really.lol

If this be it

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It’s 9pm on a Tuesday and I’m wondering if I’m living through the most idiotic version of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I’ve been working on my silly little novel manuscript, thinking about what to pack, what to do in Mexico City. I’ve been stressing my silly little head about what has to happen at work this week before I head off. It would be pretty funny if after all of that, things go pop. I’m sure they won’t, but imagine.

Tomorrow we have big, stupid negotiations planned with the company. Lawyers and judges. Many, many billable hours. We prepared documents to be printed out as thirty page handouts and to be distributed amongst committee members.

How do you make God laugh?

Make a plan.

Easter Sunday

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

We got out of our heads. We ran every morning around the canal banks where the tree blossoms have already burst and dropped on the ground to look like cheap confetti. We bought a new video game and took turns smashing things on the screen.

On Saturday, we watched The Passion of the Christ, which made me realise how much strange specificity is in the Bible story. The arrested Christ getting bounced around three different legal authorities to see who was going to deal with him feels too mundane to be false.

There were invitations that we avoided: come to the circus, come to the club. The circus is taking place at the club, which is circus-themed.

Next weekend there is a wedding that is essential to attend but that I can’t imagine being at. How do you pack for a British wedding and for Oaxaca in the same suitcase?

really there's nothing better than lying drunk in a ditch

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Drayton and Mackenzie

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There’s a healthy suspicion of novels where the substance of the characters’ working lives is relevant and actually explored. The formulas of TV do permit it. Throwing around finance jargon in Industry or showing off the prowess of the medical consultant team in The Pitt is normal. For the novel, it’s unbecoming to talk about work in the same way it makes you dull to turn to your dinner companion and bore them about your job. Work is not the life of the mind.

Drayton and Mackenzie is striking because it’s a story about two friends who go into business together. Against my expectations, hijinks don’t really ensue to depart from this premise. There are some personal sideshows for sure, but in the main this book is about two people and their careers. The two men start life in McKinsey, doing the grim consultancy work of laying people off in a depressed industry. Then, one of them has an idea. He convinces the other to follow him and they drop out to get started. Away we go.

I’m writing a novel at the moment and a lot of it hinges on what the company that the protagonist works for is up to. So I’m thinking about how to write about work. The entire structural premise of my story hides the true activities of the company from the protagonist and us the reader, and I think I did that for the distaste of writing about work straight on as much as I did for narrative tension. In Drayton and Mackenzie, there are long stretches where James Drayton thinks about business problems and ways to solve them. There are sections about raising capital.

I fucking hate thinking about all of these things in my actual life, so why would I write about them? Verisimilitude, I suppose. If you write a story about someone and a lot of the action takes place at work and there’s no actual work in it, it comes off as a bit false. The dullness of the paper company is a joke in The Office. In Severance, the irrelevance of the work itself is taken to a deliciously surreal extreme: you’re just putting numbers into boxes on a screen. The work is not the point; it’s about power and the mind.

I don’t know what I’m getting at. I don’t even know if Drayton and Mackenzie is good. It just came at a helpful time in my life as a provocation: can you really push the work out of your story?

berlin as interzone

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

PIPs in Germany

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I sit on a works council at a tech company in Germany. One of the things we’ve been working on is killing the Performance Improvement Plan, and we’ve just managed it.

In Germany (as in much of the EU), dismissing someone for underperformance is deliberately hard to do. The employer must issue two formal warnings at least three months apart, reassess the employee’s capacity, and demonstrate that training and support were offered to help them improve. Tech companies, having imported a US and UK corporate culture, tend to find this process intolerable. So rather than follow it, they construct a situation in which the employee effectively fires themselves. The mechanism for this is the PIP.

When put on a PIP, an employee is presented with a list of failings and coerced into taking personal responsibility for them. They sign a document to that effect, “here’s where I’ve been letting you down and here’s what I’ll do to fix it.”. Their assessment cycle shifts from quarterly to weekly, often in meetings where they sit alone opposite both their manager and HR. A clock starts ticking. The PIP typically lasts three months, after which things must have improved—or else.

The thing is, there is no “or else.” Under German law, a PIP has no legal standing. When it expires, the employee simply continues in their role as before. But the employer will conclude the process with a grave expression, announce that it’s time to part ways, slide a Voluntary Termination Agreement across the table, and urge the employee to sign immediately “for the best terms.”

By this point, the psychological pressure has been building for months. The employee has been made to accept all responsibility for the problems, in writing. Their every action has been scrutinised and second-guessed. They believe a paper trail exists that points inexorably toward their dismissal. Most people sign.

In our experience, virtually no PIPs end in improved performance. They end in people choosing to leave because of the ordeal they’ve been put through. The purpose of a system is what it does. A PIP is an employee torture device that saves the company the legal burden of building a proper case for dismissal.

What makes this even more insidious is that leaving voluntarily in Germany means waiving the right to pursue legal action over discrimination or health issues. It also means forfeiting a bunch of unemployment protections, including health insurance continuity and unemployment benefit.

I picked The Silver Eggheads off a shelf of battered paperback pulp fiction in the Glasgow branch of Oxfam Books. Like all good pulp fiction, the illustration on its cover is absurd and confusing. A flesh-coloured humanoid with simple socket holes for eyes and a mouth, two-pronged grabbers for hands, ball-joints for knees and elbows, and hemispherical breasts covered with the solitary piece of clothing: a white bra. Just next to that creature, a seemingly human man in a mid-century sort of lounge outfit and a sailors’s hat reaches across a metallic console of dials and gauges as if to grab the flesh bot. In the extreme foreground of the image, looming in from the left hand side of the frame, a glass balloon with suggestions of facial features that are once again socket holes skitters across the floor with thin metallic appendages that end in unheimlich four-fingered hands.

I opened this book for the first time a week and a half ago but it’s taken me a while to read it, even though it’s not very substantial. It’s been a busy week at work. In an all hands meeting, a leadership figure announced that at a summit of the C-suite it was decided that the company must be all in on AI or be left behind. That meant everybody was to immediately adopt the latest tools available in their day-to-day work. Hundreds of dollars in AI credits and days out of the work week would be made available for experimentation.

In this presentation and in others, enthusiastic employees filed to the front one at a time to give their testimony of how AI had changed their life. If there was any sweat on those brows, it surely had something to do with the efficiencies that were being found in the thus far salary-intensive business of writing code for software. The subtext of every demonstration is that this particular employee is ready to take on the role of overseer of virtual employees once most of the real ones have been shown the door.

The Silver Eggheads was first published in some form in 1958. Leiber wrote a sci-fi satire of the publishing industry that he saw becoming more commercial and hostile to the interests of the writer by the day. In his world, people stopped reading human authors long ago. Instead, the “writers” of the day are mere operators of wordmills, great big automata that have been trained on the history of human written culture up to that point. The wordmills, all owned by futuristic versions of familiar publishing houses like Random House and Harpers, have perfected the production of a narcotic kind of lukewarm literature that has been algorithmically tuned to go down smooth, never challenging or demanding concentration. This literature is called wordwooze.

The book’s events open with an anarchist movement striking the publishers and destroying all the wordmills and we spend the rest of the story following the exploits of the colourful figures (some human, some robot) at the helm of a couple of those publishing houses as they figure out what to do next. The key twist: one of the publishing houses has been sitting on a secret contingency plan for decades. A cadre of sexy nurses has been looking after a nursery of the preserved brains of pre-wordmill authors, which have have been harnessed and protected in silvery eggs to one day act like a doomsday seed vault, repopulating the media landscape with human creation. Still with me?

Contemporary reviewers seem to have figured Fritz was a typical sci-fi pulp author who wrote, with only one hand on the keyboard, of pleasure robots and the mechanics of machine sex. There’s plenty of that. But putting this book down today, it’s hard not to gesticulate wildly around at the Situation. We’re already a decade into algorithm anxiety, the sort that has Spotify’s playlists reducing your taste in music to an optimised curve in multi-dimensional space. The last phase had short-form video reduce the recipe for attention down to its potent intravenous base, a continuous flow of wordwooze that comes with eye strain, a crick in the next, and sheer pant-shitting existential dread after a good long session of scrolling. But now, we are finally at the phase where we can remove people from the wooze production so we can see if Fritz was onto anything in particular or whether this sci-fi imagining was as inevitable as self-driving carriages and man walking on the moon.

In the world of The Silver Eggheads, there are fewer writers and the people still bearing that name are machine operators. I nod along wisely and ask Claude Code to try again and not mute the unit tests this time. The stuff that the wordmills produce is all anybody ever reads nowadays. It’s not that the pre-wordmill stuff isn’t available. It’s just so outdated and unapproachable and weird, why would you bother? Instead, the mills seem to be cranking out (operative words) reams of titillating erotica for both robot and human audiences in much the same way that Grok and friends have begun to do for the goon squad who are quickly forsaking the comparatively dull and slow-flowing waters they used to goat around in together like priapic satyrs.

Later in the story, a series of kidnappings seem to be carried out by warring factions (not worth explaining) and in more than one instance it seems that the apparent kidnapping was just the elaborate submissive fantasy of a publishing executive. When the rescue party arrive, they are sent away as the sounds of whipping and glee come through the locked doors of the kidnapper’s lair. Much of the wondrous technological apparatus, it seems, has been constructed for the male libido. I say male because most of the female characters are sexy nurses, pleasure robots, or in one case a prudish censor robot who finds love in a flurry of couplings on the final page that wouldn’t be out of place at the end of an Elizabethan farce. Scroll through the images generated by any popular AI model today though and you’ll see little has changed in what the AI has in mind for the ladies.

So what about the eponymous eggheads, that have been preserved by a prophetic scientist a sort of low-background-radiation training data set? They are finally put to use in an inaugural writing competition but unfortunately the work they produce has too much of themselves in it. It’s too individual, too transparently a projection of their writerly egos. There is one standout winner, but it turns out to have been written by one of the nurses. Not to worry though, by the final pages the publishers have landed on various solutions that involve robot writers with sufficient experience living among the humans to write for them without inserting difficult human egos into the work. Robot writers for robot readers has existed for some time, you see. In the other tab I scroll through Moltbook, ostensibly a message board for autonomous agents to shoot the breeze.

They're not coming

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The words aren’t coming and usually that’s my fault. I wad up my sense holes with dopamine doped fluff and the ooze of it bungs up my brain. I lose the element of surprise so I can’t write anything interesting at all. The writing I have done in the last week or so has been the drip drip of mucus out from the congested sinus and onto the page. Scenes I’ve poked at move glacially slowly through their outlines without interest.

It’s the weekend and I don’t want it. I sound depressed and I don’t think I am. Not yet, anyway. I just want to burrow and burrow down. Sarah’s woundedness is good cover to cancel, quit, and avoid things. She’s the one driving the agenda to get out amongst it tomorrow though. I have to buy some ski boots.

Even on the short walk to the supermarket for yet more groceries we were passing the ropey Kneipe on the corner and a scene there threw me for a loop. A taxi had halted in the middle of the lane and both passenger side doors were wide open. A group of six or so men in coats were shouting back and forth to one another in a scatter across the pavement and roadway, perhaps traipsing out of the bar and into the taxi and trying not to leave the straggler behind. They were so many and so loud and so chaotically hanging out the side of this taxi that it looked like some sort of clown carjacking. I lost my train of thought.

I’ve had too many screens for too long today, and the day before. When I close my eyes I get that spinning feeling that makes me feel a bit sick right away. Tomorrow we buy ski boots. In the evening we’ll go to Passage to see that Iranian film. We like to reward ourselves with the good screen, the best screen.

I wonder if I can get to Bauhaus to have them cut some timber for me so I can build a desk thing. Time at the farm house doing renovations (picking up and carrying what I’m told to bring) has given me unruly ideas about crude joinery solving my problems.

Finally, finally, I’ve applied for German citizenship. In the end, I submitted a web form.

the words aren't coming

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ice

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

For a week Berlin’s been covered in ice. It’s an inch thick on the roads and the bike lanes and the pavements, and it’s been there so long it’s black and mottled and hard like a mineral deposit. They don’t grit or salt here. There’s a dispute about who should do the gritting and the salting, between the city and the Ordnungsamt and the street cleaners they contract. Verdicts differ by jurisdiction so some neighbourhoods are slippier than others. Halfway along a bridge over the Spree there’s a border between two districts and sure enough there’s a crisp line where the sheet ice stops and the gritted slurry starts.

The canals froze over. First they collected the usual experimental strewing of cobblestones and car tyres. There are animal tracks crossing the water. Over the weekend, the city collectively decided that the ice was thick enough and crowds of woollen figures gingerly stepped out onto it. The dark ice is safest, they say. Somebody fell into the Landwehrkanal in our neighbourhood, another into the Krumme Lanke.

Last night, Sarah cut her finger trying to prise apart slices of frozen bread with a paring knife and we went to the emergency room to wait around for a few hours for stitches. I counted four people with foot injuries. Usually they had one shoe off and the leg propped up on their partner’s lap. One older Turkish lady had a bruise on her forehead; she’d fallen twice.

It’s 1°C right now, the first time it’s tipped over zero in a long time. There was a thick freezing fog stuck to the ground this morning when I tentatively tiptoed to the train station to the office. The ice is melting and now it’s even worse, a slick sheen on top of the smooth accretion of ice that’s slowly, slowly melting away.

Alexanderplatz, January

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Far seen tower

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I'm a Fan by Sheena Patel

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We wanted to go see something; it was our first opportunity since we’ve been back in the city where cinemas are unlimited to us and where we’ve been like churchgoers there since the first winter we arrived. The pavements have been glazed with ice two, three times over, so we didn’d walk like we usually would. We took the bus and got off at Hermannplatz, walked up the sharpish hill to Neues Off. It’s always packed in the tiny little atrium there with small groups of friends chatting on the pavement outside, even in the freezing cold. Once we pushed our way through to have our tickets checked, it transpired I’d brought us to the wrong cinema and that we should be at Passage Kino on Karl-Marx-Allee. It is not the first time I’ve made this kind of mistake. We took the U-Bahn down there and still sat down before the movie started, comfortably.

It was a good time. There’s not much more to say abot it other than it was relatively well-written, a little predictable in places, and very comfortable in its being a movie-by-formula. It seems to say it’s a murder mystery, you know what you’re here for. Josh O’Connor is a good call for a comic and suspect protagonist. Benoir Blanc is sorting fading into the background of this series, knowingly, happily. Glenn Close and Josh Brolin are having a lot of fun, I think.

When we got home again, I reflected that this is the kind of thing that was the meat and potatoes of the cinemas’ income before the home video and streaming cataclysm. It’s franchise but only gently. It’s made for grown-ups, pretty much. I could easily watch a bunch more and not feel like I was getting bilked. It’s enough to get me happily and thoughtlessly out to the movies every week or so. Not everything has to be a special presentation.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I watched this with the in-laws at Christmas as part of a Richard Curtis runthrough. Coming after Notting Hill it was stark how poorly this film has aged in comparison. Perhaps it was never as good in the first place, but Hugh Grant is far more clearly a twat, Kristen Scott Thomas’s character is written as a complete moron, and neither of these in the endearing ways that the writer cracks later. Nevertheless, the Auden bit still gets you, but he didn’t write that did he.

Car Cabine

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Sage Frost

Sat, 27 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Loup Workshop

Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Although LyseDoucet’s [sic] habit of introducing herself as a background character with a huge wink to the stalls grated a bit after a while, I ended up very endeared to this book in the end. I remember live coverage of the war in Afghanistan on the BBC growing up, and the image of Lyse Doucet on some balcony with explosions in the background is strong in my mind. She’s a badass, and this feels like a relatively well executed diversion for her. The debt this owes to The Grand Budapest Hotel, or maybe that that movie owes to hotels like this, is clear.

Overpasses

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I finished reading this book on a plane to Amsterdam and in the end, it felt right to be reading it in aviation-land. It’s an airport read. I got what I wanted from it in that it gave a little bit of insight into the Russian media and political landscape of the 00s. I learned some new names and had my memory of others reinforced. That said, there’s a bit of self-aggrandising in here and there’s not a little bit of misogyny. Maybe that’s authentically what a slightly mercenary TV producer in Russia sounds like, though.

Eddington (2025)

Sun, 23 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I like a movie that gets out of hand like this. I’d forgotten until the opening credits that this was Ari Aster. Its marketing doesn’t have the trappings of the horror genre because the setting doesn’t have those traditional elements either. But this is definitely horrific, and effective. Its ideas are right on its sleeve but it still has interesting enough things to say about them that it works. There’s a streak in me, and I see it in others, to find the major questions of our time just aesthetically lame and to not want them to appear in my art for that reason. Coronavirus,screens and online radicalisation, fascism, division, all that crap is what I’m talking about. Nobody wanted to see a Covid movie for a long time and the first scene of this movie hits that point hard with a conversation about literal face mask policing.

Anyway, this movie was great and weird and fun and right. The fact it pissed off shallow watchers on left and right makes it feel about right.

Probably helpful to my experience was that we watched this in the biggest screen at Passage, the old theatre with great seats and a solid picture and sound.

Die My Love (2025)

Sat, 22 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Watched as part of a triple-kino weekend in dark, freezing Berlin. This one at Rollberg. Maybe that contributed to our dislike; we always resent walking past Passage and having to climb the hill to the ugly shopping centre.

We both hated the ending. It was visually poorly executed and seemed like a reshoot, sound stagey, VFXey mess. It was also not really earned. Why is she tearing pages out of her notebook? She was never writing! Was it real or a fantasy or a delusion? Who cares.

It’s kind of a pity, there were some really great performances from the leads and some tasty peculiarities. When the credits rolled and I saw that it was an adaptation of a novel, it sort of clicked into place. The non-linear structure, the struggle to depict subjective interiority, the uneven sections with Lakeith Stanfield, and that ending. Adaptation is hard.

Crew of Słubice

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

No Past

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This went straight onto the Bad Smart People book list. I did find Midge in particular kind of absurd, like an even more extreme Thérèse Raquin, but I suppose we’re meant to find her ridiculous.

dreamed that the berlin cdu banned bike helmets because they were damaging car bodywork

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A bugonia is a flower

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

We watched Bugonia. Spoilers to follow.

We both suspected that she really was an alien at different points during the movie.

When Teddy exploded in the wardrobe, I wondered for a moment whether either he’d detonated the vest on purpose in an attempt to kill the aliens on whatever ship he thought he was being teleported to, or she’d somehow triggered the vest to trick him. The latter theory was ruled out by the fact she probably wouldn’t have done that in her actual teleportation wardrobe.

I liked the way she popped the world like a little bubble with a weird, spiky thing.

The montage where everybody on earth was dead at the end was sort of cathartic. I suppose that a lot of people feeling doom-brained about reality will feel the same way, and actually it’s a little bit of a theme along with House of Dynamite. We’re just thinking about the end of us all more than usual right now.

The desperation of the antifreeze was tough to watch.

sometimes the absolute banality of work breaks thru my resolve and i just get crushed by a wave of despair. nothing even happened. it's just like the curtain wafted open a little bit when i wasn't paying attention and i was blasted by kms rays

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Commonplace Book: Housing Policy

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

History

The first housing policies were introduced in the midst of TB epidemics in Europe that threatened to curtail the 19th century labour supply and even risked popular revolution. Their regulations introduced a lot of what we recognise in modern housing, like separate bedrooms, which allowed the isolation of the infected, and showers, which were a cheap way to bring hygeine to the masses.

— The Europeans, Housing policy, who does it best?

There was no trend at all in UK house prices until well after World War II. With the inflation-adjusted price index to 100 in 1980 (the year Thatcher came to power) the house price index was 47 in 1845, and 47 in 1960. House prices rose on average just 0.25% pre year faster than consumer prices between 1845 and 1979, but all of the increase came between 1960 and 1979, when prices rose by 1.75% per year. But after Thatcher came to power, the annual rate of increase in real house prices increased to 3%.

— Prof. Steve Keen, Remedies for ridiculous house prices

Between Thatcher and today, house prices have risen 3.5 times faster than consumer prices.

— Prof. Steve Keen, Remedies for ridiclous house prices

Since the mid-1990s house prices have decoupled from their long-run relationship with incomes and rents.

— UCL, The demand for housing as an investment

Financial innovation, in particular the emergence of residential mortgage-backed securitisation (RMBS) from the 1990s onwards, allowed new sources of institutional capital (for example, from pension funds and insurance companies), to enter the housing market. RMBS involves the packaging up of many mortgage titles into a security that pays a specific yield depending on the relative riskiness of the portfolio of mortgages contained within it. By selling RMBS, banks could remove these loans from their balance sheets, enabling them to reduce their regulatory capital requirements and then further expand their lending. The fees from selling on such loans helped banks make up profits lost due to lower interest rates.

— UCL, The demand for housing as an investment

Financialisation of housing

Most lending for housing was done by Building Societies, and this is crucial, because Building Society loans don’t create money. Instead, Building Societies have deposit accounts at the private banks, and when they make loans, their accounts fall by precisely as much as the borrowers’ accounts rise.

Banks, on the other hand, increase their assets—loans to households—and their liabilities—household deposits—by precisely the same amount when they make loans. This causes the money supply to expand, and particularly the amount of money used to buy houses. This expands both aggregate demand and incomes, but most of it drives up house prices. Some more houses are built, but overwhelmingly, bank loans make existing houses more expensive.

— Prof. Steve Keen, Remedies for ridiculous house prices

Housing has two economic functions. It is a consumption good – it provides shelter – but also an investment. In relation to the latter, it can be a financial asset providing realised and unrealised capital gains and rental returns; a source of collateral to support borrowing; and an efficient store of wealth. The demand for housing as an investment can impinge on its function as a consumption good given an inherently limited supply of housing and land in desirable areas.

— UCL, The demand for housing as an investment

Housing and commercial real estate have become the “commodity of choice” for corporate finance and the pace at which financial corporations and funds are taking over housing and real estate in many cities is staggering. The value of global real estate is about US$ 217 trillion, nearly 60 per cent of the value of all global assets, with residential real estate comprising 75 per cent of the total. In the course of one year, from mid-2013 to mid-2014, corporate buying of larger properties in the top 100 recipient global cities rose from US$ 600 billion to US$ 1 trillion.

— UN, Special Rapporteur on adequate housing

Unequal tax burdens

Council tax operates as a poor proxy for a wealth tax, with some people paying council tax at much higher rates relative to their property value than others in different places.

— IPPR, Supporting the status quo

For instance, a worker on £50,000 will pay £3,000 more in tax every year than a landlord with the same annual income from rents alone, representing a fundamental unfairness.

— IPPR, Supporting the status quo

The Vienna Model

50% of the housing supply in Vienna is social housing.

— The Europeans, Housing policy, who does it best?

While LPHAs have been building homes for over 100 years, it was only in the period post World War 2 that they became more prominent actors in Austria’s housing market. Especially in the post war period the construction of LPHA homes served to replace war-damaged houses and to provide homes of better quality than found in the private rented sector, where quality standards were comparatively poor.

— The system of limited-profit housing in Austria

The key principles of limited-profit housing are anchored in the WGG (i.e. the Limited-Profit-Housing Act), a sector specific law that only applies to GBVs (Gemeinnützige Bauvereinigung). In return for complying with the rigorous governance and auditing rules codified in the law, limited profit housing associations are exempt from corporation tax.

— The system of limited-profit housing in Austria

The main principles are the following:

Cost Rent: GBVs calculate on a cost-basis, which means that rents can neither be set above nor below the costs incurred in the production, financing and management of residential buildings.

Limitation of profits: Surplus generating components are a constituent part of cost-covering prices.

Revolving funds: Equity is permanently tied up for limited- profit purposes and surpluses are continuously reinvested.

Personnel restrictions: BVs must be independent from the construction industry, in order to prevent tie-in deals to the detriment of customers.

Limited business activities: Limited-Profit housing associations must primarily pursue business activities that are within the main scope as stipulated in the WGG, i.e. the construction, maintenance, and renovation of homes, and must do so in their own name.

— The system of limited-profit housing in Austria

Commonplace Book: Mental Health

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

With around 5.5k cases annually, self-harm is one of Wales’ top 5 causes of hospital admission.

It’s clear that our mental health is shaped by social and economic factors. For example in England, adults in the most deprived areas have higher rates of mental health problems (26.2%) than those in the least deprived areas (16%).

In England, the suspected suicide rate was 11 per 100,000 in the 2 years up to January 2025 — 17.4 per 100,000 in males, 5.0 per 100,000 in females. The rate among unemployed people was 126.7 per 100,000. Men are around 3 times more likely to die by suicide than women — a gap that has widened over time. Women were more like to report a suicide attempt than men and just as likely to have suicidal thoughts.

82% of young people said they feel anxious about major political issues like war and conflict, and 87% said they worry about climate change.

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This really reminds me of being a certain age and experiencing the culture as remixed in Tumblr posts and usernames. It’s kind of a series of poses in tableaux. It was made to be clipped, GIFed and posted to Tumblr with “ugh, this.” as the caption. Which is to say, I like this short film and it reminds me of a much simpler time that I thought was complicated when I was living it.

i've got that cèilidh leg

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Potential

Thu, 24 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

At school I luxuriated in not trying very hard and doing alright anyway. Teachers called me “gifted” – a term that was, incredibly, written into education regulations at the time. They also called me lazy, insisting I had untapped potential if I would only apply myself.

Now I’m thirty going on thirty-one, almost a decade into a career with which I have a fraught relationship. I want change, and to get it I need to grow. Materially, I need to learn things: languages, skills. This year has been about discovering how much learning potential I’ve lost since those school days. What would have snapped into place effortlessly as a kid now refuses to take hold. My work ethic has improved a hundredfold, but my ability to learn and think has degraded even more.

So what – blame a decade of the internet, short-form video, AI? Maybe. But I suppose I’m realising again that there’s a reason we go to school as children. If I were exercising more, I might find I couldn’t build muscle like a twenty-year-old. This happens to everyone. I just thought the mental decline started later.

Perhaps things will change once I ditch this career that has, as I keep saying, damaged my head somehow. My brain has grown in the wrong directions, like those watermelons forced into cube shapes.

Staging a series of mental tests in language and skill acquisition just before my thirty-first birthday was probably unwise. The ticking clock metaphor writes itself.

You should stay away from your potential. I mean, that is something you should leave absolutely alone! You’ll mess it up! It’s potential, leave it! And anyway, it’s like your bank balance, you know – you always have much less than you think. Leave it as the locked door within yourself and then at least, in your mind, the interior will always be palatial. Wonderful gleaming marble floors, brocaded drapes. Mullioned windows, covered in mullions, whatever they are. Flamingos serving drinks. Pianos shooting out canapés into the mouths of elegant men and women who are exchanging witticisms… “Oh yes, this reminds me of the time I was in BudaPESHT with Binky… We were trying to steal a goose from the casino, muahahaha…” But it won’t be like that. You don’t want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.

Tue, 21 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Material 2024

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here are some of the coolest posters I saw in the city this year. Here’s the collection from last year.

New Heavy Shit playing on Karl-Marx Allee

Poster for the CTM festival, Berlin

Oceanic Refractions installation at CTM

Regular Thursday nights at KitKat

Die Wissen art fair

Letters from the Kindertransport

Chill Mal Berlin, posted on the Treptower Park underpass

Knocked Loose at Huxleys

Radial System festival

A sauna exhibit at the Finnish Embassy

Utopia Europa at Haus der Kulturen der Welt

Authentic body control, venue unspecified

Fail Collective at Lido

Acid for the children, location by request

PDA, location via telegram

Elm Street at AEVE

William Forsythe at Staats Ballett Berlin

A place for diversity and multidisciple at The Old Mint

Espace by Görli

Naomi 0 at Kantine am Berghain

Country festival at the Polish bar

How will Europe see it if the war in Ukraine lasts another year?

