• 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.)

• In the liminal state between awake and asleep I had a fantastic idea. I can’t remember the idea now, just that I was jolly impressed with my half-conscious self for being so brilliant, but it was probably some nonsense.

• Went for a corona jab in a Wellbeing Hub in a shopping centre I mainly associate with feeling slightly unwell while searching desperately for a toilet or an exit. Now my shoulder feels satisfyingly sore like I’ve been pumping iron, and maybe coincidentally my tongue’s gone a bit funny, and that’s OK.

• As I walked along, a chap cycling past slipped and fell off his bicycle (he was OK), then minutes later I passed a child bawling his eyes out after falling off a scooter – it was like an omen foretelling what would happen to me if went cycling in these moist, early autumn conditions with my Continental Gatorskin tyres.

  Then I bought a pie, which had been praised by YouTube nutter who’s sure to be played by Michael Sheen when they make the film of his life. It was a good pie which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t Obtsobering again this month (unlike the bibulous vlogger). Also tried the “chicken curry” version, which was too underwhelming to have been worth killing a chicken for, oh dear.

• If our devices etc. are really all listening to us then I feel sorry for them, we’re so boring going on about this and that.

• Grew a record three tiny tomatoes on the balcony this season. Going “they actually taste like tomatoes”, claiming that supermarket ones don’t, is witless bollocks, but these did taste like tomatoes. Alas I didn’t take the time to slice them finely to make the world’s tiniest tomato salad, just ate them. Maybe next season will be the season I try using Tomorite.

• To leafy leafy London (to watch a RHLSTP). On the way home, overhead wire problems – I was at once excited about the delay repay ramifications and concerned about being stranded. Thinking myself clever, I took an alternative route – a train to Stansted, then a coach. There followed some drama as the train I could have caught was cancelled, reinstated, and eventually arrived quite late but still I’d’ve been much better off (as in both time and money) catching it and having faith in the railway gods. But never mind, I got to spend a charming hour at Stansted airport coach station so who was the real winner?

• Outside the Liverpool Street Marks & Spencer a man said “wait” or “hold on a minute” or words to that effect, and I thought he was telling me not to go into the shop but no he was speaking to an unseen someone on his telephone. Then I was too caught up with the selection of prawn sandwiches and the temperatures of the drinks cans that I didn’t make a note of the exact wording of what he said, so I can’t be sure, which I don’t like.

• Amy Gledhill (h). A visit to the Playhouse is worthwhile for the novelty of the push-action paper towel dispensers they have, but she was good as well.

• Some work. To save a few pounds I migrated a database to a slightly smaller server which was actually the same size, price and everything as the old one.

  I’ve been using Visual Studio Code a bit, although I often go back to Sublime Text out of force of habit. VSCode is tantamount to an integrated development environment, and I don’t really like its heft, and the most egregious thing about it is the icon depicting a conical flask (sometimes called an Erlenmeyer flask) to denote “Testing” (like we’re supposed to think it’s a test tube).

• Found an earwig on the soap dish (I know/I know it’s serious). Thanks to AI for identifying it … I used to know what an earwig looked like without deferring to a computer, it’s like something’s making me more stupid.

• Terry Reid (h) at the arts centre. Part of me wanted to stay at home, and I couldn’t remember if (according to TikTok witches) that feeling means a protective spirit is trying to save you from something bad, or a malign one wants you to miss out on something good.

• The Envy apples mentioned last week turned out to have an unpleasantly pappy texture, but maybe it was my fault for storing them improperly and for too long.

  The new Apple Watch with the Jet Black finish is nice. I don’t understand the metal-snobbery of anyone who pays the extra for a titanium one – oh is recycled aluminium not good enough for you? Grow up. But maybe the extra durability is worth it.

• I’ve become someone who brushes his teeth before breakfast, not after. Doesn’t it make the coffee taste minty? No it doesn’t, grow up.

• In the Sainsbury’s loos, a man dressed like a police officer was using the hand dryer, standing in the way of a washbasin, so I had to use the other, lower washbasin whose lowness contributed to me splashing water on my (fairly light-coloured) trousers.

• The Apple event, the coverage thereof and especially people’s toots about it, are a bit like when Alan Sugar tweets the Tottenham score. Anyway after all that I bought some Envy apples; I wanted to try some RedPop but I could find none.

  John Gruber, who I increasingly worry has been kicked in the head by a horse, has been making some disparaging noises about the European Union, to which I counter: here in Europe we can still get an Apple Watch with a functioning blood oxygen sensor, and an iPhone with a physical SIM slot. (And I was going to say gambling apps in the App Store but not sure how good and/or special that is.)

