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 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 been 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).

I’ve gotten into porridge. I used to enjoy a sort of overnight oats, i.e. cold brew porridge, but now I like hot porridge.

Having another go at growing avocado plants. You know how it goes, suspend the bottom of the stone in water – I like a tiny jar that used to contain jam or marmalade, from an upscale café or hotel breakfast buffet – and it will split, a bit redolent of The Substance (2024), and eventually a stalk will emerge. Climate change isn’t far enough along that you can grow a tree that will bear fruit yet, it’s just a bit of fun.

Repotted some bits of jade plant in some compost that I don’t think was peat-free.

🎦 Wuthering Heights (2026). Crikey.

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.