Underground techno at the Renate annex

Gig at the Watefront of some kind, I ain't reading that

Partybar 3000

Perko and friends Zur Klappe

Queer film at the indie Kinos

Kennedy Self at the Volksbühne

Good 2 U

Buffalo girls won't you come out tonight

A Better Way is doing a Flash Day

A L'Arme! at Radialsystem

The noises are back

Burst at Panke

Elek on the sixth of the ninth

Counter-cinema at places I've never heard of

Get out the vote poster, make your mark

Rettenbach @ Duqo

Have you at least looked for it?

Paranoid x Neukölln

Synthetik @ Club Ost

Last Resort @ Panke

Fundraiser for the Rosa Rolling Safespace @ about://blank

Method, a play @ Volksbühne

The Flake record store celebrates Christmas

Forive Us Our Tresspasses, trangressive work @ HKW

Reading 2024

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I read 74 books this year. I’m not reviewing them all; I don’t remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it’s called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names. I can’t really understand how I made it this far without somebody insisting I read this book.

The setup is ostensibly simple: semi-autobiographical protagonist Anna is an author and an active leftist in 30s, 40s Britain. She keeps four notebooks simultaneously, each for different strains of thought and experience. One is in the form of a draft for a novel, based on her own life.

At the bottom of the spiral you have Ella, a writer character in a fiction that is written by Anna, a writer character that is written by Doris Lessing — the writer character who existed in the same world as you and I. Each writer reflects on the story unfolding and about what of themselves they’re putting into their characters, and what their characters are showing them about themselves.

So yes, it’s a book about writers writing, and it’s no surprise I should like that kind of thing if executed well. But it’s also the proof of this idea… that the form of the novel was invented to depict the internal life, to depict subtle psychologies that aren’t discernible in other forms. The level of detail and the extent to which I believe these women are real and complex — it goes beyond anything I’ve ever found in another novel.

I haven’t stopped thinking about this book ever since I picked it up. The ambition of it and the execution being so good that you never feel the construction of the layers within layers. It’s my book of the year and it’s expanded what I thought was possible.

In the final act of Barton Fink, John Goodman’s Mundt character finally flips. As he runs down a burning hotel hallway past the writer protagonist, wielding a shotgun, he screams over and over: “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

The Magus by John Fowles

I read The Collector a few years ago, and that was the impression I had of John Fowles. It’s a claustrophobic, captive horror story with an antagonist with a twisty, turny psychology. When I started reading The Magus and it opened up on this beautiful Greek island, a setting that’s bright and open from sea to sea, I figured if it was going to be a completely different beast.

It’s was and it wasn’t. It plays out over a much grander stage and time scale, and very gradually walks you from Mediterranean wish fulfilment to a psychological horror that totally unseats your sense of reality.

I love a horror story where the characters make perfectly reasonable and smart moves but still cannot get out of dodge. I can’t fault Nicholas, I’m sure I’d end up in just the same bind. His torturer plays on his sense of good manners, his vanity, his desires, and his curiosity. The layers just keep coming and coming.

The Interrogators by Allan Prior

There is a bookcase in an apartment in Mallorca. It’s full of wrinkle-spined paperbacks of a certain age that get more crispy and soaked with salt and suncream year after year. It’s got books in languages that I can’t really read. It’s got Italian yellow fiction, the original ones with the eponymous yellow spines. It got some classics, some modern classics. Every year though, I try and pull something off there that is in English and is unapologetically genre.

Last year, I read an original 80s paperback edition of Fletch and The Man Who, and this year I read The Interrogators. It was first published in ‘65 and the Pan Books copy I had can’t have been much younger than that.

Get your bingo cards ready. In a fictional town in Northern England, a jaded detective (name of Savage) takes on one last case. A girl is abducted, sexually abused, and murdered by a depraved killer who is still on the loose. Savage is assigned a naive rookie as a partner, and together they try and crack the case. If it weren’t for these politicians and higher-ups, they might have a chance.

It couldn’t be more rote, and I’m not even here to claim that this is more than it says on the tin because it’s not. But it was an unputdownable, workmanlike detective fiction that saw me through a couple of afternoons by the sea. It was my annual reminder that clichés exist for a reason and that I need to get over myself once in a while.

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

A poet writes a novel and the prose is beautiful. I had never heard of Kaveh Akbar before this year and I was drawn to this book at first based on the physical object. The cover is arresting but it was also in a format I hadn’t seen before: a European trade paperback. It’s sort of equivalent to the hardback I’m used to. It comes out first, is pricier. It’s just a bigger paperback. All of this to say, a larger than life book with a great cover, an unknown, and a title like Martyr!, always with exclamation mark. It got me.

It’s a confident, swaggering book. Dream sequences, notoriously pointless and annoying, in Akbar’s hands are touching and very funny. Humour runs throughout this pretty tragic story. He knows how to joke about US-Iranian relations, the search for God, and the search for his mother.

I can’t really get it across to you how brilliant the prose is in this chaotic, swerving but beautiful book. Great books often feel like a magic trick by the end. All the scraps laid down for you suddenly come together and the author reveals a live dove that flies away. Martyr! certainly does that; the ending is a beautiful culmination. But what makes it special is you feel like Akbar could do this all day.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

No shit, it won the prize. Orbital is a real athletic piece of prose writing. It contains some of the best sentences I’ve read this year (Martyr! has the others) and possibly ever.

Billionaire megalomaniacs looks at space and know exactly what it’s for. Scientists look at it and though they don’t know, they’re confident that the point of themselves is to study it until it becomes clear. I think the rest of us have a tendency to look and think: all well and good, but what’s it really got to do with me?

After completing the first ever spacewalk, Alexei did a crude colouring pencil drawing of the sunrise because he felt it needed to be understood in ways other than an image recorded by a lens and photosensitive film. When Alan Bean got back from being the fourth person to walk on the moon, he likewise felt compelled to paint it. All the photographs of the moon show it to be monochrome and in fact it is, but he wanted to paint it with colours because human experience is different.

Samantha Harvey has done the writing that most effectively explodes the so what feeling about space, I think. I’m sick of the Carl Sagan clips and Neil DeGrasse fucking Tyson and even sweet, dear Chris Hadfield. Harvey’s descriptions of the infinite filtered through the minutely personal still take make me feel something and look up.

Money by Martin Amis

I came late to this continuum of English men that seems to run through Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, then somehow to connect with Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and into the murky depths of modern “rationalist” movements and “free thinkers.” I worry that if I’d been exposed to it at the right stage of being an angry young man, I’d be more insufferable today.

Putting all that to one side for a minute, McEwan and Amis are both very good at writing pointy stories about horrid men. Money is particularly interesting at the moment because it’s hard not to read the protagonist as Trump, isn’t it? This man lusts and sweats his way around New York, ugly and moving always in a patina of, if not the reality of: money. The hollow in the middle of the man. His downfall as a result of his own stupidity and the avarice of the wronguns around him. It all has echoes.

The foul, brilliant narration is impressive if exhausting. The inclusion of the author as a character gets a little bit of an eye roll from me but I don’t mind it terribly. In the end, I come away wondering quite why these men of dubious intellectual circles are so good at writing these male monsters that want to make you tear your own skin off. And yes, I come away entertained.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut, tr. Adrian Nathan West

I love books about an intellectual scene and I love books about Fucked Up Little Guys(tm). These two interests often intersect. Other examples include Bright Young People, about the social set that dominated British tabloid headlines in the 30s and were sent up in Evelyn Waugh’s fiction and Grand Hotel Abyss, about the lives of the philosophers of the Frankfurt School. They’re all messy weirdos who bounced off of another and brilliant to read about. Also you get to sound intellectual whilst basically just reading tabloid gossip.

When We Cease to Understand the World concerns itself with the figures responsible for the rise of quantum physics. Schrödinger, Heisenberg, all the boys are here. What Labatut does that is particularly good is depicting the psychological effect of the discoveries. The scientists finding these irresolvable truths and actually understanding them basically all lose their marbles, and Labatut does a good job at depicting why to an innumerate audience (me).

There’s something pruriently exciting too about the intellectual 20th century scene. Heads up, fascism is coming, do your equations and figure it out before the bombs start falling and the camps are built. You can feel the precipitous acceleration towards mechanised society and the nuclear bomb from all the way back to the 1910s, when the secrets of the subatomic are revealing themselves to these neurotic little guys — and freaking them the fuck out.

Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd

This is the first Boyd I’ve read and I picked it up after listening to an interview the author did, presumably on the press tour for his new spy novel Gabriel’s Moon. I learned in that interview that he’s known for his spy fiction and after some time poking at other things, he’s back on the espionage and it’s quite good. I also scratched down the names of the early career-defining titles. I picked up Brazzaville Beach.

It does not spoil the book to tell you that Brazzaville Beach is not a spy novel. You’d be able to figure that out by reading the back, which I usually don’t. It’s a book that is set amongst a community of experts studying a colony of chimps in the Republic of Congo. Our protagonist is Hope and she’s seeing the chimps do things that upset the theories of the lead scientist in the camp, and her benefactor. Hijinks ensue.

This story goes places. It’s a great high wire act that is remarkably propulsive and at the same time adept at peeling back the psychological layers of the protagonist through flashbacks. Where it doesn’t go is espionage. Hilariously in hindsight, I spent about the first half of the book waiting for somebody to subtly tip their hand as intelligence. All right, enough with the monkeys, who’s spying on who, I thought. Nobody, obviously, that’s the other ones.

Future Sex by Emily Witt

It’s strange how the cultural moment say, eight years ago can feel so much more outmoded than two decades back. It’s the narcissism of small differences, maybe, that made me recoil in irritation from this book. It’s a micro-memoir, it’s a piece of gonzo reporting about love and sex in a particular corner of the modern age: Silicon Valley in the years of optimism.

The author is a Googler living in the Bay Area. She finds herself at sea with the evolving landscape of relationships and dating. She asks good questions about where the free love moment has actually landed us. Do we have new, better models to follow in our love lives? Or are we just fucking it up in novel ways?

She goes some way in looking for answers. She looks at dating apps, the production of professional porn, chat girls, something called orgasmic meditation, sex parties, polyamory. She does in-person gonzo reporting. She reflects through the lens of her own relationships. All the while, there’s a feeling building in me (no, not that kind), and it culminates in the Burning Man section.

God I hate these people. Yes, self-awareness pours off the page, about being a rich tech worker ruining San Francisco, ditto ruining Burning Man. It failed to inoculate me from the feeling that whatever the answers are to the cultural questions of the moment, I wish this distorted region of the West Coast wasn’t treated like the laboratory of society. It’s an idea generally in decline, and this book only makes me glad to see the back of the cultural moment.

Happy Hour by Marlowe Granados

I just wrote a very negative review of a autobiographical book written by a coastal media figure. It’s another story young woman of a young woman trying to figure shit out, whilst also swimming in fairly elite circles in an American world city. I couldn’t stand it. So why do I like this autofiction by culture writer Marlowe Granados?

Cynical take: it’s set in a New York-y and draws experience from the media scene there, and that’s a milieu I’ve spent some time on the fringes of myself. It’s about a person in the arts (broadly defined) and not somebody in a full-throated tech job (like I, self-despisingly, am).

Generous take: it’s good! The self-insert Isa and her best friend are self-regarding and directionless in a way that is so authentic that it makes them irresistibly likeable. This isn’t a book that goes somewhere, but the Brownian motion of the protagonists through New York is the point. The observation is delicious and bitchy and from time to time the writing reaches out and slaps you with something unexpectedly lovely.

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Too good

Sat, 22 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

today it's raining but only on my street. spring does that

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Not now

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We’re through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there’s sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked. Ugly, stupid work. Pointless work. Now just as spring comes I’m sick.

The other day I was in the office and I sat down in a meeting room and looked at the TV mounted on the wall, which advertised the next scheduled call in there. It said: Content Item Service Product Forum. How can that not be the work of a crude Markov chain? How can you not think of the OSS guide to sabotaging an organisation with bureaucracy?

Continuing the theme of bullshit, consider the architectural render of an upcoming housing or commercial development. Picture all the trees, the ghoulish figures thriving on their dog walks and willingly occupying the public space. Consider next, the reality of the bare and cheaply cladded built space as delivered.

Here is, simply put, the best writing about Formula 1 there is.

Wolf See

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Sunday

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Crackle

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Make open

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

pup

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Snow daps

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

One light winter

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

No outside

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Michi's smoke machine

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Material 2023

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone’s camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year.

A flyer for the 2030 Berlin Klimavolksentscheid, which did not pass

An exhibition, an experiment. Poster on the bridge over the Treptow/Neukölln/Kreuzberg canal corner

Matrix Nightclub hiring poster, Warschauerstr

Brutalismus 3000's Ultrakunst Tour, poster at Warschauerstraße.

Popa Chubby at Berlin Hole 44, poster by Treptower Park underpass

Boogie & Funk, 23 'til late

Translation: You don't have to explain it to me in English. I do speak German.

Acts playing in the carnage of mid-summer Görlitzer Park

Polyamour at Suicide Club, poster on Oberbaumbrücke south approach

Eargasm God, poster on Oberbaumbrücke south approach

Hard For No Reason, stickers at a day party in Rummelsburg

Congo-rama, poster on Hasenheide

Poster at Elsenstraße in the midst of A100 construction

Translation: Bass the A100 away! Poster for party protesting the construction of the A100 autobahn through Markgrafendamm

Pop-Kultur at Kulturbrauerei, poster under S-bahn tracks on Kiefholzstraße

Extinction at Rosa Luxemburg Platz, poster for a rally

Mongolian music group known for their polytonal throat singing, poster on a construction fence in Baumschulenweg

Notices from existing residents of the neighbourhood trying to find accommodation for reasonable rents. Translations: Caro, Robert & Levi don't want to leave here [...] We're looking for a new home and ask for help. We can just about manage 1,400 euros.

Super, poster on an electrical box at Schlesisches Busch

Louie Vega is coming to Berlin. Poster at Oberbaumebrücke south approach.

Theater of Things. Poster under S-bahn tracks at Kiefholzstraße.

Hamam Nights at Panorama Bar, Berghain. Poster at Warschauerstraße.

Model railway and toy expo. Poster am Schlesi.

Fragments of old posters under Warschauerstraße S-bahnhof

Zementbass at ://about blank in Markgrafendamm, which would be destroyed by the A100 autobahn

Mira, asks local dog owners if she could look after or walk their dogs. Next to the drawing of the dog's face, translation of two notes: (It would make me happy) (I am 8 years old). Note pinned to the notice board of LPG Biomarkt, Bouchéstraße

Dance Factory Berlin, poster at Hasenheide

A Psychadelic Show at Urban Spree. Poster fixed to the pavement for pedestrian to look at while they wait for the light to change at Warschauerstraße.

Cheese Berlin, meet the cheese maker. Poster at Markhalle Neun.

Hand-painted reproduction of the film poster for Close (2023) at 2m x 3m scale, exhibit on film posters at Kulturforum

Closing down sale at Mensch Meier, poster in Wrangelkiez.

Alternate poster for Dune (2022), exhibit on film posters at Kulturforum

Old posters at Warschauerstraße S-bahnhof

Frontex is the EU's border enforcement agency, poster in Wrangelkiez.

Translation: With your head throughy the walls, poster am Schlesi

Poster on the bridge over the Treptow/Neukölln/Kreuzberg canal corner

During the DDR government, local authorities refused to pay licensing on American marketing materials and created their own for imported films, exhibit on film posters at Kulturforum

Fast Music. Poster am Skalitzerstraße.

English Traders by Boddinstraße sells homeware. Translation: Gift Stress? Poster in the eponymous passage on the approach to Passage Kino.

Snowdrop run

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

WG Sebald was the last German author to make an international breakthrough. He grew up a few miles from the Austrian border, grew up in England, and considered himself a student of Peter Handke of the Grazer Gruppe.

Wenderoman authors Monika Muron and Uwe Tellkamp turned to The New Right. Later authors of the genre bucked the trend: Lutz Seiler, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Felix Stephan.

The best West German art came from people who saw the Americans not as liberators but as those who ran a system that allowed the Nazis to integrate into the new government and elite: Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorf, Alexander Kluge.

p10

Walter Benjamin observed that across Europe there was once scarcely an interior where no one had died.

p17

Like Heiner Müller says, it is better to speak of people than the people.

p32

Eva Leitolf spent 20 years assembling the series Deutsche Bilder, photos of places where racist attacks have occurred.

p34

In Minima Moralia, Adorno wrote about getting on with cars whilst in exile in Los Angeles.

In 1964, he wrote to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to demand a crossing light be installed at the Institute for Social Research. It is known today at the Adornoampel.

p38

An Ausfallstraße is a road that connects the historic city center to the autobahn and periphery.

p46

(Nell Zink) I moved to Germany to get away from attractive men.

p50

One can regard fidelity as a neurosis. I have heard it called sexuelle Abhängigkeit.

p80

(Dische-Becker) It is almost as if there’s a monogamous relationship between Germany and Jews, and anyone else is an interloper.

p90

Germany is the arbiter in Europe when it comes to both antisemitism and migration. If Germany says it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean, then it’s fine to drown people in the Mediterranean because the people who are the most sorry for their past treatment of minorities and have learned the most from their abuse of racialised people say it’s fine. If Germanys says the people trying to get into Europe are a danger to Jews so it’s fine to deny them entry, then it’s fine to turn them away.

p146

Sholem Alecheim’s 1911 epistolary novel Marienbad

p172

Gethsemanekirchen in the 1990 Summer of Anarchy in Mitte and Prenzlauerberg.

p191

Hanno Klein, a power broker figure during the reconstruction of reunified West Berlin, looked down on Ossis, and was killed by a letter bomb. Case as yet unsolved.

It's enough to make you crazy

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety. I try to do less of that. Touch grass, if you will. I still read a lot but I try to read fewer feeds and more books and long articles. Is it helping? Do I still feel obligated to have a working knowledge on this or that current thing? Well…

The West has managed to make the deaths of thousands of people in Israel-Palestine about itself, in more than just an original sin Sykes-Picot kind of way. The editorial board at The New York Times equivocated on whether demanding Israel give a humanitarian pause is a necessary. The New York Times then hosted a gala for the Committee To Protect Journalists, which is awkward because Israel has racked up a body count of journalists of late. A demonstration against that hypocrisy was well covered by none other than Nan Goldin. Meanwhile in Germany, various liberal Jewish artists are being de-platformed by German institutions for criticising the actions of the State of Israel. One example here.

Institutions fail us. This long and somewhat indulgent piece by the painfully former Editorial page editor of The New York Times does read like a bitter post-breakup album. However, it is at least interesting as another account of the paper’s inability to step up to the Trump moment. God only knows what’s going on in there right now.

The Verge has published a collection looking back at the year that former institution Twitter died, with fun editorial design straight from the freshest parts of Topolsky-era Bloomberg Businessweek. See, right there. I should excise the accumulated media cack from brain that has me making references like that. Anyway, I liked this bit on on the way the feel of the place changed from the perspective of the employees.

An institution that is failing in perhaps a more classical way is Google. It is grinding to a halt under the burden of its own bullshit, with no elon ex machina required to drive the plot forward at all. Yet another former employee piece clarifies why the company just can’t do anything any more. Surely related is the threat posed to their very first product: search engines, by the very same AI product that they’re failing to innovate on themselves. Though many of their products are no longer fit for their original purpose, humans still set up shop in their decaying husks to do surprising things. They leave Google reviews appraising a remote highway bridge based on how viable it is to sleep underneath.

Humans often surprise themselves in their tender responses to uncaring and cruel things. We’re the baby monkeys clinging to the cloth mother that, whilst giving the outward appearance of care provides nothing. We’ve created a world of diverse objects that dwarf us in size and are unyieldingly hard and astonishingly fast. Somehow we live amongst them. We are mown down by speeding cars in astounding numbers. Unlike splattered hedgehogs and may bugs our mourners leave written records. That’s something we count on and that we feel sets us apart. It alarms us when people die, but also when libraries burn, or when they are hacked to such an extent that even their physical hordes are made inaccessible to us.

The library will rebuild the digital shell around its treasures, but so many things are lost every day. The more you think about how much is lost in the pulping process by which breaking news slides through zeitgeist to neo-nostalgia to the era at an end before being pressed flat and slipped between the pages of History, from a short while ago to the beginning of time… the more you hallow the archivist. Search the records of the Old Bailey and find the indictment of 1726 against “Samuel Johnson, alias King Cabbage” for stealing “4 Coach Seats, the Goods of Bridget Buckley” and kiss the hands of the cataloguer. Can you read it? The English language is so promiscuous that it has nodded in wave upon wave practically every grammatical device and shred of vocabulary that has washed upon its rainy shores, just like so many other languages.

The amount of nosepickings I’m finding in library books these days. — Lorenzo Dervani, London

Wartime reading

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war.

I didn’t start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it’s been instructive. Malaparte was a fascist, which gave him access to all kinds of people during WW2 who I haven’t really seen close up before. Kaputt is a brilliant book by a narcissistic, self-aggrandising, lying piece of shit. It’s about war, its perpetrators, its victims, and the people who are callously advantaged by it. Reading the article, I was also reminded of this quotation from a profile of Graham Greene, who spent a lot of time in the halls of power watching politicians fail to avert disaster.

“I shall always associate balconies and politicians—plump men with blue chins wearing soft hats and guns on their hips. They look down from the official balcony in every city all day long with nothing to do but stare, with the expression of men keeping an eye on a good thing.

Greene wrote about a world we still live in, where horrible crimes are committed every day by beaming politicians with good teeth, aided by their government-conscripted thugs.

The London Review of Books published this essay about the history of Hizbullah, their inception, their relationship with the rest of Lebanon, with Iran, with the West, and their endless struggle with Israel. It all culminates in the precarious present situation, with everybody waiting to see whether Hizbullah ignite a broader regional conflict in retaliation for Israel’s actions. This article from Seth Anziska in the New York Review of Books zooms in on the First Lebanon War as a single episode of that history, and makes direct appeals on the state of Israel to stop the killings.

For a perspective from the other side: The New Yorker published this short but provocative interview with a leader in the West Bank settler movement, which includes some outrageously genocidal quotations. This has to be at the more extreme end and I’m sure there are moderate voices in the country, but they don’t seem to be found in the government. For a perspective from a settler that seems less of a thug, there’s a discussion of The First Man by Albert Camus wanders around topics like his feud with Jean-Paul Sartre and his status and comments as a pied noir: a descendant of French settlers in Algeria. When attacked by Sartre for failing to support the Algerian liberation movement in their aims of removing French settlers from their country:

Camus boldly affirmed that his family, “being poor and free of hatred”—and Camus really was raised in abject poverty—“never exploited or oppressed anyone. But three quarters of the French in Algeria resemble them and, if only they are provided reasons rather than insults, will be ready to admit the necessity of a juster and freer order.” It should, then, be possible to give the proper rights and freedoms to Algerian Arabs without condemning and destroying the pieds noirs indiscriminately, or forcing them out of the only country they had ever known.

I don’t know enough about anything to know if Sartre was right to make the criticism or if Camus was right to defend his family. All it does is point to the intractability of a situation where after a people have forcibly settled somewhere: a new generation is born there and naturally feels that place is their home. Very few people would volunteer to have themselves or their families uprooted from the home they’ve known, and the result is brutal violence and death.

The panacea, which seems to be nowhere in sight in the Levant, is peaceful co-existence or even integration. This article about self-identification in Anglo-Saxon England analyses what the archaeological and written record can tell us about who the people in what we now call England thought they were through the turbulent periods of occupations and invasions. The archaeological record elides the true scale of the brutality of the past so I’m not suggesting that there was and could once again be a totally peaceful integration of different peoples in a single territory, but it’s just a case of the gradual evolution of a people’s self-identity through waves of movement. If that seems a facile comparison to draw, I’m sorry. I’m just reading as much as I can.

i pine for my cold bolthole in berlin

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Links, November 2023

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies. The book is full of social climbers, aristocrats, nobility and the dreary functionaries of government too. All of this to say, did you know you can read what all the royals are up to on any given day in the Court Circular?

This catty profile of a dominant British literary agent is also of that milieu. He’s an incredibly crass man who can get anybody on the phone and takes all his meetings in a grand hotel bar. It’s a compelling portrait of someone outrageous from a bygone era. Another outrageous upper crust guy on my mind is Lord Aspinall. There were a couple of recent episodes of Behind The Bastards about him. He basically scammed his way into the aristocratic set, got weirdly into exotic animals, and probably helped his friend Lord Lucan get away with murder. He was also friends with a bunch of fascists. By the way, remember: fascists don’t always sound like fascists.

Before I move off of English elites, here’s a good write up of the stitch up that killed Joan of Arc. I confess I didn’t really know the story, but it’s much more complicated than “burned by the Catholic Church for being a woman in charge”. Now for two more things on the topic of: “it’s complicated, actually”. First, the latest in a tradition of blog posts from people who’ve had to write strict schemas for things that interact with the messy, human world that is full of exceptions to rules is this post about the horrible edge cases in music metadata. Second, this post on Tumblr disrupts our (Western, English-speaking) notions of what a haiku actually is, for the better.

You know what no, here’s one more link about how things are stubbornly complicated. Humans are intrinsically stubbornly complicated. This beautiful illustrated piece in The New Yorker challenges the notion presented by AI positivists that we ourselves are just sufficiently complicated stochastic parrots and nothing more. It doesn’t so much make the argument that there is something about human language acquisition or consciousness that is verifiably different from an arbitrarily advanced artificial intelligence, but it makes the argument that we are humans and that’s enough. There’s also just something about the way that toddler is rendered that is so tender and sweet.

It looks like we’re in the very online zeitgeist section. Gimlet represents a particularly optimistic micro-moment in the modern digital media landscape that is now certainly gone. The Decline and Fall™️ is described well here. The Dirt newsletter featured a dance-focused cultural critic who has written a few popular pieces of analysis lately. Dance is front and centre of pop culture, but goes unspoken and under-analysed a lot of the time.

Surely it’s a natural transition now from the zeitgeist section to the doom section. Something’s fucky in the Danish intelligence services. If you want to be a spy all by yourself, open source satellite imagery is just a Python script away. Alternatively, practice your secret codes at the Waffle House. Here’s an idea: pray to be saved from the end of the world.

Okay I’m left with the pieces that don’t hang together at all. Here’s one more piece about Borges’s literary estate, about which I seemingly cannot read enough. Here’s a fancy candle that goes bong (thanks Robin Sloan), and here’s Balkan vernacular architecture.

Links, October 2023

Sun, 05 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

First here’s Sequel, which is one of those apps for tracking the stuff you watch and read and listen to, and the stuff you want to watch and read and listen to. I do a lot of that, and this app looks slick, but I probably won’t switch to it because it’s iOS only. For you, maybe that’s perfect.

I always wondered at how many tunnels snake their way through the soil in central London. I always thought: there’s so many that the earth must be practically a sponge. This write up of a single development near Victoria train station proves me right. The foundations of the tower are carefully around a dozen sewers, deep cut and shallow light rail tunnels, underground station concourses, you name it.

I’ve always been interested in how different people use physical metaphors in language. Is the past behind you because you’re walking away from it? Or is it front of you, where you can see it, as opposed to the unknowable future? Where does blue stop and green begin? Somebody asked, what shape is the year?

Now, for the descent into hell. First, this game gives you a taste of what it’s like to run Trust & Safety for a social network. It’s really well written, and makes references to real incidents and issues that social networks have contributed to: genocides, mass shootings. Finally: Israel & Gaza. There are war crimes being committed every day. n+1 magazine makes the apt comparison to 9/11: a terrible attack on civilians that begat an even more terrible war of extermination.

