Got some Bombas socks some months ago, and they might be the best socks I’ve worn in all my years of wearing socks – slightly ugly, but both comfortable and hard-wearing, and the company give the impression of not being evil bastards. I didn’t use to like a shorter sock, but I’ve come round to the sleekness of ankle and no-show socks, especially when wearing shorts, so the socks I got were that kind. Now winter is coming I thought I’d investigate their longer socks, but turns out they’ve closed their UK shop after less than a year – yes they give it the old soft shoe about “you now have access to our larger assortment of socks & underwear”, but getting socks shipped across the Atlantic Ocean feels a bit much? Weak pound innit.

To London’s glittering West End to see Stewart Lee’s Basic Lee. Lee was looking a million dollars actually. Turned out it was the opening night, and it will be mildly interesting to see how the show has evolved when it comes to a provincial theatre or the TV maybe next year. Pleased that someone’s tackling the Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall issue.

The stone lions in Trafalgar Square were still fenced off – very sensible to stop the carnivorous beasts eating the dead head of state who’d passed-by the day before, lead-lined coffin or not you can’t be too careful, but couldn’t they hurry up and let them back out now? Saw some bagfuls of decomposing flowers too.

Days later, to Ipswich to see Edwin Gamble (supported by Chloe Petts). I think they were funny but the acoustic design of the Corn Exchange maybe isn’t great. I’m supposed to hate Ipswich and everything it stands for, but the waterfront in particular is actually quite nice, it was like being somewhere on holiday. No cathedrals but two bus stations, one of which is called “Tower Ramparts”, and who doesn’t like a rampart?

Sometimes in GTFS feeds there are service_ids mentioned in trips.txt and calendar_dates.txt but not in calendar.txt. I always just sighed, assumed it was an error, ignored it, but turns out it’s perfectly valid and everything makes sense now. Who knew? (Anyone who read the documentation knew.) It’s quite good that I never bothered reporting the what I thought was an error, avoided some slight embarrassment there.

Out to a big room to see Penguin Cafe, who I suppose you could say are the continuity Penguin Cafe Orchestra, everyone’s favourite minimalist instrumental folk, slightly pretentious, soundtrack to a thousand documentaries. In imagining what the audience would be like, I thought polo-necked architects, but really it’s all about zip-up garments made from technical fabrics these days. It was a nice evening.

The “deep purple” iPhone 14 Pro. If the Foxconn factory is actually a giant who poos out iPhones, then the giant must have been eating beetroot. I slightly regret the colour choice but it’s growing on me. It’s a clear improvement on the three-year-old old phone, and a lot of spendthrift nerds replace their phones more often than that. Oh the flat sides feel so nice in the hands.

Queen still dead is she?

• Impressed by how much bus timetable data has been updated for the StateFuneralOfQueenElizabeth bank holiday, well done everyone. There’ll be more buses running but fewer places open than on Boxing Day, so … a lot of empty seats?

• Shops (Morrisons) supposedly muting their self-checkout machines out of respect … I must confess, for a while I’ve sometimes turned town the volume myself (there’s a widget in the corner of the screen) when the loud robot voice has been too much, but maybe this makes me an awful shit because most people find the sounds helpful for telling when a barcode’s been scanned successfully. And some people enjoy how coquettishly the Sainsbury’s machines ask “would you like your receipt?”

• Don’t know why I uploaded the picture of the mat-based tribute last week, but the next time I passed by it had gone, replaced by a union flag with an unflattering oval portrait of the ex-monarch at its centre, repurposed from the jubilee.

• The live stream of increasingly tired people shuffling past the coffin was slightly compelling. I hope someone’s taped it so they can win the Turner Prize.

Still 1 Seconding Everyday, although it’s been years since I uploaded a video, and I’m undiligent about filming something every day every day. The other day I stood for minutes with the camera pointed at a gull, willing the seabird to fly off its perch before my arm got tired.

1 Second Everyday is a bit like BeReal, which all the cool kids are using these days. (It’s also different in several important ways.) And I read that BeReal is “like the oat milk of apps”, in that … I wish they sold it in smaller cartons? It probably makes you fart less than cow milk?

Noticed Joe Lycett had at least two of the Ikea Fransine cushion covers in the background of his interview on the Jeremy Vine television programme. It’s a good cushion cover. This generation’s Andy Kaufman, he wasn’t as good as Miles Jupp at presenting the weak Radio 4 parlour game It’s Not What You Know but that’s OK.

A victim of bicycle theft again. And it’s OK, it was the heavy spare bicycle I’d been wondering whether to sell, which I’d sort of deliberately locked insecurely; the good new bicycle is light enough to carry upstairs to safety and remains unstolen. Haven’t reported it to the police yet … they’re probably too busy arresting protestors or shooting unarmed men. But I suppose I should, if only so the crime stats can have some small effect on house prices.