• Due to an oversight, and the visual similarity between the numbers 3 and 8, the URL slugs for weeks 284–286 here were numbered 234–236, and it’s too late now. But in several weeks’ time they’ll have dropped off the RSS feed and maybe I can fix them then.

• On the train back from my holiday I overheard some Americans telling an anecdote. The setting was some kind of university canteen/dining hall, and 40 people went to queue at the soup station, so they decided to start with dessert and work backwards, what a funny story.

• In the clearance section of John Lewis they’re selling those phallic Alessi beechwood salt/pepper/spice grinders for a lot less than they’re advertised anywhere else, so maybe there’s an arbitrage opportunity there for someone.

• As a result of the Transport for London cyberattack their buses have vanished from the map, which was my leading source of emails this week. It’s not a big deal because the bus arrivals feed still works, and I’m surprised anyone uses bustimes.org in London instead of the several better London-focused apps, but each to their own.

  Also I noticed that the Travel Norfolk website has the cheek to scrape bustimes.org for its “find my bus”/“show live buses on map” feature. That’s … interesting, and I guess I’m more flattered than I am irked.

• Thought I should finally find out what “Hawk Tuah”, the “Hawk Tuah Girl”, is all about, because remaining ignorant would make me no better than Andrew Neil not knowing what the Global South is. And well, is that it?

• Finally I deleted the Twitter app off of my phone, but I still look at it on other devices and it’s actually not a cesspit if you’re following the right people, and my experience of the newer, worthier microblogging platforms is still one of witless bores and shit puns (because I’m not following the right people, I know).

• This week I have been mostly on my holidays. I’ve got sand in my socks.

  The website got knocked for six by some sudden changes to upstream data things – not great timing on the face of it, but actually my relaxed holiday demeanour helped. (Reading between the lines, they’ve replaced a component of a thing, which to their credit has made the big map of live bus locations update quicker and has fixed at least one long-standing little bug – it’s just a shame about the new problems.)

• The Oasis pre-sale ballot form rejected my usual email address, accused it of being invalid, because the local part (before the @) is one character long. Never mind, that someone hasn’t read RFC 5322 isn’t my only reason for not pursuing it any further, and such is the folly of having a show-offy unusual email address.

  (It’s not really a problem, because I can make up a longer email address because I have catch-all wildcards set up. That’s cool apart from the problem of misremembering which email address I’ve told whom, and on balance the extra spam and mis-addressed emails are more trouble than than they are interesting. I remember Mr cardigan.com getting messages intended for, I guess, the Cardigan Mountain School for arrogant young men that owns cardigan.org … now I’ve wasted some time on the Wayback Machine failing to find the blog post about that, but I enjoyed this on the way.) (I regret the .in domain too, having no connection to India and it’s tricky to say out loud.)

• I can still proudly say I’ve never used Airbnb, due to rigid dogma, as long as we don’t count the times I’ve let someone else book and BACS’d them my share of the cost, like Richard Stallman having an assistant use nonfree software on his behalf. (That may be a misremembering of how Stallman operates, but I’m making fun of me not him.)

• 🎮 Had a nice time playing Thank Goodness You’re Here. It’s lewd, and at one point it’s a bit gross and nightmarish, but I had no actual nightmares.

• Defrosted the freezer, and it’s left a thin, smooth layer of ice so the drawers slide in and out wonderfully like a toboggan on the Cresta Run.

• Some work. I have a dark mode again – I sort of soft-launched it a while ago, and took some time to improve it, before finally foisting it on the prefers-color-scheme: dark crowd this week, and there was less opprobrium than last time, in fact there was no opprobrium.

• Went to grin and wave at the east coast truckers’ convoy, which was more fun than staying indoors wondering what all the noise’s about – actually I couldn’t be arsed to wave very much, which suggests I’d be bad at being royal or a pope. Inevitably, seeing all the shiny trucks, looking a bit undignified as they do without a trailer attached, left me yearning to play Euro Truck Simulator 2 again.

• 📺 The third serie of Industry (will probably be on the BBC in a month or so, but until then the pirates have it in HEVC format). There’s a character named Muck which I thought was yet more inaccurate subtitling (closed captioning), but no, it (Sir Henry Muck)’s his actual name and if you think about it is the sort of name a chap might have.

• In a 2002 episode of Top Gear, J Clarkson says of the Renault Vel Satis, “it’s like driving along in Arthur Negus.” (That must have been a dated reference at the time, but nowadays it’s easier than ever to educate oneself and learn that Negus was an antiques expert on television between the late 60s and early 80s.)