Week 73

Monday 10 August 2020

• It’s been warm out.

• Didn’t “staycation” (and the more obscure “holistay”) use to mean a holiday (vacation) spent at home? But people are using it to describe any kind of domestic tourism, like staying in a holiday cottage. Why don’t we go the whole hog and use “staycation” for any holiday that involves staying anywhere?

  My previous employer is among the most enthusiastic offenders – I could pretend I left that job in protest about it, but it would be pretence. The only thing worse than this erosion of the meaning of “staycation” is people complaining about it.

• I quite like Toblerone ice cream, which is a kind of ice cream bar on a wooden stick. (Don’t call it an ice lolly or you’ll upset people.) Alas, it’s hard to find in shops – this week, I went to two branches of Iceland, who’ve stocked it in the past, and none was to be found.

  I searched Twitter, wondering if other people were having the same trouble, and just found folks who’d bought the ice cream but were disappointed by it. Someone griped that it’s nothing like Toblerone – one of my favourite things about it, as I don’t much like Toblerone – and another that the inefficient triangular shape represents poor value for money.

  To be honest, I don’t like Toblerone ice cream that much, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But it’s encouraged me to have another go at making Supermarket Market work.

• Let me be clear: I can’t abide motor cars. But I enjoyed watching some of the many videos released this week where Gordon Murray talks about his ludicrous new T.50 supercar. You could watch him talk all day – in fact, really, because there’s a lot of videos and they go on a bit. Some of the quirky things about Murray are his shirts, his saying “motor car”, and his saying “funky”.

• A sore bum has cast a shadow over most of the week, as sore bums are wont to do. I expect there are worse things, somewhere, than a sore bum, but I can’t imagine what they’re like. Well, it’s barely sore at all now, so that’s good.

• I have no respect for the pathetic nerds who post their week noteses before the week has finished. I spent the last minutes of the week in a thrilling race against time to maintain my Duolingo streak.