Now the maxinated can enter France without proof of a negative test result. It’s topsy-turvily much harder to re-enter the (yet more disease-ridden) UK, so there’s a risk of catching the virus and being stranded abroad, but I guess I can privilegedly cope with that if it happens.

I have ordered the tests needed for returning and having returned, and man the enterprising startups’ hastily developed webistes are shonky. (I’ve used a couple, as if to spread the risk of one being dodgy.) Makes you think.

It’s been humid, and has anyone noticed it’s tricky to tell if you have a fever or it’s just really humid? Well, I think it’s just really humid.

Some work. Among other things (well, of course among other things) going through and using the nicer pathlib where previously I’d used os.path, which is a bit pointless but I can think of more pointless ways to pass the time. It turns out that some parts of the Python ecosystem break if you use a Path in place of a str, so it’s not that simple a change.

In weeknoteses past, I’d admitted to enjoying the radio broadcasts of an newspaper columnist (who has really disgraced himself in the last fortnight). Later (still more than a year ago) I’d concluded, partly from the plummy voiced company the guy keeps, that he’s actually a berk and I resolved to read and listen to better people. And I was delighted to stop my subscription to the newspaper of record earlier this year, without even having to speak on a telephone (because it’s not like the customer retentions department is responsible for the editorial hatefulness). So hooray for me, is that growth?

Which reminds me I enjoyed Jeremy Clarkshole’s farming series, notwithstanding a bit where he blames a poor crop of oilseed rape on not being allowed to sicken bees, and some things that went unsaid about the negative externalities of sheep farming. Which is not a shock to me – I’m entertained by lots of his and his colleagues’ work – we can contain multitudes. I think the wrinkled motormouth is a textbook case of “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

“Hey guys I was today years old when I learned that…” No, sorry, but yesterday I read something about the transport of grapepickers in the 70s, which made me wonder where the “plonk” word (for cheap wine) comes from, and I learnt it’s probably an alteration of “[vin] blanc” (but who knows?).

The excitement of booking an antigen test and printing Eurostar tickets and things. And then the new “amber plus” status was announced. But we’re undeterred by the prospect of quarantining for at least five days upon returning from France – think how productive I’ll be – so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It will be more of a pain in the arse than anticipated, but don’t let’s get out the world’s tiniest violin on my behalf.

Some work.

I’ve been disappointed by the autonomie de la batterie of my téléphone portable, and the big problem is all the time I spend looking at bustimes.org – you know, dogfooding. (A former distant collegue called it “we drink our own poison”, so don’t ask them to look after your pet.) It’s not that much time, but it more than decimates the battery, so maybe I can do some things to make that less of a problem.

On the bicycle to see a relative. A bit horrible with all the pollen blowing in my face, but you know, worth it, and then lovelier with a nice tailwind on the way back, only a bit marred by some mechanical crappiness at inopportune moments at traffic lights with important people with places to go behind me.

Bicycle mechanics’ waiting lists are long because it’s the summer and everything, so I boldly traded the old bike in for a newer (still second hand) one. I look forward to seeing someone else enjoying the old bike, re-refurbished, in the near future.

I have some complaints, like it’s a bit heavy, but eating less pies and fewer ale would have as big an effect as getting some carbon fibre forks. It’s difficult to see what gear one’s in, indicated by a red thing on a black background behind some reflective translucent plastic – what was Ian Shimano thinking? – so I dismantled one gear shifter and dabbed the red thing with a silver metallic marker pen, which is a slight improvement.

Then on my first longish ride I got the chain all tangled up. Untangled it after much sweating and having unnecessarily detached the chain, and eventually gave up trying to reattach it and walked home. Bought a whole new chain with a “Quick Link” link, which turned out to be even harder to attach, but then I remembered how to reattach the old chain so that’s good. This is quite boring, isn’t it?

It’s been warm out. Stay hydrated.

Honoured to address a branch of the Omnibus Society on Zoom. Whoever said there’s no such thing as society? Because here’s a whole society dedicated to the study of those weekend broadcasts of EastEnders, The Archers etc, where the past week’s episodes are concatenated into one. Although it turns out that the EastEnders omnibus ended a few years ago, killed by the iPlayer I suppose, which must be why the Society pivoted to focus on the “man on the Clapham omnibus” sort of omnibus.

