Monday: I went on a train. A man made a lot of announcements on the loudspeakers, grandly introducing himself as our “senior conductor” and going on about this and that, and kept pausing dramatically for emphasis, only slightly more normal-sounding than the viral Manchester Civil Justice Centre answerphone message. The man who walked through the train checking tickets seemed relatively quiet and normal, and I struggle to believe they were the same person, maybe they were just the normal/junior conductor.

And there was a loose connection or something, so the sound would periodically cut out mid-announcement, but alas never during the name of the train operating company (CrossCountry).

• My records show that I previously encountered a senior conductor almost exactly a year ago, and I drafted some observations about the garbled announcement “the cafe bar will be closing at Diss” which confused my tired brain – it sounded like Diss was one of these new times they keep inventing like prosecco o’clock – but in the end it didn’t feel interesting enough for that week’s notes.

  • The Sublime Text spellchecker has no knowledge of prosecco.

Thursday: I had a bath immediately after chopping a chilli pepper. I slightly worried the stinging sensation was because I’d not properly rinsed away the Mr Muscle Platinum Shower Shine residue, but no it must have been the capsaicin.

Saturday: I had to go near the coast.

Turns out the Coasthopper drivers aren’t just up against motorists who don’t know the width of their own vehicles, there are also many rowdy passengers on pub crawls and actually maybe that’s why there are no buses later in the evenings. The audio announcements they have now are a bit quiet, I wonder how their text-to-speech software copes with some of the less logically pronounced place names, and the disembodied artificial man voice sounded familiar from various sloppy videos on TikTok and Instagram – as with the train earlier, I’m sorry I didn’t record a recording.

I was delighted with all the ladybirds in a pub garden, and I learn that the collective noun is “loveliness” which is quite right.

Crikey, that’s Q2 nearly done over as it were. I bought a TRMNL wholly and exclusively for business purposes, cos it seems just the thing to display bus times on, but so far it’s been resolutely set to the Days Left This Year thing (plugin? integration?) and I’m not sure I like it.

Friday: Haim (Dreamland, Margate). Didn’t see much of the seaside town beyond the walk between the train station and the amusement park, but was excited to see an oasthouse on the train there, and that wasn’t even the highlight.

Saturday: walking towards Euston I came across a far-right march heading in the opposite direction. I shook my head to show my disagreement with the gutlords’ jeers, of course.

Narrowly avoided sitting on a turd in Tavistock Square – is that a win because I didn’t sit on the turd, or a loss because I’d sat very close to it and it put me off my sandwich? I think it was human in origin, and to be fair it looked healthy, a 3 or 4 on the Bristol Stool Chart.

Tommy WÁ and Macy Gray (Birmingham Town Hall, Birmingham), wonderful.

A while ago I was finally persuaded to start using the NYT Games app instead of the website to do Wordle, and I started doing the Mini crossword and Connections as well. It’s nice to have two new ways to pass the time until we all die, but goodness me the Americanness is sometimes baffling – “cheese” is a key component of a salad is it?

The bus times website celebrated its tenth birthday. I thought about a cake, maybe returning to where it all began (Selby), but then I didn’t do any of those things. But, coincidentally, I did feel a new enthusiasm for doing some work, so that’s good.

I have been mostly listening to the back catalogue of Three Bean Salad which is as great as everyone says. Nicely, I’ve reached September 2023, when the temperature and humidity were about the same as they are now.

Significantly, I’ve mostly stopped using the Overcast app to listen to podcasts, because it doesn’t show episode artwork. It does if the podcast’s producers embed it in the audio file, but they overwhelmingly don’t, and I so didn’t want to miss seeing the 3BS artworks that I’ve jolly well switched to Castro.

Regarding actual beans, last week I was introduced to Heinz Five Beanz, which are like baked beans but with four more kinds of bean, what a good idea.

I should have written a separate blog post about gooseberry fools instead of serialising my observations like this, but:

Some shops use the same lid design for their apricot and lemon fools, which is a problem when they’re kept on a low shelf where it’s harder to see which is which. So I’m grateful to Tesco, Asda and the Co-op for printing the type of fool on the lid, no doubt at some extra expense.

Some more minor differences in ingredients: the Marks and Spencer gooseberry fool, which is pretentiously called a “west country luxury fool”, contains spinach extract.

🎦 Mars Express (2023), a visually gorgeous French animated film. I’m bad at reading subtitles.

I’ve tried some of the different supermarket gooseberry fools now. Of course they have the same ingredients, the same sort of packaging, and they’ve all decided that exactly 114g is the correct amount of gooseberry fool. Unlike the others’, Morrisons’s gooseberry fool was positioned in its premium The Best range … but now, and I think this might be a leading economic indicator, it’s been discontinued and replaced with a cheaper-looking version, and dextrose has been appended to the list of ingredients.

