Week 136

Tuesday 26 October 2021

• The construction of the new block of flats next door continues apace. Upsettingly, they’ve erected an oppressive grey fence, enclosing what was a nice line of shrubs along the path leading to the entrance to our building. But let’s not be all nimby. Its redeeming feature is a charming graffito depicting a moth (I thought it was an elephant at first), and there are further moths on other fences around building sites possibly all over the town which I hope to find.

• A new serie of You seemed worth paying for a month of the hated Netflix for to see what murdering the creepy slimy character in it has been up to. Some have described it as “far fetched”, as if that’s not one of the best things a thing can be, because I certainly have no time for things fetched from nearby, thank you, fetch them from afar please.

• Steve Allen, who has the “Up With The Partridge” (“early breakfast”) slot on the hated radio station LBC, was in the news for being unpleasant, which inexplicably prompted me to have a listen to his programme. And actually there’s something compelling about the spectacle of this disagreeable man going on and on, discharging raw sewage from his brain into the airwaves, even though I thought I had a low tolerance for boring arses.

  At one point Allen mentioned seeing an advert for Neutrogena hand cream starring some Norwegian fishermen, and being mystified because he didn’t think a fisherman would use hand cream. This intrigued me, so I did some research, and it turns out to be slightly interesting. Like all the best apocryphal stories possibly concocted by marketeers, there are multiple inconsistent versions, but: well, obviously fishermen’s hands get dry and chapped from being out in the cold wind, so the fishermen sat down and invented Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Concentrated Hand Cream using their knowledge of dermatology. Or maybe the fishermen noticed their skin getting soft and nice when they handled fish guts, and this empirical observation influenced the development of the cream. Either way, of course I’ve now bought some Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Concentrated Hand Cream.