Weird how they interrupted Bargain Hunt for a news report about how healthy the queen was, euphemisms eh. Two days later, I passed a church where “EɪɪR” was spelt out in offcuts of coir matting, or something of that nature, you know the stuff you stamp your feet and rub the soles of your shoes on at the entrance to somewhere. Did they have this poignant tribute ready for a while, or did the vicar start frantically cutting up carpet remnants after the news broke?

Don’t look an extra bank holiday in the mouth, but at what cost – oh how it’s going to mess up bin collections and public transport timetable data. (I think Coatham Coaches is the first operator to upload an updated OperatingProfile confirming they’re not operating on the bank holiday, well done to them.)

There’s a reply button on this website these days. But I broke it few weeks ago, so you’d type a reply and click send and your message would just disappear into the ether. Consider it a free undo button. But I’ve fixed it now.

(It’s a DigitalOcean “serverless function”, and it doesn’t help that their documentation is so bad, and their web interface … how long have I spent staring at the silhouette of a shark bobbing up and down that they use to indicate the “loading” state?)

This week, mainly a larger-than-expected little family rendezvous, our earlier attempts to get together this year having been stopped by various people unfashionably succumbing to the novel coronavirus. Lovely, spiritually nourishing, etc. Miles from the nearest Lightning cable for a few days.

Duty called and I had to rent a little motor car. The last person had left the fuel tank almost empty, so I went to buy my first ever petrol. I’d vowed never to be the sort of fool who doesn’t know what side his fuel filler cap’s on, I know there’s the secret arrow on the dashboard that tells you, but both pumps on that side were occupied so I had to go through the charade of trying to stretch the hose to reach the nearside of the Vauxhall Corsa, sheepishly getting back in the car to drive a bit closer … still not the most humiliating moment of any given week though.

Cars are bad.

Some work.

The old website for downloading NPTG (National Public Transport Gazetteer) data got switched off, breaking some of my shit – not in an important way, because geography doesn’t change much, but still I ought to have been better prepared because there was plenty of warning. You’ve got to download the XML now if you want regions, administrative areas, districts; the CSV download only has localities.

Moved bustimes.org to the DigitalOcean App Platform, which has some problems and I have some further complaints about but who cares.

Didn’t listen to any right-wing speech radio.

Some work. At last, the timetables of services split into pieces to avoid being longer than 50km (like the excel, which is registered in five, not four parts as I once claimed) no longer look a terrible mess. Turns out joining the journeys together is actually quite simple, I just had to overcomplicate the problem first.

🎦 Orphan: First Kill, easily my cultural highlight of the week. It’s a bit blurry at the start, a mixture of spooky atmospherics and de-aging and maybe a bad projector, so I briefly thought I was having a funny turn, but the emergency exit signs in the room stayed perfectly in focus. I’d seen thirty seconds beforehand, a great thirty seconds and the resulting bit of deja vu was nice too.

Weeks ago, the key to the letterbox here snapped in the lock – the lock bunged up after years of rain and dust getting in, and the key having a pronounced weak spot. The lock could still be locked and unlocked, and I wasn’t worried about someone nicking all the takeaway menus and estate agents’ flyers, so I ignored it, continued with my life, until suddenly the lock was stuck locked.

How to remove a broken key from a lock? I half-arsedly tried a dab of superglue on the end of a stick – didn’t work. Then I sent for a broken key extractor set, and by jingo, it was the work of just a few moments fiddling with one of the tools before the key was out of the hole. Locksmiths don’t want you to know this one weird trick.

Got a new key cut – didn’t work. But then I tried sellotaping the broken key together, and that did work. And now I’ve had the lock replaced, and it has a much less flimsy key, and everything is right again. Cool story.

I think I’m healed – I can lie on my other side again, and accidentally walked ten miles without any painful consequences.

Missed the National Express 23X by a fraction of a moment (mainly have myself to blame), so the lost village of Imber remains a mystery for another year. It would be cool if they put on that coach service again next year.

Spent some time in Belgravia doing nothing instead. Some thoughts about the poncy citizenM hotel:

• Since I last stayed in one, I think the silly iPad that controls the lights/blinds/TV/temperature has gotten harder to use, or have I just gotten older and dodderier? Oh well, untangling the electric blinds, and scrabbling round the back of the TV to turn it off and on again, was a fun little problem-solving challenge.

• They still don’t put tiny kettles in the rooms. I suppose they think they’re being “courageous”, like Apple removing the iPhone headphone jack. You can go downstairs where a barista will make you something frothy, but what if you want some horrible tea with a sachet of UHT milk?

People getting mad at the trailer for This England, the dramatisation of some of the events of 2020, because it’s a bit West Wing, makes people seem too statesmanlike, maybe? They’ve got Andrew Buchan playing Matt Hancock, an inspired choice because they do look alike, but it’s a shame he couldn’t do something with his hair (like Pete Campbell off of Mad Men) to make him look even more like Matt Hancock.

