This week I’ve mostly had laryngitis, which is a poncy way of saying I lost my voice for a bit. When you’ve read that the best way to recover is to rest your voice by speaking as little as possible, it’s really tempting to say things to check if your voice sounds normal yet.

I had a routine hospital appointment, which I might have phoned to cancel if only I hadn’t lost my voice. Later, I found myself bellowing “I’ve got laryngitis” at a cold-caller, by which I meant I was happy to waste their time by listening to their sales pitch as long as I didn’t have to talk, but they didn’t understand and kept asking me questions.

I am grateful for the dystopian innovations that make it possible to do things without speaking, the newest of which is tap on tap off on the buses here, which is also good if you’re not sure how to pronounce the name of your destination. (I think the system has undercharged me a couple of times, but to investigate further would be like telling the teacher they’ve forgotten to set homework.)

Otherwise I feel much better, or maybe I’ve just got used to feeling crap. I’m aiming for five million steps this year.

It was Sainsbury’s/Nectar Wrapped time again, and I was the #11 buyer of pesto tuna piccante on sourdough ciabatta in East England. It’s a nice sandwich, a bit soggy but it’s replaced the the halloumi and roasted vegetable wrap in my life.

This week I’ve been mostly coughing and feeling sorry for myself. I wish I’d been more careful about sanitising my hands etc. when I went on all that public transport the day after I’d weakened my immune system by binge drinking. I am grateful to my body for producing mucus, it means the system’s working to flush out bacteria and viruses, but I’d like my voice back soon thanks.

Even so, I was more gregarious than usual, we saw the sea and some smaller bodies of water, the winter coat got some good airings.

Happy new year. I like the idea of starting a film or programme at a certain time in order to experience midnight at the same time as the people in the television, but I couldn’t find a good list of suggestions with timings, and I was too tired to stay up much past midnight.

(I’m embarrassed on behalf of everyone who let off fireworks minutes before midnight, or earlier – have we forgotten how to synchronise our watches? But maybe I’m being narrow-minded, time is a construct, people are free to light fireworks whenever.)

Snow. Alas, I was too strung out on Lemsip to take any photos while the snow was falling and the light was pretty, and soon it had gone grey and melty.

(I’ve never actually used Lemsip, but “own brand paracetamol and crowdfunded honey” doesn’t sound as good.)

Christmas. To the Liverpool City Region and back.

I commend to you the lovely pubs of the Georgian Quarter, but maybe we’re twats for being so easily impressed by all of Rob Gutmann’s stag’s heads and antique bedpans.

It’s become a tradition that I return home with a big bag of empty plastic yoghurt pots, because Liverpool City Council won’t recycle them but my local council will. I know it’s not normal, and they probably all get dumped in the sea anyway. It’s good that the Simpler Recyling legislation will soon mean I don’t need to bother.

The train from Leeds to Peterborough. It was an older train, superior in some ways to the newer trains. Due to split ticketing, at Doncaster I had to move seats, and I didn’t want to confront the person sitting in my reserved seat, so I sat opposite a sour-faced woman and her sleeping large adult son (I guess). After a while he woke up, drank some cider, and was a bit arsey to her as she struggled to move so he could go to the toilet.

Later, it was time for us all to get off the train. The announcement that “we’ll shortly be arriving” tends to be a bit early, and no matter how chill and unhurried I am I still end up standing for a while waiting to actually arrive. After all that standing, upon stepping off the train the woman went all floppy and collapsed on the platform edge in front of me. Remarkably, I’d just read something about reisting the urge to help so I felt OK about kicking her out of the way letting all the other capable people around help instead.

(I wondered if the newer trains have a more accessible platform-train interface, i.e. a shallower step down from the train to the platform, but apparently they don’t.)

Then I had to catch a bus. There was a bus waiting outside the station, but its rear destination display was blank and I’d lost track of time so I assumed it was an earlier bus that had broken down or something. It’s a credit to First Eastern Counties that my brain couldn’t believe the display was simply broken, but of course it actually was and the bus pulled away before I could run after it. So how mildly interesting that I’d been visited by the ghosts of both level boarding and PSVAR in the space of a few minutes.

Anyway, I got to spend an hour in Peterborough, where I bought a lemon squeezer and tried unsuccessfully to photograph a Christmas tree–shaped display of bubbly water in the entrance to Waitrose, so I am the real winner.

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).