Week 88

Sunday 22 November 2020

• Anyone who uses the word “dinner” is an arse. Because there’s dinner as in “dinner lady”, also known as “lunch”, and there’s the tory dinner as in “dinner party”, known as “tea” or “supper” to sensible people. Yes, the meaning is usually clear from the context, and yes, dinner ladies are called MSAs (midday/mealtime support assistants) these days, but why be ambiguous? And yes, it is a class warfare thing.

• There was much shouting about Fleets, the new pretend Instagram Stories content type on Twitter, and I was dismayed that I couldn’t access this new feature because it was still being rolled out. And then I could access it, and it was underwhelming. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• A type of beer that had disappeared from UK shelves has reappeared on UK shelves, in enormous boxfuls. I picked up an enormous box and carried it as far as the checkouts, then thought better of it – it was such a heavy enormous box, so hubristic, what was I thinking? – and returned it to the pile on the other side of the big shop, all covered in my germs. Oh dear, but I got away with it, and maybe one day it will be expedient to buy such a boxful, with the help of a trolley and a bicycle.

• It turns out that Morrison’s stocks Buses magazine. The barcode scans as Barbie magazine, which is 89p cheaper than the Buses cover price, and it’s more respectable to appear interested in barbecues or dolls than buses, so great.

• The consumer pronoun Which? has pronounced on shop bought mince pies. Their website has a paywall, but various newspaper correspondents are here to reword press releases and reveal the results for free. They gave short shrift to the “claggy” Sainsbury’s pies which remain my favourites so far and deserve longer shrift.

• The bicycle had gone months without sustaining a puncture, which reflects excellently on the Kevlar reinforcement of the Schwalbe City Jet tyres. Then this week there was a puncture – in fact, two punctures at the same time – which I fixed and it was fine. So that was something to do. Cool story.

• 📺 Industry. I have also watched some of Ted Lasso, which … well, it’s unusual that they made the trailer make it look much worse than it actually is.

This is a bit boring isn’t it

Week 87

Sunday 15 November 2020

• There’s a famous guy – by which I mean he writes an email newsletter – who lives around here. He glins, you know? He doesn’t seem very mentally well, but I think even folks who sympathise with his terrible views would agree that he’s a prick.

  The other day, I walked past him. I must have thought about him less than an hour ago, which would have been a spooky coincidence if he hadn’t lived rent-free in my head for a period during which I didn’t walk past him once. I extended a middle finger in a way he was unlikely to notice because my coat has long sleeves, but nevertheless must have sent a shiver down his spine and made him reconsider his position. I think he was walking a dog – it was post-sunset, and I didn’t give him a proper stare, so I might have imagined it – and, a bit further along the road, I almost trod in some dog shit – so I can’t rule out the possibility that the guy doesn’t pick up his dog’s turds, which is pretty bad if true, grounds for another cancellation. Perhaps he’s too busy glinning to mess about with plastic bags.

  Black Books was an excellent sitcom, wasn’t it?

• The SwitchBot Curtain I ordered some months ago arrived, taking me a bit by surprise. It’s a sort of robot that runs along your curtain rail to automatically open or close your curtains, which I just think is a neat idea. Alas, it struggles to close the horrible “grommet top” curtains here – there’s too much friction – and the curtain rod in my bedroom is not of a consistent girth, so it gets stuck. Clearly, the only solution is to move house. Meanwhile, at least it just about manages to open the curtain in the other room – not quite the waking me up with bright sunlight I’d envisaged, but then it’s quite gloomy out anyway.

• Looking back at my camera roll to see if anything else happened this week. Cycled up a hill and looked at some fog. Bought some flour from a shed and made some very puffy bread.

• Why not email in to let us know your least favourite type of jam. I think mine is chilli.

Week 86: tar patch for Alan Shearer

Monday 9 November 2020

• Gambling is, and I cannot stress this enough, a mug’s game. But I placed a bet (£6) on the orange tyrant, and cashed out the following morning when the market was having a panic that he might win. So I won £3.85, and he didn’t win, so that’s nice – the two best outcomes.