Liked the look of a cushion cover I saw in the background of a television drama. You’d think, by now, at the very least Amazon would have the technology to let you click on a soft furnishing and have a matching product delivered tout suite. They don’t, but Google Lens exists. Of course most streaming services don’t let you take a screenshot to upload, because a criminal might take enough screenshots to make a flipbook. But somehow I managed to find out that it was an Ikea Fransine, brilliant. They’re available on eBay but I don’t have any cushions to cover.

Some work. Drew a little map for “the people who do the Barbour jackets catalogue” which was nice.

The haematoma gets less red. At first, the bruise was the shape of Ireland, with an unbruised bit where Northern Ireland would be where my AirPods case had served as a shield. Resting indoors, sometimes with a bag of ice applied, is not so hard when the outdoors is on fire/uncomfortably warm anyway.

Had some thoughts abut the difficulty of finding hats for plus-sized heads (a size 8 is too tight for me, and anything that says “one size fits all” can fuck off), UPS’s bad website (their quirky vans and smart uniforms look so smart, but do you know who else had smart uniforms?), and things of that nature, but I can’t be bothered.

Still listening to Steve Allen’s radio programme (usually the podcast thereof). He (or the character he plays) is a strange, unpleasant man; you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to him”. But I’m drawn to the spectacle, rubbernecking, it’s a compulsion.

The other day, he was marvelling at things like Flightradar24, and then imagine how I yelped when I heard him say “bus times dot org”:

Thanks, Lee in Leicester. He was unimpressed – “no, no, it’s not normal, not normal is it?” indeed – and that’s OK. He’s mean-spirited about a lot of excellent things – trade unions, environmentalism, Gemma Collins – esteemed company!

Given all the hours of radio I don’t listen to, and applying Bayes’s theorem, who knows what other bits of national media coverage there’ve been…

Some cultural highlights of the week:

• Enjoyed The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, in which Benjamin Cummerbund illustrates twee pictures of cats. It’s got most of the cast of Flowers in it. At one point Wain falls off the back of a 1922 AEC S-Type, which a crushing bore would point out is just slightly anacronistic because the war hasn’t happened yet in that bit of the film. I hate it when people complain about that sort of thing.

  I have some complaints about Curzon Home Cinema, but it does have a cool playback progress bar.

• Zodiac, Gregg Wallace’s favourite film. It’s a strange choice of favourite, but I wouldn’t have watched it otherwise, so thanks. I have a “favourite movie” that I use for account security questions but I’ve never seen – maybe Gregg does the same.

• The second of serie of Industry, set in the banking world of workwear and snorting and fucking.

• Putting rocket on pizza.

Some work. I’ve quite a streamlined process for updating databases when bus operating companies cease operations, now – not enough to be cause for whooping and cheering, but it’s something, and I think the industry has got better at that sort of thing. Apart from that, it’s a bit grim, obviously.

Further to the Tesco Express self-checkout sardine from last month, I distantly remember a children’s book about some Cluedo champions who also investigated real crimes and caught a criminal who left some kind of small fish – I want to say a sardine, but maybe an anchovy or sprat – at each crime scene. You’d think a criminal could simply not leave fishy clues, if they didn’t want to be caught, but their minds work in mysterious ways.

Wednesday: woke in a bit of agony, something to do with the claret coloured bump from last week’s bicycle fall, a haematoma (write that in your copy book) in the buttock area. That evening, went to the walk-in centre, where they said I should go to A&E, so I did. Don’t think I’ve been since I was a wee child, if ever. (They call it the Emergency Department these days, to avoid confusion with the Arts & Entertainment Network TV channel I suppose.)

The hospital’s computer system had crashed. After twelve hours, I was seen and told to go home and rest – sound advice. The whole thing had been a waste of time but never mind ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I’d been a silly fool for not resting, cos actually I’d been quite restless, walking miles and running up stairs for the past few days.

Spent some time staring at a vending machine, watching people get frustrated with the card payment interface – you’ve got to press the buttons in just the right way – then along would come an ambulance driver or medical professional, with their superior intellect, and get it right first time. Then once you’ve managed to pay, it’s pretty cruel how, in a place where people are likely to have broken arms, opening the flap at the bottom to get at your bottle of pop requires at least two hands.

The good thing about long waiting times is I thought I’d have to get a taxi home but in fact it was mid-morning so the bus service had resumed.

I had some bagels proving in the fridge, but the extra time didn’t matter; they still came out bad, but for other reasons.

Found my jumper. Some people say “it’s always the last place you look” is the sort of pointless truism only a boring moron would trot out, but it’s true!

