• Went to vote in the police and crime commissioner byelection. There was a huge queue, the like of which I’d never seen for a proper election, let alone a two-bit Mickey Mouse sinecure one … it seemed disproportionately whatever the opposite of a sausage fest is, and I realised that it was actually a queue to see an intimate performance by the boyband Blue. (The polling station was deserted, accessed by a carpeted ramp that creaked as I stomped fatly along it.)

• There’s a market stall named Jake’s Kitchen, whose motto/slogan is “because cake is always the answer”. That’s bang wrong – sometimes the answer is 1914, Borussia Dortmund, or cress. But if the question is “what would rhymes with Jake?”, cake is the answer, so why didn’t they call it Jake’s Cakes? It may be that some of the things they sell are technically not cake – pastries, tarts, biscuits etc – but then why is the slogan what it is?

• Andy Burnham, Wonderwall, and have you noticed the scouse Stephen Graham has replaced the cockney Dexter Fletcher after many years as the voice of the McDonalds adverts? It’s pretty thin, but surely a newspaper columnist will tie the things together and say the ascendancy of North West England.

• Got some of that Berocca, the soluble effervescent multivitamin tablet. I know it’s nonsense – famously it turns your pee a funny colour, which is a satisfying side-effect but really just shows you’re pissing away the extraneous vitamins. It’s a shame that they’re all a horrible synthetic orange flavour. Using ice-cold water makes it more palatable, but also stops the tablet dissolving so readily. I’d prefer an unflavoured version, it if only it were available – it might be unspeakably bitterly disgusting, but wouldn’t that only enhance the placebo effect? (See Rory Sutherland on Red Bull.)

• Got a smart electricity meter, which is huge for me. No in-home display, because the meter is too many floors away – I thought that something called Alt HAN meant that wasn’t a problem these days, but apparently not. But I can use the app to look at various graphs, after waiting about half a day for the previous day’s figures to appear. Compared to the water meter app, the electricity one is considerably less shite, and therefore even more compelling.

  Transfixed by how little electricity I’ve used since the meter was installed. I did paint a rusty bit of the fridge, improving the effectiveness of the door seal – did that made that much difference? No, I think they’d been way over-estimating my usage.

• 🎦 Saw Inception at the IMAX instead of the big football match.

  The Invite, which I can’t believe wasn’t renamed The Invitation for UK audiences. Just slightly too pleased with itself about how funny it is, and there’s a folding bicycle in it, which made me wonder if there’s anything to the theory that there’s a correlation between the two (see Twenty Twelve and W1A). Of course not.

• Tried one of those exfoliating foot peels. You pop your clean dry feet into bags of acidic gloop for an hour or so, then the horrible old skin peels off over the course of a week, leaving beautiful softness. It works on the whole foot, which feels unnecessary – the tops of my feet didn’t need peeling – but there may be versions that target just the gnarly bits of the soles.

  Quite what the point of it is, I can’t say – I’ve no plans to show anyone my feet, thank you, I’m keeping my socks on at all times – but I found the process satisfying and I’m pleased with the result.

• To Sheffield, to I’m embarrassed to say a podcast festival.

  A fancy pants hotel.

  • I finally plucked up the courage to use the conveyor-belt toaster, but not enough to risk putting the barely toasted bread back in for a second toasting.
  • I hung up the towels to signal that I didn’t need fresh towels, I’m not Boris Becker, but still fresh new towels seemed to appear each day, woe is me.

  It seemed like there were a lot of vintage steel-framed bicycles in Sheffield, which I supposed made sense for a historic centre of metallurgy. But Reynolds, of Reynolds 531 tubing fame, is actually from Birmingham, so it might be nothing.

• To Liverpool, where I stayed for longer than expected – given the railways’ advice not to travel in the hot sticky heat, ignoring their advice would have been rude and looked like I was unkeen to spend more time with my da.

• Something I think about sometimes is how I remember seeing it jokingly speculated that Robert Slimbach, the prolific type designer of Arno, Minion, Warnock etc. fame, wasn’t even a real person, and his fonts were the work of a dozen faceless Adobe employees. And so it may be with Ray Stenning, the designer of most of the snazziest bus and train liveries and interiors of the last 40 years – he’s real, I once bumped my head on a low ceiling in front of him, but I hope he has some help from all the staff of his design agency. This has little to do with anything that happened this week, except that his pawprints are all over the new Metro electric buses, some of which finally entered service while I was in the area, cool.

• The journey home. Peterborough station was absolutely rammed and I was glad that I’d set off early and wasn’t trying to go to or through London.

  All the while I had a Ritter Sport Cornflakes in my bag, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that it melted, enrobing various items – a sock, a loose AirPod – in sumptuous milk chocolate that I’m afraid looked like a dirty protest. Apparently the Sport is because it’s just the right size to fit in the pocket of a sport jacket, unlike a Range Rover Sport or a Land Rover Discovery Sport or a Suzuki Swift Sport.

Peter Bazalgette, the television executive and producer, is the great-great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, the civil engineer who pioneered London’s sewage system, and perhaps you can see where this is going. I wondered who was the first to make that point, but instead of answering that question I’ve just collected some examples.

Victor Lewis-Smith:

Given that his Victorian forebears were responsible for London’s sewerage system, surely it’s fitting that he’s keeping up the family tradition by smearing excrement over our screens.

Alan Partridge in I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan:

[…] Peter Bazalgette of Endemol fame is sometimes wrongly credited with the invention of reality TV. In fact, it was Alan Partridge.

It’s a little known fact that Peter’s grandfather Joseph designed the London sewer network. Some people have very unkindly suggested Peter has simply taken what his granddad did literally and continued it metaphorically, delivering an unending torrent of human filth and waste into our homes. But I’m not one of those people. I think he’s quite good and has made a reasonable contribution.

