It has gradually, and then suddenly become clear that I could, should, ought to employ someone. (Why stop at one?) Not a PA to help me write my blog, but to help make the #3 UK ground transportation website even better. There’s a danger that I might be terrible at managing people, but what if I’m not? And if I am, then I have someone manage me?

At this stage, just putting the idea out there in a “cosmic ordering” sort of way, but early expressions of interest are welcome.

Haircut, cos I was starting to superficially resemble the alarming new Argentine president-elect. Now it’s a bit short in this weather, and I may have made a mess of the back, but this is why there are hats and hoods.

An irritating week. And what I said last week, about the advantages of anxiety consolidation etc, was poppycock.

To horrible Ipswich to watch Dave Gorman (a), which was two fun hours. I was left inspired to try a cryptic crossword, so I did, and I actually managed to solve a couple of clues, which is a personal record.

Mamas Gun (h) (a hitherto unknown-to-me pop/soul band) at the arts centre, good. Must be the longest I’ve stood without sitting down for a while, how interesting.

🎦 Didn’t hate Saltburn (2023), enough of the sort silliness I enjoy. Should have paid more attention to the production design but I don’t think a second viewing is called for.

Sat through Napoleon (2023) without needing to leave for a wee.

Some work, which was all (three) different kinds of pointless time-wasting, but who can say if it was really pointless? I learnt some things along the way.

📖 Wondered if I’d spotted an anachronism in My Year of Rest and Relaxation: someone recycles some yoghurt pots, pre-9/11, and I think of plastic recycling as being a post-9/11 thing, the 2003 Household Waste Recycling Act and all that. But actually folks have been recycling plastics, especially in New York, for longer than I thought.

(Even if it was an anachronism, I think it would be OK, they should be allowed in works of fiction.)

Continued to have a cold or infection or whatever. When I heard the news about David Cameron, I thought I was having a kind of fever-induced hallucination.

Sniffed some salty water as instructed by the NHS, which is kind of disgusting. Anyway, I feel mostly better now, thank you.

Experienced some unusual anxiety about something stupid. But I appreciated how unusual it was, and there’s something to be said for consolidating all your anxiety into one manageable feeling of unease.

Caught a cold again. Once may be regarded as misfortune, twice looks like carelessness … am I particularly bad at washing my hands?

A tiny bit of work. Maybe next week I’ll make a thing that turns a long bus route “number” like “Connecting Communities Suffolk Coastal East & West” into a handy acronym like “CCSCE&W”.

The 13:00 news and current affairs programme The World at One is known as WATO for short, but that would be the acronym for the completely different World at One, and the definite article is an important part of the programme’s name. But actually the The doesn’t appear in the logo or anywhere on the programme website.

The “Amazon Kindle Kids” electronic reader is quite good even if you aren’t or don’t have a kid: small and light and comes with a free case. The setup process forces you to invent a kid, but then it’s only a one-time pain in the arse to delete the kid and turn off “Kids’ Mode”.

Alas, the power button still being on the bottom is a recipe for it turning itself off when it’s propped up on an easelly lecterny thing. And I got mine a while ago, before they changed from the dreaded Micro-B to the lovely Type-C socket.

The shower and the kitchen sink hot tap both leak very slightly, just enough to form patches of mildew and limescale. Alas, I can’t see any way of stopping the flow of hot water – a prerequisite before disassembling a tap – without draining the hot water tank, and I’d rather not bother. I have learnt that, in the cupboard with the washing machine and other electrical things, there’s a lever on a pipe that, when turned, makes all water spurt out the end of the pipe.

Has anyone chosen Mastermind as their specialist subject on Mastermind?

📺 Finished enjoying Starstruck (a New Years’ Eve or two ago, someone suggested starting the first episode some minutes before midnight, so the Big Ben bell bongs in the screwball comedy at the same time as it bongs in real life … fun if you like that sort of thing) and the first series of the extraordinarily cast Julia.

Baked the last of the cooking apples. (Cored, bunged with sultanas, filled with brown sugar.)

Some work. I have a thing where people can type in a (UK) postcode to see what bus stops etc are near it. And it annoys me when those things demand an entire postcode, when the first few characters are sufficient to give a general gist of my location. But my own thing was guilty of the very thing I’m so annoyed by. Well, not anymore; adding the ability to search by just an “outcode”, as those prefixes are called, was pleasingly nice.

(Remember a quirk of the NHS COVID-19 app … if your postcode was “XX1 1XX”, it used to say you were in the “XX11” postcode district.)

A slight complication I discovered a bit later: turns out some strings like E2 and PE1 are both valid postcode outcodes and bus route numbers.

(Is that all this week? Pathetic.)

