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.

Went to Brighton for a few hours, a long way to go for a short time and nebulous reasons. Partly to escape the neighbours’ noisy kitchen/bathroom renovations, and to make something of the last few days of my 26–30 Railcard, but mostly to see if the Ikea there had any of the big plates I’d looked for last week. And it did, and they’re really quite big.

The Brighton Ikea is nicely centrally located, and not too overwhelmingly big, but it loses some points for not having any big chimneys outside like the Croydon one does.

After returning home late, and having to unwind by watching a review of the 1998 Honda Accord, I slept late, and when I awoke bustimes.org had been broken for some hours.

It’s always bots isn’t it. Bots can run JavaScript these days, which feels like finding out that Daleks can go up stairs. (I know both have been the case for some time, one for much longer than the other.) And sometimes they cravenly hide behind residential proxy/embedded-SDK networks. (Did you know that if you make an app or internet-connected device, you can get paid for sort of renting out your users’ internet connections for web scraping purposes? But please don’t.)

The website being monetised with advertising has some ramifications. I have to allow bots that do supposedy valuable things like checking that the website is respectable enough for advertisers to advertise on. But if I muscularly welcome all bot traffic, its starts to look like I’m doing ad fraud (because bots can run JavaScript these days).

One of my eyelids swelled up for a few days last week. They’ve been prone to inflammation for as long as I can remember, such that I’ve even been accused of wearing eyeliner (guyliner?), but this time no one noticed so I didn’t get to say you should have seen the other guy. I read in the gutter press that one of Ant and Dec had a similar problem recently, a blocked tear duct apparently, not sure if that’s from too much or not enough crying. I nearly cried at how quickly one of the teams solved the connecting wall in the Only Connect final.

The road closure (see last week) got extended. I wish I didn’t care that they’ve misspelt buses this time.

My fizzing-with-ideas hasn’t translated into me doing any work about it, but it might be time for me to learn what a Web Component is.

The Orielles (h).

To London, by FlixBus. I was impressed that there were two drivers, yes they appeared to be double crewing it, but I should have realised more quickly that this was foreshadowing being delayed by a gloop of slow-moving traffic. Oh well, I can’t deny that it was £6.49. I felt sorrier for the rainswept folks waiting for the return journey, although the double crewing meant they wouldn’t need to wait for the driver’s legally require break like I did that time.

Snapped a key in a lock of a door, which could have been a chance to use my extraction tool again at last, if only it wasn’t a hundred miles away. But I had access to tweezers – no good – and nail clippers – good – so it was only maybe ten minutes of stressful panic.

Having an afternoon to spare, I went to the Croydon Ikea in search of the 32 cm plate. The website said they were in stock there, and not in any other easier-to-get-to London Ikeas, but I couldn’t find any 32 cm plates. (The next day the website said they were out of stock.) To save face I bought two normal-sized plates instead. Couldn’t be arsed to queue for meatballs.

Thought to myself, “this is the first time I’ve been on a bicycle since I started doing the New York Times Spelling Bee regularly”.

Thought to myself, it’s been a while since I saw a horse, or a cow.

bustimes.org now has a “popular pages” list. That’s not short for “the 10 most popular pages in order of popularity”; it’s a random 10 of the top 20, sorted by length (number-of-characters, not kilometres) for aesthetic reasons, you know like the diamond geezer sidebar. It’s absolutely not the best thing I could have done with the time, but it was mildly interesting, at the weekend, how the London bus routes SL11 (new) and 96 (change of operator) shot up there.

They’re digging up a bit of a road I sometimes walk along, so it’s unusually quiet of traffic and stuff. Disquietingly, I still saw several people waiting for buses there – they hadn’t read the unclear and badly spelled post on the website equivalent of a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying Beware of the Leopard. They might have scanned the QR code at the bus stop, but it wouldn’t have helped cos no one had remembered to update the scrolly yellow bit of the slightly cursed live departure board website. It’s at least partly Elon Musk’s fault, cos in the past this sort of thing would have been tweeted, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

This left me fizzing with ideas about what I can do about it on bustimes.org, but ultimately you can’t beat the helpful sheet of paper that one local person had taped to a bus shelter.

🎦 Marty Supreme is in fact not about Marti Pellow.

I’m lazy about putting away clean dry laundry, never reaching laundry zero. Maybe there’s a solution that’s like the laundry equivalent of Ben Fogle’s two four dishwasher machines: having enough clothes horses to hold all your clean clothes, instead of a wardrobe. Or I could persuade myself to be less lazy: consider that the robotics companies have yet to produce a robot that can fold clothes well, so that’s one of my few advantages over robots, and I should celebrate that by putting my skills to use. And it’s a good way to pad your step count – even if you aren’t walking, a smartwatch is fooled by the arm movements involved.

• Limmy had some good advice about where to hang what on a clothes horse.

• I’ve seen the advertising executive–turned–unlikely TikTok star Rory Sutherland described as “the two dishwashers guy”, on account of a viral clip of him talking about the idea, but please let’s not erase Ben and Marina Fogle.

If using AI is like eating animal products, then I fear I’ve become like a vegan who eats prawns, but it’s boring to talk about.