I think a video recording will be published at some point. I forgot to say some of the things I’d planned to say – in “Chekhov’s gun” terms, it was like I’d brandished a gun but never fired it – but that’s OK. Everyone was very effusive, and any pigheadedness resulting from that was neutralised today (entirely unrelatedly) by a grumpy email from a charmless Graham, who made some valid points but… (I think I wrote some similar emails as a child, but I grew out of it. Learn about compliment sandwiches, dude.)

Found myself scrolling through the Instagram account of a “car-free [name of city]” campaign. I think I’m as motor car intolerant as anyone, but suddenly I felt like a Mr Toad ready to combust some hydrocarbons. I don’t think they post very often, so with a few strokes of the screen I got a concentrated dose of a whole year’s worth of lobbying … but ugh. In particular, it’s shitty to complain about creative parking by delivery drivers, who are just trying to meet their paymasters’ unrealistic targets, and who have never knocked me off my bike.

On Sunday evening, I had a lovely bicycle around the unusually quiet streets, with the football commentary in my ears (AirPods Pro transparency mode), the radio stream lagging a few seconds behind pubs’ televisions. And it was lovely. I was mildly annoyed by the police van parked on a pavement (sidewalk) blocking a bicycle lane, but I’ve nothing but respect for vans of all kind (see previous bullet point). And I saw a hedgehog.

“You can shove your Lamborghini up your arse” is a fine thing to chant and I’ve never felt such national pride, because that make of motor car is stereotypically owned by folks profiting from exploitation, nothing to do with “the politics of envy” or anything like that.

I think I’m going to go to a foreign country at the end of the month. Incredible stuff. I’ll be slightly relived if a mutant variant or something means we can’t go, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ what are the chances of that?

Went to London, which was novel. I didn’t have a good reason to go, but I’d bought a train ticket when I had a reason, and I wasn’t going to let the train ticket go unused.

Coincidentally, the Goodyear Blimp (actually a semi-rigid airship) followed me to, and around, London. Needless to say, I soon found myself craving some tyres.

Went to the seaside, which was a bit novel too. Walked from one seaside town to the next, in light drizzle, and some whizzy new buses whizzed past – whizzo.

⚽️ On Tuesday I won £2.13. Still, obviously gambling is stupid, don’t gamble. And the real winner was football.

On Saturday I walked to a park I’d never walked to before, like a pound shop diamond geezer. It would have been fun to hear various cheers emanating from pubs and boats and houses, but they were out of earshot. After a week of walking quite far, my feet had by now gone a bit Joyce Carol Oates.

Some work.

On the train to London, I continued some stuff I’ve been doing to make bustimes.org more useful in London (still less useful than the great London-centric apps like Citymapper).

On Saturday, there was little database performance problem, and it’s satisfying to be able to look back at this silly little website like the rings on a cross-section of a tree trunk and see it last happened 20 weeks ago which was a different time.

The “Fish finger named most Beard Friendly Sandwich for second year running” news inspired me to get some fish fingers and put them in a sandwich (a “fish stick sandwich” for US English speakers) and I am grateful for the inspiration.

I don’t fully understand the “beard friendly” fuss, but what’s good for the bearded is good for the beardless – a sandwich sopping with ketchup, mayonnaise etc is annoying enough if you’re not concerned about soiling a beard, because bare faces get dirty too.

Some work.

• This is a bit embarassing because independent schools are bad (although taking their advertising coins might be praxis). (Wick, it turns out, is a place in Litttlehampton as well as a better known place in North Scotland.)

• I accidentally deleted all the timetable data – not ideal, and worse still I was a bit incapacitated by hayfever and one unit of beer when I realised.

  I wasted time fiddling about with a perfect solution (surgically restoring just the stuff I’d deleted), before settling for a much easier, good enough solution (restoring the backup from a few hours ago and not worrying about the few hours of vehicle tracking data that would be lost).

  (Thanks to DigitalOcean® Managed Databases’ automatic backups for saving my arse.)

• Made an improvement to the layout of certain weird timetables. That’s what it’s all about, iterative improvement, it just keeps getting better, and if no one notices, good.

Went to an Fauxtalian chain restaurant (lots of outdoor seating) with some people cooler than me, and had the best (only) meatballs I’ve had this month.

I was going to go to the Fens but I was too tired so I didn’t and that’s OK. Cool story.

