To leafy leafy London (Hopefully a Few Laughs at the Cadogan Hall).

Because I’m too chill to run I had to spend 59 minutes waiting for the next train. There are some newish power sockets at Liverpool Street station, even some USB Type-C ones, but I couldn’t find a working one, some of them are upwards-facing and have been crapped on by pigeons, I’m broadly pigeon-positive but it felt sordid and inglorious.

A bit fascinated by a new, vibe-coded looking competitor to bustimes.org, wheresthebus.co.uk. I’ve found some problems with it, e.g. they’ve weirdly hallucinated the names of some bus operating companies, but it’s accumulating new features apace and I shouldn’t sneer, I should thank the slop jockeys for motivating me to pull my head out of my arse and fix the many problems with my own stuff.

Bought some bleach. Do you know I’d never bought bleach before? I’m suspicious of it, it’s bad for septic tanks and stuff, but I can’t deny that it’s made the toilet look cleaner than any amount of scrubbing with namby-pamby toilet cleaning liquid ever did. I know it just whitens limescale instead of removing it, but that’s OK – if you think about it, the accumulation of limescale forms a protective coating and it’s like getting more toilet for free.

It’s a point of pride that I don’t know about IQ. It feels a bit eugenics-adjacent isn’t it? I’d like to say that, like ounces and Fahrenheit, I don’t know what sort of number is considered a high one, or even if a higher or lower one is “better”. (Pretty sure I’ve got a high one though.)

Got some olives with the pits/stones still in them. I know they’re probably tastier than olives that have been pitted/stoned, which confusingly means de-pitted/de-stoned, but it’s a such a lot of admin to eat around the stones and spit them out. It’s not the biggest problem going on now, but it’s up there.

Noticed a lot of people using the word “anyways” instead of “anyway”. I was going to decry this as an Americanism, and puce-of-face protest that in this country maths is plural and anyway is singular. But evidence suggests that it’s nothing of the sort, and there’s multilateral agreement that it’s “anyway”, but maybe we have to let it go and accept that language evolves.

Years ago – in 2012, apparently, I blogged about it but the archives that far back are a bit patchy – I bought some Zebra Sarasa pens and too many uni-ball Signo refills – they’re slightly nicer than, but handily the same size as, the stock Zebra ones. Now there’s still plenty of ink in them, but they’ve dried up, and the usual fixes – standing them in hot water etc. – don’t really work. It’s like the time I self-restrainedly saved the chocolates from my advent calendar only for them to go stale and horrible, and learnt some kind of valuable lesson.

• The great proselint informs me that “in hot water” is a cliché, but I was using it in the literal “in a cup of stuff from a recently boiled kettle” sense. Maybe I should switch that feature off, but I can cheat by putting a linebreak in the Markdown.

Anyway. A pen drying up after 14 years is not bad, frankly it’s to be expected, but it makes me think maybe recherché pens that you can only buy on the internet aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, and the best pen is one you can buy from any Tesco Express. The uni-ball Eye is popular and I like the freer-flowing ink.

I want to clarify that a vegan who eats prawns is a fine thing to be – it’s still doing your bit to eat fewer animal products and destroy the environment less. I bought some nutritional yeast flakes this week.

Writing these weeknotes is a weekly constipated struggle, but I promise I will never use a large language model to help. I use a lot of dashes, but I hope you all notice that they’re en dashes, generally favoured by British style guides, not the longer em ones common in LLM shite. I do want to have a go on Claude Code for some things, but I still want to be able to badmouth my enemies for being AI jockeys.

Went to Brighton for a few hours, a long way to go for a short time and nebulous reasons. Partly to escape the neighbours’ noisy kitchen/bathroom renovations, and to make something of the last few days of my 26–30 Railcard, but mostly to see if the Ikea there had any of the big plates I’d looked for last week. And it did, and they’re really quite big.

The Brighton Ikea is nicely centrally located, and not too overwhelmingly big, but it loses some points for not having any big chimneys outside like the Croydon one does.

After returning home late, and having to unwind by watching a review of the 1998 Honda Accord, I slept late, and when I awoke bustimes.org had been broken for some hours.

It’s always bots isn’t it. Bots can run JavaScript these days, which feels like finding out that Daleks can go up stairs. (I know both have been the case for some time, one for much longer than the other.) And sometimes they cravenly hide behind residential proxy/embedded-SDK networks. (Did you know that if you make an app or internet-connected device, you can get paid for sort of renting out your users’ internet connections for web scraping purposes? But please don’t.)

