• The local app-based bicycle/scooter hire joint has designated parking bays, and they charge a £5 surcharge for parking anywhere else. Now they’ve done a new thing: if you hire a bike/scooter that someone’s left outwith a designated parking bay, and you return it to a designated parking bay, they add 10 “bonus minutes” to your balance. (So if you take less than 10 minutes riding to the nearest bay, you’re quids in.) It’s a good idea, and actually I think it was my idea, but I’m not bitter about not being credited or anything.

  You can see where this is going: yes, I’ve been scouring the map for stray bikes and scooters, and pounding the P, like it’s (I imagine) a shit Pokemon Go. Alas, some of the vehicles on the map turned out to be in people’s houses or back yards – fair enough, they’d paid their five pounds – and I didn’t want to trespass, but still I’ve accumulated 22 free minutes which could come in handy the next time I’m late for an appointment or accidentally walk to Sprowston.

• 🎦 Argylle … crap, utter crap.

• I like John Constable’s “I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, – light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.” It’s a lovely sentiment, but sometimes things make me doubt – like the BMW iX (Larry David’s character has one in the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm), and those hairless cats.

• To Liverpool and back. I wasn’t on the LIV–NRW train that derailed – not quite “narrowly avoided”, but “broadly avoided” isn’t right either.

• James Acaster (a). It’s profligate and selfish to go to see more than one date of a sold-out tour, but. There were things I didn’t remember from last time, and other things I’d forgotten.

• The Go! Team (h), a more superlative live proposition than I’d expected.

• Janine Harouni (h). She said “C-section” several times, and I wondered if that would annoy Caesar if he were around – is it Caesar erasure? At least he’s still got the salad – “C-salad” is too ambiguous (Cobb, chicken).

  • 2024 is the centenary of Caesar salad. What are we all planning to celebrate?

    Is it arrogant to name a salad after oneself, or is it worse to take credit for a salad someone else invented? The restaurateur who the Caesar salad’s named after is broadly credited with inventing it too, but I don’t know if the name was his idea.

• Apart from that, ugh. My problem with eating globe artichokes is it involves too much admin, so imagine what actual admin is like.

• Cleaned the oven door. I’d tried before using various products, but the thing that worked was this sharp-bladed scraper that professional window cleaners use. The glass is so clean and see-through now, I keep switching on the oven light just to admire how clean it is. Best thing I’ve done all year.

  Come back next week, probably, when the glass has shattered mid-roast because the scraping damaged it.

• On a bus, upstairs, I noticed one of the windows visibly trembling. Then it loosened beyond a wobble, until it was flapping about, only attached on one edge, threatening to fly into oncoming traffic and maim someone. (I’d have taken a picture or video, but my phone camera was on selfie mode and I was too startled by the image of my face.) Fortunately, the driver noticed and stopped at the next stop. Imagine if something terrible had happened due to my hesitancy to dash downstairs to raise the alarm – I’d’ve felt guilty, but the maimee would’ve felt worse.

• The huge news is that I felt impelled to write a non-weeknotes blog post. (Even thought about continuing the cadence for the whole month but pfft.) And now today The Sunday Times, supposedly a newspaper of record, has repeated that seemingly Wikipedia-sourced probable lie, as if they learned nothing from the Hitler Diaries hoax.

• Apart from the beauty of collective bargaining and all that, an under-celebrated benefit of the railway workers’ industrial action (“train strikes”) is all the yellow-stickered “reduced for quick sale” perishable goods there were in the shop at the station.

  (Remember when Jeremy Clarkson said striking public sector workers should be shot … in the previous breath, he’d actually said the strikes were “fantastic” [because there was less traffic on the roads], but then “we have to balance it though, don’t we, because this is the BBC” … it annoys me that it annoys me when people omit that context, because he would never do something like that, oh wait.)

• Two chances to take in some live stand-up, fumbled by (a) completely forgetting – why didn’t I put it in iCal? – and (b) being unable to find the venue, a venue I’d been to at least twice before, only later realising that it moved last year (to somewhere I’ve walked past loads of times) (I’ve updated OpenStreetMap and tried to update Apple Maps now).

