Waited tensely for a bus on bank holiday Monday. It had disappeared from the electronic screen, but after many minutes it appeared on the map on bustimes.org, so I could reassure the fellow person waiting, When pressed, I recommended and said I’d used the First Bus app, for some reason, as if keen to avoid allegations of bias.

It was my birthday. I did two poos of an almost perfect size and consistency, which is the greatest present one could wish for.

Went to Dereham briefly to take in the fumes of the Mid Norfolk Railway’s vintage bus day, which isn’t mid at all.

On the (normal not vintage) bus back, the driver missed various signs about road closures and diversions and went down a dead end, which to be fair is the sort of bungling I’d be doing if entrusted with that job. A capable man leapt to try to help and “see back” the abortive attempt to turn the bus around – it was no good, there were many dreadful sounds of metal scraping against road – and direct the eventual successful reversing. By the way, it just so happens that this week I’ve been working on improving the way I show the GPS traces of buses:

Later I noticed our have-a-go hero looking at bustimes.org on his phone. Legend! Some fellow passengers had been quietly mocking of his attempt to help, but not me.

The other five days of the week were more normal and I touched no buses on them. Do you know, I think I’ve never met an arancini that wasn’t disappointing,

Down by the river, the place has been reverberating to the guff-like sound of paddleboards being deflated at the end of a day in the water. Similarly but differently, I overinflated a bike tyre – like doing a few press-ups has given me an unknowable strength – and the inner tube burst, terrifyingly, the in the warmth of the hallway while I was relaxing later.

Some websites and apps similar to bustimes.org have a “favourites” feature. The argument against is easy: the beauty of everything having its own URL is people can simply add their most used bus stops etc. to their browser’s bookmarks, so let’s not reinvent the wheel. But increasingly these days I don’t even know where to find that bit of Safari on my phone.

Radio 4’s The Secret World, which used the mimicry of impressionists to imagine the private lives of famous people, imagined Morrissey as a harmless pedant rather than a horrible racist, complaining to Microsoft support, or possibly Bill Gates himself, about Internet Explorer’s so-called favourites feature: that you should be limited to picking one favourite and, if I remember correctly, “other agreeables”. And for some reason I’m a bit tempted to copy that pedantic boreness.

I walked up a hill and saw a snake in a pond, while listening to a podcast about the man who reviews tinned fish watched longingly by a dog in short videos on the internet.

roadworks.me.uk keeps existing, hoarding details of all the roadworks in England for no obvious reason but eventually I want the map on bustimes.org to show ⛔ where there are road closures. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the data is bit of a mess, but it’s OK, I’m just jolly grateful that it exists at all.

One of the things about it is it includes the location of every skip on a public highway. (A skip is superficially similar to a dumpster.) If you don’t think about it for very long, you might wonder what’s the point of that, but it could be game-changer for dumpster divers. I would like to find a nice dining chair in a skip, but selfishly they’re usually full of all rubble and old sinks and stuff.

Watched at least two thirds of the Twenty Twelve, W1A, etc sort of trilogy for the first time, which was amusing enough I suppose. The saying of the word “yes” is elevated to something special, like a vegan restaurant roasting a whole cauliflower. Here’s the thing, one of the characters frequently says “so that’s all good”, which is one word away from “so that’s good”, a phrase I’ve used nearly ten times in past weeknotes here, and I would hate for anyone to think that was not a total coincidence but really an inept misquote.

In Lidl, I was so impressed by someone who seemed to know his 17-digit Lidl Plus membership number off by heart. But it wasn’t his membership number – turns out, in lieu of scanning your Lidl Plus card, which is not a real card but a QR code on an app unless you print it out yourself, you can tell the checker-outer your phone number, which is a less unusual thing to remember.

To Blackpool, a charming place to go for a few days, and not just so you can post a picture of the tower with the caption “Paris is divine at this time of year”.

The complimentary (Hamilton by Hilton) hotel breakfast was nasty, but it’s partly my fault for being too scared to use the conveyor-belt toaster machine I’d heard so much about but never met one before, or the autoclave/centrifuge they had for making waffles.

Despite it being relevant to my interests, I was not sticking around for the UK Coach Rally which was to happen there at the weekend, but you bet I was excited to see some of the exhibitors setting up and a new Volvo B13R UNVI XL arriving before I left.

In Blackpool I took in James Acaster’s show. For reasons, he was supported by a Luther Vandross tribute act, who was a consummate professional in the face of an understandably nonplussed audience, and performed for just long enough to justify his being there but maybe longer than some of would us have liked. For the same reasons, the interval and pre- and post-show music was marvellously the Mike Flowers Pops album A Groovy Place.

I am grateful for some of the patchy 4G connectivity along the West Coast Main Line for saving me from sending a slightly nonsense typo-ridden message. In a more developed country it would have sent before I had a chance to switch on Airplane Mode to stop it in its tracks.

The apparent discontinuation of Patum Peperium Gentleman’s Relish – the brackish anchovy spread, not a euphemism – might not be the worst news, but it feels typical, isn’t it just typical? Some people are holding out hope that it’s a publicity stunt, like all the times Heinz has stopped making salad cream … for an hour, but I don’t think so. I thought I still had a pot or two in a cupboard, and some of the salmon-based Poacher’s Relish too, but no – I know it’s so salty that use-by dates don’t really apply, but I threw them away because it’s bad for the old blood pressure.

Do you know I’ve had a blog post about the stuff in my drafts folder for more than ten years? I suppose I can delete it now. Past me found it interesting that the smaller pots were somehow cheaper per gram than the larger pots, but I might have got that wrong, and I didn’t think it was interesting enough to finish and publish it.

