His blog
Went to vote in the police and crime commissioner byelection. There was a huge queue, the like of which I’d never seen for a proper election, let alone a two-bit Mickey Mouse sinecure one … it seemed disproportionately whatever the opposite of a sausage fest is, and I realised that it was actually a queue to see an intimate performance by the boyband Blue . (The polling station was deserted,…
Got some of that Berocca, the soluble effervescent multivitamin tablet. I know it’s nonsense – famously it turns your pee a funny colour, which is a satisfying side-effect but really just shows you’re pissing away the extraneous vitamins. It’s a shame that they’re all a horrible synthetic orange flavour. Using ice-cold water makes it more palatable, but also stops the tablet dissolving so readily.…
Tried one of those exfoliating foot peels. You pop your clean dry feet into bags of acidic gloop for an hour or so, then the horrible old skin peels off over the course of a week, leaving beautiful softness. It works on the whole foot, which feels unnecessary – the tops of my feet didn’t need peeling – but there may be versions that target just the gnarly bits of the soles. Quite what the point of…
To Liverpool, where I stayed for longer than expected – given the railways’ advice not to travel in the hot sticky heat, ignoring their advice would have been rude and looked like I was unkeen to spend more time with my da. Something I think about sometimes is how I remember seeing it jokingly speculated that Robert Slimbach, the prolific type designer of Arno, Minion, Warnock etc. fame, wasn’t…
Peter Bazalgette, the television executive and producer, is the great-great-grandson of Joseph Bazalgette, the civil engineer who pioneered London’s sewage system, and perhaps you can see where this is going. I wondered who was the first to make that point, but instead of answering that question I’ve just collected some examples. Victor Lewis-Smith : Given that his Victorian forebears were…
Got a moisture meter for the potted plants. The dial that goes dry • moist • wet is slightly funny. I suppose there’s a more expensive version that includes damp . The instructions are clear that the probe must only be stuck in soil, and definitely not in liquid, but it’s so tempting to find out what sort of explosion would ensue if I tried probing some wet water. The heat and humidity are bit…
Squandered some time logging old public transport journeys on TransitTracker (FKA Busmiles) for the small satisfaction of covering the “all time map” with more and more squiggly lines. This means doing a sort of digital self-archaeology, finding old emails from train ticket retailers and stuff. Past me is a mysterious and unknowable figure, e.g. in 2014 I booked a ticket to Glasgow, pretty cheap…
To Scunthorpe, to see John Kearns’s Tilting At Windmills , which is loosely about The Waste Land and Lighthouse Family. Many of the shows around the country were and are sold out, but this was barely a quarter full, which atmosphere wasn’t ideal but never mind. Perhaps the people of Scunthorpe are special Latin pedants who objected to the blurb calling him a “ Taskmaster alumni”, he’s an alumnus…
Thought to myself, I haven’t made a lasagne since the coalition government. So I made a (lamb) lasagne. It was fine, slightly bland but hopefully the blandest lasagne I’ll ever make. I used some pre-chopped frozen soffritto mix from a bag, is that interesting? After in the ballpark of two decades of seeing the words “Post Moderne” written on this bicycle seatpost, the penny dropped and I realised…
Monday. Some bicyling around the idyllic countryside, where I bought some local soap and kimchi from a farm shop and got caught in a refreshing shower of rain. What a great density of churches there is, no houses just fields and churches. Tuesday. Past me had laid some traps for me, and they came home to roost and broke the website – Redis restarted due to factors, and a typo in a configuration…