They’ve finished building some more flats near here, and I’ve dutifully added them to OpenStreetMap. And now they’ve turned their attentions to the last bit of brownfield site, the diggers are a-digging, and I can’t tell if they’re building another building or just a piazza/car park. (I have above-average skills at using council “planning access” websites, but still it’s easier just to wait and see.) Anyway, the presence of an “unexploded ordnance” rigid truck near one’s front door may be a bit alarming, but that sort of thing is just a precaution, right? Cool story.

Watched some minutes of that new television news channel for shits. This is way beside the point, but oh the presenters are such creepy and weird looking people. And people love that sort of thing, so perhaps it’s going to be a measured success after all.

It’s been wet. I bicycled for a couple of hours in the drizzle, which of course was worthwhile, both intrinsically and in order to spend a weekend in the company of some relations. But I do regret not making better use of the waterproof footwear and clothes I own. (The supposedly water repellent Allbirds shoes leave my feet disappointingly wet, especially now one shoe looks so fally-aparty. But maybe I am a shoe power user and expecting too much of them.)

Apart from anything else, good to have some kind of silly little holiday and breathe some even fresher air. And it turns out that the birds who make such a din at the crack of dawn aren’t such an imposition if you’re very deeply sleepy (or the window is closed).

It occurred to me that these days we have the Declans Rice and Curry, in addition to the Tims Rice and Curry. (Declan Curry is a former BBC journalist, and the others have more extensive IMDb profiles so possibly need less introduction, although to be honest I’m not au fait with either of the four men’s ouvres.) Searching Twitter confirms again that there’s no such thing as an original thought, but also makes me feel less alone, especially considering all the normal people who don’t tweet these things that occur to them.

It’s been humid.

I feel a bit like I’ve not been making enough of all this relative freedom, like it might go away again. Hmm. This week I did travel some distance west, where one of the things that happened was some ostensibly aggressive but actually harmless daytime drinkers complimented my hat. I achieved none of the westerly things I’d hoped to, so I’ll go again.

🍞 Someone recommended a book by Richard Bertinet, and I second that recommendation. Maybe I don’t agree that bread really ought to be really crusty, but thanks to him I’ve started doing some things differently: using less yeast, and not pummelling the shit out of dough, and shaping dough like I know what I’m doing. (He has some videos, like on YouTube, which are better than a book for learning about what to do with your hands, but books are nice to read too.)

Cut my hair. Sometimes this is motivated by seeing someone else with unkempt hair, just as seeing a ratty beard can motivate me to bust out a razor. This time I felt vindicated after the fact when I saw Robert Peston looking a bit silly. There’s nothing inherently wrong with dishevelment, but ol Pesto’s barnet looked unusually bad and I was glad mine didn’t.

I thought I made a point of mentioning haircut events here for “quantified self” purposes, but now I can’t find a record of the last haircut, so that was pointless. Oh well, the hair itself serves as a 3D graph of time.

⚽️ Big up the little remote-controlled ball-carrying car.

On Saturday I wandered out and was a bit suprised by the much refreshed men wandering about draped in flags, and the car horns beeping merrily, all over the scoring of a single goal. Nice for them.

Woke to a stonking headache, quite different to and less usual than a hangover. Some people get these things often, and they have my sympathy, but actually by having them all the while they get to get used to it.

If I tended to wake sensibly early, I’d have felt it earlier and gulped some water before it got really bad, but I don’t. “Well, I’ll really appreciate this being over when it’s over,” I thought, but I didn’t really.

I’ve been listening to The The One Show Show, lots of episodes in quick succession starting from the first. Maybe they’re a bit too pleased with themselves about what what a crazy idea they had, making an Obsessed With… style programme about a programme one wouldn’t think of making such a programme about, but maybe they have every right to be.

It’s been quite warm. On the bicycle I went to see some relations, with the novelty of staying the night instead of pedalling there and back in short succession. Having not slept in the countryside for a while, I’d forgotten what a racket the birds make – I didn’t fall asleep quickly, and the ruddy dawn chorus had started up by the time I managed to.

The return journey coincided with an organised “cycle event”, so there were lots of all-the-gear-and-some-idea folks whizzing about, coming the other way or overtaking me and complimenting my shorts. (I am going to get some better shorts, because the shorts of choice, although they are are natty and more modesty-preserving than cycling shorts, are really swimming shorts and are insufficiently stretchy.)

