Week 389

Friday 4 September 2026

Had a spam:

Hi Bus Shelter,

This came up when our team was looking over your Google listing:

“Blaby council need fix it up as it’s a disgrace.”

Jason Smith wrote it, and from what we can see it may go against Google’s review policies, so our team can likely have it taken off.

Our team is happy to take a run at it for you. There’s only a fee if it actually comes down,

This is the Google listing. I’m quite taken with the idea of a bus shelter hiring Bell Pottinger to do an astroturfing campaign, and why don’t they all have their own email addresses as part of the internet of things?

The spammy reputation management company has some terrible reviews on Trustpilot, by the way.
Trying to buy some new handlebar grips, for a bike with grip shifters – which were popular on cheap bikes 20 years ago – so they need to be unusually short, 90mm. There aren’t many choices that don’t look unfortunately like alien foreskins or something. Maybe not as bad as the state-of-the-art saddles they have these days, which are sort of crab claws with all trypophobia-triggering holes in them like a crumpet.
🎦 Tony – not Blair, Parsons or Chocolonely, but Anthony Bordain, who’s sort of like the American Rick Stein?

Spa Weekend I didn’t so noisily enjoy as some of the folks in the screening but that’s OK. Some months ago I pounced on a discounted year of my limitless, and taking a punt on things that might be shite makes that more worthwhile.

Week 388: can amnesty

Wednesday 26 August 2026

I used to wake up to the sound of the iPhone Crickets ringtone/alarm, you know the one that’s the sound of chirping crickets, so now the sound of cicadas engenders some stress.
Home.

There are some fine places to buy food on the way out of Luton Airport, but I skipped past all of them, onto the DART, and then there was just a Tesco Express. Nothing wrong with a Tesco Express, but it was a bit of a culture shock, and the Grain Bowl (really a box), well its contents were one of the blandest things I’ve ever put in my mouth.
Read two and a bit thousand emails (accumulated over a few years, not just the holiday!). There were some good emails in there, thanks everyone. I’d quite liked revelling in seeing how high I could get the unread count, but now I seem to have changed; hope I don’t take up a more disgusting habit in its place.
🎦 Kiki’s Delivery Service.

I like to smuggle a can of ginger beer or fizzy blood orange juice into the cinema, and to time the opening of the can so the noise doesn’t disturb my fellow cinemagoers. Ideally, there’d be a ring pull amnesty where someone opens a can on screen and everyone watching can open theirs at the same time. And good news: currently there’s a Coca-Cola advert which contains exactly what I’ve long wished for. But you’ve got to be prepared, and arrive in good time, not wander in near the end of the trailers.

Weeks 386 & 387

Wednesday 19 August 2026

Further to the Jake’s Cakes thing, I saw an ice cream van named Jake’s Flakes – a fine name, even though the van surely sold cones and ice cream as well as flakes. Having a name that rhymes with one of the things you sell is a privilege.

(Bakes also rhymes with Jake’s, but using bake as a noun gives me the ick.)
To Catalonia. The first time I’ve done various things since these weeknotes began, e.g. touched an aeroplane, camped. Saw the total eclipse, enjoyed some of the finest food and drink available to humanity, was at times sweaty and mosquito-bitten and uncomfortable.
Months ago, I decided I’d worn my last short. Not because I care at all what Gyles Brandreth, Billy Connolly, Maciej Cegłowski, or Bertie Wooster think, but rather because of an odd mole that I want to shield from the harmful rays of the sun. I’ve got some loose linen trousers – not quite the Zara death pants – instead, which are no substitute, and possibly make me look like I’m wearing a nappy. I should’ve worn shorts and smeared sunscreen over my shins. I saw hardly anyone else in long trousers.
- (Brandreth and Cegłowski have tweeted extensively disparaging shorts. Connolly didn’t really confirm nor deny rumours that he thinks men in shorts look babyish on Adam Buxton’s podcast. Wooster mocked the fascist Roderick Spode for “swanking about in footer bags”.)
Also, sandals.
- I paid £17.99 for some Crocs in 2013, equivalent to £26.06 in today’s money, but these days some new ones cost nearly double that? (Are they made out of RAM?) And it’s somehow relevant that last month, a fellow wearing Crocs was being astonishingly racist on the bus.
Bravely, brazenly, I didn’t pack a computer, a good decision I don’t regret. With impeccable timing, early on the first morning the Bus Open Data Service went loopy and remained so all weekend, but everything I could do to work around the loopiness I could do on my phone (so I did).
- I use Prompt for SSHing on my phone. Writing this is how I learn that there’s been a Prompt 3 for more than two years, while I’ve been using the old version.

Week 385

Tuesday 18 August 2026

Was late for a thing on Saturday because I thought it wasn’t until Sunday. In my defence, it’s ripe for confusion that Sat and Sun begin with the same letter. If you think about it, there are so many more letters of the alphabet than days of the week that there’s no excuse for some of the days being spelt so similarly.

(I know that in some languages all of the days all start with the same letter.)
It finally rained, and I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. Later, I felt like that even more when some men delivered a food waste bin and a stack of caddies to the building – what a jolly surprise, a dividend of the Simpler Recycling legislation (which we haven’t time to discuss the flaws of) I think, but I wonder if people will think it’s to do with the Green-controlled city council. And fair enough if it is.
🎦 The Odyssey. I was a bit sleepy, but then I wasn’t. The bit where Agamemnon drank some Pepsi Max was rather crass.
Obsession. The best film I saw that week.

Week 384

Tuesday 18 August 2026

I was house-sitting in the ’nam (Fakenham) on and off for a few weeks. Apparently walking barefoot on grass is good for lowering your blood pressure, and what a treat it was to be able to do that in a secluded garden without risking anyone else seeing my horrible feet. On the other hand, it was nice to return home where the water pressure is better.

The sound of wood pigeons crash-landing on a roof is louder than you’d think.
Started rewatching Halt and Catch Fire.
- It’s on ITVX these days. The big football matches palpably affected its reliability, indicating that many people choose ITV’s coverage over the BBC’s coverage of the same matches, and even more troublingly they watch it over the internet, which has more delay and feels less efficient than free-to-air digital terrestrial TV.
- What a banger that Lido Shuffle is by the way.

Week 383: if cake is the answer, what is the question?

Tuesday 21 July 2026

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 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.

Week 382: Berocca

Tuesday 14 July 2026

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 make 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.

Week 381: peel

Tuesday 7 July 2026

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.

Week 380: Ritter Sport

Tuesday 30 June 2026

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.

Bazalgette

Wednesday 24 June 2026

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.