My recflective bicycling jacket is so good at reflecting light that it activates those infrared sensors from a great distance – you know, the “touch free exit” buttons some buildings have, and the flushes of posh public toilets. I can tell you it’s annoying when a toilet flushes when you don’t want it to. In the loos at Waitrose, I stood at a urinal and my shiny coat turned on the taps across the room like there was a poltergeist about. (The sound of running water can make you want to pee, and what better place for it?)

But only certain parts of the lurid blouson are mirror-like enough; I need to work on the choreography of exiting this building so the door appears to open itself without my so much as looking at the door release button.

Out to RHLSTP two evenings on the trot. As expected, the Joe Pasquale episode was remarkable, will go down in history, etc. Another highlight was leaving the room for a wee – partly thanks to the sound of rain on the theatre’s roof – and returning just as everyone was applauding the end of the first half.

🍞 A few loaves have had an amusing air bubble in their crust, bulgy like a snake who’s swallowed a golf ball. (Pictured, with some damage from being extracted from the tin.) It’s unusual and I like it, but it’s really a sign of under-worked/under-proven dough, so I must do better.

This week I made an apple cake, the sort of cake that’s better the next day. And in the process I dropped my telephone on the floor and cracked the screen, which was unfortunate, but still I had an apple cake.

Happy iOS 17.1. They’ve fixed that WebGL bug, and now the declining number of errors logged is an interesting indicator of how quickly people update their telephones’ OSs.

Walking from the bus station after sunset, I passed some new digital advertising screens in the downstairs windows of an office. They’re really very bright, and seriously possibly a seizure risk for anyone with photosensitive epilepsy etc. I typed a shirty Instagram comment suggesting they dim at night to save electricity, then deleted it … they’re not facing any residential buildings, and maybe the brightness actually makes the street safer at night. But their throbbing obnoxiousness is surely asking for someone to throw a brick.

🎦 Killers of the Flower Moon (2023). A crackling fire is heard near the start, which is an opportune moment to reach into a packet of Fisherman’s Friends. The epilogue is a great insight into high production values of early true crime podcasts.

Gravity (2013) – a 3D screening which was a bit pfft and not mind-blowing. A while ago I stayed in a hotel with a Nespresso machine whose lights where blinking unintelligibly, and I’m so proud of myself for downloading a manual and figuring out that it was asking to be cleaned, and initiating the self-cleaning procedure and so on.

Saw the trailer for Saltburn (2023) and I’m going to say it: Brideshead Revisited for the Sally Rooney generation.

In a recent interview, Steve Coogan begrudgingly praises “those Duchy of Cornwall orange jiggers” (a posh kind of fizzy orange juice) despite their association with “a power structure that keeps a foot on the throat of working class people.” But there’s no such product. There are Duchy-branded easy peelers and orange marmalade – possibly not grown in Cornwall – but the only orange jigger I could find is made Fentimans, who have nothing at all to do with HRH Sir Prince Charles. So the monarchy is dead to me.

(Other produce that people mistakenly perceive as being royal: Clarence Court eggs.)

Some relatives stayed over, as they sometimes do, and I had an excellent sleep on the sofa. Spent the day before making the place into less of a hovel, but not so tidy that it would look like I’d made an effort. I’ve spotted a few carpet beetles, I think – they have wings, which reassuringly distinguish them from bedbugs, but do mean they can appear alarmingly out of nowhere.

I’ve been practising Vernon Kay’s figure-of-8 mopping technique. Completely unfoundedly, I make up that Kay makes a meal out of doing a bit of mopping now and then, and thinks that’s his fair share of the domestic duties. More troublingly, Kay says he doesn’t trust floor cleaning liquid products – because he thinks they’re communist spies or something? – and instead recommends making your own by mixing bleach with some other ingredients. That’s bad advice, and if I didn’t know better I’d wonder if he was deliberately tricking his fans into asphyxiating themselves to death with chlorine or chloramine gas. Just buy a bottle of Flash.

It says “🌱 with plant based ingredient” on the label of my floor cleaning product, as if that’s supposed to mean something to me. It’s weird: did it use to be made out of animals, and is the plant-based ingredient … palm oil???

First mince pie of the season, and a locally sourced mince pie. From Suffolk, which explains why it was so bad, whether heated-up or room-temperature: the pastry was soft and limp and too thick, and the filling wasn’t good enough to compensate. Merry Christmas.

I made an apple pie from scratch on Saturday. A small one, about the size of a big rat, two apples with the bruised bits removed–worth. I should not have decorated the lid with the leftover pastry, because it made it too thick. Next time: latticework.

Cold- or flu-like symptoms for most of the week. Snot city. I had some chesty cough mixture left over from the last season, but the cough I had this time was more of a dry or tickly one so it didn’t help as much.