Fathers

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Carriages

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Glanz Savigny

Sat, 14 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lightning rod

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Up to the bar

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Not a bad view

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Pieta

Thu, 31 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Links, August 2023

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

While I claim that the reason I haven’t emerged as the foremost British emigré writer of our times because I simply don’t have time between watching movies and drinking beer: Franz Kafka wrote stories on the side, at night, when he was tired. Enjoy this profile not of his literature, but his day job: “I am more interested in his insurance affairs.”

A dragon guarded the literary estate of Borges and made anybody who wanted a part of it suffer. I think I love her.

In shocking news that nobody could have predicted, it turns out that the women of early analytic philosophy have been overlooked.

On the de-sexification of our media space by large corporations: Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.

Remember that abandoned mansion town in China that people kept sharing like “hur dur this is what communism gets you.” Well it is farm land now.

Apropos of nothing, here is an interview with Peter Alexander, a trans man living in Australia in 1937.

The Pins

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Overwatch playa

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Stretches

Sun, 27 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Links, July 2023

Sun, 30 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I increasingly hate computers and the world inside them that my brain is trapped inside of. That said, here are some things about computers. Let’s be practical, with another resource to get you to stop screwing up shell scripting. Once you’ve figured that out, why don’t you train an AI homunculus to reflect your own neuroses back at you, and start a conversation? It’s time for a vibe shift.

The unfortunate truth is that the digital world is the real world is the digital world. Culture and reality do not reside cleanly in a single realm; they slosh back and forth (an ass smashing into an ass, forever). The seemingly rigid schemas and structures in computing are in fact as plastic as our human messiness demands they be. As such: the definitive guide to vaporwave text encoding.

The rich people dying in the submarine already feels like it was years ago now, but here’s this about the totally unsurprising iniquity in the response and attention they got while a ship sank in the Med, killing hundreds of helpless people who could have been easily saved. Continuing the downward spiral is Khloe Kardashian’s pantry as a wormhole into the trend of consumer capitalism bringing the drive for merchandising into the home.

In something a lot more life affirming, here are two short films about people screaming and falling from a great height (the latter tells less and shows more, and is better).

As an adult, I pay for the convenience of not having to be in one place to do computer things. I have been subscribed to Dropbox, iCloud, and many TV and movie streaming services over the years. Those are becoming less and less of a good deal, and the geeky voice at the back of mind is saying louder and louder: why not do it yourself?

For a while I had a second-hand Mac Mini with an external hard drive dangling out the back, and it was my Plex server. It did a passable job at this but there were problems. All the applications except for Plex were running inside Docker Desktop and that would just crash every week or so. I never did figure out why. The other big problem was that that single 4TB hard drive was filling up. and I didn’t really like the idea of building up a big squid of unreliable hard drives attached to an overpriced, ill-suited Mac.

Requirements

I decided that I wanted to collapse a few disparate needs into one home server:

Physically un-intrusive and not too loud. I do not want to be a “big server guy”.
A media server capable of holding and streaming a big catalog at a high resolution
A multi-device file syncing service like Dropbox
Network attached storage for large and cumbersome files
Backup for important files (primarily photos and documents)

There are a few non-requirements too:

A web server. I’ll keep hosting my web stuff on somebody else’s metal, away from my home and my ISP.¹
An intensive course in sysadmin. I’m not trying to learn BSD from top to bottom with this and spend hours a day keeping it alive and at the cutting edge

Choices

I chose to build a compact Network Access Storage (NAS) box with a good amount of storage expandability. I chose not to buy one of the NAS enclosures from people like Synology because they seemed expensive and also I felt like trying to build something myself. I chose TrueNAS as the operating system because the internet told me it was good and because I was too cheap to pay for Unraid.

Using PC Part Picker (without which I would never have been able to do this) I put together the following list, mostly built around the tidy little Node 304 case.

Fractal Designs Node 304
ASRock B550M-ITX motherboard
AMD Ryzen 5 4600G
BeQuiet Pure Rock 2 Black CPU cooler
EVGA 500 W1 500W power supply
2 x Corsair 8GB RAM
Critical 1TB M2 SSD
4 x 4TB Seagate Barracuda

I decided to go AMD because I heard it was cheap and less difficult to cool. I have since learned that if you want accelerated Plex transcoding, there’s a certain range of Intel processors with integrated graphics that Plex supports to do that. That’s okay though, the CPU-bound transcoding on the AMD CPU hasn’t really struggled. I then just chose a cheap but not the cheapest cooler on PC Part Picker and that’s how I ended up with the BeQuiet. I now use the fan that came with the case, but the big heatsink from BeQuiet is still in use.

I’m still happy with the motherboard but I think I probably could have found one with six SATA connections to max out the case’s capacity for drives. I’ve bought a PCIe to SATA expansion card for another two connectors, so it’s fine. That PCIe lane is available because I’m not bothering with a GPU, by the way. The AMD chip with integrated graphics is fine. I threw a 1TB M2 drive on the board without really thinking about the fact that I should have probably used that high speed storage for some more capacity, but never mind.

Onto the actual storage. What I’ve learned is that making ZFS pool and RAID configuration decisions is really annoying. I think I made the right call for now. I have a RAID Z1 pool of those four 4TB drives for about 10TB usable storage and it’s currently about 40% full. What’s annoying though is how hard it is to expand that. I’m not smart enough to know the reason for this, but if I buy two more 4TB for those other two slots in the case, I can’t just widen the vdev to be six drives. I have to make a new vdev, at which point I may as well just make a new pool. The other upgrade path is to replace the 4TB drives in the current pool with something bigger one-by-one. Once you have all matching capacity the pool magically just increases its capacity.

Anyway, a problem for future Jack. For now, I need to be careful not to start hoarding data to fill up those 10TB just because I can. When the time does come, I’ll open up the case, add the PCIe storage expansion card, and add two drives to the empty drive frame.

Reality

The NAS is built and puttering along quite happily. It’s pretty quiet and it lives inside a well ventilated shelving unit in the living room. I could definitely forget about it 90% of the time, but I have found it very difficult to stop tinkering with it.

The SSD contains folders for syncing mine and Sarah’s important documents between devices with Syncthing. That works well and there’s a periodic job running to replicate those files to the main pool, which has more redundancy. The files are also periodically backed up to Backblaze. I haven’t really used Samba shares yes, though I have sunk some time into figuring out how to get all the file permissions right for when I do want to use some network attached storage.

I use a script called icloudpd, which makes a periodic backup of all my iCloud photos to the main pool. It’s good, but so far it only backs up my photos. I should set it up for Sarah too but I haven’t found any information on how to install the same TrueNAS Scale application twice but with different configurations. Also icloudpd doesn’t bring any nice metadata, it’s just chronologically organised folders.

Other than the media centre applications, which I’m not going to detail here, that’s basically all the box is doing. That is probably a good thing, but it’s very tempting to get it to do more and more. I spent a lot of time making first the TrueNAS admin panel available outside my network with port forwarding, and then some of the internal applications, just so I could check on them, you know? It’s a slippery slope.

I hope I’ll be bored enough of it soon to leave it alone to do its job quietly. I do not enjoy being fascinated by computer things, and luckily I am only ever fascinated by them episodically.

Web hosting has been a long and winding road. I have previously served my website from a droplet on Digital Ocean, Netlify, and it now lives in Cloudflare Pages. ↩

steaming, chewable air. air you could squeeze out of a tube

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Build a box

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Despite being a dictionary-reading, computer geek, gap-tooth nerd as a child… and mostly into adulthood, I never did do any PC gaming or building. I think by the time I would have gotten into that I harboured illusions about myself as a creative, artistic person, who probably ought to use a Mac. Thus, I used a MacBook from a relatively early age and never messed around with building the things.

Recently though, I finished building a PC for the first time in my life.

I’ve been running a Plex server for a long time, and I’ve slowly been building up the infrastructure around that: applications that need lots of storage and a good VPN. For a while I had all of that running on a Mac Mini with an external 4TB USB drive. It was relatively unreliable. All the applications except Plex were running as Docker containers on Docker Desktop for Mac, which crashed every few days for reasons I could not figure out and decided to stop investigating. I didn’t really trust the hard drive, even though it only had movies on it, nothing I would really mind losing after a drive failure.

I wanted to give building a simple server a try. Here’s the full part list of the current box:

Fractal Designs Node 304
ASRock B550M-ITX motherboard
AMD Ryzen 5 4600G
BeQuiet Pure Rock 2 Black CPU cooler
EVGA 500 W1 500W power supply
2 x Corsair 8GB RAM
Critical 1TB M2 SSD
4 x Seagate Barracuda 4TB

There are a few cool compact NAS cases that I thought would be nice and un-invasive to have lying around. The one I really wanted was the Fractal Designs Node 304. It takes a mini-ITX motherboard and six hard drives in a box the size of a microwave. That’s not the case I bought first time because they were sold out for the next three months and I’m impatient. Instead I bought a more standard ATX mini-tower, also from Fractal. I back ordered the 304 and have just rebuilt the whole thing into that so I can sit hidden in our bookshelves.

I’m still happy with the motherboard but I think I probably could have found one with six SATA connections to max out the case capacity. I’ve bought a PCIe to SATA expansion card for another two connectors, so it’s fine. That PCIe lane is available because I’m not bothering with a GPU, by the way. The AMD chip with integrated graphics is fine. I threw a 1TB M2 drive on the board without really thinking about the fact that I should have probably used that high speed storage for some more capacity, but never mind.

Anyway, a problem for future Jack. For now, I need to be careful not to start hoarding data to fill up those 10TB just because I can.

The main problem here is that I seem to have taken up a part time sysadmin hobby while I get all of this working. I haven’t spoken about the software. The operating system is TrueNAS. I’ve made lots of attempts to have the server be available for file syncing and admin outside of my home network, and I’ve ended up with a patchwork that just about works. I can access the TrueNAS dashboard through a DynDNS domain and a forwarded port. A few of the applications are exposed through a Cloudflare tunnel, which is a kind of cool but the auth is terrible.

Links, June 2023

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I think I’ve given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it’s nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised… easy. That’s why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees. Johnny Decimal, everybody.

A fellow foe of the Grand Narratives that organise our collective consciousness is Roland Barthes, who as it turns out, really had the hots for one of his students. He was down so bad that he started rambling about love at length during his packed lecture series. Sorry Ro.

For a while, Britain has been maintaining the remnants of its prestige by emphasising its timelessness, the bottomless vagaries of its arcane lore that stretch back to time immemorial, when Arthur and the dragon… so on and so forth. What this means in practice is that the civic structure is all en-cacked with faux-ancien fairytale nonsense. Here’s an example: a parliamentary report on how weird the legal fictions around resigning from the House of Commons are.

Being a recent immigrant to Germany (we know!) where the last reactor has just been deactivated, I have thought of myself as a relatively unmitigated nuclear power booster. It’s cheap, it’s carbon neutral. This write up about how the output patterns of the other renewable sources mean that nuclear might not have a place in our energy future is the first thing written about it that’s given me pause.

Mary Gaitskill has the only interesting conversation with a Chat AI that I’ve seen so far. Worried about the implications of it all? Don’t worry: proof that the world has been ending since the moment it began.

Swim chain

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Poppies

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Lake hut

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Boating

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

When the sun came out in Berlin, people started climbing into the canals in their inflatable boats. When I rode my bike over Elsenbrücke, I even saw them floating along the Spree in their dinghies, with a bag of beers and a fishing hat. One evening, I saw a lone paddle boarder in the middle of that wide river.

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Trundle bench

Sun, 14 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

BuzzFeed News

Wed, 10 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’d like to pour one out for BuzzFeed News, which was unceremoniously taken behind the woodshed this month. I have shared my thoughts about my time at BuzzFeed, much of which was spent with the News division, and most of which was motivated by that division. Now they’ve finally gone and killed it, the most worthwhile thing that media corporation ever did.

I have a lot of fun and messed up memories from my time at the Fun Internet Company. Those times are well and truly over, both at the personal level and the macro economic level. The backbiting merry-go-round I’m still vestigially connected to is replete with think pieces about what that era was all about and what’s next for media and society now it’s looking really rather done. The main piece I care about though, is this fantastic oral history, featuring many of the people I knew there and some wild incidents I was around for any many that I wasn’t there for but were part of the lore.

Links, May 2023

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

First, whimsy. I like it when people do something that could have been straightforward and to the point, but instead they inject a little bit of charming madness in there, the unpredictable human touch. Here is a band website that is old fashioned, simple, and yet deeply weird. Give it a minute. Here is a clock website that shows an excerpt from a book for every minute of the day, a bit like my favourite film installation, The Clock by Christian Marclay. Here is a hand-curated archive of fictional brands that appear in media. Here is a man who invented his own set of workouts based on wielding a nerfed sledgehammer, called the shovelglove.

Drifting out of the territory of sheer contrived whimsy and into the realm of the real, where the sheer breadth of the human experience means that people just doing their thing yields delightful strangeness. A small boat’s motor gave out off the coast of France and their mayday call was answered by a 19th century design sailing ship, who towed them back to shore. Kraftwerk made weird rhythmic sounds and kind of invented techno in 1970. A guy cycled through Berlin with a full DJ and PA setup, playing drum and bass to a rolling crowd of thousands of cyclists. I was in that crowd with my friends.

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We are about to share a media experience together. Please switch off and put your phone away. Please switch off your smart watch and annihilate any other illuminated sources of time. Please strive to be entirely within the world created by the shared experience rather than in your own life or even your own body, whose use should be constrained to the sense organs need to consume the experience and the parts required for breathing, crying, and perhaps laughing. Limit then, itching, fidgeting, coughing, sneezing, farting, and throat clearing. I, of course, might start scrolling through my phone if I get bored.

I live in the time of images. I’m not upset about it; there are some great images! Nevertheless, I have spent and will spend an incredible proportion of my live consuming media images and sounds, thinking about them, and discussing them with others. Most of my social relations are mediated by these images. I speak to others using references to media we have both enjoyed. I spend quality time with others by sharing a media consumption experience. As a result, I’ve developed a sickening little system of morality around media. I have an implicit worthiness hierarchy for the kind of media I spend my time consuming. From most worthy to least worthy, it goes:

Watching live theatre
Watching live music
Watching film at the cinema
Reading a book
Reading an eBook
Watching a movie at home
Watching “prestige” TV
Reading a long form article on a screen
Listening to a history podcast
Listening to a news podcast
Watching “non-prestige” TV
Watching “edutainment” YouTube
Scrolling through social media
Watching general YouTube

In each case, if I’m doing more than one thing at a time during any of these activities, the worthiness is downgraded significantly. You can short change a piece of media by consuming it wrong, with little commitment or attention. Tell Christopher Nolan you watched Tenet in twenty minute sections on a transatlantic flight just like he intended. Tell x auteur director you think you saw their movie but you were scrolling through Zoopla at the time so you don’t know how it ended.

In the ranking above you can see those old fashioned, probably bullshit biases: live experiences are better, books are better, paper over e-ink, drama is better than comedy (all the way back to Aristotle, that one), social media is bad. There is not a single one of these binary comparisons I would defend as right, and yet my lizard brain organises them thus. Note also that while I rank live music very high, listening to music otherwise does not merit even a ranking. I don’t think my broken brain can just sit and listen to recorded music while doing nothing else unless I am very much on drugs.

I rank actual self-improvement or attempted creativity above all of these. If I spend any time trying to build up a skill like a language or musical instrument, that’s much better. Here, I resist the urge to precisely and comprehensively stack rank the worthiness of every possible use of my time for fear of sounding like (and perhaps being) a psychopath. I am not in the habit of creating much these days, there’s simply too much to consume that is already good. Creating things is mostly disappointing in my limited experience, though I feel like I ought to do it on a daily basis.

Naughty

Tue, 25 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We got a nasty letter from some lawyers. We had some lawyers send a nasty letter. Why are people so up in our business here?

Overwhelming good

Thu, 23 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

This morning I was sitting at my desk with my eyes half closed. I started to yawn and I stretched my arms out and back. Something in my chest, around my sternum, made a dull pop. I didn’t realise I had anything to pop in there.

The last couple of weeks have been full of great new things, and I’ve totally worn me out. We moved into our new, more permanent home in Berlin. We’ve had lots of help with the entire process, and we’ve thrown money at the appropriate parts to try and make things easier. I am still completely wiped.

Completing a move alongside a busy full-time job and three evenings of German class per week is a bit much. I’m glad that I’ve fit an amount of running that I’m happy with but there are other pieces of self-care I’d really to get done. I’d like to join and start regularly going to a gym again. I’d like to get a haircut.

Portrait of Mrs. Anne Fleming, Lucian Freud

Here’s something more interesting: his great grandmother was Ann Fleming, née Charteris. Ann was born into, and continued to move in rarefied circles. Her first marriage was to the 3rd Baron O’Neill, and that was the one that eventually begat Fred Again (lol). However, she was a real bed-hopper. She started an affair with Lord Rothermere and when O’Neill was KIA in Italy in 1944, she married the lord. Around the same time, she started an affair with Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels and also actual spy. They later married.

The Rothmermeres kept up a pretty busy salon. One person who was in their orbit is one of my favourite portrait painters: Lucian Freud. He painted a portrait of Ann. I didn’t know he painted her! That’s the most surprising connection to come out of all of this, really. Included below is the portrait he made of Lady Caroline Blackwood, his own aristocratic muse replete with doomed marriages. They eloped to Paris, where he painted Girl In Bed.

An aside here: I’m convinced that this blue-blooded Ann with the spook husband and the chronic infidelity has to be the basis for John le Carré’s Lady Ann Sercomb, wife to George Smiley. I’m sure this is known.

Girl In Bed, Lucian Freud

Cinema unlimited

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Moving to a new country with a new currency, one of the things we’ve been thinking about is, “is it cheaper?” It’s a very intangible thing. I’m too stupid to do quick currency conversions in my head, I’m earning a different amount of money (is it more, is it less, yes!), and different kinds of costs work out very differently. Recently we had an incident with an outrageously expensive (or was it?) iceberg lettuce from Lidl, a budget supermarket, 2€! Unlimited metro usage is 29€ a month (until it possibly doubles in a couple of months, or doesn’t). We’re getting a new apartment that is twice the size of our apartment in London and more than I’ve ever paid for a place to live, but it’s not twice as expensive as that place in London.

Anyway, inscrutable differences aside, you know what is fucking great value here? The Yorck Unlimited membership card from the Yorck cinemas group of Berlin. For 19€ a month you can see as many films as you want at any of their fourteen very nice cinemas around the city.

I am well aware that Yorck did not invent the unlimited cinema membership, and that unlimited memberships in the UK are available for not wild amounts of money. I don’t care, though. The nineteen-fucking-euros a month (less than 2x the cost of an already very reasonably priced standard ticket) Yorck Unlimited membership might make winters in Berlin actually good.

We are living in a short-term rental right now, with no TV or home media paraphernalia. The upshot is, I don’t watch any TV or movies at home whatsoever, because doing so from my laptop makes me feel like a depressed person. Instead two to three times a week, we walk to the cinema and watch something. Like the people in the 80s! The stakes are so low in picking a movie to watch, I’m seeing things I would have half-watched on TV at home and probably wouldn’t have given another thought. Out of the two cinemas we’ve been to (Rollberg and Passage), I prefer Passage, but who cares!

So far this month we’ve seen Babylon (very fun, a lot of movie), She Said (good, no more or less), Close (devastating, lovely, mostly French), Return To Seoul (divided opinion in the Hackinger-Reid household, very Cool, darkly funny, also French!).

I think my enthusiasm so far outpaces Sarah’s. She’s more willing to watch some easy TV on her laptop of an evening, which I respect because it is more normal behaviour than marching down to the cinema multiple nights a week like Jaws just came out for the first time. Maybe my hype will wane when the days get longer and the sun is out more often. For now though I can be found many weeknights in a screening for Literally Whatever shovelling popcorn into my stupid grinning face.

Links, February 2023

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I’ve been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that’s the only real giveaway that I’ve moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I’ve completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?) and I’ve generally reduced my intake of UK news to a minimum.

In other non-English news, AI has been used for something good! Researchers are uploading photographs of fragments of ancient Babylonian inscriptions and letting an AI do the work of trying to put them back together to make readable texts. One such text is this poem about spring arriving in Babylon:

The river Arahtu,
– created by Nudimmud, the Lord of Wisdom – Waters
the plain, drenches the reeds,
Pours out its waters into lagoon and sea.
It’s blooming and green on his fields,
The meadows shimmer with fresh grain;
Thanks to him the corn piles up in heaps and heaps,
Grass grows high for pasture for the flocks,
With riches and splendor befitting mankind,
[All is] covered in glorious abundance.

In Japan, an exceedingly lovely-looking Ghibli Park has opened up and it has this charming website with an animated map. The park sets itself apart as a sort of anti-Disneyland. “There are no big attractions or rides in Ghibli Park. Take a stroll, feel the wind, and discover the wonders.”

This Garden of Blogs is another hand-picked web ring in the old fashion. It’s a mixture of magazine articles, experiments, personal websites and experiments. All the links are presented in a deliberately inefficient way, forcing you to stop and explore them one by one by hovering over the emojis in the virtual dirt. In my filter bubble, there’s a general movement away from the aggregate and towards the analog and handmade (ridiculous though those concepts are when talking about digital products). Big data is, after all, dead.

This blogger hypothesises progress bars that sound like birdsong, an ambient audio cue that you only sort of notice when it’s finished.

The idea of making a soundscape of the workings of the machine has been around for a while of course but I’ve found it hard to see a plausible route to get there in this era of notifications. A room of dinging things would be torture.
[…]
I would love it if sitting in my home office had the ambient sound of a rainforest. Everything, I would think, listening, is working as it should.
The frogs are reaching a crescendo! (I am about to get a notification that a job has finished, I think to myself.)\

Room tone is the sound a room makes when there’s nothing happening inside of it. Each year, Criterion edit together the moments at the beginning of their interviews from that year, when their subject sat and was recorded doing nothing at all. The subjects’ personalities come through in funny ways when they’re forced to just sit still.

This interactive explainer demonstrates why wealth accumulates in the hands of the few unless actively checked. The explanation is really well done. I’m kind of jealous of the combination of skills it takes to produce something like this, to fully use the web to the best of its educative potential. The same goes for this very in depth explainer about how GPS works.

Paul Ford is just good at using words to explain things about the web.

Rixdorf

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve been living here together for a couple of weeks. It’s a quiet Sunday in our place in the city, the first of its kind. We found our long-term apartment and we’ll be there soon. We’re engaged; everybody knows. We made sure of that. We’re going to get married. Did you hear, we’re going to get married.

Roots are going down. We have our grocery shops, our first couple of bars and cafes that might one day be considered our places. Most of them are going down in Rixdorf, a village in Berlin, they say. On Sunday the church bell tolls in the square and children in all-in-one snow suits toddle along the pavements. People bundle out of bakeries.

Our new place isn’t far away in Treptower Park, which is still arguably Neukölln. Though it is promised to us, we are yet to sign a piece of paper over it. Still, we’re filling it with an imagined life. Once we’re in there and re-registered, we can kick off a series of bureaucracy that will conclude with us getting married. We’re getting married, you see.

I’ve been travelling to the work in the office every weekday to get into the swing of it, and to get my hands on as much free food and coffee as possible. Sarah has been studying for her masters and generally getting ready to start working for the Charité next week. She is a very in demand clinical professional, and she is reading about endangered bird habitats. Many weeknights, we are having dinners with friends or going to the cinema. We are getting married. We are getting married!

Tempelhofer Feld

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Above the clouds

Thu, 26 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

From Hääggen down

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Panorama lineup

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Warschauer sunrise

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

i asked chatgpt to: hold me

Tue, 17 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Leaving London

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

I’m leaving London after living here for half a dozen years. I’ve been too busy with the leaving to feel sentimental about it but I’m making myself reflect. I used to find myself arguing London’s case all the time. Now I’m ready to leave it and barely look over my shoulder. I tried very hard to get here. I built a life around keeping hold of my perch here, so I have passion for the place. When I first moved here I wasn’t alone, but I left the quiet county I grew up in for the opposite end of the country.

We arrived in Brixton, in our own place. In fact in a place very much much not our own. In fact in an apartment owned by somebody else and rented to us. It was an apartment bought in the nineties; it was a speculative property investment made by a rapidly socially mobile young professional in an Afro-Caribbean neighbourhood being recolonised by many such speculators. It was bought by a kind of boom time mobility that no longer exists in a kind of neighbourhood that, though it hangs on, is rapidly being boxed in. At the time, none of this occupied us. We had an address in London. It was our own place.

We were young professionals in a global city and we adopted a lifestyle that pretended as much. Our kitchen was newly fitted and we filled it with groceries delivered by an Ocado van that made multiple stops on our street of tidy pastel terraced houses. We were equidistant from two centres: Brixton and Herne Hill. Brixton was for weekdays. I commuted from the end of the Victoria line to my office in Oxford Circus. I could sit at my desk and watch the shopping crowds traipsing up and down Regents Street, queues forming outside the Apple Store for new products. Herne Hill was for weekends. I swam in the 1930s lido. I went to the market and looked at expensive cheese and never bought anything.

Messengers of god tried to reach me every weekday. Oxford Circus tube station has four primary entrances symmetrically placed around the eponymous junction. The four staircases dig into the earth in front of Niketown, H&M, The Microsoft Store, and Tezenis. At the end of the work day, we waited in enormous crowds at the tops of the staircases. The station was closed due to overcrowding for some amount of time at rush hour almost every weekday. The messengers gathered and addressed the audience. They spoke about the hellfire and damnation that waited below and the salvation that waited for those who let Him into their hearts. Some carried signs and held them over their heads: The end is coming. Many wore Britney mics and wheeled around an amplifier. Some sang and banged a tambourine. Eventually the gates at the bottom of the stairs opened and we all went down into the ceramic, intestinal belly of the earth.

At the other end, Brixton tube station is theatrical. You creep up the diagonal slice of its three long escalators. At the top, the evening sun appears in an opening above and silhouettes the figures crossing over into the light. Standing at the top of the stairs is a figure holding two tablets out to passersby. When you reach them yourself, they are two copies of the Evening Standard offered by a messenger in a red windbreaker. Where these people go when they are not at every tube station for the short window of rush hour, I do not know. Perhaps the people handing out the City AM finish their morning shift, change jackets over lunch, and get back to it for the evening shift. In the middle of the pavement a man running a hot dog stand fries onions so that the scent is inhaled by the tube station and infuses the hungry commuters with mutinous ideas about abandoning their meal plans. Turning left, God is back and he has a steel drum accompaniment. A young Arab man sings the Quran into another PA system. A little further up a middle-aged white man who looks like he could be a cab driver speaks breathlessly about Sodom and Gomorra. He too is amplified. Finally, in front of the KFC on Coldharbour Lane, a circle of vegans have staged an action that involves masks and television screens rolling footage of slaughterhouses.

Our choice of neighbourhood was opportunistic, perhaps random. The young professional who bought the apartment now located in prime location was in fact my girlfriend’s mother, who would be a less punitive and arbitrary landlord than many I would deal with later. (Social mobility is littered with these not-so-little coincidences and things that just happen to be convenient.) Nevertheless, your neighbourhood in London is a redoubt in a soft culture war posed postcode by postcode. Thus, we lived in Brixton and not Clapham. Clapham was where many of my fellow university alumni landed. It was the place of the graduate lawyers, consultants, those who worked in marketing. It was a few lines of cocaine once a month, embroidered gilets, Fiat 500s, rescued greyhounds. This triangulation of cultural signifiers allowed for snobbery directed upward and across, the classless ever-so-slightly upper middle class. Brixton then by contrast was a perfect balance, grounded but exciting. Gentrified enough to have a brunch place, yet real enough to have a Caribbean wholesaler. The microclimate I have described is only my own. This desperate self-differentiation by way of neighbourhood is endemic to a certain type of person at a certain age all over the city.