Weekended in London. It was nice and all that. Then I found myself in possession of a rented Brompton and some hours to kill, so did some pointless bicycling around and used the Silvertown Cycle Shuttle. The SCS was fine, underwhelming but what did I expect? On the two journeys I made, there was on average one other passenger. The system for securing non-folding bikes looked complicated, too much like shibari, so I got to practice folding and unfolding. It’s a shame that the timetable doesn’t appear in TfL’s open data, so it’s a pain to log on Busmiles – but they don’t want passengers to mistake it for a normal bus service, and that’s more important than the concerns of a silly website for weirdos.

While I was away I missed a dramatic thunderstorm, and also a fire in a neighbouring building. The cause of the fire was slightly interesting: some neighbours were perhaps defrosting their freezer, and put the freezer drawers outside on their balcony, and the sun shone through the transparent plastic and set fire to some cardboard, like a sociopathic child burning ants with a magnifying glass.

With remarkable efficiency, the management company has updated the list of things not allowed on balconies, and its mixture of specificity and broadness is a bit like the tenth commandment, something like: open containers of petrol, soft furnishings, or any items at all. I’m a touch indignant, but if I have to get rid of the landlord’s horrible naff fake plastic topiary, lest it bursts into flames, then that’s good.

I swear that a Google AI Overview told me that the problematic soft drink Kia-Ora was invented by the singer Rita Ora’s father. But I don’t have photographic evidence, and now I can’t reproduce it.

(I’ve been finding large language models useful, sometimes, but you don’t want to know – it’s boring and cringey, and one should keep these things to oneself. The worst thing about them, apart from all the draining of the aquifers, is the sullying of the ✨ emoji, and I’m not convinced that the sometimes-usefulness is enough to make up for those downsides.)

🎦 The Ballad of Wallis Island (2025). Charming, notwithstanding its glamorisation of sky lanterns which can cause fires and pose a choking hazard for animals.

To Kemah Bob’s show at the arts centre.

To Danny Baker’s show at the Ipswich corn exchange. I’d forgotten about my tepid review of last time. The old man talked and talked for three hours, which passed quickly and represented good value.

There was a boxing match in town, so handily there were extra trains running. The train was three trains coupled together, and the rear three-tenths of the train was so suspiciously empty that, due to behavioural science, I too squeezed into one of the seven crowded carriages like sheep.

Had some dandruff. I’m not sure I’ve ever had dandruff before, and at first I wasn’t convinced I had this time – surely it was flakes of ceiling landing on me, coincidentally whenever I touched my hair. After just one wash with Head & Shoulders it’s much better, and it serves me right for being disloyal and sometimes using Herbal Essences. (I’m going to look into plastic-free solid shampoo bars.)

Went a-bicycling with half a view to snatching a glimpse of northern lights (no chance, too cloudy and southerly) and made a detour to see if a shed on a farm selling eggs was open (of course it wasn’t) and ran over something. The thing scampered into a field, then stopped. I think it was a rabbit and the field was a church car park. Perhaps the rabbit was OK, I’d only grazed its tail, the what looked like a trail of blood on the road was something else, or perhaps not. If I’d had a plastic bag and a can-do attitude this could have been my chance to learn butchering skills and make a curry, but I did not and I’m sorry.

I feel like I’m mentally declining – more than usual, I’ve forgotten to put the lid on the kettle, left cups of tea to go cold (I like cold black coffee, but not tea), left things out of the fridge, put ambient goods in the fridge (shortbread, antifungal cream), and most expensively got fined for forgetting to lock a rental bicycle at the end of a journey.

Had some work frustrations, but let’s not forget to be grateful – the frustrations were a welcome distraction from the usual frustrations. And I was cheered up by going to send an email to the future and noticing this lovely bit of user interface in Apple Mail:

Yes you can drag the hour hand too. And yes I use this feature quite a lot – although maybe I shouldn’t and should be more brazen about being a night owl with a wobbly work-life balance – but usually I use the boring Fastmail website, which is not so whimsical.

Someone’s been making stuff up about Garth Crooks on Wikipedia again. This about the pre-eminent football journalist Fabrizio Romano (via a gullible Crystal Palace–based TikTok man):

Romano was discovered by Garth Crooks in 2010, while Crooks was MCing a corporate event at Fiat, where Romano was an employee. After being impressed by his knowledge of the Italian game, Crooks e-mailed BBC Director General Tim Davie, suggesting that Romano be given a guest segment on Crook’s popular Team of the Week column.

(It raises a lot of questions: wasn’t Romano probably still in school in 2010? Isn’t the Director General of the BBC too senior to to be dealing with such trifling matters as who is given a guest segment on a column? Mind you, Tim Davie wasn’t appointed DG until 2020, so maybe he was a lowly BBC Sport producer back then.)