• Premium meal deal fans: the Sainsbury’s spiced butternut and whipped feta wrap is good by the way. When I’ve met those ingredients in the past, I’ve been unimpressed, but together in a tortilla wrap? Amazing.

The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis writes that the baroque indie pop band The Last Dinner Party

Football Focus is a long-running Saturday lunchtime BBC programme that focuses on football, and Garth Crooks is an ex-footballer now better known as a pundit.

Garth has worked for the BBC since 1982 as a match analyst and also as an interviewer, noted for his wordy and rambling questions, which have been much parodied. Seen frequently on BBC’s Saturday afternoon football programme “Final Score” and he has been comically lampooned for his rambling questions to football players and managers.

But did GC really praise TLDP on FF? This sentence was added to The Last Dinner Party’s Wikipedia article a few months earlier, in November 2023:

and thereafter several people tweeted screenshots of it going ha ha at the idea of Crooksy as tastemaker. But the citation given, an article from Rolling Stone, doesn’t even mention Crooks or Football Focus at all.

The Wikipedia user responsible has a dubious track record, e.g. adding this paragraph to the Video Killed the Radio Star article:

In February 2002, while on international duty with England, David Beckham got into an argument with journalist Rob Shepherd, during a press conference, after Shepherd made a joke about David and Victoria Beckham’s habit of finishing second (David finishing second in the recent FIFA World Player of the Year vote, and Victoria’s inability to have a number 1 hit). Beckham sarcastically asked Shepherd “what do you know about music? How many people in your family have ever had a number one?”. Shepherd replied “one. My sister was in The Buggles”. His sister was Linda Jardim-Allen, who sang vocals on the number one hit.

Actually, that one’s completely true, and a further fun fact is that Rob Shepherd was later gaoled for biting a man in a wine bar in Beckenham. And I know that the user in question is an unregistered guest idenfitied only by their IP address, so they could be several people. But apart from that, they do seem to like making up lies about Garth Crooks in particular, e.g. that the former rugby union player Richard Hill is his daughter’s godfather, and that he once claimed to have performed the finger clicks in Queen’s It’s a Kind of Magic. (The song is actually called A Kind of Magic, and the clicks were performed by Chris Rea.)

To be really sure, we’d have to watch every episode of Football Focus – at least all those between April 2023, when The Last Dinner Party released their their first single, and November 2023. Fortunately, an under-celebrated feature of the BBC programmes website is the “Music played” section listing every song played in an episode, with timestamps.

So we should be able to narrow it down to episodes where The Last Dinner Party are listed there and Garth Crooks is named in the credits. But unfortunately, maybe due to budget cuts, there are no playlists for episodes of Football Focus broadcast after February 2023. I can’t even tell if Crooksy appeared on Football Focus during the relevant period – some episodes have no credits, and he’s not credited in any that have them.

Actually, years ago, I started (using get_iplayer) bulk-downloading the subtitles of every BBC programme, and indexing them in Elasticsearch and even making a tool that graphed mentions of [search term] over time. But I stopped, because breaking the law is illegal, and I didn’t know that one day I’d want to know if a band were ever mentioned on Football Focus. And now it’s too late, because episodes of Football Focus don’t stay on the iPlayer for very long.

Anyway. I don’t like to be a spoilsport, but I sadly suspect that Petridis has been the gullible victim of a hoax, and now his article in a once-respected newspaper can be cited in the original Wikipedia article – citogenesis.

(I had a listen to some of The Last Dinner Party’s music, cos it sounds like the sort of thing I like, and I didn’t like it very much.)

• Went to a trailer in a car park to participate in the Our Future Health research programme, to have various measurements taken and some blood extracted. I’m a phlebotomist’s nightmare with hard-to-find veins, and I’d accidentally made matters worse by being cold and dehydrated – must prepare better the next time a medical professional needs to locate a vein.

  (Yes it feels likely that it will emerge that the data is being sold to private companies, and that the blood collected actually went into one of Peter Thiel’s breakfast smoothies.)

• Got a new winter coat just in time for the warmer weather. It’s enormous, maybe too big, big enough to smuggle several frozen legs of lamb – I feel the supermarket security guard eyeing me more suspiciously – but so warm that the stolen meat would quickly spoil.