The city is where many famous people exist in actual physical space. You will come across one of them every couple of months. Each encounter is the same in essence. You will be walking down the pavement in some congested part of town, dodging other people who are dodging you. As you subconsciously scan the bodies coming toward you to predict their trajectories and adjust your own, a face insists itself. A moment of grinding while you search the records for your kinship to this person: family, friend, colleague? You know this face not in passing, but in detail, how it moves, the expressions it makes. You know the voice that comes out of it. Revelation. It is, of course, that guy from that thing. No further action is required other than to tell somebody. For some reason it is very important that you tell somebody. I saw Ian McKellan on the tube in a wide-brimmed hat, Bill Nighy jauntily walking through Soho in the mid-afternoon, Lin Manuel Miranda discussing Mary Poppins in the basement of a Notting Hill bookshop. You can’t do anything with any of this, there’s no interaction to be had because this person does not know you. So you walk on.

There are also beautiful people from time to time. It is possible to feel harassed, put out, by beautiful people. You will see a person who looks unreal; their appearance implies they don’t go through the ritual humiliations of daily life the mortals do. They look as if they earn a living by looking how they look, or by being seen doing something whilst looking how they look. You might be sat across from such a person on the tube, trying to read your book. Worse, you might be trying to bully your own body into an acceptable shape when a living sculpture walks across the gym. These things ruin your day. They break open the ceiling on how you think a person can really look, and your contentment gets sucked out into the vacuum. You will encounter these people in the city; these people do not stay long elsewhere. Perhaps, thank goodness, they are not born with it and they have merely mastered some cosmetic toolset only available in the city. If they lived outside the city they would look remarkable yes, but not unreal.

Most of the time, you don’t live in London, you live in your neighbourhood, in your house, in your bed. Occasionally though, something very good or very bad happens and you do live in London. Somebody drove a car over Westminster Bridge and murdered some tourists. Somebody stabbed people on London Bridge and in Borough Market until they were gunned down by armed police. Extinction Rebellion set up an occupation in Oxford Circus and the swirl of shopping and diesel fumes outside my office window became a pedestrianised paradise with music, poetry and for some reason, a boat in the the middle of the junction. It snowed so hard the city stopped and hushed. The Prime Minister announced a lockdown and asked everybody to stay inside their houses for the foreseeable future.

I stayed in London through the lockdowns. Others left and I pictured them cavorting around their big childhood homes in the home counties, eating an ice cream in a paddling pool as they sweated out the heatwaves. I had no desire to be anywhere else; I only wished that everywhere could be better again. I rode my bike through Westminster and St. Pauls one night and didn’t see another soul. First I lived alone in a first floor apartment in Brixton, then I moved over the road into a house that was probably build to house a family and their staff. It housed 5 young adults.

That time is a dark box I’m not willing to open all the way up. We moved to Dulwich, into a two bedroom house with a garden. Then London felt like the waiting room for a suburban gravesite. I ran every inch of the postcode. With the people gone into their burrows, it was easy to feel that all movement had left the place. I followed advice and tried to connect with the currents of the world underneath, that pre-dated the bus routes and high rises. I walked the route of the lost river Effra. I walked up a steep hill to an oak where Queen Elizabeth I once sat. It worked for a while but eventually I sank. Writing about depression is only interesting if you dress it up with lies. The world became unbearably flat. I felt either nothing or an acute panic that I might have to wake up again to the same thing. My city became a series of bridges high enough, or station platforms where freight trains roll through at full speed and nobody would have to see. I scared myself and for the second time, threw all my life up in the air so it would land in a different configuration. Two months later I was living north of the Thames, medicated, therapised and content in my own company for a time.

I started to run along the Regent’s Canal, into Regent’s Park and Hyde Park. You can see birds that I think must be lost. The primary green parakeets of London are well known by now but there’s still something about seeing a heron sunbathing in Zone 1. I cycled my bike everywhere and it glued the whole city together. I learned how to weave and dodge and endure the hazards. Soon I wasn’t alone any more, and we rode our bikes up to the swimming ponds. We joined that cadre of regular swimmers for a while. Every Saturday morning we plunged into a duck pond and did laps with the hardened old ladies. Afterwards we rolled down to a bakery and had coffee and pastries. We began to covet our idyllic routine. In the end it’s a test of your mettle. Autumn comes and the temperatures plummet. Only the most dedicated make it to Christmas; we were not the most dedicated.

A walk just after dawn in spring is still the best time to discover new things about London. In the early morning the city is calm enough to look at in its specifics. To try to take impressions at any other time is to scrutinise the side of a train as it rushes by. You are disoriented, likely to topple over and get flattened. In the meantime, you’re only able to discern shallow attributes of what you see: blue, red, white, light, dark, rich, poor, busy, quiet, old, new. But first thing in the morning, you can watch the city slowly switch from off to on. Market stalls arrive, are unloaded from the backs of vans, put up, and start to emanate the smell of something cooking. I don’t think I will come back here. I was just here at the right time.

I used to be mastodon.social/@jackreid. now i'm social.lol/@nice because omg.lol is as unserious as i'd like things to be

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

this morning, the announcement of cancelled tube services took longer than my transfer from one of the surviving lines to another. it was so loud too. it was like an art installation.

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Our place out here

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

How long am I here for? Oh who’s to say, boy. We’ve got a cottage on the island, so I suppose it’s really up to me how long I’m here for. Where? It’s out on the spur, right out where the lane starts bolting back and forth like a silly little rabbit. Near the end. It takes an age to drive out there and it knackers your suspension and in fact… it’s a lot easier if you just walk it, if you don’t mind the distance. I still don’t really mind it even in my age. That must be why I’m such a sturdy old goat to this day.

It’s a nice little place. We’ve had it since… must have been about ‘83. It’s got just the bedroom, bathroom, boot room, lounge, and a kitchen-diner with one of those ferocious wood burning stoves the locals all swear by here. The boot room is a blessing, of course. You can traipse all over the muddy foreshores and scramble up the scree and slip-splat into the odd sheep muck. Then you get home, scrape the old crag-hoppers off in the boot room, hang up your damp bits and bobs, and you’re cosy soon as you step into kitchen for a spiced tea.

We paid out to have the windows in the lounge totally replaced a few years ago. They face out to sea and it really gets howling out there sometimes and well one spring we came to open up the cottage and found a tree branch lying on the rug, sprinkles of broken glass. Something fierce must have picked the thing up and hurled it because it wasn’t a piddler; it was half a ruddy tree. Anyway, we thought while we’re at it why don’t we sort out the whole panorama. Out came the windy, whistling single glazing from god-knows-when and in went the boxed double glazing UV protected hows-it. When the bloke quoted us I thought I was going to put the poker through his forehead but she calmed me down and so they stand now: our picture windows into the tempest.

No I’m alright thank you, I don’t drink in company. Tom doesn’t mind do you, Tom? I’m still buying your pickled eggs and pots of tea, aren’t I? You know I’ve never been the boating type. My dad was, rest his soul. He learned how to sail and all that with the navy. He said the navy taught him everything he needed to know in life, which seemed to be how to beat the daylights out of you quick and easy. He could tie a bowline with his feet, mind. Anyway, I was never inclined to get in a sailing dingy on a piss rainy afternoon nor was he inclined to invite me. My wife reckons our place used to be a fisherman’s cottage. I reckon she’s being romantic again on account of there’s no path up from the shore that I’d be wanted to carry tackle and catch up every time. She would often paint a picture in her head that appealed to her like. Then before you know it, that’s how it must have been.

So what brings you boys here this time of year? It’s a bit of a funny one for an holiday. Birds? Yeah we get a few of you lot funny times of the year but usually not so young. Usually it’s old codgers like me but even sadder, silly little hats and vests with too many pockets to possibly have a use for. Can’t find girlfriends is it so off for the birds? I’m only joking of course, don’t mean any offence. I can see you’ve got your heads screwed on. Myself, well I was feeling like seeing the place and having a little bit of peace. Having a place of your own to come and run away to, a luxury I’ve never taken for granted. No harm in coming in the pitch of autumn slop, is there, when the place is just here waiting?

My wife and I have been married more than thirty years. We got the place out here after a tough spell. It was reckoned that we both needed a place to unwind, get the hurly burly off of us for a few years at a time. When her daddy passed, suddenly there was the money. Not that the cottage costed a great deed, especially back then. Besides, at least out here we could get into it with less of an audience to be listening on and twitching their curtains. We always did do a good bit of trouble when we really, properly got into it. Cathartic I always say it is, to really have it out with somebody. I’ll confess to being a little bit too accommodating most of the time, I think a lot of us are. When you’re like that the little slights and nudges and niggles, they build up don’t they? Every bloke’s got some way to let off that steam so they don’t fold in the guy’s face when he tuts at you for taking too long with your change. Sports for some people, I reckon. I could never really go for sports, which never got me far with the girlies at school. Pity. But my Debs is all I needed.

We do better out here. I always wanted us to give up the place in the city and get somewhere with a garden. Kids never happened for us but that’s no reason not to get somewhere a bit more comfortable is it? But no, she said she liked being close to her girlfriends. Oh she loved to see her girlfriends. Lunches in the kinds of places you’d never catch me dead in, but I don’t really mind, gives me a bit of peace. Time to do some reading without the twittering. The girlfriends. Bit old to be calling people our girlfriends I always think, a little bit embarrassing, you know? We’re not teenagers getting a milkshake after school any more. Doesn’t help of course that not all the girlfriends are girls, a couple of slick pricks from the school days still sniffing around in there too. Not me, though. Wouldn’t have wanted to be there.

Say Tom, when’s last boat this time of the season? Long past then. Just curious. Well I think there’s no harm in telling you my wife makes silly mistakes. I can see that a little bit clearer now I’m out here in the good air. Trouble is when we’re in the city I just get so het up about the stupid things she does to wind me up, they bubble over faster you see. Nowhere for them to go. I found messages on her phone, which she thinks I don’t know how to use but I do. There’s all this rubbish from the slick prick from the girlfriends. Well she left her phone on the dresser while we were watching the cricket. She stepped out to the bathroom and left it there, so I had a look. We are married after all. New message though, from him, so I opened up the whole lot. Like I say I get wound up so quick in that place. When she came back from the bathroom she saw me standing, not paying attention to the telly. She was onto telling me that it was going for the boundary and I was missing it. I thumped her with our paperweight from Santorini before I’d even given it much thought.

Oh she mewed like a little kitten, a bit like when we make love. Quiet, curious little sounds, you know? She couldn’t make any words. She shook a bit and looked up at me standing over her. Then she stopped after a few seconds and I think she was probably already gone within the minute. Loads of blood in the carpet. Suddenly there was nothing keeping me in that place any more. I stepped over her and into the hall, put my cagoule on and went straight out the front door. I was on the ferry by dinner time.

No now don’t get keening. The catholics made it out here a few hundred years ago and saw off silly pagan nonsense like keening and the rending of garments. Time was, what happened between a man and wife was none of anybody else’s concern. Master of the castle, lord of the manor and all that.

Sit right back down. Both of you.

There we go. Now why am I here now if I’ve supposedly wiped my hands of the place and the silly woman I left here? Nice of you to ask, rude buggers. Well I felt, saftie that I be, that it was wrong for whatever island beasties that might come along to find her. Wipe my hands of her entirely, I could not, until I’d given her a real send off that didn’t involve the foxes getting in. So yesterday I rolled her up in a tarpaulin and floated her out with the evening tide.

⁂

As it happens the guard will razz out their little boats at night for a special occasion, such as I was, apparently. A couple of them stepped off onto the pier only an hour or so after I got talking to the boys. They didn’t give me the time to go and chew on the hunting rifle I’d left loaded in the boot room, after a fortifying whisky at the pub (one exception). Of course they caused an obvious stir, a boat coming in so late. I knew as soon as I saw their boat light hit the window of the pub what had gone on. Tom having stepped away to “clean the lines”, the cheeky shit. I let the birders think they were keeping me talking. Really I just didn’t like the look of me staggering up the path to the cottage. At my age? No dignity in it.

The silly bobbies didn’t cuff me. I came nicely, they practically waved me onto the boat. I gave them my best King Lear, raving in the sea spray, but of course it was me was the storm.

The return

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Liar. Couldn’t stick with it, it being something you said you would want forever, forever being from the early lusty days until one us died. You (being a liar) gave me three years and gave up when it got complicated, which is to say boring instead of exciting. You proved yourself to be a fair weather lover, which is to say? Coward.

Max dropped bread in the toaster without looking. He read the jagged little letter again from the beginning. It arrived at some point last night, shoved through the letterbox with no envelope, a loose sheaf of note paper ripped from a spiral spine. It had been two days since the final blow up.

Beginning again at “liar”, he wandered into the bedroom and dug his phone of the sheets with his spare hand. Putting the charger into its corresponding place at the bottom of the device was at first slight resistance and then a satisfactory give. It made him think of putting a grape back on the vine. It woke up from its death sleep, but no messages came. His lock screen was a photo of the beach front at St. Ives. On his way to open the curtains he tripped over the tatty Reebok Classics strewn across the floor. The letter thumped to the floor with unnatural weight. He spent a few moments collecting shoes and carefully putting them into the shoe rack in the hallway until he noticed the smell of irretrievably burnt toast. A split second later: the alarm.

His rooms were a forsaken cranny of imperfect subdivisions that somehow belonged to a Victorian terrace in East London. He didn’t have a doorbell, but the front door didn’t lock and he often forgot to lock his own door. Visitors and delivery drivers came and went without alerting him. If the space seemed hostile, he must have made it that way, he thought. He knew how perfectly shambolic and warm it had felt during a high water mark of their relationship. It surely could not be, but it seemed as though they’d spent their days and nights moving from room to room, fucking. Now the disorder accused him because he knew it to be his own. Trying to recall the way he’d felt here before felt like reading somebody else’s diary entry; it had nothing to do with him.

He heard the letterbox rattle and his stomach sank. It was only the newspaper. He gladly took it from the doormat and tromped up the stairs. It was perhaps an affectation to get the newspaper in this day and age, perhaps less so in this slice of impossible geometry inside a Victorian corpse.

My darling. You are still my darling despite it all: the fighting, the running away, the sharp words. You make me so cruel. I cried and fell asleep after I got back from slipping that last letter (which I suppose must have been quite vile, sorry darling) through your letterbox. I wish I could have slipped myself through your letterbox. Into your bed. Do you remember when you slipped me into your bed after I had night classes in the city? I didn’t see any light from your window. Were you sleeping? I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m sure that should explain any sharp edges I left in that last letter. Anyway, I’ve had a good sleep (after a good cry (and a good wank)) now and I feel much more myself. We can’t be over of course. What a terrible waste that would be, like we’ve always said. To lose the idea of us over something so trivial as some broken crockery and some little mistakes and indiscretions. We have the rest of our lives to be getting on with, don’t we my darling? We both need to change I suppose, both need to get better.

“Saw a kestrel hovering over the big Sainsbury’s car park, incidentally. Floating on thermals from the tops of the cars.”

Elliott Hodgkins stood in the rising chaos of Max’s rooms. He picked up the stack of newspapers on the dining room table and leafed through them while he circled the room. He tucked most under his arm to be dropped in the recycling on his way out. Today’s paper he dropped back on the table with a slap. He scratched the back of his neck.

“They’ve appointed some chump to Transport. It is said that he leaks like a sieve. Is she still posting you anthrax?”

Max rubbed his frown and waggled an unlit cigarette at the desk from his armchair in the corner. El looked at the letters on the desk, just loose lined paper slipped through the door with no envelope, pages full of spiders. He heard the snick of the lighter behind him and rubbed his chin. He presumed that Max had not been to the office today, that he wouldn’t be going in the immediate future.

“Mad as the proverbial box of, like I always said.”

Max blew a plume of smoke through his fingers.

“As a hatter.”

“As you like it.”

“As I liked it.”

“All done then? Don’t mean to belabour the point but there have been…”

“I suppose.”

“Recommended option, Minister. Sign just there and that’ll be the box.”

El scraped up a few bowls and spoons and dropped them in the kitchen sink. He saw Max’s cigarette burning between his lips, the evening darkening in the window behind him. Max felt the thump of the front door closing under his chair, then the clap of the recycling bin as it swallowed the week’s newspapers. He watched his friend pull a paperback out of his satchel as he crossed the street below.

Max was struggling to banish the ghost that had come into the flat at the same time as that second letter. She sat on his lap while he watched the evening unfurl from the armchair. She held his face in her hands and nibbled playfully on the tip of his nose. She wrapped her arms around him while he boiled a packet of instant ramen on the stove. She hated it when he got drunk and started smoking again, so he fished the half-crushed, half-empty pack out from between the sofa cushions. He alternated spiteful pulls from a Marlboro Gold with slurps of ramen twirled around a fork. He saw her sitting across from him at the table and, distracted, tried to slurp his cigarette. He coughed violently and the cigarette dropped into the violently orange ramen broth, which speckled his t-shirt. He decided to call it a day and rose for bed.

⁂

“I think you’re not occupying yourself enough. If you’re not careful you’ll be back with her just for something to do. Can I tempt you to the latest in blockbuster cinema?”

Kerry sat on the floor between Max’s legs and absent-mindedly slapped his calves. She was small and light and was often most comfortable sitting on the floor. Adela was also sitting on the floor, but found it far less comfortable than her sprier partner did, so she leaned her back against the sofa and faced away from Max. When she spoke he looked at the swirls of scalp between her meticulously braided hair.

“No that’s alright.”

“You used to go on about the sex. Is that the problem?”

Adela tilted her head back over her shoulder to raise her eyebrows at him.

⁂

A letter in reply was out of the question. Whenever he was tempted he reminded himself: he kept her love letters in their envelopes, in a shoebox under the bed. When his letters arrived, she would read them then drive them straight down onto a spike on her desk like a frustrated editor, like a line cook.

Primrose still

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Snow day

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Forester cabin

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Fairy floor

Thu, 17 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Pumpkin house

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Battersea posterised

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Afterlife

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Berlin like you mean it

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

We are moving to Berlin. I’ve been making that statement of intent to anybody who will listen for the past few months. I think (hope) we’re past the stage where I need to make that statement over and over to make it happen now. It has an inertia of its own. I have a job out there. Sarah has a job out there. I think it’s happening. By the end of January 2023, we should be living in Berlin.

I’ve wanted to live somewhere other than here for a few years now. I am putting my money, my body, my relationship, my possessions, and my future where my mouth is. I hope it sticks and that we find happiness and good people out there. If it doesn’t stick, I still hope we don’t come back here. I’m nostalgic for past lives I’ve lived in London if I think about them for long enough, but they’re not what I want for myself now. I want something quite different. I want to dream in another language again.

Links, October 2022

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

First off, here’s a DJ set I liked.

Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here’s mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here’s mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That’s nice. I don’t believe it’s really going to be that simple, though.

On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive! That’s a big pity given how hard it is to get ebooks without giving Amazon money. The Z-lib archive is not lost; some brave souls are maintaining the underlying archive. Here are some older, less illegally shared files including an account of the fall of the Berlin wall shared in 2001.

Now for some ~~educational material~~. This website will tell you when and where to look for satellites that will be visible to the naked eye as they pass overhead. I heard they changed the water cycle. It’s a lot more complicated that the poster that was stuck to the wall of my geography class when I was at school. This article from the Spectator (which is grim Tory hotspot I don’t usually spend much time in) is a really good rundown of how the Ukrainian language(s) came to be, and how it relates to Russian.

Finally, here’s a silly man from the past who died a really funny death in front of lots of horrified onlookers.

Links, September 2022

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

First I have a whole collection of maps. There’s a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There’s a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There’s an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here’s a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates.

There are a couple of websites about making websites to share. First is this fun tool to make scrappy, zine-like websites for party invitations and so on. On the more technical side is a pleasingly from-first-principles guide to making your own website.

I like when you rankle a nerd of a particular flavour enough that they go off on an informative rant. Here is one such example in which a blogger dispels the erroneous factoid that The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest surviving work of fiction. It is, in fact, not.

The only thing tying these last two links together is the innate urge in humans to collect and make taxonomies. In the first case, a blogger shares his love for what he calls “vernacular photography”, that is: snapping up family photos cast away into eBay auctions. The second is a Dirt newsletter edition about The Cari Institute, which creates taxonomies of “micro-aesthetics” such as “Corporate Grunge” and “Festival Marketplace”.

Her there

Sun, 02 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Instructions

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Take these for the pain
twice daily after eating
Take these for a headache
and these for your tired legs
Take these for a pain in the neck
in the mornings

Take these if you miss your train
And you can’t see the funny side
Take these if you suffer

Take these for loss
or a twinge in the heart
Take them in the evening
Stand by a window you can’t see out of
Take with water and look into the dark
For as long as you can bear

Take these for courage
Take a partner by the arm
Take half a pill each

Take these for free
I don’t know what they do
Try them for a pit in your stomach
or for you indecision and fear of flying
As for fear of dying
Take whisky

Navigators extraordinary

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Australia lake

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Snowdon rail

Sat, 10 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Posting

Wed, 07 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

POSTING. Why must you post? Why must the thoughts you have be assessed in public for their value? Be boring or interesting to yourself. For the sake of thinking unthinkingly don’t show your thoughts to others. Otherwise, you’ll never be able to think without an audience.

I be thinking of secret shit then deleting it My mind’s on the internet, if I speak it I’m tweeting it

— Open Mike Eagle, Informations

Interview cycle

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I’m interviewing for other jobs. It’s a very strange process that sometimes feels like having a professional affair. You arrange off-the-calendar meetings with some exciting new thing, because the old one has turned sour.

I’ll stop myself before I go to deep on the “jobs are like relationships” simile, which I don’t really believe in. What I want to say is it’s a tiring situation to both have a job and be applying for jobs. The interview process for tech jobs is particularly time consuming, although not as time consuming as other fields, I’m sure. Also, I have to remind myself that tech jobs are relatively well paid so maybe you should have to work pretty hard for your money.

Nevertheless, dealing with the swirl of recruiters, calendar juggling, technical interviews, meet-and-greets — it’s all taken a lot of energy. I’m hoping the process will draw to a close soon, maybe in two weeks. Then I hope I’ll have a job offer (hooray) and I can start the next tiring but exciting thing: starting a new job. After that, the next tiring but exciting thing: getting ready to move my life overseas.

I don’t know how serial those job hoppers and digital nomads in the startup scene do it.

Crystal store

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Links, August 2022

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It’s astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond “pretty funny clip”. It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works. It answers the question of how in on the joke various parties are. Finally, it’s a tribute to how much Tim Curry threw himself into the ridiculous brief.

I love this linguistics blog by a bunch of professors at the University of Pennsylvania. These people share my particular kind of brain worms about how words work and where they come from. This post isn’t complicated. It’s just a set of sweet idioms in Japanese about cats and dogs and some guesses at what they might mean about how we see animals.

I was in Barcelona this spring (along with thousands of other twenty-somethings from London) and was reminded again that Barcelona kind of isn’t Spain, it’s Catalonia. The language is everywhere, the flag. Anyway, the point is I don’t know enough about Catalonian separatism and this article in The Baffler taught me a lot.

I have a friend who despairs that the people he manages at work can’t do anything useful with spreadsheets, an incredibly specific and funny thing to complain about. Anyway I saw this video of Joel Sapolsky, who I guess worked on Excel at Microsoft? This seems to be a video of him berating his employees at Stack Overflow for their poor Excel skills and giving them a grumpy tutorial in how to do it right. Anyway, it’s information dense and reminds me of a dear friend.

Wet bulb

Wed, 24 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve had successive record high temperatures everywhere, but most importantly to me, in London. There was a bit of respite for a week or so but yesterday the humidity starting rising and today the temperature will follow. I don’t think I’ll find 28° intolerably hot after getting used to almost 40° a couple of weeks ago, but the humidity doesn’t make it easy.

Hyde Park is parched. The leaves have fallen off the trees weeks early, which I’m told is some sort of survival technique. The high winds that saw off the last heat wave were so violent they cracked the window. I do feel particularly at the whims of an angry Earth god many orders of magnitude larger than myself. In the meantime, I try and keep the electricity consumption down, submit my meter readings, and brace for the next hike in energy prices.

Does it feel like I’m reading speculative climate fiction?

Cove

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Pieces of aeroplane sprayed across the water in front of them, but only Arlo saw the distinct shapes of people striking the sea’s surface. The beach was the thin fringe of a wide bay. At their backs, the drastic slope of the mountains dove into the ground. The town, just four streets deep, was squeezed tight between the mountainside and the sandy beach. The double blades of beach and town pinched off at the end of the bay: a headland the shape of a fist. It punched the passenger jet out of the sky, those still lounging on the beach at dusk gazed upon the innards. In the local tongue the name of the peak was “the boxer”. The name of the town was simply “beach”, which gave all but the least inquisitive holidaymakers the sense they were being brushed off and given bare essentials to navigate only to the spots where the locals could tolerate them.

The boom rippled its way across the water. Heads snapped to attention to take in the shape of a plane unmaking itself. The three girls lay on deck chairs facing the sea while the explosion fanned out in front of them. Arlo and Mary had already been looking out to see while Bea used the shade of the parasol to tap away at emails. A section of the fuselage peeled open and spewed three rag doll silhouettes. Mary saw something like a seed pod, pips ejected into the moist wind. Arlo saw nothing but people hitting the sea. Mary saw a plume of brightly coloured luggage drop clear of the rest of the wreck and glint in the golden sun. It took Bea’s pupils valuable milliseconds to contract as they lifted from her phone to take in the glare. She saw only plumes of water erupting from the surface and cracking the sunset’s dazzling reflection.

When machines spray out limp bodies, people become stupid. They wander around. They respectfully avert their eyes, though they badly want to look. Somebody assumes the role of breaking the leaden silence with an impressive scream. It is never clear from whom the scream came. Bea managed to draw the group’s roles to a close as the first sirens wailed their way along the crescent town. To what end? To bag up the passengers and arrest the mountain. “We should get out of the way.”, she said: towel already folded over arm, phone in hand, eyes crazed and bloodshot, though not wet.

The next morning, Mary sat at the table and ate a tomato with a pocket knife. One-by-one they went out to the garden to shower the sticky night’s fear off their bodies. Bea went first. The shower was a hosepipe terminated by a sprinkler head at the top of the garden, made roughly private by dense, live bamboo. The water had warmed in the hose through the day and come out of the sprinkler almost hot. The shower was the only place her emails weren’t and she lingered there.

On the beach, she watched the plumes of water erupting from the sea then heard the scream. The meaning clicked into place. She was buckled into an airplane seat, two broken legs, quickly sinking into the water. She thought about the passengers, dressed all wrong for a swim. She pictured dress shoes treading water. She looked down the deckchair at the body in her swimsuit and suddenly felt under-dressed for the scene herself.

By the time she pulled her towel off the low limb of an orange tree, Bea was shivering. Mosquitoes followed her through the door and into the kitchen-diner. She wondered if they could smell her period. Mary could. She went out to the garden next, thinking sisterly thoughts about this tightly wound girl with the important job until the cold water hit her chest. Her brain filled with static for a second, then a fizz of pleasure washed over her skin.

The central kitchen gave onto four rooms, three closed bedroom doors. At the table, Arlo listened as Bea poured three glasses of mineral water. Her eyes were fixed on the doorway to the unoccupied room with the un-used towel still folded at the foot of the bed. Aiden, the boy who rescued her from social obscurity in second year with his noise and colour and sweaty disco club nights, had been called away. He had left her alone with these other girls he’d collected in parts of his life that had nothing to do with her. It was Arlo’s turn to shower.