Teresa Pearce, then MP for Erith and Thamesmead in her maiden speech in 2010:

In the mid 19th century, Crossness was part of the visionary work of Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who built the London sewer network that cleaned up London and wiped out the cholera epidemics that had previously killed hundreds of Londoners every year. It is ironic that Sir Joseph’s great grandson is Peter Bazalgette, the TV executive who brought the phenomenon of “Big Brother” to Britain. Whereas Sir Joseph spent much of his life trying to get rid of unwanted waste from the homes of the nation, some might say that his great grandson has done quite the opposite.

I also remembered a sketch from Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle but it’s not strictly relevant.

• Got a moisture meter for the potted plants. The dial that goes dry • moist • wet is slightly funny. I suppose there’s a more expensive version that includes damp. The instructions are clear that the probe must only be stuck in soil, and definitely not in liquid, but it’s so tempting to find out what sort of explosion would ensue if I tried probing some wet water.

  

• The heat and humidity are bit oppressive, but various evidence suggests that I don’t mind being oppressed.

• Cherries!

• Squandered some time logging old public transport journeys on TransitTracker (FKA Busmiles) for the small satisfaction of covering the “all time map” with more and more squiggly lines. This means doing a sort of digital self-archaeology, finding old emails from train ticket retailers and stuff.

  Past me is a mysterious and unknowable figure, e.g. in 2014 I booked a ticket to Glasgow, pretty cheap by today’s standards, but I have no memory of going there then, and I found a photo whose timestamp proves I was elsewhere that day (the 24th of September) so what was that about? (Of course I’ve been there on other days that I do remember, along the same bits of railway track, so for the purposes of squiggles it doesn’t matter.)

• I added some buses in Las Vegas to bus times dot org for some reason. There was some speculation that this meant I was on holiday there – not on your nelly. It was just a “fun” “challange” to make the thing cope with different timezones, it wasn’t that difficult actually.

  On Sunday, I learnt that the next day was a special bank holiday in Scotland (in honour of the World Cup, oddly not on a day when Scotland were playing but you don’t look a day off in the mouth). I was alarmed and disappointed that the typical England-centric folks hadn’t issued any timetable data guidance like they had for the royal funerals and coronations, but I quickly calmed down as it seemed like most operators would treat it as a normal Monday. Still, it’s slightly the sort of thing that suggests that expanding the coverage of the website, spreading my attention more thinly, is a bad idea after all.

• To Scunthorpe, to see John Kearns’s Tilting At Windmills, which is loosely about The Waste Land and Lighthouse Family. Many of the shows around the country were and are sold out, but this was barely a quarter full, which atmosphere wasn’t ideal but never mind. Perhaps the people of Scunthorpe are special Latin pedants who objected to the blurb calling him a “Taskmaster alumni”, he’s an alumnus dammit.

  Nice to visit these towns which I’d only otherwise visit if I followed lower league football. I overnighted in Sheffield, which is only a bit geographically crazy. The bus from Doncaster to Sheffield was charming, apart from the old fellow with badly dyed hair who kept a window open so we could all inhale the fumes from the underground bus stations in Sheffield and Rotherham.

• Removed the pedestal from the bathroom sink, as I’ve done before, to fiddle with the pop-up plug mechanism and screw the tap in more tightly. Perhaps I could have left the pedestal in place and shoved my lubricated hand in, but I don’t like that, like my hand could expand and get stuck in there forever.

  To reattach the pedestal, it’s useful to have a just-the-right-height steady pile of boxes to support it, and I was glad to have a lot of old magazines I could “layer” to get the height just right. Hoarding wins again!

• Thought to myself, I haven’t made a lasagne since the coalition government. So I made a (lamb) lasagne. It was fine, slightly bland but hopefully the blandest lasagne I’ll ever make. I used some pre-chopped frozen soffritto mix from a bag, is that interesting?

• After in the ballpark of two decades of seeing the words “Post Moderne” written on this bicycle seatpost, the penny dropped and I realised it’s so called because it’s a brand of seat post, it’s not about the inner workings being exposed like the Centre Pompidou because how would that work?

  It was time to replace the saddle and goodness me, what a cruelly strange way they’ve come up with of attaching a seat to a post, like MC Escher designed a seatpost. Fortunately, someone on Reddit had the same problem before me, there’s often someone, but I wished I’d not bothered and had instead badly repaired the old saddle with gaffer tape.

• Got caught bicycling in a thunderstorm, not sure if it’s relevant, and a bit later cycled through an amber traffic light and got honked at. The honker honked again as they overtook me, in their sweet VW Passat estate, and I gave an illegible nod and thumbs up, perhaps a salute would have been better. Well, they got the satisfaction of being right, and I promise I’ll be more careful next time. Days later, I returned to the scene on foot, and you really don’t get much time to clear the junction, hmm.

• Monday. Some bicyling around the idyllic countryside, where I bought some local soap and kimchi from a farm shop and got caught in a refreshing shower of rain. What a great density of churches there is, no houses just fields and churches.

• Tuesday. Past me had laid some traps for me, and they came home to roost and broke the website – Redis restarted due to factors, and a typo in a configuration file made it actually just stop and not start again. I’m not sure if I woke up just in time or the alerts woke me up, but either way I fixed it surprisingly quickly for one so rumpled and bleary-eyed.

• 🎦 Partly to escape the tedious rumble of practising military jets, I went to see Top Gun (in which Tom Cruise goes into a ladies’ bathroom). If our brave boys decided to fly over a built-up area specifically to make us retreat into the soundproofed cinema to watch the 40th-anniversary screening of their military propaganda, fair play to them, it worked on me.

• Someone’s left a copy of Coding for Beginners atop a dustbin. Makes you think.