The 114th and 115th weeknoteses here were mistitled weeks 124 and 125 respectively. (Like some kind of Dominic Cummings, I’ve gone back and quietly corrected them now.) And no one mentioned it, which is comforting.

Twanged my ankle.

Like the last time this happened, I was wearing some Atheist Shoes – they’re quite comfortable, and look interesting from above, but I don’t actually enjoy the shouty Richard Dawkings style message on the soles, and apparently God dislikes them enough to injure me. I was just walking along, not doing anything dangerous, so there’s no other explanation.

I went to the freezer for some ice to speed up the healing, but it turned out I’d switched it off at the plug earlier – not quite unwittingly, I remembered I’d done it to silence its loud hum, but not remembered to switch it back on. Not too much ruined – just some chopped chilli and garlic, which are things to have in a freezer I warmly recommend.

Spent one day indoors and now, some days later, it feels mostly normal again, which is terrific.

I fancied a Cornetto, but the availability of Cornetti is surprisingly poor. A typical small shop has only strawberry (the worst of the flavours) or a “soft” chocolate kind (as if a normal one is too hard … sounds a bit effeminate).

Eating the vegetable fat based frozen dessert cone I settled for, I saw a car with a big spoiler. Like the last such motor I was intrigued enough by to Google the number plate, it had its own Instagram account (with not so many followers). I learn that Toyota based the shade of red paint on the bum of a macaque, which is great and reminds me that those godless shoes are available in “kitten testicle grey”.

I haven’t finished Curb Your Enthusiasm, but it’s disappeared from Sky Go for a bit, which is OK – it’s a thing that happens, and I’d noticed the expiry date warning a few days earlier, and it’s likely to reappear one day in the future.

It’s funny how the continuity announcer on some of the Sky programmes warns about “strong and frequent language”, which I guess means swearing and fast talking. But lots of boring bores on the internet have noticed the same thing, and I’ve not heard that phrase for a while, so maybe the folks at Sky have had all meetings about it and rerecorded the announcements to make slightly more sense, which is disappointing.

Switched on the wrong ring on the hob and melted the kitchen scales. In my defence, the hob rings are arranged in a 2x2 layout, but the knobs are in a 1x4 row, which is extremely normal but literally a textbook example of bad interface design. It can be comforting to search Twitter to find other people making the same mistake.

Actually unrelatedly, bought a microwave oven. Warming up leftovers in a fuddy-duddy oven or saucepan is OK, but space age microwaves are more efficient, maybe? Apparently 93% of UK households have one.

I don’t know why I did the “click and collect” thing. Declined the offer of help carrying it to my car (I don’t have a car). Then I think I was expecting to carry it all the way home, but the box was bigger and heavier than I’d imagined.

Like a gift from god, I found an abandoned shopping trolley in a bush, with all of its wheels. But what are the ethics of using a stolen trolley? That’s the trolley problem. Obviously, after wheeling the oven home, I’d have returned it (the trolley) to where came from (the Asda, not the bush). But I didn’t.

A further present from a higher power, there was a conveniently timed bus that took me some distance. (Maybe my first experience of the alarming vibrations of a Wright StreetLite. Noticed it wasn’t tracking on the Bus Open Data feed for some reason.) I might then have caught a further bus, but for some reason I instead persisted in carrying the heavy item the rest of the way, very slowly and stoppingly. Walked past another wild trolley. Thought one of those for-hire electric scooters would have been handy – I’d not have scooted, just balanced the box on the deck and pushed – but none were around.

I have no regrets, apart from maybe everything. It’s the simplest (just two knobs, and a “ping” sound when it’s done) and smallest microwave oven I’ve ever met, but there’s still not really room for it. Delivery would have been cheaper than the bus ticket, but imagine what an equivalent gym session (obviously I am now shredded AF after the carrying 💪) would have cost.

That reminds me: I was briefly curious about gyms a few weeks ago, and read the phrase “Unlimited* Sports Water”, which is just brilliant. Somewhere, this Sports Water and its limits are explained, but I’d prefer it to remain a mystery, and I refuse to join any gym that would have me as a member, so I’ll continue taking kitchen appliances for walks instead.

Also unrelatedly, joined a “car club”, which is not like the Dodge Charger Owners’ Club but lets you hire a motor car, which might be useful occasionally.