She hadn’t noticed him at first, but as she scrubbed the tomato skin from under her thumb nail she saw the boy’s tan shoulder blades through the bamboo as he picked lemons. She realised she had walked out of the guest apartment wrapped in only her towel and, unthinking, unwound it in the open to scrub her face. She stayed longer than the cold water invited, watching him reach up to grip the fruit, pluck, and drop them into a pink plastic laundry basket. His hair was shaved short; she could see the full shape of his ears from behind, the shapes moving in his neck, a hint of deltoid stretching and sliding. He must have been about eighteen.

She saw him turn in her direction, searching for lemons. His chin was raised, foreshortening his jaw, cheeks, brow. His eyes followed the lemon from the tree, into his hand, into the basket. They came back up and settled on Arlo. It was hard to know what he could see of her; she couldn’t know how to arrange herself behind the dappled coverage of fruit trees and bamboo.

Charlotte, at the after-party of a Philosophy society social in student accommodation in Clerkenwell. In the kitchen, a boy from the course who liked her little black dress was leaning in close. Other bodies pressed close but somehow they were alone. Her heart pumped thickly. Her mouth parted just slightly for his— but their foreheads banged together, shock and confusion and quickly, the flush of embarrassment. He had a bottle of supermarket gin in his hand that he’d been reaching for. He laughed first with shock, too loud, then a kinder look that was far more devastating. She withdrew and asked cups of white wine to tell her a different story about herself. The wine soon came back up. The girl holding her hair back didn’t know her name and couldn’t find anybody who did. She was so fragile then; that was all it took to blow apart completely. Charlotte would never again be left outstretched and humiliated. She would carve off the most likely parts of herself. Thus she became Arlo. Not enough people knew Charlotte for the change to be remarked upon. She left obtuse angles: angles not leaning into the mouths she wanted but instead away, to be chased. Cruelly, most had not understood their role in this game, and let her alone.

The boy in the lemon trees smirked, acknowledging himself but showing no intention to pull away. She betrayed herself, a smirk back. A shiver ran up her neck and finally she couldn’t stand the cold water any longer. She reached for her towel and the boy scooped up his basket and headed inside.

In the street below, the boy’s hand found purchase on a reassuringly chunky cable. He had his face pressed up against the front of the cabinet. There was something veterinarian in how his arm looped under and up the back. He pulled hard.

The internet connection to the street was severed. Bea’s document dropped into a grey, hesitant state. She refreshed, gone. Serpentine fear crawled up the recess of her spine for a moment. She crushed it and stood up from the bed so sharply that spots swam in front of her eyes. She padded to the kitchen and poured out three glasses of mineral water. Still facing the fridge. “Internet working for you?”, she asked the goat’s cheese drying out on the top shelf. Mary was lounging on the sofa with a book she’d fished from the between the scraps of recipes cut out of magazines and ceramic curios on sideboard. It was a bestiary of the reptiles on the island with large, glossy pages. She could understand most of it, but it was teaching her the local names for specific kinds of geckos and so on. She read the word for ‘pearlescent’, as in scales. Her phone was lying with an empty battery in her rucksack in the wicker wardrobe in ‘the small room’. It had been there since the plane took off. She told a full colour rendering of a lizard that she didn’t know. She gave Bea a sympathetic look, but the lawyer’s eyes were praying to the cracked plaster ceiling. She gulped down her water and her lips drafted apologetic explanatory emails.

“Mary would like us to know she is unplugged.”

Arlo emerged for the first time that day dressed as a tennis player. Her white cap shaded her slack expression from the weak kitchen bulb and what light washed in through the small single window. A Mexico City Olympics t-shirt (child’s size medium) tucked into white, pleated skirt pulled high to maximise distance to top of white sock portending mint condition white Reebok Classic.

Moments earlier she had been sat stiff on her bed, refreshing a news article about the plane crash. Her first refresh had rewarded her by replacing the thin two paragraph story based on wire copy with something less ‘Breaking’ and more ‘Developing’. Sole airport on the island closed for time being. Now air crash investigators and relevant agency representatives on site. Since then, pawing at the screen had yielded nothing new. She had just begun to reach for a familiar distraction (private browser window, looping clips of bodies fucking one another made grainy black and white) when the connection dropped. The warmth oozed out of her skin quickly while she listened to the two in the kitchen through the door. They had only been on the island a few days but she could picture the kitchen scene’s blocking. She presented herself in the doorway to the dark (but blissfully cool) kitchen-diner-lounge and saw them stood perfectly on their marks.

Mary was wearing jean shorts and a huge yellow t-shirt, which on the front said “Just stop oil”. When she rose from the sofa to accept Bea’s glass of water, Arlo saw the block print all the way down the back: ‘Are you terrified about what happens to your loved ones when the climate crisis hits?’ The final word hung somewhere around the knees until Mary reached under it and hitched it up to scratch a mosquito bite on her lower back. Bea found something simian in the movement.

She lay down on the sofa staring at the ceiling as she played clips of the lemon boy’s skinny back to drown out the frozen image of a body striking the water.

“Will you come to the cove with me? We haven’t used the snorkels yet.”

Mary was watching Bea, whose document-deprived eyes were miming the act of reading the ingredients of a pre-packaged soup from the fridge over and over again. Her attempt to derail the collapse in Bea took a moment to find its mark, then Bea’s eyes lifted off the soup and landed on a point a few hundred yards behind Mary’s head.

“I’m sure they will have closed off the beaches. They won’t want people swimming around anywhere near the site. I don’t want to be swimming around anywhere near the site.”

Before Bea could load another salvo of reasons, Mary pulled closer and tried to find a way into Bea’s distant eye line. She summoned a view of the island from above, the swirls of the ocean currents cascading off the edges. The cove was thoroughly upstream and around the corner from the town that had rapidly filled with emergency vehicles, pop-up marquees, and men with rubber gloves and clipboards.

“The cove is protected from all that by the headland. I found an easier way down to the water too. Maybe the internet will be back when we come back. A watched pot never boils.”

The easier route was a goat track. Mary had already made the perilous scramble to dip her hands and face in the sea. On her first day on the island, she came to the cove alone while the others unfurled into their small living quarters. Aiden had messaged the group chat three hours before the flight in urgent but veiled terms to tell them he wasn’t going to be joining them. The three girls were already on their own ways to the airport. Momentum carried them to see through the plans without their common link.

Mary could picture Bea in a glass and steel eyrie, being chased around by angry people in suits like a dove harried by dogs. Aiden was not replying Bea’s messages, worrying that the person who booked the apartment would not be there to announce them. Things were unacceptably askew. The taxi crackled to a stop beside an orange tree.

Mary had greeted their host, an island woman, in her own language and she began bubbling over. These sad skinny women gave her little to hold onto but this wiry one with the boy’s haircut was kind. She asked about the fish and coral in her first breaths. She filled the eager girl’s hands with the snorkelling gear. They used to swim with the shoals of iridescent fish each morning; their boy swam deep and fast like an eel. Heart disease carried off her boar husband and puberty made the boy sulky, less inclined to wake her up at first light begging for the sea. Mary accepted the opportunity gladly. The woman showed them up the stairs into their place and the boy listened to them creak across the floorboards overhead.

When it was all done, Mary dropped her backpack down at the foot of the bed and went straight out to touch the sea with her body. *

Now Mary wanted to empty her life of shredded metal and burning fuel and rolling news coverage. She wanted to fill it once again with waving blues and greens. Sweeping aside excuses and Bea’s anxious administrative spasms, she carried everything they needed in her backpack: three towels, a couple of shirts to warm up in, sun cream, three sets of goggles and snorkels.

Since she was a sobbing toddler digging at the bottom of the garden, she’d been accused of running off to talk to plants when the human stuff got hard. She didn’t care. On this side of the island the land met the sea with seventy foot cliffs. Their cove was a single notch carved out, leaving steep but not vertical slopes and at the water line: a small pebble beach enclosed on all sides. With the towels rolled out they could sit and look at the blank horizon of the sea with limestone protecting them on both sides. When Mary handed out the goggles, Bea doffed her wide-brimmed sun hat and started fitting, adjusting straps. Arlo declined with a thin wince and turned back down to her book.

She watched them wade up to their waists then dive under the water from her perch on the towel. Her eyes went down to her book but bounced right back up. When the two snorkels were a good distance out, she picked her way over the pebbles and into the shallows, which were calm and warmed by the late morning sun. She lay on her back, floated, and looked at the sun that burned through her eyelids in fuzzy pink and yellow. She tried to nullify her thoughts. A few moments passed and her mind was no quieter. The same as ever, it all came at once: look books, the rabid character assassinations that flew between intellectuals that were key millimetres apart on the issues, things one is supposed to say about the issues, the scope of things one ought not say about the issues but in saying makes one rakishly contrary and not simply stupid, fragments of Italian cinema, memes, which drugs it is possible to look sexy whilst taking and how.

She returned to the towel, and to her book: a book on good housekeeping from the 1890s. The level of the irony with which she was reading the book was not clear, even to herself. Before long she was cold in the shadow of the cliff sides and she pulled a shirt from Mary’s hiking backpack. Just stop oil. It swallowed her and before she could squash the sentimentality she saw herself at age five falling asleep on the sofa, in the flickering purple light of cartoons, wearing her father’s giant t-shirt as a nightgown.

She hurled a pebble into the sea to shatter the thought. Then she scrolled through a blog post she’d saved, about a diner in Manhattan where everybody pretends to be a Republican, as a joke.

Arlo went back to the empty apartment. Those on the island who weren’t talking about body identification and repatriation took their siestas. She dove into the emptiness of the place like cold water but when she got to her empty bedroom it was too much. She adjusted her black silk wrap over her swimsuit on her way out the door. Down the slope of the garden she saw the bead curtain cinched open with a piece of blue ribbon tied to a nail. The mother was out, complaining to the telecom company from a phone booth on the road to town. The television was on: a bald weatherman sweating in a suit much too heavy for the mid-afternoon heat and the studio lights. The boy was lounging half asleep on the sofa, wearing only shorts. A mosquito buzzed in her ear as she stood over him, taking in the wisps of dark hair under his belly button. She didn’t notice his eyes opening to look back at her, she just found them there. She sat on the edge of the sofa, arranging her shoulders to be looked back over, just so. She couldn’t read him. She laid a finger on those tufts of hair and he let her. She drew it down and he stopped her. He shook his head with his face fixed and neutral, perhaps dreaming. She fled.

On her own bed alone she held her breath until it hurt then allowed a dagger of air in, then held it again. With the internet still out by his own hand, the boy masturbated to synchronised swimming on the TV.

An hour later Arlo pushed her face up from the pillow. She checked the time on her phone and despite herself, wondered if the other two were okay. Standing at the top of the goat trail she could see two fluorescent yellow specks in the water; the tops of snorkels. She sat on the towel watching the snorkels for a few minutes trying to decide whether they could stay vertical if the girls wearing them were dead. Her passivity deserted her. She took off her black wrap and her Sarkozy 2007 baseball cap and waded unflinchingly into the still sea. When the water was up to her armpits she dunked her head and scrubbed her face with her hands to let the salt water rip off any makeup that might betray her.

When her feet first left the sand and she dug at the water with her arms it felt good. She settled into a confident front crawl (Saturday mornings at the pool, badges sewn onto a faded blue towel, all of it had been sleeping somewhere in her). The snorkels were close, a few more beats. One on the right twitched upwards and there was Bea’s face absurdly mashed into the rubber seals of goggles and snorkel. Arlo didn’t have any more ways to behave, no more persona to play. Bea spat out her snorkel peeled off her goggles and looked into the girl who was finally at sea. Arlo trod water and paddled slowly with her hands, looking back at Bea’s face as took the snorkel off and fitted it to her, fiddling with the straps. The water had drained the flush out of her cheeks, soothed the grey fatigue that ringed her brown eyes. Blanched and calm, she looked like a young nun fussing with a noviciate’s wimple. Arlo let Bea stretch the mask over her head, opened her mouth to bite down on the snorkel. Still wordless and with a beneficent smile, Bea pointed down with her index finger.

Mary was a shining mask with tendrils of hair spreading out in all directions, slowly twisting in the current. Her arms were limp below her and waved with the water. The mask tilted up to address Arlo, faltered for a moment, then Mary waved her over in half-time. Arlo wafted the water slow enough to match the new pace of things. The severed bottom half of Bea swung slowly to the surface and was replaced by a thin slice of the back of her shoulders, calves, head, as she lay back in the water and floated. Two of Mary’s fingers tapped the hollow of Arlo’s spine and rested there. With her other hand she pointed straight down to the sea floor.

My friend Tom writes a lot and I respect him for his discipline. He’s taken the task far more seriously than me. He’s read a lot more about writing itself than I have.

We recommend or buy each other books quite often. I gave him a copy of Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, which I really love. I think it’s touching and playful and genuinely unique, so I wanted him to read it. He loved it (my taste was successfully flattered) and went on to seek out the rest of Saunders’s books at the library (another thing I admire him for).

He picked up a copy of A Swim In A Pond In The Rain. Frankly, I had no idea whether George Saunders was a living author or not, but it turns out he is! He’s alive and teaching a writing course at a college somewhere in the states! Anyway, this book is a product of that writng course. It is itself a practical course in writing that uses a number of short stories by great Russian authors like Tolstoy et al, to illustrate things about writing stories generally.

The book is not, however, general. In fact it’s very specific. Its advice is frank and straight-forward. Saunders loves these stories and enlivens them to the reader without losing sight of their construction. The nuts of bolts of how stories work has never been better laid out for me. The role of editing, which I’ve always avoided as too painful and boring, is now something I accept.

After reading the book I felt spurred on to write and Tom felt the same. So we agreed a deadline after which we’d exchange drafts of short stories we’d written, as a motivating factor to get something done and finished. It’s been going well for me. I have a draft that I don’t hate, and I’ve handed it over.

German is hard

Wed, 20 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I was always a bit cocky about languages. I got good marks in them at school and by the end of sixth form I felt I had a pretty good grasp of French. That felt like a lot in the context of semi-rural England where very, very few people learned and spoke a second language fluently.*

French faded because I was an idiot and didn’t keep it up after I went to university. Spanish was never that strong but what little I had atrophied too. The thing about those languages though, and about the bit of Italian I’ve looked at, is they feel sticky. I feel like I pick things up quickly, understand the reasonable basis for vocabulary and grammar, and retain them.

Since starting a relationship with a Swiss person with a very international family and friend group, any remaining delusions I had about my language abilities have been swept away. I won’t list the languages in her orbit, but it’s a lot, and everybody is crushingly modest about their abilities. A final piece of humble pie: the main language at play is German, which I have never learned, until lately.

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Kitchens II

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The ferry

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Seder place

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Taking down Goodreads

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

TL;DR I’m switching from Goodreads to Oku. Sign up here (referral code).

I got rid of most of my social media accounts. The remaining ones are really services I use to track something I do myself that I share with others: Strava (running and cycling), Duolingo (learning languages), and Goodreads (reading). Of these, the one that I have always been dying to replace is Goodreads. The website and the native app are both terrible, it’s owned by Amazon, and the means to get your reading data out of it and into something else are being made increasingly difficult. But for a long time, Goodreads has dominated. I think the main reason is social inertia: people are on Goodreads because other people are on Goodreads. If you really want to see what your friends are reading, and most people are on Goodreads, you had better be on Goodreads too. For that reason, any challenger to Goodreads had better be a lot better, not just a little.

I’ve been tracking challengers to Goodreads for a while. The alternatives fall into two main camps. First you have the startups. They’re side projects that the founder probably hopes to grow into a sustainable business one day if they gain enough traction. They tend to be pretty slickly designed, not overloaded with features, and at a “beta” phase advertising more features to come.

Second you have the open web enthusiast projects. These people are close to my heart. They tend to be aligned to the IndieWeb movement, which aims to move power away from centralised platforms that can use and abuse users’ data and attention as they see fee and instead empower people to own their own data. The technical problems you have to overcome to facilitate a social netowork where everybody has total data sovereignty are myriad, but the IndieWeb people are making noble progress.

Free (as in libre, not gratis) books and cataloguing information around them are not new, in fact some of the biggest archive projects on the internet address books. The Internet Archive has a project called The Open Library that technically ticks all the boxes. You can sign up for an account, make lists of books based on their definitive catalogue, mark what you’re reading and what you want to read and share those things with others. The Open Library is developed by volunteers and suffers a bit from a lack of visual and user experience polish, it’s a little chocked full of features, and it lacks a dedicated native application.

LibraryThing is, funnily enough, a tool for managing the catalogue and inventory of small and medium sized lending libraries. They also support and encourage use for personal libraries, which is how you can use it for similar purposes as Goodreads. It gets good egg points for being a totally ad and cost free service for one of the only universal goods in the world (libraries), and is supported by revenue from their TinyCat product which provides user-facing tools for libraries at a still very small cost. However, it’s not really meant for using as a social tool like Goodreads.

I mentioned the IndieWeb people earlier. Some of them got together and had a workshop addressing some of these questions:

We’ll focus discussion on personal libraries on one’s site and how they can interact with each other. How can we pool data and resources for the common good? How can we provide Goodreads-like functionality in a decentralized manner?

I think they’re asking all the right questions but I can’t help but think 99% of the people in my life aren’t going to bother with the work required to implement solutions that keep things totally free from centralised control and therefore abuse. For example, here’s a service that uses federated posts and a protocol called Micropub to share updates about what you’re readng with other people who have implemented those things on their personal websites. The feature payoff for the amount of work the user puts in is low.

A couple of who are into both into reading and into personal websites as curated experiences to be tinkered with by the creator, like Mac Wright’s bookshelves on his website. Maggie Appleton did a great post about the workshop and made some proposals about how existing exchange formats like JSON and RSS could underpin a lot of the essential functionality. I’m doing some of what she’s talking about to keep my own store of what I’m reading in a sharing-place agnostic format, but I’m the freak, nobody else is doing that.

So we’re left with the services that aim to do the bulk of the work for users, providing them with an easy and centralised experience, in exchange for money. The Story Graph is a great early contender that explicitly aims to replace Goodreads and replace it with something people can use that isn’t owned by Amazon. They charge for a premium version instead of running ads, which is great. They give you some statistics about what you read, and aim to provide you with smart recommendations. Similar in terms of ideology but maybe a little less mature is BookWyrm, which seems to allow the same central set of features but with a smaller user base.

Ultimately, how many people are on a new challenger is only important as a signal about whether the thing will stick around long enough to be worth investing in. The only people I actually care about are my people, the friends whose books I want to see. So I’ve been hanging on and watching these new services to see if any reach the “I’ll know it when I see it” threshold of maturity to start pestering my innocent friends to shift all their collections over. A couple of services were in contention.

Booqsi launched with a pretty good user experience off the bat, but it’s still quite limited in terms of features. For example, you can’t mark yourself as reading more than one book at a time. You can’t automatically move your collections over from Goodreads or anything else. It makes for a bit of a sparse experience.

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When, from the outside, a collection of people or an institution is doing things I strongly disagree with, it often turns out that from the inside I can see all the mechanisms and incentives that make perfectly normal people works towards bad outcomes. Take online advertising. In my last year at BuzzFeed I finally bit the bullet and started working in the part of the team that makes the money: the ad tech team.

Proposition: online publishing is generally supported by some combination of a paywall, donations, a benefactor, affiliate commerce, or ads. Financial Times is entirely behind a paywall. The New York Times has a partial paywall and ads. The Guardian gets by with some ads and some donations. The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos who seems to have some interest in its continued existence and could pay for it to lose money indefinitely. Wirecutter and other review sites make a lot of money out of affiliate links to products, supplemented by ads. Finally, BuzzFeed and myriad other places make most of their revenue from advertising.

Every single one of those revenue models poses problems from a business perspective and an ethical perspective. My experience is with advertising though so I’m going to to walk you through what I learned about how the ecosystem actually seems to work. It’s rotten but it pays for the words we eat all day every day.

Let’s start with the problems an ad supported publisher faces.

A primer on ads

revenue = impressions × price

impressions = pageviews × ad density

Advertising revenue is derived from the number of ad impressions a publisher gets multiplied by the amount they were able to charge advertisers per impression to put their ads there. If somebody sees your ad on your web page, that’s an impression. As I learned more from the people who sell campaigns to advertisers, the amount that advertisers care about impressions versus more sophisticated metrics shocked me. For all of our fussing about targeted advertising and getting the right ads in front of the right people, the bottom line is to make money from ads you need to get people on the site and they need to have your ads in their viewport, getting impressions.

The number of impressions you get breaks down further into how many page views you got multiplied by the amount of ads you managed to show the user in the time they were on the page, also known as the ad density.

Because one factor of impressions is page views, your revenue is directly affected by anything that curtails the flow of users to your website. A decade ago along came the big platforms in social media and search that started to cannibalise those page views. People discover your content through their news feeds and timelines and they tap on the articles. If you’re lucky they end up on your actual website and your banner ad loads up top and gets you an impression. If not, they see a (much easier to read) stripped-back version of your article hosted by the platform themselves and it’s little to no ad revenue for you. The firehose of traffic is controlled for the most part by Facebook, Twitter et al, and they can (and have) arbitrarily decided to point it elsewhere in the past.

Factor two of the ad revenue equation is CPM (cost per mille, as in thousand impressions). How much do you get to charge for each of the impressions you went out and got for your advertiser? A lot of factors go into pricing but high on the list are: the prominence of the ad and the audience quality. Prominence of the ad works across time and space: an ad that you see for longer is more valuable, and an ad that takes up more of your screen is more valuable. Publishers tell stories about “premium packages” and specially integrated ad experiences but ultimately, it’s about how much time and space your ad is going to take up.

Publishers improve the quality of their ad audience by targeting ads and making advertiser’s ads are going to the right people. Right people in this context often means the right age group and the right income bracket. Knowing those aspects of your audience and being able to produce segments that represent specific people the advertiser wants to reach, that’s the desire that drove the worst of the worst when it comes to web advertising.

Play the game

I worked in the ad tech space for one year, and I have absolutely no idea how the data privacy angle actually works. There are thousands of companies and products with impenetrable names who do something related to “audience insights” or “activation”. All of them want information about your audience. In exchange they offer you the ability to do things like target ads to racketball players in Utah over the age of forty.

Quite how those companies figure out who lives where and what they’re into isn’t clear to me, nor is whether the classifications are even accurate. What is obvious is that they rely on a collective effect. The more websites sign up and hand over user data, the more data points they have to join up from that user’s behaviour across multiple destinations on the web. Your profile of a user could start with matching their IP address with up with that of somebody who also has a plan with Verizon. Now you have a home address because Verizon has that. Your data connectivity platform is also used by Amazon, The New York Times, and CNN, so you also know what category of products they buy at what price points and what their key news topics are.

There is no mastermind behind it all. Each company plays it part and provides a service to a partner who makes up a different piece of the puzzle. The publishers share their data because they can increase their CPMs by offering better targeting to advertisers, the data platforms sign up as many sites as they can so they can offer a product with better targeting capabilities, the advertisers pay to place ads to market their stuff to an audience who might be interested and hey, even support digital media with some big ad buys.

Ironically, at the scales of traffic that a lot of publishers get, the kind of specificity I’ve described would yield an audience that’s too small to even make money from. Nevertheless, we want to be offer that ability to advertisers and put it in the slide decks we present to the Chief Marketing Officer of Coca Cola. A lesson I learned, and the reason why I doubted some of the targeting capabilities offered by third parties, is that there need not be much of a relationship between the level of sophisticated targeting actually being done and the claims being made in marketing materials to other companies.

GDPR and other data privacy regulations were intended to solve this by forbidding publishers from sharing users’ data like this without their explicit and informed consent. From a part of the company shielded from the sausage factory, before I worked directly on ads, I welcomed these changes when they were introduced. I hoped that other jurisdictions would follow the EU and introduce similar measures, and so they did.

It’s incredible how quickly GDPR and other data privacy regulations go from looking like the solution to all our problems, to an implementation detail, another piece of third party code thrown into the slurry. Most publishers handled the informed consent problem by reaching out to another third party to integrate their consent management platform. Script goes on the page, pop-up appears, user smashes “Consent to cookies” as fast as they can as they slice through the thicket of bullshit in front of their news article, informed consent acquired, fire the data off to the third parties and render the ads.

Consent management platforms break, they can be implemented incorrectly. In one failure state, all the ads might disappear from the page. In another, a rare user who has never consented to a single crumb of third party cookies will have their data sent to all askers without further regard. It is unclear even to people adding a consent system to the publisher’s website, what precisely is allowed or is not allowed to be shared and with whom under the various configurations you can choose from the consent pop-up. No malicious intent is needed for a website to add your visit to their article from an iPhone in north London to the constellation of data points about you that some platform like LiveRamp has stored, even though you denied all the cookies offered to you.

I don’t think I’m shocking anybody describing the situation in online advertising. You would even be forgiven for thinking things will soon get better, for users’ data privacy at least. Browsers are increasingly sparring with this ecosystem, locking down third-party cookies, blocking requests to trackers and ad networks like good little bodyguards. The ecosystem responds. Reports of the death of the cookie are greatly exaggerated. Universal ID is a system that circumvents third-party cookie blocking by laundering user data through first-party cookies instead. The incentives for publishers to integrate with these trackers are the same as in the old scheme: if you have this tracker in the page, x giant advertiser will pay more per impression because they think they know who they’re getting with more accuracy.

People are doing their local best

Now you’ve had my very editorialised primer on how an ad-supported online publisher works. The thing I want to emphasise is that the ecosystem doesn’t require any malicious actors to produce terrible outcomes. It’s just about how the incentives are arranged.

Start with the user, so the books say. Users want to be informed, entertained, or even mollified by some content. They don’t think they should have to pay for that content really, there’s so much free stuff around and besides, there’s ads. The journalist wants to write about what they think is interesting or important for their audience. Maybe they’re not writing what they think will be their career-defining work right now but it’s not bad and they trust their editors’ instincts and the job market for reporters right now is such that they should be happy to not be freelancing. Besides, they work hard on their stories and the analytics tools the publisher provides tell them hundreds of thousands of people read their words every day.

The editor wants to be known for running a team that produces meaningful content that also performs. That is, they want content that gets clicks and is part of the conversation, slipping the greens (unique fact-based reporting and cultural analysis) in with dinner (posts that will appear in the search results of the day’s top ten search terms). They want to cultivate new writers and give their team the space to do great work, and they pray they’re not going to be pulled into a meeting room any time soon, given a dollar amount and a list of the names of people in the bullpen behind them.

The CEO wants to convince investors there’s growth coming, that they’ve got new ideas for revenue that haven’t already been tried to varying levels of success by every other publisher. The CTO wants to come up with ways they can increase revenue per user, reverse declining page views, and reduce the dependence the business has on platforms that could switch off the money hose tomorrow with an algorithm update. The ad sales team want to hit the excessively aggressive revenue targets the CEO set to wow the investors. They can’t do much about their audience size, that’s up to editorial and tech to figure out. So they focus on selling high CPM ads: big ads, highly targeted. The big clients won’t sign off on deals until their tracker of choice is in the page to verify they’re hitting the audiences the guys from sales are claiming.

The ad tech team want to be part of the solution for increasing those revenue numbers. They field those requests from sales for the umpteenth tracking script, another universal ID solution. They try and do as little harm as they possible, hitting the page performance as little as they can with the torrent of ad scripts. They try and push the ads out of the way of the content for the most part, put the kibosh on a new full-page popup ad format sales are asking for. When they do implement a new third party script, they try and decrypt the terrible documentation and ignore some of the more outrageous demands it makes of the page’s performance and users’ data.