• 🚲 Got some new tyres after a statistically significant increase in punctures. Fitting them somehow turned into disassembling the jockey wheels off of the derailleur to give them a good clean – I blame the influence of a TikTok I saw on Instagam – and getting dirty grease on my socks and treading it everywhere including the bathtub – social media is a pernicious beast.

• 🎦 The End We Start From features an anomalous number of pre-2000 motor cars, so let’s say it’s set in a parallel universe where Gordon Brown’s scrappage scheme didn’t happen. It did happen in this reality, so we don’t need to worry about ecological disaster.

• To Manchester and back by Megabus. I had some thoughts about the Scania Touring motor coach (the door by the wheelchair space squeaks a lot, passengers in the aisle seats can’t easily reach the power sockets, etc) but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

  I liked the softness of the Manchester water – I think my hair likes it better, and I’d spent some of the previous days scraping limescale off of a shower panel.

• Panic Shack (a) (the Pink Room, YES, Manchester) superlative.

• This Is The Kit (h) (the studio where Sale of the Century used to be filmed) didn’t even play their best song but that’s all right by me.

• When I free-pour muesli I often pour too much, more than I can handle, so I wondered what size an official serving of muesli was. This led me to the website singleportions.co.uk and the distinctive, passionate style of its product descriptions, the sort of writing we’ll miss when all marketing copy is produced by large language models:

  This is ALSO not stored in a ‘plastic dispenser’ as seen in “poor” Hotels and Guesthouses - how do we know how long that cereal has been there ? what’s the BBE date ??!! (and stale!) Always ask for fresh, sealed and dated cereal ; and if they don’t have any - suggest they come to this website

  This is NOT a large box of - Frosties - that go stale the minute the box is opened - each one of these is fresh and the same as you would get in a Top Class Hotel

  I’ve never had breakfast at a Top Class Hotel, so I don’t know if that’s true. I keep my (homemade) muesli in a plastic box and it hasn’t gone stale, but maybe it will now I’m only having 45g at a time. Alas I won’t buy anything from singleportions.co.uk, because actually I care about seagulls not choking to death on plastic waste.

  (This dredged up a memory of Stewart Lee telling a made-up story about David Attenborough stealing ketchup sachets, and I’m pleased by how quickly I found the audio, an episode of the weak Armando Iannucci’s Charm Offensive from 2007, in which two other leading lights of the BBC are accused too.)

• 🎦 The Boy and the Heron.

• The Holdovers, a Christmas film ingeniously released in mid–late January in the UK (and why not). Not quite as funny as the men guffawing at the back of the room seemed to find it, but what is?

• Posted a job advert.

• Went to help my da reattach a register plate (a sheet of metal between a flue and a wood-burning stove). For the rest of the day I had an interesting taste in my mouth, and when I blew my nose later all black stuff came out, so maybe burning things is bad? Anyway, the taste has subsided now, leaving the taste of the salt on the roads you taste when you go outside at this time of season, even though I’m not licking the roads I’m just breathing.

• 🎦 Ferrari. (Ha ha I thought it was about the LBC breakfast show presenter.) For a film about fast driving it starts a bit slow, then I cried a bit (first time this year). Surprisingly the Italian accents don’t feel silly.

• Poor Things. Obviously amazing, but I disliked it, maybe due to having a headache and stuff.

• To Mark Watson at the Diss Corn Hall, a lovely time. Then a brisk 20-minute walk to wait in the cold at the desolate railway station, where they lock the toilets and waiting room etc at 19:30 the bastards, and there’s not even a vending machine on the platform or anything. (Should have run like the wind to catch the earlier train, or waited in a pub.)

• I was an interested follower of the Post Office Horizon scandal years ago, before it went mainstream, subscribed to the Computer Weekly RSS feed. (Didn’t manage to watch much of the recent ITV drama, because I’ve become the worst sort of snob I used to hate and it’s not as well-written as The Wire or something.) Anyway, the Post Office were the first users of Qmatic, the disembodied voice that announces “cashier number three, please”, whose brilliance becomes clear when you queue somewhere without it (CeX) … my point is, oh how the mighty have fallen.