Improbably I recovered, and the flooded railway lines dried out, in time for me to spend another <24 hours in Glasgow; that’s not boring enough to write about at any length here.

(Last week the phrase “how many arseholes it takes to fill the Albert Hall” was staring me in the face and I didn’t think of it. Pathetic.)

Anonymously reported to the council a broken button at a pedestrian crossing. I’d seen people standing there for ages waiting for the lights to change, apparently not having noticed that the light that lights up when you press the button hadn’t lit up when they’d pressed the button.

Crossing the road just a day or so later, I pressed the button and the light illuminated immediately … so I think it had fixed itself. Perhaps repeated presses and/or rain had loosened the mechanism or something like that. (Remembering the trouble with my kettle, maybe you need to strike the button aggressively at just the right angle.) And I feel ashamed for having wasted the council’s time with a non-problem, but I hold out hope that it was actually their shit-hot team who sprung into action and fixed it.

Twice to London and back. Once to Off Menu at the Royal Albert Hall – I had no memory of buying a ticket, so it’s lucky that their system sends an email the morning before the event. Now they know how many pathetic losers/podcast listeners it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

Everyone rightly moans about how shit their local train operating company is, so can I take a moment to shout out the rock-solid reliability, the sickening punctuality of Greater Anglia? (Between the first and second trip, so I only got fleeced once, I learnt about their significantly cheaper summertime “hare fares”, only available from the Greater Anglia branded website and app, an offer which (and by extension summer) ends tomorrow apparently.)

Things forgotten from weeks gone by:

• Peering through the window of the local One Stop shop, I noticed plastic cups attached to all the bottles of wine – what an ingenous idea for a shop that’s on the way to the railway station, a free plastic cup to drink your wine out of on the train. It’s the continental way, isn’t it? But of course they were those anti-theft devices more usually seen on bottles of spirits.

• Baader–Meinhof phenomeon of the week: Boygenius. It’s true what they say, you know you’re getting older when police officers supergroups seem younger.

• “Just been tossing the pill about with Chuggsy a little bit”

Edited with a pair of scissors, the label from a bottle of mint & tea tree shower gel can be reused to label a tin of peppermint tea bags. (Unless you have multiple kinds of mint tea, e.g. spear, which you need to distinguish between.)

Incredible: just looking at the mint & tea tree shower gel website (Aldi or original version), I swear I can smell mint. (I have a poor sense of smell; not being able to detect a gas leak is a concern. But everything’s electric here, so it’s probably more dangerous being colour blind and unable to see blood in poo.)

Sunsets getting earlier means being frustrated by the limp crapness of the front light’s attachment to the bicycle (“securely held in place” my arse). Turns out I’ve lost a little plastic lock ring worth 99p. So I’ve combed through various boxes of clutter, and gone to all the local Evanses Cycles and Sportses Direct to confirm that not everything listed on their websites is stocked in their shops – a lot of vain bother just to try to avoid paying for delivery, but it’s good to keep busy.

(For a moment, I thought the aforelinked Julie’s Cycles did free delivery with no minimum order value! But taking advantage of poor Julie like that felt like a dick move – there’s nothing else I need to buy from them, and 99p can’t be enough to cover the postage. And anyway, I was mistaken.)

Limescale. Cleaning influencers recommend citric acid – in powdered form, not as it occurs in fruit – as if it’s a common thing everyone has in their cupboard. But it’s not, it’s hard to find in shops, worse than an Ottolenghi ingredient. Actually, Wilko sold citric acid in their brilliant winemaking section, which I only realised eight minutes before the local Wilko closed forever, and eight minute cities have never been a thing.

(Now it occurs to me that Roys of Wroxham might have some – they certainly sell huge bottles of vinegar which serve the same purpose – so I’ll try there.)

Off the alcohol – I wouldn’t call it “Octsober” cos I’m not fundraising for charity and it was still September when I started. It’s stopped me feeling so tired, which is nice.

📺 Boiling Point, the four-part sequel to the stressful 2021 film, is intense and at times it’s like being right there cutting onions. But the most astonishing part is seeing two different characters keep Marmite in the fridge.

Happy Bee Network. Some of the coverage of Greater Manchester’s new franchised bus services has elided the fact that they’re still operated by the private sector at the end of the day; part of me would like a commitment to either 100% public ownership or total free-market anarchy, not this still uneasy mixture.

Shut the fuck up you weasel faced cunt - can you let Andy Burnham, who is an amazing mayor by the way, have his day in the sun? You sad fuck

I must declare a professional interest: it’s advantageous for me that the new Bee Network app isn’t yet as good at live bus tracking as some of the old operators’ apps were.