It goes on. I could expand this circle to include the ad buyers, the programmatic ad exchanges, the product managers at the big platform companies. You get the picture though, each of the individual actors here are just doing their best for a hyper-local good. I’ll go out on a limb and say that nobody in this web has an actual in-depth understanding of the domains of their inter-connected counterparts. I can give the picture in overview. Wizened types who’ve been at it for a decade could go deep on how the data aggregators work and how they prop up the whole online publishing industry, but they don’t know the letter of the law coming out of Brussels and they don’t actually know why Facebook makes the changes to its news feed that it does.

I’ve only been talking about the ad supported revenue model, because that’s what I worked on at a company that has history had an anti-paywall stance. That leaves the other models, which each have their own foibles. There’s affiliate content (editorial conflict and biased coverage), the wealthy benefactor (implicit censorship based on the benefactor’s interests), donations (unreliable and insufficient revenue), and the paywall. I don’t go as far as my former employer and claim that paywalls are fundamentally anti-democratic but there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the truth is paywalled but the lies are free.

These are some of the pathologies in the corner of the media industry I worked in. None of them belong to arch-villains or greedy monsters. Most of them belong to the inescapable, choking pull of capital, but some are built piece-by-piece by kind and thoughtful people I variously call friends and colleagues.

The layoff business

Sat, 12 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

When I was growing up I sometimes thought I wanted to be a writer, but I quickly realised that doing it for a job wasn’t going to be fun or rewarding. My position is that I took the coward’s way out in choosing to go into software engineering, for a more financially stable existence, but I went into the world with a respect for the writing staff and a general dread at their constant mistreatment.

At least in the time since I’ve entered the profession, software engineering has been a “seller’s market”. The pay is good, there are lots of jobs, and there’s generally good job security. In the same period the media industry has been collapsing in on itself. Ad revenues have fallen because of things like the platforms hoovering up all the views and dollars and we seem to be approaching the end of unbridled targeted advertising on the web.

Media companies have been merging or going out of business¹, and in the meantime they lay off swathes of reporters at every turn. When I joined BuzzFeed, the UK operation had a pretty healthy set of reporters. Sitting in the physical newsroom you had a big news desk with an editor-in-chief and deputy editor, an investigations team of six or so, about six news and politics reporters, and a collection of “desks” with one or two people covering science, celebrity, and so on. There were copy editors, a picture desk with a photographer, an illustrator. There was an art director.

That didn’t last. The newsroom was gutted in a deep round of layoffs that saw off at least half of them. Coverage contracted to pull out of regular Westminster beat reporting (gone were the political reporter who became the first female Chairman of the Lobby and the other reporters who regularly appeared on the morning TV news). All news had to be reported with a global focus so that their content could serve audiences where ad revenue could support it. A year or so later and another round of layoffs. Most of the remaining reporters reporting into editors in the US.

Following the fortunes of those writers for a while after BuzzFeed, they are subjected to a relentless game of musical chairs and new media startups make some splashy hires and then contract or fold, leaving their writers to head back out to complete for a seat after another chair or two has been whipped away. I developed a certain dread every time we made new hires on the editorial side. My overwhelming feeling became “we can’t be trusted with the care of a writing staff”. We couldn’t provide an environment for them to report the news, or to comment thoughtfully on culture and so on.

I worked closer with the senior figures in the US newsroom while we built a rebranded news website for them. Indeed it was a project for them. Our splashy editor-in-chief Ben Smith wanted to distinguish the BuzzFeed News brand from the “quiz people” so people could wrap their heads around the idea of reading a multi-part investigation into the Uyghur concentration camps by the people who did The Dress. The mis-alignment with what the readership cared about what typified by the time we spent on a front-page that could be curated into a number of layouts to present the nature of the news day when 90% of traffic went straight to an article page from a tweet, never seeing the homepage.

On a trip to the newsroom in New York during the project, I happened to be in the room when an all hands meeting was called. The podcast production team was summarily laid off. The team had produced at least two cult classic shows, Another Round and See Something Say Something. The former was an “unapologetically black space”, a very successful black culture show presented by two black women. The latter was a funny and thoughtful podcast that discussed the Muslim experience in America. The team comprised a deep bench of reporting, presenting, and producing talent for the audio format. Bim Adewunmi, a producer on the team who I watched fiercely quiz the sweaty leadership team on the cuts, has gone on to be a producer for This American Life.

Later that afternoon, in a bar on the same block as the office that has since closed (cause of death: COVID-19), the newsroom commiserated as audio of the fraught meeting circulated on gossip sites. It was autumn and the rain was pouring down in the city. An aptly timed torrent of water broke through the ceiling in the middle of the newsroom and somebody tweeted a video, something about leaks at BuzzFeed News.

I began to worry about what business we were really in. We came here to spend investor money and lay off journalists, and we’re all out of investor money. It seemed our remaining business function was to make incredible quantities of journalists jobless in annual or biannual cycles. Some organisations will proudly point to their alumni and what they’ve gone on to be, to claim to be an incubator of great talent. They hope others will infer that they are great talent scouts, that something in the practices and culture on the team cultivates outstanding reporters that go on and do amazing things elsewhere. It obviously begs the question as to why you have quite so many alumni, and whether in all honesty you really set out to be a journalism school or you’re just a media organisation who has a habit of losing (by laying off) great staff.

BuzzFeed has lately shifted to a strategy of mergers and acquisitions. They acquired HuffPost and then Complex. This seemed to be an acceptance of the fact that their existing audience was not going to grow and they didn’t have any ideas to fix that. Instead, they can buy other peoples’ audiences. So they bought HuffPost’s audience. They also bought their staff but had even fewer compunctions about stripping it down. Another of the great new UK newsrooms was scattered to the wind before they even got everybody on the same Google Drive account. Nevertheless, the audience had been bought and hopefully the remaining staff can keep up the output to keep them.

I’m out of the business now. I never had any bold ideas about how to fund media companies, my year on ads saw to it that I was left with no grand illusions about Another Way. So once again I can’t blame anybody in particular for the crap conditions that exist for the people who actually write the stuff that we read. Once again the enemy is capital. There’s a new wave cresting where writers have to cultivate their personal brand independent of their current employer so that they can fire up a successfully monetised Substack newsletter when they get laid off. I’ll probably soak up some opinions on all of this while the remnants of Media Twitter still populate my feed, but hopefully in time that’ll be replaced with thoughts about renewable energy and grid balancing. Or even better, with nothing.

The Max Read newsletter has an interesting take on why media organisations with big stable staffs used to be viable:

But by the 1990s, faced with mounting costs and declining budgets, the CIA stopped covering journalists’ bar tabs, and instead began investing most of its money and talent behind important new agency projects like Google and Mark Burnett Productions. This is called neoliberalism, and it’s why it’s much harder to maintain steady employment in newsmedia in the 21st century than it was in the 20th.

— Max Read, 9th March 2022

Snow spray

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Dropped skis

Sat, 26 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The grey run

Thu, 24 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Reutibach

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

First snow

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

They give it away

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I think the time I spent on the Community team was interesting. Firstly it was the closest knit team I’ve ever been on, socially speaking. Partly there was a good social chemistry between team members and a sense that we had a fun part of the product to work on and we knew about it more than anybody else in the organisation. The pandemic baked in those personal relationships strongly, to the point that we became a sort of insufferable clique.

The product problem was interesting because it was one of the few places working at a publisher where you can actually get to know your users, where they actually have a specific understanding and engagement with BuzzFeed versus somewhere else. The downside was the fear we always had about the community content model being immoral.

These teens (and they were mostly teens) were using the tools we give them to make quizzes and lists for a few different reasons. Some of them were to share amongst their friends at school. Some of them were really interested in a particular fandom and the tools let them create and share fandom content with likeminded people in the community. Others, and this was the group I worried about, saw a byline hosted at buzzfeed.com as a foot in the door that would break them into the world of being a BuzzFeed writer, or a writer generally.

The insidious part of all of it is that they are spending sometimes incredible quantities of time creating content for free, and we were serving ads next to it and making money off of it. Our team’s goals were to increase engagement in that core group, to reward them with points and trophies, and to grow the group. We were directly incentivising that behaviour with performance metrics like boosting the number of community posts written and so on. Meanwhile, we still employ full-time writers who create quizzes and lists and so on for a salary (and not a very good one), while a sub-group of the tech team is working to undercut their labour with free labour from volunteers. You can frame it how you like, and a lot of these users really loved the stuff we were giving them, but that’s the economic reality.

Ferry crossing

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Brideside

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

You did your best

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The new pattern for living seems to go like this. Emerge from a lockdown and shake off the careful life you built inside the restrictions imposed on you. Take a few halting steps out to your friend’s house, to the pub garden, walk the streets more and more carelessly. Soon you can forget the bread baking cycle and the little routines you imposed on yourself so you didn’t bang your head off your own four walls. Live more energetically and spontaneously (while you still can). Soon, travel is back on. Head out of the city and see your parents. Dare to book a plane ticket.

The apartment in Paris

I shot out of the gates myself, determined that I wouldn’t pass up opportunities any more. I went to Switzerland, then France with my girlfriend. In Paris we squeezed it all in with no slack days. We met more cousins than I knew a family tree could accommodate for drinks and dinners and those French lunches where everybody manages to have a couple of glasses of red in the middle of the day.

We spent a week in a manner somewhere between tourists and locals. The apartment in Montparnasse was borrowed from a friend who was out of town, and we went for morning runs. We bought fresh bread some mornings to have with breakfast, which like all meals seemed to involve primarily bread and cheese that had no business being so good. The allowances for being tourists were as follows: the running route inevitably led to the middle of the city (the somethingth arrondisement, I really struggle to get native with those) and some great landmark, we visited the Musée d’Orsay on my urging, and we dawdled around when the path to an appointment led us somewhere nice.

Canal St. Denis

I like the Musée d’Orsay because:

It’s much smaller than the Louvre
It’s a little bit quieter than the Louvre
You spend way less time walking past hall after hall of Christian devotional art (sorry basically everything from 1000-1600) to get to the good stuff
They have a great collection of Rodin busts
The restaurant is inside of a clock

Fans of Starry Night

After Paris, we headed south to stay with Sarah’s parents in their mid-renovation farm building in the Loiret. There things slowed down a lot. For a while I worked remotely from an adjoining building before I came to my senses and booked the rest of the week off to just be with everybody else. A crucial part of everybody else was Pip, the little kitten rescued from a drainpipe. It is quite amazing how much time you can spend watching the kitten, or talking about the kitten to others who are also watching the kitten.

Pip, the gutter cat

For the most part we holed up while Sarah got as much quality time with her parents as could be had in the respite from pandemic-induced estrangement. Her family are spread far and wide geographically, but they’re very close in the important ways, and frankly I don’t know how they cope for long stretches apart in the current climate. On a rare outing from the hamlet we saw a chateau and climbed a watch tower in the middle of a huge forest to see the view. The autumn foliage made it pretty spectacular.

Forest of Orléans

After France, I was only back in the UK for a blip before I got on a plane, alone this time, to New York. This was ostensibly a work trip and indeed I did have lots of meetings and see lots of colleagues I haven’t seen since the pandemic began, and I did go to the giant holiday-slash-IPO party.

However, a big reason for me to get here was to see some friends I haven’t seen in person since before the (all together now) pandemic began. These friends were all made from working at BuzzFeed but half of them don’t work there any more and they were always more than colleagues anyway. During the pits of the lockdown in 2020 we spoke basically all day every day. It’s been really, really cathartic to see them again in person.

New York City skyline from a rooftop in the Bowery

Things have changed for basically all of us during the pandemic and the little re-openings. There are new partners, new apartments, new pets, new jobs. It’s a common refrain that my cohort in particular has had the last few loose years of our twenties taken from us and we’ve been thrust out the other side into that middling settling-down period. While I reject the premise with a mixture of denial and hope that I’ve still got more in me, it’s hard to deny that the average member of the friend group has “grown up” a bit. Perhaps due to circumstances of ventilation and social distancing or perhaps due to how we’ve changed as people, more of my time catching up was spent walking the dog, or chilling in an apartment, or having one or two at the bar and calling it a night. The regrettable truth is that it’s better this way. Rather than the usual week I planned to be here for about ten days, and the reduced pace meant my liver could keep up.

Mysterious Italian American Christmas establishment

Ava drooling

So it got toward the end of the week and things began to get a little bit weird. After the BuzzFeed holiday party a lot of people got contact tracing emails saying they may have been in contact with somebody who has since tested positive for COVID-19. In the meantime, the headlines about the vaccine-resistant and highly transmissible Omicron variant grew from a background murmur to a roar. We cancelled a dinner party and people started laying low. I had a couple more one-to-one hangouts in the open air and got ready to get out of here before the cage came down.

The morning of the day before my flight, I took a lateral flow test to certify myself as fit to fly, and it came back positive. Things rolled into motion from there. I moved my flight. I got out of my shared Airbnb and into a hotel room where I’d be self-isolating for the next few days, perhaps over Christmas. I stocked up the room with supplies to be relatively self-sufficient and now I wait. I’m writing from the hotel room now, while the flight I was supposed to be on flies up the coast of Newfoundland on a great circle back to the British Isles.

So just like last time and the time before, I’ve been a little slow, we’ve all been a little slow to make the change to living defensively. Like last time I wasn’t really sitting rapt as the Omicron variant concerned scientists the world over because I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to get the last good days in while they were still on offer. Was that reckless, selfish? Ask a sample of a hundred people and at least a few would say I was wildly reckless to travel so much and for so long and a few would say I should stop worrying about it. I’m here now. I hope to be home soon for the next quiet phase of a smaller, and hopefully cosier life. When I finally get back to my home and my girlfriend I imagine it’ll be all home cooking and baking and little home improvements and those small joys that can be found close at hand.

The Williamsburg Bridge

Let’s see how long I can stay so objective about my predicament.

Keep Park Clean

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Bloom in December

Sat, 04 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It can be a village

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

We were cycling to work together this morning and my girlfriend bumped into an acquaintance she hadn’t seen in a few weeks in the bike lane. I cycled a little ahead of them down from Ludgate Circus to Blackfriars Bridge and listened to them make smalltalk and catch up. Being in a busy but flowing bike lane on a morning commute usually makes me feel good in a tribal kind of way (us the cyclists vs. them the nasty cars). However, this felt nice because it made the city feel more like a town, and a sort of utopian European one at that. For a moment anyway.

Hunting grounds

Thu, 18 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The feeling of away

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been away from home for just over a week now. I’ve been in France. When I’m not in the UK I feel a lot less claustrophobic; I feel like I have such a wider range of choices to choose for my life. An advantage of this trip has been spending time with people who actually live in not-the-UK. I believe to some extent that people are the same everywhere but it’s been nice to see the variations in the patterns of a life. To stereotype, in France I’m talking about long lunches, cheese, and drinking like a grown up rather than in destructive and socially enforced world record attempts.

The other thing is languages. I have always loved languages and I’ve lazily assumed they have always loved me too, ie. that I was quite good at picking things up. However, the last several days of visiting France with a Swiss woman whose family variously live in, have lived in, or are fluent in the native languages of: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Peru, and the list goes on… well it’s always humbling. My English, my once-confident and now atrophied French, my schoolboy Spanish, and my fledging, absolutely crap German — they’re all I have. In the UK that’s quite something, here that’s a little embarrassing to me, even when you’re spending time with the kindest fluent English-amongst-others speakers of all time. Anyway, my little resolution to myself is to channel the shame of my monoculture upbringing into motivation to keep slogging away at German and naturalising my French at the very least.

I’m working remotely this week but last week I was completely out-of-office in Paris. I did a really pleasing amount of the things that weigh on me when I’m letting myself down: running and reading. I must have read about four books in a week, all modern fiction. I haven’t been updating my watching and reading pages on the website because my system for doing so is a bit broken. Nevertheless, the books I’ve read since coming away are:

Whore of New York by Liara Roux
A Ship-wrecked Sailor by Gabriel García Márquez
Matrix by Lauren Groff
How To Blow Up A Pipeline by Andreas Malm
The Ministry For The Future by Helen Thomas Anderson
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
Animal by Lisa Taddeo

I suppose that’s seven books, not four. That’s what you get when you travel by train a lot, from London to Paris, around the Paris Metro and then down to the Loiret from Paris. Also it helps that I loaded all of these books onto my Kindle so I could slip them all into my coat and carry them around all day. I might be a convert, for travel purposes anyway.

Paris Autumn

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Gainsburg

Sarah in the apartment

Montparnasse Cemetary

The Bully family stone

The windows again

Morning runs

Canal St. Denis

Champ de Mars

The mountains and the beetroots

Wed, 03 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

When I cycled to work this morning the air felt like the mountains. Maybe once it gets cold and dry enough the smog drops out of the air or something (unlikely). Either way, the sky was blue, the sun was low and golden and blinding. The roads were full of cyclists breathing steam and I didn’t trust any patches of glittering moisture I saw not to be ice. I got to work early; I just didn’t want to squander those hours of sunlight when the night comes on so early. By 6pm it can feel like it’s always been dark and always will be.

I’ve made a lot of travel plans for the next few months, a lot for me anyway. France, New York, and New York again. Before travel opened back up I promised myself that when it did I would attack it and not take it for granted again, and I think I’m doing alright at that. Last weekend was the stag do we had to postpone about three times as the pandemic rumbled on. It was worth the wait, everybody was very unwell on Sunday — we are a strange culture.

Also playing on my mind: must cook. My cupboard is full of onions and potatoes. My fridge contains fresh tomatoes, yellow bell peppers, mandarins, apples, kale, some wilting beetroots (what the hell do I do with you), and copious amounts of boxed up couscous with roasted cauliflower.

Drink up

Tue, 26 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I can’t stop watching and listening to things again. I’m back in a cycle of cueing up a continuous stream of video content from dawn until dusk. I walk into the bathroom watching TikTok, I come out casting a podcast to the speakers in the living room, where I work from home. I get on my bike and put my headphones in, queue up another podcast episode while I ride through the streets. It’s getting dark in the evenings. If I don’t get out in the morning before work I don’t go outside. Today I went outside to drop off a letter, I can’t remember the journey. I was listening to something. I don’t know what. In the window behind this text editor is a YouTube video about to start, “I taught my mom how to compose her VERY FIRST piece of music!!”. In ten minutes I need to stop what I’m doing and get on my bike to meet some friends. We’ll talk about some stuff we’ve seen. Then we’re going to the cinema.

Carbohydrate tubes

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I ran out of steam with cooking a little bit this weekend. A lot of that probably has to do with some gargantuan hangovers I inflicted on myself a few days in a row. It also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a victim of my own success in using what’s already in the cupboards. I used up those spices that have been sitting around. I used up those frozen sausages in the freezer. I used up the dregs of that short-grain rice. The upshot is that my cupboards and my fridge are more fundamentally empty than a quick shop could fix. That’s a deeper hole to set off from when you need to cook something.

Through the unattractive haze of a hangover yesterday I tried to think of something meal-shaped that I could produce with the matter I could find in my kitchen. I came to a realisation: mostly what I eat is a pan-fried vegetable with a sauce with salts and fats in it, all on top of a bed of boiled tubes of carbohydrate.

Fried kale with tagliatelle and a homemade tomato sauce

Mushroom, asparagus, and okra stir fry with egg noodles

Instant ramen given a fancy hat

I think I need to do a root and stem re-stock of the basics in my kitchen based on a new raft of go-to recipes. I not that I’m not enjoying this food (I love my own food to a fault), it’s that I don’t want to end up in a rut.

Eating and swimming

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The good bread

Running’s been difficult lately, but swimming in the ponds is getting better each week. It’s cold enough now that it burns your skin all over when you get in. It’s cold enough that when you feel the cold on your legs as you step down the ladder you think, “not everybody would do this”. Very self-satisfied of me. When the burning fades off, this sudden feeling of wellbeing washes over.

Other than that the weekend was quiet There was lots of good food: more red riso arancini, celeriac soup, pancakes with bananas and Biscoff, sourdough from the bakery, embarrassingly good gnome-themed salad dressing. There was bed, the sofa, TV, and movies. We’ve been watching Twin Peaks again because it feels right for autumn. We watched Limbo, which might be my favourite film of the year.

Red miso and wakame arancini

This morning I finished watching Maid, which really makes me want to give up what I do for a living for something more valid (I won’t).

Museums of Oxford

Fri, 08 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

It’s getting darker and colder, but so far I don’t mind. Like I said before, I’m cooking a lot of satisfying food. It’s still warm enough to get into the Hampstead Heath ponds every Saturday morning. The crowd there is thinning out and there’s now a pleasing corps of batty and rich ladies of a certain age who we’re starting to see on a regular basis.

Leftover homemade pesto with udon noodles

I’m doing more in those dark evenings. After the office on Thursdays, we’ve been going to the pub in central London, which feels like behaviour from a previous life. I’m meeting up with friends to watch films in the cinema. The new James Bond movie was packed out.

Last weekend we went to the Ashmolean and Pitt Rivers museums in Oxford. I’ve been to both before but I really like the Pitt Rivers in particular. It’s an anthropological museum and the stuff is organised into glass cases by kind, not by origin or time. So you have a cabinet full of dozens of zithers and zither-like objects from different civilisations across time. Wisely, they’ve done a lot of decolonisation work since I last went. They’ve left the old handwritten orientalist labels on things, alongside explanatory and critical notes. They no longer display human remains or things like shrunken heads, though.

Keys across time

Meadow

Tue, 05 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Time to cook

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

I like to cook a lot. Sometimes I cook all afternoon, one meal after another. I end up with a fridge full of boxed up meals that I can pile through in the week or give to loved ones. Dinner guests are relatively rare these days, in the wake of the pandemic year. Some people have been scattered away from the pestilent city centre. Some people are understandably still reluctant to dive into a full social calendar. Others, like me at the moment, are busy all the time because they’re making up for lost time.

Today I’ve been on something of a comedown from a festival. It was the biggest crowd I’ve been in for years by orders of magnitude. I had a wonderful time, and today I felt very grey in comparison.

To bustle myself along I did some cooking. First I prepared a Japanese style pesto, which was boxed up and put in the fridge, to be paired with soba noodles later. Then I cooked a huge Tuscan bean and kale stew that turned out a bit light on the beans. I skimmed a bit of the pesto and had it with a huge courgette (when does it become a marrow?) I chopped and fried, served with some spaghetti for dinner.

Tomorrow I’ll make red miso and and seaweed arancini from a recipe I’ve never tried before. All of this cooking over the weekend is in aid of having some work friends over for dinner. An excuse.

Lands End

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

The Undergrowth

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

You've not met many fishermen

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Journal - 30th July 2021

Fri, 30 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

There’s been a gap. There have been some changes.

I left that house alone and I crossed the river
I miss the cat
I cycle everywhere I go if I can
I’m learning a new language for her and also me
I live alone most of the time
I’ve been off the island and onto another island
I’m fully vaccinated against the virus
I’ve sold most of my books (I still have plenty of books)
I swim in the ponds; I see my friends for breakfast
I’m happy and I’m not ill any more
I’m busy; I squeeze people in; I squeeze them into my calendar
I’m twenty-seven years old

Freezing the allotments

After we got back from running I went to Dulwich park to take some pictures. We sat on a bench in the cold and had a burger and chips.

Street playgrounds

Last night was Burns Night. We realised much too late and had to scramble to make our own vegan haggis, which was a big success in the end. Leftovers for lunch today were a delight. We finally broke dry January with the last drams of a couple of bottles of good whisky.

Sun, 20 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Could that work

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

How she got there

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

My top films of 2020

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I think the last film I saw in the cinema before they all closed was The Lighthouse. After that weird nautical trip we emerged from The Ritzy in Brixton in the middle of the afternoon, dazed and out of sync with the normal world where people were charging up and down the pavement. The cinema was only a couple of minutes down the road from where I was living at the time; it didn’t seem like a big deal.

A couple of weeks earlier I saw 1917 in the Picturehouse in Dalston. I really loved it. Of course when I got home and read the reviews they were critical, and had good points. The story did seem to be a thin veil over a storytelling conceit that Mendes wanted to try out, or an overly romanticised account of based on the life of his great-grandfather or whoever it was referenced in the end card. At the time though I was totally carried along for the ride. I miss cinema spectacle.

I wish I’d seen Uncut Gems at the cinema. I watched it on Netflix at home and it the usual from the Safdie brothers: watching people make worse and worse decisions until you want to throw up, and generally enjoying the ride. If you’re going to be surrounded by the filmic equivalent of a panic attack it may as well be at cinema scale. After watching that I wanted more punishment so we watched Heaven Knows What. It’s an earlier Safdie brothers movie about a few people bumming around Manhattan, scoring heroin and hurting themselves and one another. The story belongs to the lead actress. The Safdies met her while they were filming something else, and one of them convinced her to write her story down, and eventually to play the lead in their film adaptation of it. I came away needing a shower.

I also wish I’d seen the film of the year in the cinema. I watched Parasite on a laptop in bed, like so many films this year. I really needn’t have; I watched it back in January and the cinemas were still open. For a film that won the Oscar for best picture, it didn’t have a particularly wide cinema distribution, though. Anyway, Parasite was so fun and well-executed from beginning to end. I rewatched Snowpiercer with the realisation that it was Bong Joon-ho. It’s a good ride that bangs you over the head with Bong’s ideas about society; Parasite’s themes sneak up you a little bit more, but are hilariously and outrageously on show by the final scenes. In May, I got round to another of Bong Joon-ho’s films: Mother. It was slower than the other two, but no less tense. It’s about how far a mother with to to protect her son from the world, even as he seems to be doing other people harm.

I think that right before I caught a flight to India, I watched The Farewell at home. It was really fun and touching and it took me way too long to get around to it. The pandemic has made for so many difficult relationships between my peers and their families, and Akwafina’s great performance as someone around my age awkwardly trying to do the right thing amidst death and family keeps coming back to me. On the flight we watched Honeyland, in-flight entertainment systems synced up by hand and headphones in. It’s a documentary, the story of a wild beekeeper in a remote village in Macedonia and the trails and tribulations she goes through. It’s slow TV, and it’s really good.

We got back to the UK just as everything turned to shit. For months we used films not necessarily for their own sake but as distractions. Sometimes I needed a dim distraction, something easy and trashy. Sometimes I felt like I should be using the time locked inside to better myself, watch something enriching.

One of the success stories in the first lockdown was Portrait of a Lady on Fire. It was just a visually beautiful film, a small love story with the some nice pathos. We watched it one night in that house share after watching another briefing from the Prime Minister, back when everybody watched those. Another film we watched as a house during the worst of the first lockdown was Moffie, a film about a South African boy conscripted to fight a border conflict with Angola. The atmosphere around him is violent and threatening, most of all from his fellow soldiers who radiate dangerous, volatile masculinity. In the end, it’s a love story.

On the other end then is the trash you watch to pass the time. I watched Extraction. It stars one of the Chrises as who cares, he’s very good at fighting. Action movies are now so informed by video games that they seem to merge, the impossible tracking shots and first person perspective seem to reinforce the permeability between the two forms, aimed at the same audience. I also watched Emma, totally boring but passable period drama. Chalamet is slimy, Pugh plays a child.

I finally watched Bohemian Rhapsody after avoiding it for years and it was so awful. The dialogue is ham-fisted, the structure meandering and directionless, the editing absolutely bizarre. Malik’s Mercury is pretty good but he’s got nothing to work with. His queerness is incredibly sanitised. It’s one of two films I saw this year that I found aggressively bad. The other, which took itself far more seriously, was Only God Forgives. I get that it was trying to be a violent mood piece but it just came off as self-important and vaguely racist. Gosling is a good action hero, but this is a boring project.