The website being monetised with advertising has some ramifications. I have to allow bots that do supposedy valuable things like checking that the website is respectable enough for advertisers to advertise on. But if I muscularly welcome all bot traffic, its starts to look like I’m doing ad fraud (because bots can run JavaScript these days).

One of my eyelids swelled up for a few days last week. They’ve been prone to inflammation for as long as I can remember, such that I’ve even been accused of wearing eyeliner (guyliner?), but this time no one noticed so I didn’t get to say you should have seen the other guy. I read in the gutter press that one of Ant and Dec had a similar problem recently, a blocked tear duct apparently, not sure if that’s from too much or not enough crying. I nearly cried at how quickly one of the teams solved the connecting wall in the Only Connect final.

The road closure (see last week) got extended. I wish I didn’t care that they’ve misspelt buses this time.

My fizzing-with-ideas hasn’t translated into me doing any work about it, but it might be time for me to learn what a Web Component is.

The Orielles (h).

To London, by FlixBus. I was impressed that there were two drivers, yes they appeared to be double crewing it, but I should have realised more quickly that this was foreshadowing being delayed by a gloop of slow-moving traffic. Oh well, I can’t deny that it was £6.49. I felt sorrier for the rainswept folks waiting for the return journey, although the double crewing meant they wouldn’t need to wait for the driver’s legally require break like I did that time.

Snapped a key in a lock of a door, which could have been a chance to use my extraction tool again at last, if only it wasn’t a hundred miles away. But I had access to tweezers – no good – and nail clippers – good – so it was only maybe ten minutes of stressful panic.

Having an afternoon to spare, I went to the Croydon Ikea in search of the 32 cm plate. The website said they were in stock there, and not in any other easier-to-get-to London Ikeas, but I couldn’t find any 32 cm plates. (The next day the website said they were out of stock.) To save face I bought two normal-sized plates instead. Couldn’t be arsed to queue for meatballs.

Thought to myself, “this is the first time I’ve been on a bicycle since I started doing the New York Times Spelling Bee regularly”.

Thought to myself, it’s been a while since I saw a horse, or a cow.

bustimes.org now has a “popular pages” list. That’s not short for “the 10 most popular pages in order of popularity”; it’s a random 10 of the top 20, sorted by length (number-of-characters, not kilometres) for aesthetic reasons, you know like the diamond geezer sidebar. It’s absolutely not the best thing I could have done with the time, but it was mildly interesting, at the weekend, how the London bus routes SL11 (new) and 96 (change of operator) shot up there.

They’re digging up a bit of a road I sometimes walk along, so it’s unusually quiet of traffic and stuff. Disquietingly, I still saw several people waiting for buses there – they hadn’t read the unclear and badly spelled post on the website equivalent of a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard. They might have scanned the QR code at the bus stop, but it wouldn’t have helped cos no one had remembered to update the scrolly yellow bit of the slightly cursed live departure board website. It’s at least partly Elon Musk’s fault, cos in the past this sort of thing would have been tweeted, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

This left me fizzing with ideas about what I can do about it on bustimes.org, but ultimately you can’t beat the helpful sheet of paper that one local person had taped to a bus shelter.

🎦 Marty Supreme is in fact not about Marti Pellow.

I’m lazy about putting away clean dry laundry, never reaching laundry zero. Maybe there’s a solution that’s like the laundry equivalent of Ben Fogle’s two four dishwasher machines: having enough clothes horses to hold all your clean clothes, instead of a wardrobe. Or I could persuade myself to be less lazy: consider that the robotics companies have yet to produce a robot that can fold clothes well, so that’s one of my few advantages over robots, and I should celebrate that by putting my skills to use. And it’s a good way to pad your step count – even if you aren’t walking, a smartwatch is fooled by the arm movements involved.

• Limmy had some good advice about where to hang what on a clothes horse.

• I’ve seen the advertising executive–turned–unlikely TikTok star Rory Sutherland described as “the two dishwashers guy”, on account of a viral clip of him talking about the idea, but please let’s not erase Ben and Marina Fogle.

If using AI is like eating animal products, then I fear I’ve become like a vegan who eats prawns, but it’s boring to talk about.

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.