  What can one buy for £3.85? Apparently a bottle of Sainsbury’s Penguin Sands wine (either Shiraz or Cab Sav). 🤯 I have not bought one.

• Bicycled to see my da. It’s sugar beet season so I mudded my clean trousers and shoes, mainly by squelching past some magnificent Scania lorries that were parked inconsiderately so beets could be elevated into their trailers. Apart from that it was lovely.

• During a different bit of biycling, I saw the sobering sight of fieldfuls of furloguhed aeroplanes, and then came across a bit of cycle path where the message tar patch for Alan Shearer had been spray-painted on the ground. So there must be a person named Alan Shearer who’s in charge of tarmacadaming at the council or one of its contractors, and I bet sharing a name with a beshirted retired footballer turned pundit is… not much of a hassle actually. The most interesting thing about this graffiti was how large and clear the lettering was – usually you just get some small illegible abbreviations.

• As soon as I read about the AirPods Pro Service Program for Sound Issues, I booked an appointment with a Genius, in the nick of time before the non-essential shop would have to close. I wasn’t sure if my sound issues were really issues – a crackling sound when out in windy conditions, or when lying down with an AirPod touching a pillow, both easily solved by changing the “Noise Control” setting from “Noise Cancellation” or “Transparency” to “Off” – but surely it was worth checking, and if you have to switch off one of the main features then what’s the point?

  Before I was allowed in the shop, I was delighted to have my temperature taken and again confirmed to be perfect – even though having a normal temperature is no more special than passing a cognitive screening test (person, woman, man, camera, TV).

  Well, after a bit of palaver with serial numbers and diagnostics, the Genius replaced both AirPods for free, even going to the trouble of extricating the replacements from their elaborate individual cardboard boxes. And the replacements don’t make any crackling sounds, which is reassuring.

  Shortly later, I woke from a nap and was convinced for a while that I’d swallowed an AirPod, which was alarming. (If you do swallow one, you want to expedite its passage, because remember the pig pedometer fire? – you don’t want the battery catching fire in your tummy.) I eventually found the stray AirPod, on the floor not in my poo, so panic over, but perhaps it’s best to use wired headphones when sleepy.

• The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (No. 4) Regulations 2020 came into force here in England. It’s nice that there are fewer motor cars about, at least compared to the few days before when folks were flocking to non-essential shops. Website traffic and money are less low than they were in April – possibly because some places aren’t England, and schools are still open, and the government isn’t actually advising “avoid public transport”.

Stay well.

Week 85

Sunday 1 November 2020

• I continue to fail in my duty of care for my foot. I limped a long way uphill, in the rain, and was hobbling by the time I got home. But it it gave the non-foot parts of me a sense of wellbeing, and I was distracted by trying to remember the second item I needed to buy – after dishwasher salt,¹ which I’d bought from the top of the hill. (It turned out to be bin bags.)

  Bicycling seems like a better way of enjoying the benefits of exercise without needlessly aggravating a foot. This week I have finally discovered the marvellous bicycle journey planner cycle.travel, which uses Open Street Map data, recognises that paved roads are preferable to bumpy paths, and is easily better than Google Maps or anything.

• Last week, for some reason, I caught a bit of Gregg Wallace shouting Inside the [croissant] Factory,² and it inspired me to make some croissants. (Coincidentally, I saw on Twitter that a bookmarking website was also making some croissants.)

  Given that I ignored some important aspects of the recipe I looked at, because who the fuck is Paul Hollywood, what does he know, and why does he want me to use so much butter, the croissants weren’t actually that bad and I only threw away most of them. But imagine how good they’d’ve been if I’d followed the recipe.

• Watched a bit of Roadkill, in which Hugh Laurie plays a sort of bizarro Chris Grayling named, as far as I can tell, Ian Roadkill. Actually a bit odd to hear Laurie not speaking in an American accent.