Christopher Nolan has spent most of the year howling for his film Tenet to be shown in cinemas, and he did get his way. In the intervening period between lockdowns I went to see it at the local Picturehouse. It was rubbish, really. The central idea was quite fun, and there was some good spectacle but overall the thing didn’t hold together. I’m glad I saw it in the cinema, but even there I couldn’t hear what the hell anybody was saying, the dialogue was mixed that badly.

When I’m hungover I like to lie on the sofa under a duvet and watch bad and relentlessly male movies. I watched 21 Bridges, one of Chadwick Bozeman’s final projects, where he plays a cop killing crooked cops. I don’t know if it was good, I suspect it wasn’t, but that’s hardly the point with films like that. It feels inspired by Training Day, which I also watched while I was hungover this year and is arguably better but much more problematic in its treatment of the Criminal Underworld. Then there’s Greyhound, in which Tom Hanks tells an all-grey war story about some boats. I’m pretty sure it was bad, but it passed the time while I waited for the nausea to pass. Green Room helped me to understand people who are afraid of dogs, getting your face eaten by a Rottweiler looks like a hell of a way to go. Moneyball, which I saw this year for maybe the third time (an indefensible use of my free time) is so boring but I somehow love half-watching it.

On The Rocks was a cosy watch. Hanging out with Bill Murray is always the point of any movie he’s in, and it never disappoints. The story is small, and most of what you get out of the film is that peripheral stuff: how cool everybody is, how nice all the places and things are. Watching it got me on a peel of watching Sofia Coppola films I’d missed. I get that Somewhere was supposed to feel stale, but it was too much. A Very Murray Christmas is a good time and I am happy to defend it.

When a film is so hyped it often takes the dazzle off the actual experience of watching it. If Beale Street Could Talk is so beautiful and tender and everything I was told it would be, but the thing is it’s been a few years of people telling me. I wish I could go back in time and just get on with watching it in cinemas in the year of release. I’ll keep listening to the soundtrack for a long time.

The best case scenario is taking a chance on something and being pleasantly surprised. Perhaps the best example of that was Rams, an Icelandic film ostensibly about two estranged brothers who defy a governmental order to destroy their flock of sheep during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. It’s really a story about authority, community, and brotherly love. I loved it and I think about Gummi and his rams a lot.

Another case of a punt paying off was Rocks. Mercifully released on Netflix, it tells the story of a poor girl in London whose mother abandons her and her younger brother, for whom she has to care while keeping it together at school. It all feels very real and relatable to me, and Rock’s downfall is all the more painful to watch for it. The shining light of this movie is the supporting cast of Rocks’s friends, all teenage actors putting in great performances.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is the best documentary I’ve seen this year. Of all of the documentaries being passed around while Black Lives Matter protests played out on Twitter, this is the one I watched that stuck with me. The film has interesting origins. A bunch of young Swedish filmmakers travelled to America in ‘67 to document the unfolding cultural revolution and captured an incredible collection of interviews with civil rights leaders at the beginnings of their careers. Stokey Carmeical interviewed with his mother, Angela Davies before her trial. The footage sat on a shelf for decades, and then was re-edited together in the modern moment.

That’s it, I don’t have a conclusion. Watching films at home has become a way bigger part of my life this year. Honestly I’m hoping next year I’m back to watching fewer films, more of them being at the cinema, and spending more of my time doing stuff with friends instead. In the meantime, I’m glad for the distraction.

am i depressed again or did i just forget my afternoon coffee

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

My top miscellanea of 2020

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve spent a lot of this year living in the worlds other people have made for us. The world of our senses is either too boring (the insides of our homes, dinner arriving in cardboard at the front door) or too awful (bodies in refrigerated trucks, forests burning, and police brutality) to enjoy, so I’ve been turning to media more than ever. It’s been mediating my perception of the world, organising the information so I can take it in, or turning it into stories so I can connect with it on some emotional level with my burned out stump of a brain.

The media I think about the most is film, TV, and books, and so I’ll write those up a little later in the month. There’s also a good chance there are some late entries to those categories as I wile away the days around Christmas. Here instead are the podcasts, games, articles from big publications, and weird corners of the internet that have stood out this year.

Podcasts

I listen to podcasts when I can’t ready something but I need to be occupied or distracted. The idealised version of myself runs with no music or podcasts, he just lets his mind focus on the slap of his shoes on the ground and the steady rhythm of his breathing. The real me reaches for stories and news to fill the empty space and to pull himself out of his body so he can ignore the pain of his chest legs and keep running. The same goes for cooking. I really love cooking something new and complicated and sometimes I do actually just sit and cook to the sounds of water bubbling and oil hissing. A lot of the time though, I need something to chatter to me.

Song Exploder & Switched On Pop

There is one more situation podcasts feature in my life, actually. COVID-19, when it has permitted travel at all, has pushed us away from trains across the country and planes to others and towards long car rides. In the safety of our metal and glasses we’ve been able to travel for breaks in Devon and Dorset this year.

Music podcasts are a sweet spot for entertaining a driver doing the long haul. They aren’t a relentless wall of voice, like an audiobook. They’re episodic, and the theme changes up every half hour to forty minutes if you queue them back to back. They’re filled with clips of music from different sources that follow a train of thought so you don’t have to change the track over while you’re driving.

The best two music podcasts I’ve found are Song Exploder and Switched On Pop. The first, Song Exploder has an artist walk us through the writing, recording, and production of one of their songs. The interviewer is entirely edited out of the show so you just have a well guided monologue from the artist and their collaborators and the relevant parts of the song are ingenuously edited and woven around them. A friend of mine who I recommended the show to says he just didn’t get music before he listened to the show. I can’t really fathom that but anyway, now he seeks out new music all the time and listens to albums from front to back and gets loads out of it. It just took being shown what choices go into the music we listen to.

Switched On Pop is a musicology and critical theory podcast that does something I’m a sucker for: analysing pop or “low” culture through a bunch of different critical lenses. One host is a songwriter and the other is an academic musicologist and jazz nerd. Together they deep dive on the cultural or musical topics surrounding a pop song in what turns out like a critical theory tutorial with again, incredible sound editing to support the storytelling.

A good starter episode for Song Exploder is Scott Street by Phoebe Bridgers and a good starter for Switched On Pop is Rosie or Flamenco & Rosalia.

This American Life

Nothing beats This American Life for storytelling. The show seems to have a pretty irregular publishing schedule and they often air reruns so I haven’t managed to form a habit around it. Instead, I’m reminded to check one of the This American Life episodes in my feed every now and again and whenever I do I end up listening to three or four in a week. They’re the kind of radio story that make you laugh and cry out in public.

This year, for their 25th anniversary, they republished some of their favourite episodes from years gone by. Americans In Paris featuring David Sedaris and 24 Hours at the Golden Apple are both wonderful.

The Daily

It cannot be escaped, and I don’t listen to The Daily every day because when I used to do so it was part of an unbalanced diet comprising a hosepipe of distressing and overly granular data about the world. Sometimes I come downstairs in the morning and I want that morning breakfast news-y feeling, though, and it’s still The Daily that I reach for.

The recordings they got of a Brooklyn hospital during the first peak of the pandemic in NYC have stayed with me for months.

The Dollop & The History of England Podcast

I found The History of England Podcast and listened to the full back catalog while I was on strong painkillers last year and so I associate the period spanning the Roman withdrawal to The Wars of the Roses with lying in bed in a delirium. David Crowther, the one man bad who runs the show, was off sick with a lengthy illness for a while at the beginning of the year. He’s back now, though, and I’m still sure to check in and listen to what is basically a very well-researched man ramble on about history in an affable and self-effacing tone, recorded from his shed. This podcast is a place I go, and it’s a nice place.

The Dollop is a new one (thanks Hana!). A historian tells a ripping yarn from history to a layman, and they riff liberally over the top of it. The improv-on-info format is a tried and true one, but this podcast really brings something to it and it makes for a great way to pass a couple of hours with stories from history.

The History of England Podcast should really just be listened to in chronological order but this recent one on Elizabeth I’s love life has the honour of ruining the pronunciation of the word marriage for me. The Dollop episode about America’s First Ghost was my intro and it’s a great one.

Games

We bought a Nintendo Switch at the back end of 2019 and it really, really came into its own in 2020. I’ve lost the will with the other consoles for a lack of games that allow local multiplayer and that I can find sufficiently playful. Overall, other than the odd sim game, I think my priorities for games just align with Nintendo now. Also, the form factor for the Switch has been big for us in a year when crying and playing a game in bed because going downstairs is going to too much today… is a relevant user story.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Zelda arrived in our lives just in time for the first lockdown in April. It’s the game we allowed ourselves to sink into completely for hours every day. The world is fleshed out and lush, remarkably so for a handheld console. The RPG elements and mini-games meant this game had the stamina to take the hours and hours we needed to spend in Hyrule instead of the real world this spring. Sometimes you just need to spend some time galloping around in some far-flung corner of the world.

The only let down with Breath of the Wild was what happens at the end. Given the state of the world outside Hyrule, we were really hoping and expecting to be rewarded with a utopic Hyrule without Ganon after the work was done. Instead, you have to linger in the moment just before everything was okay. Apparently, it’s a standard for the Zelda genre.

Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing was really just another vessel to pour our time into during lockdown. It has the added bonus of providing another digital space to hang out with people in. You can see it as depressing or heartening that we were all willing to play a slow farming and building game this year seemingly with the ultimate aim of hosting our friends and maybe exchanging gifts.

Super Mario Odyssey

As a latecomer to the Nintendo ecosystem, I don’t have fond childhood memories of playing the earlier Mario games on the Nintendo DS or whatever, it’s all new to me. I haven’t internalised the Mario grammar system where orange signifies fireball, where star signifies invincibility, speed, and points.

As far as I’m aware though, the absolute focus on hats in this iteration of the series is new. In this game, everything is a hat and everything has a hat. The hats are sentient, they appear to be a species of their own with their own culture evolving in parallel with koopas and Italian plumbers. When the Bowser-Peach abduction-with-implied-sexual-violence set piece plays out in this game, there’s a parallel abduction of a member of the hat species. A hat-Mario accompanies the player on their elliptical rescue mission.

Super Mario Odyssey was really fun, and my main impression from the whole experience was that I’ve never thought about hats enough.

Articles

It’s hard to know what to bother reading online. These articles have all been informative in some way or another. Everything in the world has already been said a million times, especially online, so these articles are the things that found me and told me something in a way that got through.

Ed Yong & Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic

Everybody’s writing about epidemiology all of a sudden. Do you remember last year and all the years preceding where science journalists had a really hard time finding and keeping a job? Well now there are floods and floods of articles about the minutiae of viral load, aerosolised particulates, and respiratory co-factors — and I strongly suspect a good number of those bylines aren’t experts in the field.

Until this year I knew Ed Yong as the author of I Contain Multitudes, a much lauded pop science book about the amazing bacterial fauna of the human body that I picked up and put down in relatively short order. This year though he’s emerged as the pre-eminent scientific voice on the virus. He has been writing outstanding columns on the virus all year, but this one is where he really hit his stride.

Zeynep Tufekci is a not a microbiologist but she is really great cultural critic and observer of society. She has also been remarkably early at drawing attention to two themes in addressing the pandemic: the role of ventilation and non-uniform contagion.

The Third Thing

The pandemic has taken relatively little from me. I’ve kept my job, I’m still living in the same city, my relationships have endured, and I have my health. It has taken away something far less tangible, though. What do trips to the pub after work, a film at the cinema, going out for dinner, visiting some friends in another city and checking out a museum, popping over for tea — what do they all amount to and what have we lost by losing them?

The Third Thing in an essay by the poet Donald Hall about his relationship with his wife and the role in it of the third thing. The third thing is what you talk about, what you enjoy together, the third point on which your gazes meet. This pandemic has brutally trashed so many of my third things, and this essay helped me articulate that.

The Battle of Helm’s Deep

Discovering this history blog (and the rediscovery of blogs generally will become more of a theme soon) was a joy. This guy’s deal is that he reviews the historicity of stuff like Game of Thrones, Assassins Creed, and most completely: The Lord of the Rings. His many part series on the Battle of Helm’s Deep is a deep dive into the minutiae of armour, archers, siege machinery, and something I’d never heard of before called operations. If it wasn’t so straight faced and informative it would just be funny.

The Battle of Helm’s Deep series is what got me into this blog but it has a depth of content with lots coming out all the time. Right now I’m awaiting the next instalment in a series about the depiction of the Dothraki in Game of Thrones.

What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say

Joe Biden beat Donald Trump in the US Presidential Election, which is a good thing that happened this year. Way back in the year there was this profile of Joe Biden that my mum sent me, for the same reason she often sends me things: he’s a stammerer. I’m a stammerer too. When I was a kid it was bad, couldn’t speak barely at all sometimes bad. Nowadays I’ve gotten good at switching out words for other ones and most people barely notice. That is, until I seem to have forgotten a word, which is never really me having forgotten a word. So it goes for Biden too, apparently, except for him it makes him look like a senile old man running for president.

Corners of the internet

I’ve spent more time on blogs this year, and on those crazy personal websites that are more of a thing of the 1990s than the platform-driven internet of today. It’s a conscious decision and unfortunately much of the world of blogs or of this anti-platform counter-culture is full of blog posts and blogging. However, there are some real gems to be found.

Diamond Geezer is the blog of a seemingly anonymous man living in East London and loving it. His methodical coverage of updates to the bus routes go alongside walks through individual wards of the old City of London, and ranked lists of all the parks. As somebody trapped here for most of the year, it’s refreshing to find the words of somebody who seems to find no end to the novelty to be found in this city.

Paul Ford wrote a good introduction to the world of tilde servers, in which he built his own. They’re Linux servers that you can apply to be given a user account for. You SSH in and become part of a little community inside that box. There’s mail, IRC, little ASCII gardens. The little window the outside world gets is the idiosyncratic pages the users in the box can serve at their tilde address: https://tilde.town/~user. Everything else is contained within. It’s been a fun introduction to the shared box model of unix systems, like I imagine things ran in colleges in the 80s.

There will be more

This is the best 2020’s bric-a-brac, the jumble of media types I haven’t given their own space for whatever reason. Before the end of the year I’m aiming to compile similar round ups for movies, TV, and books.

It has, we know, been a weird year. It’s left an imprint on everything I’ve done and consumed and enjoyed. I wouldn’t have played this many games, wouldn’t have read so much about epidemiology. I certainly wouldn’t have watched so much TV and film on my sofa, but I’ll get into that.

on strike until the rain stops

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Cooking Terms

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I love cooking but the terminology seems very fluid to me until I hear chefs talking to each other about how they prepare an ingredient in a way that sounds so specific. It turns out these words do have distinct meanings that I struggle to hold in my head.

Sautéing

A very awkward Frenglish word. Means frying ingredients in not very much oil but over a relatively high heat.

Searing

A larger ingredient like a meat is cooked over a very high heat just to brown the surface. The process that makes things go brown is called the Maillard reaction. Usually things are seared and then cooked over a lower heat to get the middle.

Sweating

Sweating involves cooking diced vegetables, like onions, over a low heat in some oil so that they evaporate some of their moisture without browning at all.

Braising

A combination of wet and dry heat. First the ingredient is sautéed and then transferred to a covered pot with a hot liquid like a stock or gravy.

Tempering

Cooking herbs and spices in hot oil to get them to release some of their essential oils before being mixed in with the rest of the dish.

Deglazing

Taking the oil you were cooking food in and running it off to start a sauce by adding stock etc. Probably only applies to meat.

Coddling

Heating food in water that’s just below boiling point. It’s pretty much only done to eggs now.

Poaching

Heating food in water that’s about 70-80 degrees celsius.

Simmering

Heating food in liquids that are above poaching but below boiling temperature, 70-100 degrees celsius.

The hills of south-east London

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I went and saw Jamie in the park. It was freezing cold today but I had panicked and put on a heavy coat. The hills in Dulwich were unrelenting from the beginning and I was dripping in sweat before I reached Clapham. We spoke about things breaking down, about how much we can endure and how many times we can restart things and change our conditions.

We were up late last night, we’re in a strange detente for now.

Christmas is looming and forcing everything.

Wilding

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Pellatt Road

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In East Dulwich there is a Pellatt Road. I still don’t know how to pronounce it; a simple “pellet” seems most statesmanly. I’ve wondered where that name came from. It struck me as a person’s name, probably.

I started looking, and found an MP for Southwark who died a little before a plot called Friern Farm near the village of Dulwich in Surrey was bought up and replaced with a tidy horseshoe of early Victorian streets, one of which was named Pellatt Road. Taking that as good enough, I sank into a rabbit hole finding out about what life he led to get a street here named after him.

Apsley Pellatt Snr was born in 1763 to a man of the same name. His father (Apsley, obviously) was from Lewes, his mother Sarah was from Bermondsey. When he was twenty-five he married Mary Maberly. Her family were wealthy curriers (leather finishers; I had to look it up). Her brother John would eventually break out from the family business to form his own business, buying a mill in Aberdeen and supplying leather and linen good to the army who were busy fighting Napoleon in Europe. Apsley and his wife settled in his home town of Lewes, but his business was at St. Paul’s Churchyard.

In 1790 Apsley had his first son, who would become Apsley Pellatt IV, the main but by no means the only Apsley Pellatt in our story. That same year Apsley Snr bought a glass house on Holland Street. The Falcon Glass House was about a twenty minute walk from his business in the churchyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral. He would step out of his shop in the shadow of the cathedral, walk down Lugdate Hill and turn left down Blackfriars Road, past the Blackfriars Pub (which I have personally tried and can attest is worth a stop), over the bridge and through the warren of workshops that would have butted up the water’s edge on the south bank of the Thames. Nowadays, the Millenium Bridge would have halved the trip between his shop floor and his factory if there wasn’t a big Tate Modern sitting where his glass works should be. Anyway, Pellatt’s acquisition had been making glass for almost a hundred years up to that point and Apsley got to work getting to grips with the craft.

Pellatt & Greens's St. Paul's show room in a fashion magazine from 1809

By the turn of the 19th century, Pellatt & Greens Co were a renowned glass manufacturer. They had their production on the south bank of the Thames and their showroom at No. 16 St. Paul’s Churchyard, with bazaars in two locations in Marylebone. Money from the slave economy powering the industrial revolution enabled grew the merchant middle class in the Georgian era, which in turn freed up money for ornaments and curios. It’s in that context you can imagine Pellatt & Greens show room servicing a rotating cast of upper middle class couples arguing about which luxury decanters and wine glasses would do. In a simple analogue to celebrities appearing with luxury products in advertisements today, Pellatt & Greens’s advertisements make it very clear they are “Glass Makers to the Queen”.

A trade card advertising the show rooms of Pellatt & Greens

Britain had been fighting for supremacy on the seas for decades, be it mercantile or naval. Cargo ships and warships were a crucial backbone of the country. It seems Apsley Pellatt had one eye on his luxury goods business and another eye on dealing himself into the naval-industrial complex. In 1807, Apsley Pellatt took out a patent on the “illuminator”. This invention, basically a porthole, would be ideal for illuminating the dark and dingy lower decks of a ship. Its round, lensed glass would focus light into the interior as well as provide some more strength against getting smashed in by cargo jostling into it or rough seas pounding it.

This method consists in placing an illuminator in suitable apertures in the decks or sides of ships and vessels, and in buildings and other places, to answer as a window or skylight. This illuminator is a piece of solid glass of a circular or elliptical form at the base, but the circular form is the most productive of light, and the strongest against accident; it is convex on the side to be presented outwards to receive and condense the rays of light, and has a flat or plane surface on the inside of the room or apartment, which it is intended to light. It is or approaches to a segment of a sphere or spheroid; it is in fact a lens; both sides may in general be left polished, but where the illuminator is to be placed in a situation where any danger may be apprehended of it being acted upon as a burning glass, one side at least should be ground or roughed. Its size is various according to the purpose or situation for which it is designed, and its convexity is increased or diminished according to the side required. The ordinary dimensions are a base of about five inches diameter, to one inch and a half in height from the center of the base; the illuminator is fixed in a square or circular frame made of wood or of metal, with glazier’s putty or other cement.

For decks and other parts of ships, its construction is so managed by thickening the edges, as to render it capable or resisting any injury from the weight of goods of every description, and the beating of the waves of the sea in the ports and scuttles. It is let into the deck or other building with the convex part projecting above it, so as to receive the rays of light; it is fixed in the deck or other building either with or without a wooden or metal frame, according as the space wherein it is to be fixed will allow; a groove of only one quarter of an inch will be sufficient to keep it firm, and in a deck of three inches thick, one quarter of an inch is bearing enough; in decks of less substance, the bearing must be increased one-eighth of an inch. The under part of the deck or other building which forms the ceiling of the cabin or place must be sloped away all round, so as to form a small dome, that the rays of light may diverge in all directions; the like method is to be observed in the ports and scuttles of ships, or in what place soever the illuminator is fixed. By being fixed in a square or round frame, with or without hinges, it may be made to open and shut for the free admission of air in hot climates.

In dwelling houses, buildings, and all other places, it is far superior to the skylights now generally used, not being liable to accident or leakage, nor can water pass under what it is fitting into. For buildings it is necessary that one side should remain unpolished, as the rays of the sun produce the prismatic colours when shining on the illuminator; this precaution is unnecessary in ships’ decks, as the traffic on them in a short time grinds or roughs the upper surface, but in no degree to prevent the effect, but if any thing conveying a more pleasing light under ground, vaults, and cellars, wherever any communication may be made with the open air, may also be lighted with this Invention, excepting only where from its situation it may be liable to injury from the passing or repassing or horses, &c

The illuminator will also prove a very important substitute for the glass now used in lanthorns for lighting the powder magazines in ships of war, care being taken that the convex side be in the inside of the lanthorn where the light is placed.

Apsley Jnr joined the business in 1811, when he was 21. Presumably he’d been away getting an education, given his later authorship of scientific engineering works and political radicalism. It seems he spend his twenties taking over responsibility for his father’s business as the elder Pellatt gradually aged into retirement, and trying to start a family. In 1814 he married Sophronia, who died just a year later aged just 23 and making him a painfully young widower. Seemingly he was able to put himself back together, or he felt the pressure to find another wife to create an Apsley V with. He married Margaret Elizabeth Pellatt in 1816, and had a son named Apsley in 1819.

The Pellatt and Greens Company were a community fixture by then. They donated the considerable sum of twenty pounds a year to the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing and Labouring Poor, a charitable record that later works to Apsley IV’s credit. The local papers record a couple of small misfortunes that befell the company. The theft of a large quantity of their glass is reported from a cart in the City of London one Thursday night in early February 1818. The next Tuesday, the unfortunate culprit, Joseph Napphali was found in the apparently notorious Weavers Arms in Finsbury after trying to hawk the stolen glass in Petticoat Lane. The Weavers Arms was demolished in 1986 and the site has been subsumed as part of the enormous UBS headquarters in the Liverpool Street/Broadgate Circus megacomplex, so arguably still a den of thieves. Anyway, he was brought before the magistrate in Worship Street and presumably went down.

In 1812, Mr. Fox, a clerk from the Pellatt and Greens manufactory was found dead on Blackfriars Road in the early evening. He had clocked off and was presumably on his way over the bridge to check in at the manufactory over the river and head home. The coroner, possibly eager to similarly clock off and head home, delivered the verdict: “Died by the visitation of God.”

Bunhill Fields, a burying ground for Dissenters

Apsley Pellatt IV’s mother, Mary Pellatt died in 1822 at the age of 54. Four years later her husband followed her. The senior Apsley Pellatt died in 1826 at the age of 63. He lived to see the entire reign of George III, the independence of the American colonies, the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, and the abolition of the slave trade, but missed the abolition of slavery itself by just a few years. He left fifteen children and a respected glass company. He was buried with Mary in Bunhill Fields in Shoreditch, which was dedicated as a public green space in 1853, and in which I used to go and sit and eat lunch when I was working for Depop in their Paul Street office. Somebody, perhaps the in-laws given how many Maberlys are buried in there, negotiated for them to be interred in the tomb of one Obadiah Boote along with a mix of well-heeled Georgians merchants. The side of the vault reads:

Apsley Pellatt Esq late of the St Pauls Church Yard & the Falcon Glass Works Dec 21 Jan. 1826 In the 63 Year of his age.

Elizabeth Pellatt Daughter of Apsley & Elizabeth Pellatt & grand-daughter of the above. Born Nov. 2. 1817. Died May 16 1834

Mrs Mary Pellatt. Wife of Mr Apsley Pellatt died Dec 14. 1822 Aged 54 Years

…A whole host of Maberlys omitted

Apsley Pellatt. Grandson of the above. Born Dec. 2 1819. Died May 29th 1839.

Apsley Pellatt IV took control of the company on his father’s death and renamed it Apsley Pellatt & Co. The younger Apsley took a keen interest in the scientific side of glass-working. Michael Faraday’s notebooks remark that a sort of laboratory for optics had been built on the Falcon Glass House premises in the 1820s.

Drawings taken fro a tour of Falcon Glass House given to a trade magazine

Around this time, a (clearly very excited) journalist from a trade magazine came to visit the glassworks of Apsley Pellatt & Co.

The factory is situated in Holland Street … It is not the cleanest neighbourhood in the world, but we must not mind that: it is the glass-house we want, not the street: and if we wish for information, we must not travel in shiny boots and white kid gloves. The glass factory, then, of Messrs. Pellatt comprises several buildings necessary to the art, and occupies about three-quarters of an acre.

It is almost impossible to describe one’s sensations on entering this buildings for the first time. In the ordinary way, the visitor is generally shown the glass-house first. He is lost in wonder. He gazes around him upon the dingy walls, in the centre of which is the melting furnace, the chimney of which rises through the iron roof. He cannot reconcile the dimness of the place with the bright glow from the pot-arches or the dull radiance proceeding from the anncaling arch. He feels some little alarm as he sees dusky figures close behind him swinging about great masses of what appears to be red-hot iron.

Pellatt's sulphide reproduction of Wedgwood's abolition medallion

Apsley IV’s interest in the science of glass-working quickly yielded results. In 1819, he took out a patent for a process for encases medallions in glass. Not much later the Falcon Glass Works began producing sulphides. Sulphides (also known as incrustations) are glass wares that contain three-dimensional images, often busts of heroes or beloved relatives in military dress, known as cameos. Georgian London went through a fad for these cut glass memorabilia items and Apsley Pellatt Co profited from it by being early with the technology and producing a range of products: decanters, paperweights, bottles, jugs, mugs.

It seems Pellatt spent the earlier part of the 19th century refining his glass techniques for cameos and writing up his findings. In 1821 he published his Memoir on the Origin, Progress and Improvement of Glass Manufacture including Glass Incrustations.

Pellatt was a political liberal. His father had donated serious sums of money to associations for the poor, and the younger Apsley did the same. His views on universal religious equality were relatively extreme for the time, and he wasn’t quiet about them. He joined the Common Council of the City of London, which makes sense given his position as a prominent merchant local business figure. He was also a member of a couple of couple of counter-cultural political organisations with the aim of securing religious freedom for all, and in particular for Jews. The Philo-Judaean Society aimed to remove some of the discriminatory actions against Jews in the markets in the City: laws limited the number of Jewish brokers in the Exchange, Christian Sabbath laws prevented Jews from opening their businesses in Farrington market on Sundays. Pellatt petitioned the City to give Jews freedom of the city in 1829. He proposed to increase the number of licensed Jewish brokers in 1830, and he made the case for the Jewish market sellers in 1832.