To Pinewood Studios, to watch the studio recording of Taskmaster series 17 episode 3. I don’t even like Taskmaster as much as a lot of people do – I tend to zone out and go on my phone mid-way through any given episode – but very much enjoyed stepping through the screen and watching it in person.

Our first glimpse of the top-secret series 17 line-up was on the card the titular taskmaster has with their names on. (Like the one in the linked picture, it had one of the contestants’ surnames spelt incorrectly.) Some indiscreet blabbermouths have since leaked the list on the internet, for those who know where to look … I hope the full force of Channel 4 and Avalon’s lawyers will rain down on them.

Anyway. My tiny brain is struggling to cope with having seen a bit of the next series while the current one is airing.

ID’d at the big Sainsbury’s in Slough, yes I looked too young to buy baba au rhum, and I’d not brought any ID. I’m supposed to be flattered – the effects of exfoliating and moisturising – but it meant going without pudding, and possibly the alcoholic chilled dessert spoiling at the checkouts before any staff returned it to the shelf. (I’m sure some shops’ point-of-sale systems don’t have it flagged as an age-restricted item.)

So Slough is dead to me, a bit. I’d gotten a better impression the last time I visited, when it was a sunny day and the bus station hadn’t burnt down yet.

By the way, FirstGroup plc’s timetable data incorrectly lists a disused, unserved stop that looks like the best stop to alight at for (a mile or so walk to) Pinewood Studios. I’ve now filled in an online form about it, but I might as well have whispered into the wind or written my message in sand.

Cistern update: what was I on about last week, talking a load of rubbish? The buttons/rods thing was a red herring. But I swear there’s a knack to flushing in such a way that the valve closes properly post-flush; maybe some people hold the button down too long? Alas, watching how guests flush and telling them they’re doing it wrong isn’t really tenable.

🎦 Talk to Me. (About some Australian teenagers and their embalmed hand, a tale as old as time.) Freaked my nut out so much that I left behind a half-full bottle of sparkling mango Rubicon.

A Haunting in Venice. My mind wandered to thinking about HTTP caching for a bit. Venice is a silly town – ooh, building on land isn’t good enough for you? Pathetic.

“Or the local cow eating grass right over there?”

Happy iOS 17. It/Safari has a hard-to-reproduce bug where sometimes WebGL just doesn’t work sometimes, which would be annoying if say you’d recently retooled some maps on a website to use MapLibre GL JS instead of Leaflet.

Tim Vine (a), Northampton. There’d been a change of venue from a reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete–roofed one to a more structurally sound one, which being larger may be why it was possible to get a ticket. It wasn’t that good, but it was nice be in the shoemaking capital of the East Midlands and see the spectacle of pen behind the ear in person.

Overheard, down by the river: “She’s into going out for dinner … I don’t get the point of it when I could make something just as nice and stay indoors. But I’m not like ‘fuck you Jamie Oliver’ or anything like that.” (I’m worried that I’ve not transcribed that perfectly, that I’ve become what I hate (inaccurate TV subtitles), but I think that’s more than the general gist.)

Went for the flu jab and got a bonus corona jab (Comirnaty Original) in the other arm too. So now I feel a bit achy, like the self-satisfied feeling of having had a long session in a gym, brilliant.

Watched some videos which didn’t really address the cause of the dual-flush toilet cistern sometimes continuing to trickle after flushing. They’re all about fitting a whole new flush valve, which might be inexpensive and necessary but feels unnecessary and wasteful. But I worked it out: the two rods/pegs that the push-to-flush buttons press down on can disengage from the buttons, leaving the rod stuck down a bit and the button unusually loose. I’m not explaining myself well, but it’s actually a bit like the gooseneck kettle power button saga from earlier in the month. I’ve made some adjustments and I think they’ve worked, and the pleasure of flushing a well-adjusted cistern almost makes you want to flush again and again just for fun.

An life-affirming hour or so in Great Yarmouth. Also a seagull went to the toilet over me, which is pretty unlucky if you ask me.

Before I go, some amazing stories about the floundering retailer Wilko:

• A while ago I needed some coir compost (it’s peat-free, and light enough to carry without a motor car). There was none at the local Wilko, but the website’s useful stock checking facility told me a different branch had some in stock, so I went there and bought some coir compost, brilliant.

• Also a while ago, on a local website I saw a banner advertising Wilco with a c, which is like a more obscure version of Halfords, possibly one of North East Lincolnshire’s main sellers of car batteries. I clicked and was directed to the website of Wilko with a k – how funny to imagine what series of misunderstandings led to that. And yet that free advertising on Wilco’s dime was not enough to save Wilko.

• I bought a garlic press the other day. (“£4. Someone’s earning!” Actually cheaper than Amazon.) And yet I know it’s much cooler to crush garlic without specialised equipment, or to slice it finely with a keen blade.