You know the “net promoter score”, where folks ask questions to which the answer is either “I need you to understand that people don’t have conversations where they randomly recommend [East Midlands Trains] to each other”, or “very likely [not really, but I don’t want the poor employees to get in trouble].”

But I search Twitter and actually people are randomly recommending bustimes.org to people. I could say something mean-spirited about it but I won’t – people find something useful, and want to share the useful thing, which is lovely.

As I was walking past Tesco Express, a lady laden with bags toppled over, oh no. I hesitated until someone else approached to help her up, and I’m afraid I just scurried away like I had somewhere important to be. (Thinking back to the fainting TalkTV political editor, of course I’d’ve run over to help if I was a mum like Liz Truss.)

Just hours later, I was bicycling along when suddenly the right handlebar snapped clean off and I landed cross-legged on the ground, bruised and grazed, sand in my mouth and my jumper torn. Oh what instant karma. Motor cars motored past, as it probably looked like I was meditating on the grass verge, but one did stop and kindly check I was OK, which I was after a fashion, and I gingerly pedalled home sort of one-handedly.

It was the old old bicycle, by the way. Who knows how old the handlebars were, and maybe whoever fitted them didn’t use a torque wrench, putting untold strain on the metal by over-tightening.

I’m sure you don’t want to hear about my swollen purple bum – I should have been quicker to sit on a bag of frozen brussels sprouts – woe unto me. What must the neighbours think of the moaning each time I get up or sit down or lean over in bed to reach a cup of tea.

🎦 In The Living Daylights, Timmy Dalton says “it must have scared The Living Daylights (1987) out of her”. There’s a box of fragile cargo marked “handle like eggs”, which apparently is a thing and is also written on something in Thunderball, which I’ll have to keep an eye on ITV4 for.

I had a tin of zesty pop to drink during Licence to Kill, so I waited for someone to open a can on-screen so I could open mine at the same time without the noise disturbing anyone. But there are no ring-pulls in the film. Bond orders a bottle of Budweiser with a lime, but he doesn’t get to drink it.

Sure you’ve already heard Nathan Fielder’s (from off of Nathan For You) The Rehearsal is something. The second episode was underwhelming, but after the third I feel silly for having had any doubts. There’s a New Zealandish torrent search engine that seems better than the famous Swedish one, I don’t know what everyone else uses these days.

I call women’s football “football” and men’s football “men’s football”. 👅

It was too hot for a bit. Time went all gloopy. In years gone by, when weather was more normal, people would whinge “it’s too hot”, but this was different.

Last week, I accidentally left the freezer door ajar, took a while to twig why the floor tiles were cold, took the opportunity to defrost the whole thing, became interested in the temperature inside it and the fridge in the hot weather, and got a little Bluetooth thermometer I’d been curious about since seeing a tweet months ago … cool story.

Cleaned around the doors and stuff, because you want a tight seal to stop heat getting in and making the milk go off/the refrigerator work harder. Some internet sources recommend smearing Vaseline on the gaskets to soften the rubber, but others say you absolutely shouldn’t, it’s as polarised as whether WD-40 belongs anywhere near a bicycle chain.

Finally, after last year’s dry cleaning fiasco, got some new curtains (Next). Not as bad as “cheap and nasty polyester monstrosities” – they’re exactly as offensively dull as the old ones, don’t want to rock the boat or ruffle any feathers, but nicer being made from more natural fibres and a more appropriate width.

They’re lined blackout curtains, in case that matters. Years ago, after hearing Merlin Mann going on about it on a podcast (?), I took an interest in eliminating light pollution from the bedroom, in search of a better night’s sleep, because our troglodyte ancestors didn’t have artificial light. I think Gwyneth Paltrow’s taken up the cause these days. But what a load of rubbish … isn’t moonlight natural?

🎦 A View To A Kill. Walken, Jones, a dirigible … but not as good as all that.

Prima Facie (Jodie Comer’s West End debut). I’d never been to a National Theatre Live screening before. Oh the theatre, the smug audience in London laughing at bits, but it was powerful and important enough for me to quickly forget any childish annoyance at that sort of thing.

The absolute worst: realised I’d mislaid a jumper I was fond of, who knows when or where I last had it (a regular selfie-taker would be able to know this sort of thing) (obv it’s been too warm to need a jumper recently) (I’ve daggier jumpers I wouldn’t mind losing, but being worn less often they’re less likely to be lost), woe unto me.

To Chelmsford, which Chuck Dickens called the dullest and most stupid place on earth, because the branch of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen hadn’t opened yet when he visited. There I had a thrifty-boy seat-filler’s ticket to see Jools Holland (and his rhythm and blues orchestra, and Beverley Knight) in a parched park. I wondered why so many in the queue seemed to be carrying bags of golf clubs, but no, they were folding chairs, of which I’d never seen so many, the sort people sit in to picnic in laybys beside their campervans.