Week 76

Monday 31 August 2020

• Some larvae took up residence in and around the bin, which was rude of them. I think I have seen the last of them now.

• Just days ago, I’d not come across the phrase “coupe bowl”, but now here I am the proud owner of a whole number of coupe bowls. I suppose they are named coupe bowls because they’re low-slung and sporty like a coupé, or maybe after the former Sainsbury’s boss and margarine brand manager Mike Coupe.

  I’ve been eating from some cracked Ikea bowls for a while, and that’s unsanitary, so it seemed time to replace them with some similar but uncracked ones. I swung by John Lewis – pfft, but I was intrigued to learn the phrase “coupe bowl” for the first time. Then tried Sainsbury’s, and lo, they had bowls just like the cracked Ikea bowls (apart from the cracks), and at a discounted price, and also described thrillingly as coupe bowls. (So it turns out that I’ve known coupe bowls all this time, although the nasty retailer doesn’t use that insufficiently Swedish phrase.) And I conveyed them home on the bicycle without breaking anything.

  Cool story. I also bought what’s described as a “pasta bowl”, and it’s reminded me how eating from such a large, flat bowl really heightens the experience of eating pasta compared to eating from a plate. Cool story.

• Proving again the power of influencer marketing, I bought some new masks. And that was a great decision – it turns out that masks made by professional seamsters are better than the ones I made by cutting up a threadbare tee shirt and roughly sewing with a needle and thread.

• Some work, in fact rather alarmingly a lot. Maybe I should write about it. One thing I did, which wankier typists would call an “architectural change”, made the line on a CPU graph plummet wonderfully, and I was really pleased. (I’d previously dismissed it as premature optimisation, and to be fair it was at the time – it’s amazing how long my terribly inefficient batshit sufficed for.)

  That, and other grand things fixed, but still plagued by some problems I don’t understand. But what a thrill to think that maybe in weeks to come I’ll understand them.

• Anything else? I was starting to become jetlagged again – despite having not touched a jet, of course – but I think setting an alarm on a Sunday morning has snapped me out of it as I feel appropriately tired, so it’s good to know that works.