This, about the ex-footballer turned disgraced ex-presenter and pundit Jermaine Jenas, is a bit subtler:

Crooks also reportedly alerted BBC management to Jermaine Jenas’s potential as a pundit, having been impressed by his ability to correctly recall over a decade’s worth of Match of the Day 2 “Goal of the Month” winners during a dinner at an Indian restaurant.

There’s a case for letting it be, to see which broadsheet newspapers it ensnared, but I care too much about the truth. The problem is it breeds paranoia – now I read verifiably true things about Garth Crooks, like that he presented Top of the Pops once in 1982, and he presented the short-lived late-night BBC Two political discussion programme Despatch Box, and I still doubt them.

I’ve discovered a circumstance that can make the bus timetables on Citymapper, Google Maps etc. off by between a few and several minutes. (For example here Citymapper’s times are eight minutes later than the correct times, hint hint it’s always an even number.) This is a test of my integrity, because if my website is correct and some others aren’t then that’s not my problem, in fact it’s sort of quite good for me. But if I really care about the truth, doing the right thing, and indeed public transport, I should try to let the relevant people know (if I can convince them that I’m not a blithering idiot).

It’s old news now, but the best thing I read at the tail end of last week was this about AI creep Sam Altman’s disrespect of olive oil. (He was caught cooking with some expensive olive oil that’s meant for dipping and finishing, despite owning a bottle of cheaper olive oil that would be more suitable for cooking.)

I remember when Michael Caine was on Desert Island Discs one Christmas, and he shared his recipe for roast potatoes, and his use of olive oil meant my da lost all respect for the cockney actor. To be fair to Caine, the supposed low smoke point of olive oil isn’t the problem some people think it is, and his wife’s a vegetarian so of course he wasn’t going to use goose fat. (I wonder what vegan cross-channel swimmers and steam rally wrong’uns use instead.)

The dredging up of that memory inspired me to roast some potatoes, on one of the warmest days of the week, and the results were OK, but I misremembered and did the opposite of several of Poppy O’Toole’s top tips so I look forward to trying again.

I sometimes do dribs and drabs of consultancy work, sorry if that sounds a bit wanky. I’d like do more, but it’s less simple for me than just suckling at the teat of programmatic advertising/surveillance capitalism, as lonely as that is. I wish I had the equivalent of like a theatrical agent.

For non-disclosure reasons, let’s say I was offered some work by a manufacturer of red pepper hummus. As a leading critic of red pepper hummus, perhaps I could work from within to make it tastier. But I feared that I was being set up to fail, that red pepper hummus was intrinsically disgusting, I didn’t know how to make hummus on an industrial scale, and wasn’t I ideologically opposed to its manufacture? So after some dithering I chickened out, which is boring.

This weather of ours. I think my scalp is a bit sunburnt. I wouldn’t mind a bit of rain, to wash the bird poo off the balcony.

Some work. A trying week down the data mine, but there were some wins.

• Waffling about maps. I succeeded in getting tileserver-gl-light to serve some Ordnance Survey Open Zoomstack data, well done me.

• Got invited to the FlixBus affiliate programme at last, and I hope I’m not betraying any confidences by revealing my earnings so far – on people clicking through from bustimes.org and buying tickets – total 22p. Their tickets are such good value that the commision doesn’t amount to much, but the money is welcome after I lost 10p betting on the wrong pope.

  I know I complained about FlixBus recently, but in my experience their drivers get lost infinitely less often than Megabus drivers do. (Yes I know there’s really no such thing as a FlixBus driver or a Megabus driver, they’re all employed by subcontractors.) And on a previous, crowded journey, the size and proximity of the vast lady who sat next to me was, I gather, tantamount to something some men pay a lot of money to experience.

DigitalOcean gave me a $50 Amazon.com gift card for completing a survey, which is ironic because one of the few reasons to use DigitalOcean is maybe not wanting to use Amazon. (DO isn’t Better than AWS, but being smaller has to count for something and limits its capacity for evil.) And it’s a bit “free as in piano”, because you can’t spend an .com gift card on Amazon.co.uk, or donate it, or use it to buy something from the wishlist of a content creator you admire – you’ve got to find something on the .com that ships to your address, costs exactly $50 including shipping, and is worth the carbon emissions of being shipped overseas. I bought some stationery, and welcome suggestions about how to spend the remaining $2.77.

Had a bit of lurgy, after a blessedly lurgy-free winter, I think it’s tree pollen–related.

🎦 Last week I saw Sinners (2025) and forgot to mention it, so I’m mentioning it now. (You will recall the story about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a local road junction, and to this day meeting in a public place like that is recommended by the likes of Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace.)

To Panic Shack at the local arts centre.

My birthday. The craggy face of surveillance capitalism, the Lidl Plus app, what business has it knowing my birthday, sent me a push notification about a free doughnut.