyone can claim that – it just might not be true.

🎦 Nuremberg (2025).

Maybe the best thing I did all week I did was rub the strike plate with a moist wipe, and now my front door – it’s a self-closing fire door – properly self-closes without intervention. Every source I can find suggests that I’m talking out of my arse, that if your door won’t self-close properly – potentially allowing fire to spread – it can only be because the latch is too stiff. But no, there must have been a sticky roughness that was causing friction, and now there isn’t and I get a satisfied thrill every time I go out or come in.

Some work. Last week I experimented with using Amazon Location Service to offer some new map styles. They have satellite imagery, and a remarkable live traffic layer that shows things like traffic jams and roadworks. But it costs money – a small amount, multiplied by the small fraction of users who’ve noticed the obscure button to use the Amazon map style, but that amounts to a surprising lot, affordable but still more than I’d like to give Amazon. And I don’t like being unloyal, disloyal to the OpenStreetMap scene. But mainly I’m a miserly arse.

Last month I became interested in trying to pull an apple in half with my bare hands, which is a whole thing. The first apple I tried to part was a Red Windsor, which had a mushy, pappy texture, and I was successful. But the next apple was crispier and juicier, it had been in a fridge, and in the end I had to give up and use a knife, and it was only by not having announced what I was about to try to do that I didn’t look like a right hubristic fool.

From now on, am I only going to have apples with a less satisfying-to-eat texture, just because they’re easier to pull apart? Absolutely. But with practise – remembering the various mantras, twisting equals tears, gripping not ripping – I might be able to work my way up to a Honeycrisp or a SweeTango.

Upset an open bottle of liquid laundry detergent. I’ve written about something similar happening at least twice before, so you’d think by now I’d’ve switched to an easier-to-clean-up claggy powder or those harder-to-spill dangerously edible-looking pods or tablets, but no. I squeegeed most of the spillage into an open container, which I later bunglingly spilt on newly delivered parcel of coffee beans, but I’m pleased to say the Ecover didn’t penetrate the adequate packaging.

In the shower, I dropped a full container of exfoliating face wash on my big toe, and might have cried “this is what I get for caring for my skin”. It made me wonder what top footballers do to avoid the risk of this kind of injury – are their shampoos and shower gels fixed to the wall like in a budget hotel? Equally, in wasteful fancier hotels you get those tiny bottles of toileteries, whose small size limits the damage they’ll do to any foot they’re dropped on.

The Wikipedia article for web page used to be illustrated with a picture of the Wikipedia article for web page, but some bore has changed it. (Oh well. The Grokipedia article doesn’t have any pictures, which is worse.)

Bicycle maintenance. (I have adopted my da’s unwanted bike, to use as a “winter beater” or something.) I cleaned a fabulously dirty chain, but maybe the dirt was actually serving a useful purpose – like how limescale stops your kettle leaking and makes the water pressure on your shower seem higher (like putting your thumb on the end of a hose). Then I had to clean the carpet, the soles of my feet, and the bathtub that the blackened grease had found its way onto.

Went to Norwich’s second Ikea. That’s deliberately misleading, as if Norwich has as many Ikeas as the whole of Scotland, really it’s only a small Ikea with limited stock and a click-and-collect facility, and Norwich’s first Ikea closed some years earlier. The side plates they sell these days are slightly smaller than the old landlord-provided ones here from two corporate typefaces ago, but toast has stayed the same size, and the result is more crumbs. I know yabbering about plate sizes is deeply Partridge but I’m intgrigued by the massive Flamsig 32 cm plate, that’s more than twelve inches, but it’s not stocked in the small Ikeas.

🎦 Bugonia (2025).

Years ago, the consistency of Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade changed and glucose-fructose syrup appeared in the list of ingredients. I was going to share the uplifting news that they’ve gone back to using normal sugar now, but the website lists glucose-fructose syrup and I don’t think it’s out of date, I think it means they’ve regressed to using the cheaper cornstarch-derived gloop again. The sainted Wayback Machine confirms that sugar was listed as recently as April 2025 and as long ago as December 2023, so I must savour the last good jar in my cupboard.

(I know that the original marmalade was originally made by Frank’s wife Sarah-Jane, but it was named after Frank’s shop where it was sold.)