• Although there some problems with most “personal finance” blogger types, their ignorance of people much poorer than themselves, etc, I enjoy some of the work of Mr Money Mustache, like his amazing insight that folks don’t need big expensive brand new cars – pretty revolutionary in North America. But his latest, “Why you should consider house-hacking” – it would be disingenuous to summarise it as “Why you should consider becoming a slum landlord”, but sometimes it’s OK to be disingenuous. (And it’s good to see some dissenting voices in the comments on that blog post.)

  Now, there’s a difference between “improving your city by providing a useful service” and being an actual slum landlord. But is it a slippery slope? I think what I think is this: landlords are definitely all parasites, but parasites do serve an important role in ecosystems.

• The most exciting news is that Toblerone ice cream has reappeared – in Morrisons, in boxes of 4 (rather than the 3-pack previously available from Iceland). A S*n article from last year suggests Morrison considers them a special Christmas item, well they are shaped a bit like trees, so maybe some moderate stockpiling is in order.

• I was starting to pine for a new episode of The Talk Show, which is strange because they’re always admirably a bit sporadic and there are plenty of other places to hear men going on and on about this and that expensive computer. But now I see the 299th episode has happened and I wonder what kind of holiday party the 300th will be.

Week 84

Sunday 25 October 2020

• Last weekend, the robot vacuum cleaner started springing into life at about 7am. I didn’t mind being rudely awakened, I probably need to seize the day earlier in the morning sometimes, and it was a novelty, but hmm. It happened two mornings in a row, then stopped, then started again late in the evening at the end of the week.

  There’s a timer that can be used to schedule it to spring into life, but I’m quite sure the timer isn’t set, so how strange. It’s controlled by a remote control, so my pet theory is that a neighbour with an “IR blaster” (or maybe even the same type of robot vacuum cleaner) is accidentally remotely controlling it, like John Siracusa’s smoke alarm.

• The clocks autumned forwards or backwards. Last year, there were some AmbiguousTimeError errors on the website, and so it was again this year – all the fault of imperfectly designed “upstream” APIs, I might add – but this time I was concerned enough to do some hotfixes in bed, and I have some thoughts about fixing them properly, although some of the sloppy upstream stuff will have gone away by next year.

  I schedule my life around the off-peak periods of the Economy 10 tariff (that’s not really true but I thought it would be an interesting thing to say), which don’t observe daylight saving time, so what a thrill it is to use the washer-dryer an hour earlier than during the summer.

• I see that last year I also bicycled in the rain, and again here we are again. Crossing a lot of roads to get between bits of “shared use” foot-cum-cycle paths, sometimes with the help of a toucan crossing, but other times waiting for the unrelenting procession of motor cars to relent, it felt like more motorists than usual took pity on me and let me cross because my waterproof hair and coat looked quite wet.

• Bought a tin of ale, and some other items, from a shop. Later, went to a different shop, and the ale tin had exploded in my bag (it’s a bicycle pannier that transforms into a messenger bag) and ale started to dribble down the back of my trousers. Nothing really bad happened. Cool story.

• Some ennui and despair but the feeling soon passed.

Week 83

Monday 19 October 2020

• Went on the bicycle to see my da. There were rain showers, so I wore waterproof trousers, which made me sweaty so perhaps I’d have been drier without the waterproof trousers. (But the main benefit of the waterproof trousers is protection not from rain but from the muddy splashes of passing lorries.)

  Towards the end of my journey home, there was quite a lot of motor car traffic. One motor car did a dangerously close pass – you know, the sort of incident people like Jeremy Vine tweet videos of – and I wished I’d had the foresight to strap a GoPro to my head. Instead I just mealy-mouthedly mouthed “fucking hell dickhead” as it sped away. Then I passed a similar looking car coming the other way, and I glared at it, but it was probably not the same car, leaving the driver wondering why they were being glared at (or, more likely still, they didn’t notice my glaring).

  (Those Jeremy Vine videos: I’m surprised I’ve never seen one where a confronted motorist goes “oh my god it’s Jeremy Vine from from off of Jeremy Vine.)