• I try not to start anything new in January, not wanting to appear to make a cringe New Year’s resolution. But I went to the dental hygienist and was reminded I’d been neglecting part of my mouth, so I’ve changed my brushing a bit. And I installed Atuin (“Magical Shell History”) on the computer – I don’t really care for it yet, it feels jarring.

• To Edinburgh.

  • A little of what might be described as “microdosing parenting”.

  • Stayed in my first Airbnb. The radiators needed bleeding, and the freezer defrosting, but I did neither. My bed was a mattress up on a ledge – the idea of a mezzanine excited me, but not the reality of climbing up and down a ladder if I needed to wee in the middle of the night, and I’m not a guillemot, so boringly I slept down on the sofa instead.

  • The zoo! Didn’t know rhinos had such hairy ears.

  • The sun sets early there. Like a bird flying into a window, I thrust my card into what I thought was a gap in the bus driver’s assault screen but was in fact the assault screen. Funny story.

• Mostly resisted doing any work, until “why not? Why shouldn’t I?”

  I’d forgotten one of the improworsements in Django 5.0: they’ve removed the setting that makes the DATE_FORMAT, TIME_FORMAT and DATETIME_FORMAT settings have any effect, so you must pepper your templates with format strings if you don’t like their weird (American?) default (5:49 p.m.).

  So I’d forgotten to specify the time format in one place, and people were quick to notice. Turns out Barry Doe is not alone in reviling the 12-hour clock. (Sometimes I think about adopting the 12-hour clock one April Fool’s Day, just for 12 hours – it would be immature attention-seeking annoyingness, and wouldn’t it be awful if actually no one noticed?)

• The website GTFS.pro: some aspects of its design, bits of microcopy etc., feel familiar, I can’t quite put my finger on it. But it’s OK, everything is a remix and all that, and it has some admirable innovations. And there’s an amazing portrait of the founder pulling a very serious face, amazing, imagine being that serious.

• Christmas time, in some ways for me an actually slightly more-ascetic-than-usual time.

  (I didn’t see any screenshots posted on X of the seasonally empty bustimes.org map this year, which is an indictment of the decline of one of those websites. Maybe on NYD.)

• The emptying of the parental attic and the childhood bedroom (a is bigger and still-fuller than b) reinforces that not having too much stuff is a good idea. I think I do OK at keeping my stuff under control, apart from currently having two kettles. But does having lots of stuff mean less empty space to heat up so it’s more energy-efficient?

• I pretend to set no store by the calendar year, it’s just a number, but 2023 will go down as the year I started using biological laundry detergent occasionally. (Apparently it cleans better, and its reputation for irritating sensitive skin is undeserved, and if you only ever use non-bio at 30° your washing machine might start to stink.)

  I hope 2024 isn’t too shit.

• As you know, I strongly disapprove of e.g. Spotify Wrapped coming out in November, ignoring all the new music I enjoyed in December. So fair play to Premier Inn for waiting till NYE to email “You stayed with us 3 times throughout 2023”, but I only stayed twice (I think they counted a cancelled booking).

• (Yes I used the initials for New Year’s Day and Eve in a lapse of confidence over if there’s an apostrophe.)

• Instead of the Roman empire, I think surprisingly often about how there’s Declan Curry and Declan Rice and Tim Curry and Tim Rice (the Declan/Tim/Curry/Rice matrix). But Declan Curry is too obscure an ex-BBC journalist for many people to recognise the name – most interestingly he went on Pointless Celebrities with Michelle Mone – and off the top of my head I couldn’t tell you who either Tim is. (I only mention it now because the only thing like it is the Christmas/New Year’s/Eve/Day matrix.)

  Also, listing increasingly obscure continental things: continental breakfast, continental drift, continental quilt (a dated term for a duvet), continental door (a door on the right-hand side of right-hand drive coaches and motorhomes for visiting right-hand traffic countries). I don’t know what is the point.

• 🎄 Cut (slightly) my thumb on a sharp bit of burnt/caramelised mincemeat, which is a new nadir of rare pathetic injuries. Also suggests a vegan alternative to the classic frozen leg of lamb murder weapon.

• 🎦 It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).