Spent half of the week in Liverpool. The train home was delayed by 90 minutes, and I was pleased to have hit the Delay Repay jackpot. But they’ve only awarded me £6, because the system/a person is confused by split ticketing and has also inexplicably mistaken one of my single tickets for a return; I can appeal, but maybe it’s better for UK plc if I don’t bother.

When I was a small child, we were shown around a local church by the churchwarden who showed us his staff/stave/wand, a sort of ornate stick. Apparently, as well as having a ceremonial use, it could be used to break up fights or to prod sleeping churchgoers. Later, in a classroom I noticed a long wooden pole with a hook on the end, and I deduced that the teacher must be a part-time churchwarden, but no it was just a tool for opening high windows. What a funny story.

Last week I went to Screwfix for the first time. (Quick explainer: Screwfix is like a more intimidating version of Argos, where you can buy various hardware from a catalogue.) Recall the lamp I broke last year, which I fixed with glue but it soon came apart again, but the broken part turns out to be a standard part that you can just buy. After buying the part, I realised it was the wrong size: I’d mixed up GU10 and MR16, I might have yelled “we’re better than this” at myself. (Screwfix don’t actually sell the right-sized part.)

A little work. It dawned that sometimes it’s better to have one big database server than two of half the size, not just because of complicatedness but because of the benefit of one big shared memory.

As a treat, I wasted some time trying to move this blog from Cloudflare Pages. A roadblock – to that, and to previous abortive goes at using static site generators other than Jekyll – is that I’m locked in to the contraversial way that this blog post’s URL is /2025/10/week-345 but the file on the server is /2025/10/week-345.html, and why should my cherished URLs have to end in a slash?

To London’s glittering Union Chapel.

Left my AirPods charging case on the train – yes, I forgot to take all my personal belongings with me; if only the noise cancellation was less effective, I might have heard the announcement about remembering to do that. Fortunately, AirPods cases famously have some features to help you find them: I might have gotten a “AirPods case left behind” notification, if only my phone wasn’t in Do Not Disturb mode; the next day, by the power of the Find My network, I could see they were somewhere in the train station, but I dumbly filled in the online form as instructed on the website instead of going there immediately in person.

After a day or so of nothing, the pin on the map moved to an industrial estate in Welwyn Garden City, apparently in the car park of a plumbers’ merchants – had a travelling plumber accidentally been given my AirPods case? No, Greater Anglia outsources its lost-property warehousing to Pakex, a supplier of cleaning and packaging supplies with a warehouse on that industrial estate. (They also sell railway-ish things like whistles and dispatch batons.) The location isn’t that precise, but I think it was in a van outside and later moved inside the building.

What the fuck does “granular”, as in the phrase “more granular”, mean? Because to me, granules are coarser than a fine powder, but finer than coarse lumps – you know, granulated sugar is between icing sugar and sugar cubes on the spectrum of granularity. If I ever use that word, please know that I’ve been replaced by an impostor.

I was haunted by some more beeps, and this time it couldn’t be people exhaling carbon dioxide – it had to be another appliance with a hitherto undiscovered ability to make noise. (I remember when I was small, somewhere in the single figures, the unexpected delayed gratification of discovering that a toy lorry had a hidden switch that would make some lights flash and possibly a sound.)

I wondered if it was a smoke alarm trying to warn of a low battery or something. Shamefully, I tried having ChatGPT interpret the colour of the little status indicator light, but I was told I’d need to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus to upload pictures of all three alarms in the place, and I decided I’d rather burn to death. No, but seriously, instead I read the manual like a proper person, and pleasingly the red, green and amber LEDs are separate like traffic lights so it doesn’t matter if you’re not sure of the colour.

Anyway, it was the kitchen scales.

🎦 One Battle After Another (2025). ! Shamefully, I had to pop out for a wee at, to be fair, as opportune a moment as any.

Last week I saw a James Bond pastiche advertising an electric motor car that’s a sort of cousin of a Volvo, in which Alexander Skarsgård’s accent was slightly uncanny. I checked, and it was exactly a year since I’d been distracted by the same accent in Lee (2023). Maybe that’s just his voice, I’m sorry for bringing it up.