Week 112

Monday 10 May 2021

• Some things I saw last week which I can’t believe I didn’t mention here:

  • A seal bobbing about in the river, which would have been a surprise if I’d not previously read some articles in the local press about the seal.

  • Some dudes with a modified Audi they were photographing with a big camera. They’d detached the front numberplate, to make it more photogenic. The car has its own Instagram account, with more followers than most people I know. I thought I’d be angry at their blocking a pedestrianised area, and the “performance exhaust” system making a terrible offensive racket, but I suppose it’s a mostly harmless hobby.

  Well, it was nice to see a celebrity sea mammal, and a celebrity hatchback, which both happened to be grey.

• It was my birthday. A man came to replace the water heater timer which with a new, dramatically less charred one. I went to Lowestoft – my first time in a different county for more than a year – where I walked north until I could walk no more, and then returned home.

• The alarm clock mentioned last week arrived. It’s fine, but there was a hair beneath the transparent cover – yuck. Luckily, I’d also just bought a squeegee, which came with a suction cup for attaching the squeegee to a wall. So I could use the suction cup to remove the transparent cover, and dislodge the hair. What luck! Although it would have been luckier to get a clock without a hair.

• I also bought a new Chemex coffee maker, to replace the one I smashed into a thousand pieces a few months ago, because although I’ve a better way of making coffee, I wanted to use up the remaining ⅔ boxful of paper filters. Maybe producing a whole new glass thing is more wasteful than discarding some bits of paper, but my feelings don’t care about your facts.

  I deliberately got a bigger Chemex this time … forgetting that the bigger one requires bigger filters. And it turns out there’s a shortage of Chemex paper filters.

• Voted, using a Noris Triplus pencil. As far as I can tell, this electoral ward is now entirely represented by Green councillors … and that’s what I voted for, slightly spur-of-the-momently. Some prominent folks in that party are posh idiots incorrectly opposed to electric railways and stuff, but that’s neither relevant nor as bad as the alternative.

• To the hospital, for a somewhere-between-annual-and-biennial thing involving having jelly rubbed on my chest, which perhaps eels and certain kinds of pervert enjoy.

• Second jabbed. No side-effects, apart from being wet cos it was raining heavily, and all the oil washed off the chain of my bike on the way to and from the medical practice.