• In the evening there were some commotions and flashing lights outside. I went to investigate and found gileted men wielding flamethrowers/great big blowtorches … making a great big crème brûlée/baked Alaska? No, they were using the fire to remove some road surface markings, and then repainting the markings. (Including a the outline of a bus stop, where no buses actually stop.) A fire was burning on the back of their truck and it looked very cosy.

• The shop bought mince pies (“Christmas pies”) I have experienced so far, in chronological order:

  • Lidl “Favorina 12 Mince Pies”. Pastry a bit too soft. A lingering aftertaste, which arguably represents good value – the experience lasts longer. 👎

  • Sainsbury’s “All Butter Mince Pies, Taste the Difference x6”. A grown up flavour (there is some brandy in them). 👍

  • Morrisons “The Best All-Butter Deep Filled Mince Pies”. A pack of 4, “baked in store”. Maybe they are deep filled, but not deep enough for an agreeable pastry-to-mincemeat ratio – really, I think the pastry is too deep. 👎

  I made a pleasing observation, which is that the most common number of pies per box, 6, is ideal for a “rule of 6” compliant gathering where everyone eats one pie and there are no leftovers. But there’s no such thing as an original thought, and it turns out that Alec Evans of getsurrey.co.uk made a similar point.

• Taskmaster (Channel 4) is my cultural highlight of the week.

Week 82

Sunday 11 October 2020

• A bit of cycling around. Near the industrial estate where my socks were possibly misdelivered (see last week), a small supermarket piqued my interest. It turned out to be Polish, and an Aladdin’s cave of fresh produce and pastries and mysterious packets. Bought three items and added it to Open Street Map.

  • The franchise network’s blog is something. Women’s day salad, indeed.

• Ooh new Apple Maps. Very impressive building outlines for the UK. Still no cycling directions or “Look Around” outside of megalopolises yet – I met one of their vans with the camera on the roof years ago in a minor market town, so processing all that footage must’ve taken longer than they might’ve hoped – but let’s be patient.

• Saw a relative.

• Hurt my foot. I’m not sure when or quite how it was hurt.

  • Well, perhaps when I was theatrically hopping about in toilet despair upon confirming that some public toilets were closed. (I won’t pretend to be confused about why they were closed – I know there’s probably a non-specious rona related reason, I’m not like Allison Pearson or someone.) (I was eventually relieved to use an excellent loo a bit closer to home, and the excellence almost made up for the earlier discomfort.)

  Anyway. I continued to do some long walks with a sore foot – that I was able to do suggests I’m making a fuss over nothing and it couldn’t have been that sore, but now it really is sore because turns out long walking makes sore feet more (not less) sore.

  Well, at least the damp weather and rona mean I’m not missing much stuck hopping indoors.

• First mince pie of the season.

• Started listening to Sunburn: The unofficial history of the Sun newspaper in 99 headlines, which is read by Alexei Sayle, who is very good at reading aloud.

Week 81

Monday 5 October 2020

• Well, the weather has been a bit miserable. Without the sun streaming in through the windows making the place like a greenhouse, and with less residual heat from the neighbouring flats for some reason, I might finally have to learn how the electric heating works. I already know how to twiddle the knobs on each electric heater until they heat up, but there’s a little programmable control panel I’m intimidated by.

• Seen the parcel delivery dude a bit more than usual, by which I mean two or three times over the last few weeks.

  One thing I ordered was some socks which, as far as I can tell, were inexplicably delivered to a building on a distant industrial estate… very strange.

  Another was a “recipe box”. You know the deal: pay a startup quite a lot of money (although you’ve probably got a discount code) and receive a box of just the right amount of individually packaged ingredients to cook some adventurous recipes. Well, I have no regrets – the food was tasty and I’m sure I’ll find a use for the woollen insulating packaging – but I won’t be letting my subscription go on that long because come on. (Maybe I’ll try some of the other different companies’ introductory discounts.)

• It occurred to me that I would like to eat a mince pie. And, actually, apparently there are already some mince pies being sold in some shops. But I haven’t seen any (or jars or mincemeat) yet.

