Week 223: chuffing choo-choo

Sunday 25 June 2023

• Two emails I woke up to on Monday: landlord increasing the rent, and a separate chap saying “congrats on an unusable heap of shit”. Two negatives when I needed a positive! But I’d had a nice lie-in, I can handle the inflation, and it’s extra motivation to start cleaning the oven and looking harder for somewhere else to move to. They had a point about the unusability of my heap of shit too – I’m slowly working on it – but sending a vague twattish email is not how you effect change in the world.

• Tried an oven cleaning product. The branding’s a bit Brexity but it’s made the oven a bit cleaner. For the first time, I detached the oven door to access a hidden crevice, and the battle to reattach it later was definitely the high-adrenaline highlight of the week – had I accidentally broken the hinges with my immense strength? (I hadn’t.) The glass in the door is still sullied by burnt bits, but maybe food enjoys feeling like an important celebrity in a gangster-spec Range Rover with tinted windows.

• I’d never seen St George, a famous TV advert for blackcurrant-flavoured fizzy pop (making-of video). It explains so much of the last 26 years. It appears to be the actor Ray Gardner’s best-known work, and fair enough. Damningly, the Wikipedia article notes, “Despite his ties to the blackcurrant flavour, Gardner himself later appeared in two advertisements for the orange flavour.”

• Went to the seaside on one of the new triple-axle buses they have now. The interior design is a bit clinical, and the “Bus Stopping” sound kept making me jump out of my skin – it’s an aggressive honk rather than the usual bell. But apart from that it was a nice ride.

• 🚂 The Flying Scotsman was in town – it’s the chuffing choo-choo with a reputation for making grown adults behave like utter flutes, trespassing on the cess etc to take pictures etc. Whitlingham Country Park felt like a good place to observe the spectacle from a respectful distance, but I tend to underestimate how long it takes to walk there and then around the big lake to the side closest to the railway. But still I glimpsed the train being dragged backwards to Great Yarmouth, and much later a marginally better view of the puffs of steam moving through the distance.

• Maybe you or a relative have a vintage iPhone 6s whose storage is full, which is stopping updates being installed and making iOS offload apps to save space. You suggest deleting some photos, but it’s pissing in the wind – the iPhone Storage screen in Settings shows the real problem is several gigabytes of “Other”. Turns out the solution is simple, it’s to Erase All Content and Settings and then restore from a backup, and by jingo, loads of spaced freed with no useful data lost. So that’s good to know. (I guess there’s an old bug that made a cache or a log somewhere grow and grow.)

• An anonymous parcel of bottles of Woolite – the laundry liquid I recently slipped in a puddle of – arrived at my accountant’s office. Adorably they thought it was “from Kite Packaging”, which is ofc just the company who’d made the box. But I guess it was from an advertising technology salesperson (?) or someone else who’d searched the Companies House database.

  Being terribly rude and ungrateful for a moment:

  • I feel a bit bad about the accountants being treated like a PO box. There are ways of finding my home address instead.

  • For ecological reasons, I’m still reluctant to throw out the leaky old bottle yet – maybe I’ll fish around in some recycling bins for a lid.

  • I have no loyalty to the Woolite brand. They aren’t Woolmark-approved, and I was thinking of switching to a powder, of which any spillages would be less slippery and easier to clean up, and whose cardboard packaging would be better and more durable.

  But never mind. Thanks, William Woollard. And at last I’ve been vindicated in choosing an accountant with a nice-to-walk-to office, even though they seem otherwise a bit crap and I’d never actually had to go to their office before.