There’s still an Italian anchovy paste that comes in a tube that’s disquietingly similar to toothpaste.

Some work. I did one of all the things I’ve been thinking about and putting off for ages, and stuck Vinyl (fka Varnish) in front of the website, and it is good. I’d been making do with Cloudflare’s support for the CDN-Cache-Control header, but to do things like caching a different version of certain pages for visitors in Ireland I’d have needed to jump on a call with an enterprise salesperson, no thank you. And now I’m slightly closer to being able to dispense with Cloudflare one day if I want to.

I cracked and bought some emergency in-ear headphones (wired USB-C). They’re magnetic and metal, which heft gives the impression of quality but also makes them more likely to fall out of your ears. They produce a quiet background hiss, which I suppose recreates the sound of vinyl and you get used to after a while.

In the news, “Track your bus live on Google Maps in No 10 bid to boost public transport”. The dodgy PolitlcsUK tweeted: “The Government says bus passengers in all of England will be able to start tracking their bus in real time through Google Maps from tomorrow.”

• My astroturfing campaign a lot of fellows replied “but bustimes.org has done this for years” which was nice, but they’re missing the point – this is Google Maps we’re talking about.

• I feel almost gaslit – I swear Google Maps has had some bus tracking in parts of England that aren’t London for years, e.g. a collaboration with Arriva as early as 2015. The press release and news stories are light on detail, but I guess what’s new is Google is finally using some of the outputs of the Bus Open Data Service – which was set up by a previous government, by the way – a bit more than it was?

• I hope the “breakthrough new partnership with Google” doesn’t mean they’re really giving an American Big Tech company special privileges over all the home-grown app-mongers like Momego, Bus Checker, Mapway and Citymapper (and me).

Hasn’t it been windy? They should try using it to make electricity.

To Great Yarmouth for an unmentionably boring reason, but I warmly recommend walking many miles and having some average beer and chips.

To North England, to see gathered relatives and common law spouses.

I forgot to pack headphones for the several-hour train journey, but thank goodness for mobile phone speakers I was very brave and endured, and I’m determined that I can go the several days here and the return journey with nothing in my ears, i.e. without buying a materially wasteful other pair. Although I lose headphones often enough that it wouldn’t make a significant difference.

There were some football-related bus diversions in Liverpool, and Merseytravel’s idiosyncratic printed publicity has just a fairly meaningless un-visual list of roads, but thanks to an obscure feature of the bustimes.org website I could see the diversion route in relation to where I was on a map – in that moment, suddenly years of work had been worth it – so thanks to whoever’s responsible for that.

(Thanks to well-intentioned but imperfect legislation, of course the bus was fitted with the mandatory audiovisual equipment they have these days, but like most it hadn’t been set up properly and was just displaying the time, and not even the correct time. It’s such a shame and a waste, but I wouldn’t say “it beggars belief” or anything like that – it’s computers, have you met computers?)

Found out last week that freekeh – a sort of foodstuff superficially similar to couscous or rice – isn’t a valid word in Scrabble. I’d wanted to play it across two double word scores. Anyway I’m having a break from Scrabble.

I was going to say it’s a sort of foodstuff the Financial Times would probably italicise, but that’s unfair – see this chicken and freekeh tray bake recipe. (Reading the Financial Times for the recipes is the new reading Playboy for the articles, etc.)

Despite what I said last week, I got a new computer in line with company policy and it being nearly the end of the tax year. And hurried to John Lewis to buy my first Thunderbolt cable to make the Migration Assistant migration take fewer hours, and now I have a thick cable I’ve no further use for.

The computer is fast, even more faster than the servers (and clients) my stuff ends up running on, especially while DigitalOcean has no availability of its best servers with the good CPUs. I bet the shortage has something to do with AI – either its effects on the supply chain, or DO being distracted by new shite to excite the stock market – and I dread and wonder about moving to Hetzner or Amazon or the romantic idea of renting some space in a datacentre in Long Stratton.

Trod something from outside into the carpet – maybe pesto, or some poo from the dog of a different bananas former comedy writer to last time. But it was nothing that Dr Beckmann’s Carpet Stain Remover couldn’t clean up, and I wonder where Dr Beckmann ranks in the Oetker/Bronner/Pepper/Who standings.

My mobile phone has taken to switching itself off – never at a horribly inopportune moment so far, but what exactly would be an opportune moment? The iPhone 6S used to do that, usually triggered by cold temperatures, and this seemed like the same thing – it wasn’t quite random, it tended to happen when I was outdoors. And I began to dread having to do something about it, having to decide whether to give more money to an increasingly bad company that can’t even design good interfaces, or something else.

Then I realised the actual problem: the phone being in a bulky silicone case, in a trouser pocket, somehow causes the power button to become depressed. I took it out of the case and it hasn’t turned itself off again, and I get to enjoy the slippery metal like a rich person.

What else this week? I don’t know. I’ve been enjoying the gorse or broom blossoming along a former railway track. In my notes I’ve written “nutty tones”, which I think was about the great colour scheme of Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee Australia.

Bruised or maybe broke a toe by getting it snarled up with a wheel of a Herman Miller chair. Not a big toe, a second-smallest one, but what a lot of annoyance from a such a small injury. It’s making me walk slowly and lopsidedly, and I’ll end up with one leg oddly more muscular than the other.

Bridget Christie’s Jacket Potato Pizza (h). A nice time despite the venue’s uncomfortable seats and being squeezed between hombres grandes.

🎦 The Bride! (2026) (as in the bride of Frankingstein). I mainly enjoyed the rare feeling of recognising a literary reference (the phrase “I would prefer not to”).

Baader–Meinhof of the week: mole grips (a kind of pliers).