• My cultural highlight of the week is this extraordinary interview with Claudia Winkleman. Who knew the erstwhile presenter of Liquid News would be so anti-liquid?

Week 80

Sunday 27 September 2020

• To the countryside. I was going to cycle there, but found one of the new bicycle pedals hanging off – not a slight on Zonkie’s excellent craftsmanship, but rather the old crankset had somehow perished – perhaps I’d not adequately cleaned out and greased up the thread. Bit odd that the problem appeared to appear suddenly overnight – why didn’t I notice it on my previous ride? – but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

  So I went on the bus instead. Good to see the poster about face coverings had been moved from knee to head height.

• It was lovely and sunny and good to splash around some saltmarshes and places like that. I almost tripped over a seal pup, who was a bit distressed but managed to wriggle some distance towards the sea.

• Then it was cold and rainy and windy. Sometimes the rain was horizontal. Isn’t it remarkable how there are different types of weather, sometimes within the same week.

  After the worst of the wind, I noticed a lot of UK Power Networks vehicles outside the Holiday Inn. I suppose engineers from less windy areas were drafted in to help mend all the overhead power lines, and they overnighted (overnought?) there. How interesting.

• Of course I made a partrimage, a partrimilgrimage to see the Alan Partridge statue. The genius of the “AHA!” inscription on the plinth is that it’s still readable in reverse (i.e. when captured by a selfie camera).

• I am this week’s Coach & Bus Week magazine, which is nice. (Don’t tell anyone, but I slightly prefer Buses magazine, but only slightly.) There’s a bit in it where I said “use case”, but they’ve changed it to “user case”, which is really my fault because it turns out that “use case” is a bit of jargon – what have I become? – and I ought to have just said “use” (as in “hundreds of uses”).

Week 79

Monday 21 September 2020

• Some work. I let a so-called “SSL certificate” expire, which is embarrassing. (It can ∴ ought to/should be automated.) I was outdoors when I noticed that something was wrong, and on the iPhone it manifested itself as a mysterious networking error that I convinced myself wasn’t my fault. (I see the Android error message is more detailed, as well as alarming.)

• I don’t have many thoughts about iOS 14, because come on. As some kind of plutocrat, I am pleased that the experience of using AirPods and switching between devices is much improved.

  The wristwatch can now remind you to wash your hands when you get home, which I can verify works. And it can also, allegedly, detect when you’re washing your hands and start a timer, which, despite campily exaggerating the way I washed my hands, I couldn’t make work. I even tried telling Siri “hello I am washing my hands” and “start a handwashing timer”, but it was all “u wot m8”. Then I was washing some dishes and lo, a timer started. (I suppose the folks who design these things all use dishwasing machines.)

• This is my space to record that I had some heavily discounted goat curry and it was OK and I don’t mind that some stuck in my teeth. I’m sure there was also some food that hadn’t been ordered, which is always nice – who knows if it’s normal, and/or the product of disorganisation or the milk of human kindness.

• I’ve been listening to Adam and Joe’s old XFM programmes, thanks to the lovely power of RSS feeds which aren’t dead. 2003–2006 really was a different time, as evinced by a few things (e.g. something a bit ignorant about the Wachowskis) I noticed because I’m not a monster, but I also understand that it was, as I said, a different time.

• I commend to you David Tennant’s chilling performance as … Denis Norden? Harry Nilsson? Creepy.

• Bicycle pedal update. I removed the old busted bicycle pedals, which took lots of straining until suddenly it became very easy, and put the new ones on. Cool story.

  One of the things about bicycle pedals is that, to stop it unscrewing during pedalling, the thread goes “the wrong way” on one the pedals. To be precise, the left pedal. If you give it no thought, you might nod along happily with why it’s the left pedal; if you give it a bit of thought, you might start to have questions because based on the way the pedals rotate during pedalling. Sheldon Brown, the best Sheldon, has a good enough explanation that I will remember. (It’s because of “precession”, an effect that can be demonstrated with a pencil and a pair of hands.)