Top of the transcript of Pellatt's testimony in defence of the Jewish traders in the City

Sometime in the 1840s, Pellatt settled his family in Staines. That put his manufactory in Southwark, his showrooms in the City and Marylebone, and his home in Surrey. For reasons I can’t really fathom, Apsley Pellatt first ran as an MP in Bristol, in 1847. Perhaps he didn’t want to put his neck out in the City and threaten his business. His opponent in Bristol, a Mr. Berkeley, won handily. The City of Bristol was not ready to support a candidate who was for universal suffrage and religious freedom. In 1852 he tried again much closer to home. A piece in The Economist called The Coming Elections: Southwark and Finsbury gives us this:

Though the time for dissolving Parliament is not yet fixed, the din of the coming elections is heard in almost every part of the country. In many places we regret to announce there are divisions amongst the Liberals, who, having obtained a triumph, now seem, like other victorious parties, to be inclined to quarrel about trifles amongst themselves. In Southwark, for example, Sir William Molesworth is assailed, and Mr Apsley Pellatt, a very worthy man, an excellent reformer, a promoter of peace and good-will, offer himself to contest the borough in the interest of one section of Liberals against another.

So Pellatt has decided to try and outflank the already Liberal constituency of Southwark. He was running as a Dissenter (a Protestant to Protestantism) in a borough with a good number of them, a Liberal in a safe Liberal seat, and as Aspley Pellatt the renowned glass merchant and employer in the area. His professional organisation, the Institution of Civil Engineers, are happy to report:

His influential position in the Borough of Southwark, where he so long resided, brought him into prominence as a politician.

…

At the general election in 1852, Mr. Pellatt was himself returned to that constituency, and he remained a useful member of the legislature for five years, interesting himself in various commercial questions, and voting in favour of all measures of reform.

They’re clearly proud of their own boy. Unfortunately for them, with his entry in the political life came his retirement from Apsley Pellatt Co, which passed to his brother Frederic and became Pellatt & Co. The trend for cut glass memorabilia faded away with the ascension of Queen Victoria. You could blame that for the gentle decline of the Pellatt & Co enterprise; a lot of the records seems to rather cruelly imply Fred was to blame.

Apsley lost his seat in the 1857 election, and he lost again in 1859. I saw somewhere that he was a political victim of a banking corruption scandal (as opposed to an actual victim) in that 1857 election and presumably never managed to shake that. By the time he lost the 1859 election he was 68 years of age. His father had died at 63. Apsley Pellatt IV made it to 72. He fell ill around the 10th April 1863 and it looks like he headed for treatment in Balham. He died “of paralysis” there on 17th April. His wife Margaret Elizabeth Pellatt followed him eleven years later and they were buried together in Staines.

For hundreds of years, East Dulwich was divided from Dulwich proper along the historical boundary of the Friern Manor and Dulwich Manor, the latter transforming into a College town from the gifts of Edward Alleyn in the 17th century. Lordship Lane roughly traces that boundary, and put East Dulwich just over the border in the borough of Southwark. While the esteemed Southwark businessman, scientist, reformer, and politician Apsley Pellatt was being interred in Staines, builders were bidding for the contract to transform Dulwich from a village in the Surrey countryside into a London suburb.

In just a few years, train lines spread down into the area and housing enclosed the old hamlet. It seems the building of Pellatt Road’s surrounding streets was at least nearly completed by 1882, when the Heber Road School was dedicated. In those years then, some builder or councilman was looking at the new plan of roads on the old Friern estate and cast an eye at the electoral history or perhaps was a Radical type, or maybe just knew somebody who had worked at the Falcon Glass House on Holland Street, and threw Apsley Pellatt’s name into the mix.

Aspley Pellatt IV, MP for Southwark, at the age of about 70

Green chain walk

Sat, 21 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In this second lockdown it’s all suddenly become about long walks and big cooks. Emma’s been walking for a dozen miles at a time through a river of wild spaces in South London called the Green Chain Walk. I’ve been churning through the cookbooks that I’ve been picking at until now, mostly neglecting. Successes lately have been gyoza, massaman curry, drunken noodles, Tuscan bean soup with homebaked bread.

Fridays are for film night. We take turns and choose a film that is non-negotiable, which helps us to avoid commitment problems and the Mexican stand-off of choosing what we are Both Going To Do Tonight.

Our good will going into all of this is helped by the idea of a very big light (a vaccine) at the end of the tunnel (arriving within a year or so, please). Then again, I found a journal entry from August that discussed my imminent return to the office, so I’ve been made a fool of before.

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The latest issue of the All My Stars newsletter got me reading about Crash (1996). It was obviously a very contraversial film, that much I remember. There was some monocle-popping from Francis Ford Coppola on the Cannes jury; he refused to present the award that the film went on to win. What’s funny though is that the film won the Special Jury Prize, not just the Jury Prize. What’s the difference? Well I looked it up:

In 1946, a prize named International Jury Prize was awarded for that year only. Starting from 1951, the Special Jury Prize (Prix spécial du Jury) was awarded among other secondary prizes. In 1954, after a lot of criticism about the whimsical nature of these awards, the Festival authorities decided to turn to a more traditional prize-giving arrangement. In 1967, with the creation of the Grand Prix Spécial du Jury, the second in importance prize after the Palme d’Or, the Special Jury Prize gave its place to the Jury Prize and has been awarded under this name since. Six times in the 1970s, three in the 1980s and in 2001, no Jury Prize was awarded. The Special Jury Prize reappeared only twice, once in 1995, given along with the Jury Prize, and once in 1996, as the only prize of the Jury.

There’s something about the “criticism about the whimsical nature of these awards” that really tickled me. Of course these guys (yeah, guys) were just making shit up and basically handing out superlatives to a chorus of whatever the gallic “here, here” is.

Pubs in London with outdoor heaters

Wed, 28 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I was forwarded a PDF that began life as a Google Doc, before it was overwhelmed by demand. Crowd-sourced, guerrilla resources often spring up like this in times of difficulty. Perhaps I should be less surprised at how quickly Londoners have acted to work out where to get a pint without exposing yourself to the virus or the freezing cold.

PDFs are notoriusly inconvenient to quickly reference, so I’m mirroring here. Text presented as found, below.

I woke up with 1800 emails requesting access. I didn’t really have any dreams of going viral so now this document is locked. Sorry. Happy drinking. If you want to share this with friends please use this link.

Updated map

Definitely has heaters

North

Euston Tap, Euston
Holly Bush, Hampstead
The Garden Gate, Hampstead
The Stag, Hampstead/Belsize Park
The Roebuck, Hampstead
The Bull, Highgate
The Fellow, King’s Cross
Colonel Fawcett, Camden
The Prince Albert, Camden (nice outdoor vibe and heaters. Good mobile ordering system)
Edinboro Castle, Camden (distinctly average vibe & last orders frustratingly early (10pm?))
Old Eagle, Camden (but only two)
The Hawley Arms, Camden
The Engineer, Primrose Hill
Faltering Fullback, Finsbury Park
The Vine, Kentish Town
The Pineapple, Kentish Town
The Gipsy Queen, Kentish Town
The Abbey Tavern, Kentish Town
The Castle, Angel
Spaniards Inn, Hampstead Heath
Hicce, King’s Cross (restaurant, help out extended through October)
The Swimmer at the Grafton Arms, Holloway (book early)
WB Yeats, Finsbury Park
The Landseer Arms, Upper Holloway, (great food, only some outside heaters on may be 1⁄3 of the tables)
Highbury Barn Tavern, Highbury
Clissold Park Tavern, Green Lanes/Stoke Newington (no on-the-day bookings available)
The Finsbury, Finsbury Park
The Railway Tavern, Crouch End
The Woodman, Highgate
The Flask, Highgate
The Griffin, Totteridge & Whetstone
The Beehive, Tottenham

Central

Dalla Terra (wine bar!!), Covent Gardens Garlic & Shots, Soho (Mecca)
German Gymnasium, King’s Cross Remedy Wine Bar, Great Portland St Camino, King’s Cross
Gordon’s, Embankment (shudder)
Atlantic Bar @ J Sheekey, Leicester Square (plus oysters) oo how much LOADS OF MONEY
Aqua Nueva (roof terrace), Oxford Circus
Dalloway Terrace, Tottenham Court Road
Marquis of Cornwallis, Russell Square
The Anchor, Bankside
The Duke of Sussex, Waterloo
Cafe del Marsh, Waterloo
Euston Tap, Euston
Granary Square Brasserie, Kings Cross
The Lighterman, Kings Cross (2 large outside areas with heaters and blankets)
The Argyle, Holborn (has a terrace with heaters on a couple of tables. Quite pleasant)
Flat Iron Square - London Bridge
Vinegar Yard - London Bridge
The Ship Tavern Holborn, (recently purchased heaters for outside space)
Chiltern Firehouse
The Bosporus

East

CRATE Brewery, Hackney (also does a mean pizza) Well & Bucket, Shoreditch
The Old Fountain, Old Street
The Chesham Arms, Homerton
The Adam and Eve, Homerton
The Crooked Billet, Clapton
Pub On The Park, Hackney
Strongroom, Shoreditch
Crown&Shuttle, Shoreditch
The Prince George, Dalston
The Three Compasses, Dalston
The Scolt Head, De Beauvoir Town
Royal Inn on the Park, Hackney
People’s Park Tavern, Victoria Park (you need to get one of those huts round the edge for a heater so book in advance)
Approach Tavern, Bethnal Green / Victoria Park
The Printhouse, Stratford (just recently purchased heaters)
Dundee Arms, Bethnal Green
Skylight Rooftop - big rooftop with heated outdoor benches and also igloos - bookable
Rusty Bike, Mile End

West

The Prince, West Brompton (London’s biggest heated garden) The Tabard, Turnham Green :)))
The Lamb, Chiswick High Road (lots of heaters)
George IV, Chiswick High Road (only 4)
Duke of Sussex, Chiswick, South Parade (great tapas food) (heaters are in the second garden)
High Road House, Chiswick (loads of heaters: so hot, ‘it’s like a sauna in here!’)
The Carpenter’s Arms, Hammersmith (banging focaccia)
The Queen’s Head, Hammersmith
The Mitre, Holland Park
Admiral Codrington, South Ken (in case you want to pick up a minor royal)
The Anglesea Arms, Hammersmith/Ravenscourt Park
The Oak, W12 (more of a restaurant, has outdoor heaters)
The Express Tavern, TW8 0EW, Kew Bridge
The Windsor Castle, Notting Hill
PAPA L’s KITCHEN, Earl’s Court (covered terrace with heating, blankets, food and booze)
Pergola, Paddington (doing a big Christmas transformation)
Pergola, Olympia (great food offering)
Aragon house, parsons green
The Bridge House, Little Venice
The Mitre, Fulham
The builders arms, Chelsea
The waterway, little Venice on the canals
The hero of Maida, little venice
The crabtree, Hammersmith
The Antelope, Surbiton - heaters and great ales/food
The Albion, Kingston - heaters and great ales/food
The Prince Albert - Notting Hill (The tables in the garden against the wall all have heaters.)

South

Boro bistro (lots of heaters and cosy )
Tamesis Dock, Vauxhall (but only a couple of heaters) The Avalon, Clapham South
The Devonshire, Balham
Heidi, Balham
The Cyclist, Balham
The Bedford, Balham
The Goldfinch, Tooting
The Trafalgar, Tooting
The rose and crown, tooting
The Ship, Wandsworth / Putney
The Cats Back, Wandsworth / Putney
The Kings Arms, Wandsworth / Putney (‘covered’ outside space + heaters) Jolly Gardener, Putney
Coat and Badge, Putney
The Landor, Clapham North
Hootananny, Brixton
The Florence, Herne Hill
The Ivy House, Nunhead
The Castle, Tooting
The County Arms,, Wandsworth Common
The Hope Wandsworth Common
Northcote Road ( entirety at weekend )
Belleville Brewing Co, Wandsworth Common
The Nightingale, Balham
The Wandle, Earlsfield
The Falcon, Clapham Northern
The Sun, Clapham Common
The Bobbin, Clapham Common
The althorp, Wandsworth Common
The Hope and Anchor, Brixton/Clapham North
Pop Brixton
The Pig and Whistle, Earlsfield
The Halfway House, Earlsfield
The Leather Bottle, Earlsfield
The Boathouse, Putney
The Northcote, Clapham Junction (only a few heaters but it’s covered)
The 4 Thieves, Clapham Junction
The Clapham Tap, Clapham North
Great North Wood, West Norwood
The Rosendale, West Dulwich
The Woodhouse, Sydenham Hill
The Chancery, Beckenham
The George Inn, Borough
Vinegaryard, London Bridge
Fentiman Arms, Vauxhall
Canton Arms, Stockwell
The Old Brewery, Greenwich
Skehans, Nunhead
The Founders Arms, South Bank
Flat Iron Square, Southwark
Mercato Metrapolitano, elephant & castle
Ninth life - catford (firepits + heaters) The Catford Bridge Tavern, Catford Leadbelly’s, Canada Water
The Paxton, West Dulwich
Duke of Edinburgh,Brixton
Princess of Wales - Blackheath
The Bull, Streatham Common (heated outdoor sheds)
Ladywell Tavern, Ladywell, Lewisham (heated lamps and outdoor games)
The Cutty Sark, Greenwich (good view of the thames, it’s not near the boat but a short walk away)

Autumn leaves

Sun, 25 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I was locked down for two weeks, so when I got out I wanted to make the most of the autumn leaves.

Dulwich Woods are only ten minutes awawy but they were new to me

The residential neighbourhood is heavily planted too

Most of the time though, I’m back inside. I saw On The Rocks with Rashina Jones and Bill Murray after I listened to the Big Picture episode about Sofia Coppola.

Bill Murray at home

Fruit overage

you have died. you must complete your tasks.

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

just realised i dont know what counts as an animal, will report back

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

History of the Bible

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I read The History of the Bible this weekend and enjoyed it a lot. I have a little collection of books about theology now, not because of any interest in faith but because I think it’s an interesting vein of history and culture. The bible is so often quoted, wittingly or unwittingly, in popular culture and everyday speech. Here are some good excerpts from the book.

The first I’ve included because I like the readings of the Old Testament that give God a personality. In this case it’s a taunting condescention. I also just think the language here is amazing.

The climax of the book is an appearance by God (not unlike the deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy), in which God sarcastically tells Job that he knows nothing, since he is so puny compared to the power of the creator:

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements - surely you know?
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk,
Or who laid its cornerstone
when the morning stars sang together
and all the heavenly being shouted joy?

— Job 38:4-7

There are a couple of bits of analysis of the Epistles that highlight the texts drawing attention to their authorship. In the first case, in a reference I’ve lost, a little hello from Paul’s scribe is interpolated into the text at the sign off, “and goodbye from me too!”. In the second case it’s Paul himself writing the original letter:

When Paul says that a greeting at the end of one of his letters in written in his own hand:

See what large letters I make make when I am writing in my own hand!

— Galatians 6:11

It’s so childlike and human. The last excerpt I just thought was an interesting window into the huge debate around the trinity.

Paul also seems to see Jesus as lower in status than God himself:

Christ is the head of every man, and the husband is the head of his wife, and God is the head of Christ. — 1 Corinthians 15:28

The New testament thus supports at most a subordinationist Christology, that is, one in which Jesus as the Son is of lower status than God the Father.

Self-isolation

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been placed into self-isolation, it’s been three days now. A friend of mine who I saw last week got a test after some very low level symptoms and he tested positive. He feels horribly guilty for the cluster of people around him who are now in self-isolation, which goes to show how much of this situation has been laid on the consciences of individual people, wrongly.

I’ve been doing okay so far. We’ve been playing Mario Odyssey and Ticket To Ride, and we baked a load of bread. I’ve never baked a loaf of bread before, even through the first wave (of the disease and the baking).

The weather was perfect for a run in the crisp autumn sun yesterday morning, and that’s when I felt the first pang. Hopefully doing home workouts will keep me going until I can get out there.

we voided some warranties tonight

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

500mg mashed potato every 5 minutes for 5 days

Sun, 04 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Tired on waking

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I woke up today and I was really, really tired. It’s the end of the first week in a new role at work. I lay in bed until an uncharacteristic noon and having just gotten up, everything feels like far too much effort. If I’m tired or unhappy I can usually carry it around with me as I get on with things but I feel very under it today. I hope it’s not COVID-19 fatigue (the clinical kind, not the morale kind).

sometimes i'm struck by a thought and it's so awful and boring it chills me to the bone: what if i put the protein powder in a kilner jar with a little label

Sat, 03 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

the coronavirus is a huge boon for Big QR Code

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

saying yes to two people on gumtree when there is only one 20l bag of cat litter to pick up, that's how i get my adrenaline. that's how i feel something

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Round two

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The numbers are up again (the bad ones, the COVID-19 ones) and the daily cases are actually above where they ever got in the first wave. The response has been slower, patchier; nobody’s ready to jump straight into a full national lockdown again. It feels like it could be coming, though. I’ve mixed feeling about how ready for that I am.

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

gardi

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Boys State

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We watched Boys State this week. It’s a documentary that follows a cohort of Texan teenage boys going through an intense one-week political bootcamp at the Texas state capitol. They’re divided randomly into two parties*, given lessons in the state constitution, and then they run a compressed set of elections for party chairmen, gubernatorial candidates, and ultimately for state governor.

I really enjoyed it, though I felt myself predictably enamoured with the charismatic and thoughtful liberals Steven and René. Conversely, I found myself predictably horrified with the mini-demagogue-to-be Robert, and the Steven Miller Jr. in Ben Feinstein.

Ben was interesting as a distillation of the do-what-it-takes-to-win archetype that we saw coalesce around Trump. He realises early on that a negative campaign can really stall the momentum of a values-led movement in the opposition. First he pushes a “Dems in disarray” style narrative during the chairman race, and then switches to a “rigged system” narrative later on.

His final candidate for governor is presented as lacking in charisma, he even loses his voice at a crucial stage in the race. Ben is presented as a kind of Machiavellian kingmaker. He’s directly compared to Ben Shapiro at one point, and the comparison is apt. He’s all facts and figures until he sees an opening to meta-game the debate, to object on a rules basis to one moment in a district debate and then repeat that narrative to block out the issues discussion from then on.

Overall it was a good watch. I wonder how much we project our anxieties on these kids. We all wondered what Girl State would be like and whether the issues would still be: guns, abortion, immigration, and in that order. Apparently a sequel is in production.

* The parties are given the names “Federalists” and “Nationalists”, which seem to be detached enough from modern party labels that they don’t seem to come with any ideological baggage for teenagers. That’s funny given that the Federalists were once an American political party and nationalist certainly means something to me.

Rewatching Pixar short films

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I rewatched lots of Pixar shorts the other night. So much of Pixar’s storytelling is fixating on parenting, growing up, child development. Also it seems like each Pixar short is some kind of experiment in animation or storytelling.

A great example is Piper, the story of a sandpiper on a beach learning to find shells in the sand. The animation of the surf, and the sand with all its different consistencies and levels of water saturation is amazing. Also, there’s experimentation with really pushing the virtual camera’s naturalism. There’s a shallow depth-of-field to emulate a macro lens like we’re used to seeing in nature photography of small subjects; it helps us get a sense of scale. When the subjects move quickly and suddenly, the frame struggles to catch up as if a camera operator on the beach has been take off-guard. The focus is sometimes over-pulled and brought back, implying a human hand on the dial trying to keep up with the action.

You could create a hardened set of API/website management scripts (scraping, building, adding new posts manually) and put them right in /usr/local/bin*, which is where the cron jobs and SSH-from-iPhone would access them from.

Pros: Faster to run quick jobs
Cons: Moves the scripts out of version control

It’s probably also worth having a $SITEDIR variable that all the scripts use.

Among these scripts could be a health check that runs on SSH-ing in. I would tell you:

How many failed SSH attempts did we see today
How many postgresql connections have we seen today
Health check the website with a parsed curl
Health check the API the same way
The number of various kinds of media in the database

* /usr/local/bin I think that’s the right bin for my scripts. There’s a man page about what all the system directories are for: man hier.

I’d like to not have to completely delete and re-insert all my media records every time I scrape the sources (Goodreads, Letterboxd, etc). On a related note I’d like to have a record of books beyond ones that have a status right now.

The Goodreads exporter I use produces a books table that is only connected to status through other relations. If I can trust Goodreads book IDs for books to persist then I can only INSERT/UPDATE on the books table and then create a series of updates to update my status in relation to those books via the reviews table.

All of this amounts to a messy synchronisation with Goodreads, it’s exactly the kind of thing karlicoss was warning against when he said just to store the raw exports and map over them in a data access layer.

The unison file sync tool would be an improvement on one-way rsync. It is intended for two way replication but could support more than one laptop by using a star topology. Only one client syncs with the source-of-truth on a server at once.

percollate is a nice command-line to turn web pages into very readable documents for Kindle (epub, mobi, pdf). Link here.

I wanted to use some site admin scripts I’ve written in Bash as part of a cron job that keeps my site up to date. The scripts live inside the repository/directory the whole site and underlying API is stored in. To access them in the user $PATH I’ve symlinked them like:

/usr/local/bin/jbuild
->
/home/jack/server/jackreidapi/scripts/build_site.sh

So I thought I’d have a really simple cron job because the command would be in the $PATH:

* * * * * jbuild

However, if you echo $PATH from a test cron job, all it has in there is /bin:/usr/bin? I’ve added them to the $PATH at the beginning of each script but it’s a lame amount of boilerplate.

Let’s not forget about the costume party for pub names. Dress as the name of your favourite pub.

Weird pub names date back to when much of society was illiterate and pubs would use painted signs of known symbols to be identified by their illiterate patrons. They would even hang a found object outside: a boot or copper kettle.

Gravitricity is a company trying to solve the problem of spiky power production coming from renewable sources of energy. Right now many grids use big batteries to build up a buffer to supply smooth power. But batteries are expensive and they degrade.

Instead, they propose a deep shaft in which a large weight is suspended on cables, themselves driven by winches. To charge the system the winches are powered to raise the weight in the shaft, which creates potential energy. To discharge the system the weight is dropped and the cables run through the winches, which now act as generators. They’re building a live demonstration in Scotland that will be connected to the live grid.

I’ve gone off using my big DSLR because it’s just too heavy for me to carry around every day. That means I’m never going to use it get quick photos when I’m going about my day, which means any photo-taking habit I’d formed is gone. I miss it, and would like to have fun taking photos again. I’ve looked at the Fujifilm X100 cameras, which are portable enough to take on trips and toss in my day bag, but I don’t think I’m ready to drop £1000+. For now I’ve swapped the Canon EOS 7D body for a lighter EOS 1000F film body, but the lens is still really heavy. Film photographs should hopefully feel for a while, though.

A couple of games are playing with non-euclidian geometry, in which parallel lines don’t stay a fixed distance apart and the shortest line between two points isn’t straight. Examples are Antichamber, which has Escher-like impossible stair puzzles and like, and Superliminal, which uses forced perspective to allow objects to be made arbitrary sizes.

In The Calling of St. Matthew by Caravaggio, the contrast from the light is extreme. It is a form of chiaroscuro called tenebrism (from Italian tenebroso “dark, gloomy, mysterious”). It allows the artist to present the subjects on a flat, plain, or dark background while maintaining a real sense of depth and realism.

Caravaggio was painting while the Catholic Counter-Reformation was taking place. These paintings were useful to the church because of the simplicity of the scenes, and the artist’s use of real models, the scenes are rendered to be very real and relatable.

In The Calling of St. Matthew, which tells the story from Matthew 9:9 in which Jesus comes to a money lending house and calls Matthew to follow him. In the bible it sounds as if Matthew simply obeys right away and gets up to follow him. In the painting, the very real-looking Matthew is over his work table looking surprised, confused, conflicted.

The bold lighting comes down in a golden-hour shaft and highlights Matthew against the background, which is almost black (like in many of his paintings).

Source: Evan Puschak’s video “Caravaggio, Master Of Light”.

I don’t think I actually do want to be as informed as possible?

In an edition of Anne Helen Peterson’s culture newsletter, she discusses the increasingly dystopian setting in the US, on the day of Orange San Francisco (wildfire smoke from fires all over the west coast blotting out the sun and casting a deep orange shadow on everything). She recalls an interview with Alfonso Cuarón about the set design of Children of Men. He wanted a world that looks like we’d gone a decade past our current moment and just stopped. Lately, “the uncanniness is overwhelming”.

Keep your distance. But stay close.

— gotyourback.space (backgrounds for Zoom calls by artists)

What we did: love. We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages. Objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or entertainment. Each member of a couple of is separate; the two come together in double attention.

— The Third Thing by Donald Hall

we played firewatch on the weekend and i just want to know why henry is animated like such an oaf. just put it down on the table why are you throwing it across the room

Thu, 10 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Swimming in pools and lochs

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve had a lot of peace. We’re spending a lot of evenings in the pool, where only twenty people are allowed at a time and only swimming in a clockwise loop. We’ve been taking sick days when we feel worn out. I’ve been reading a little more. Emma has planted the raised bed at the end of the garden with bulbs that are supposed to sleep over the winter and erupt in spring. She forgot to check they were the right way up, but faith and bad statistics tell us about half of them will grow okay.

Tom got back from Scotland describing a similar cleaned out and freshened feeling as we always get. He swam in the loch too. He wants to go back every year too. My Instagram feed is thick with acquaintances bumming around islands in Scotland I thought remote and foolishly my own.

siege

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

long dal

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

nintendo are the best game company https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2mCqUSDCJE

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A seal

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve been on the coast of North Devon. Today the younger ones struck off from a larger group of trundling adults and children to get into the sea (we were standing on the headland and the water looked so calm and blue that Emma couldn’t think of anything other than finding somewhere to get into that sea).

We found a small rocky beach at the end of a crumbling single-track road. Emma and I went ahead in one car and wondered whether the others had lost their nerve on the way down. That was until we saw the others walking down the cliff path as we bobbed in the shallows. We swam out to the rocks and balanced on them, rising out of the water like miracles as we stood on ones that had already been covered by the waxing tide.

Header image by Devin Argenta

Last month, external accessibility experts certified buzzfeed.com as compliant with the best accessibility practices for the web. That simple statement, ripped straight from the headlines of a boilerplate internal email, does not do justice to the two-year process that brought us to that point. Nor does it embody what the achievement means to our team, especially myself, on a personal level.

In 2004, I watched my grandad build a remote control plane from scratch in his garage. I sat cross-legged at his feet on the grubby floor, ten years old. He was an engineer his whole life, a car mechanic, an ex-steel worker. His garage was filled with tools and machinery and he’d mastered all of it.

In 2016, I watched that same man try to shop online, an iPad in his lap. By then, diabetes had taken his foot, much of the sensation in his fingers, and left him with only a narrow, milky porthole for his vision. He manipulated the screen with a stylus attached to a lanyard. Even with that affordance, I watched him open Safari and make multiple attempts to select the address bar. That done, he slowly tapped in “ebay”, then made a few stabs at tapping the top result in the Google results. Presented with the homepage of ebay.com, he tried to pinch-to-zoom to find the search box, inadvertently activating a link to a promotion for a lawnmower.

A lot of people will have a story like this, perhaps less severe, perhaps worse. Statistically speaking, you’re pretty likely to have a similar anecdote, either about yourself or a loved one — after all, 1 in 4 Americans has a disability that may affect how they interact with screens. As the world fills more and more with those screens, it is going to shrink for those people unless the architects of those experiences take them seriously.

Accessibility at BuzzFeed

For me, it’s incredibly difficult to separate these personal moments from my day job as one of the people who builds BuzzFeed. Building things for the web is an invisible avalanche of tiny decisions influenced by a mix of implicit and explicit motives: make it fast, make it fun, make it profitable, make it maintainable, make it measurable. We occasionally spend some time talking about one of those things in isolation: a meeting about maintainable architecture, about adding the right metrics to our software. We then hope that those things stick around in the morass of motives in our colleagues’ minds when they’re building stuff. Sometimes it does stick, and sometimes it fades out in favour of bigger, newer, shinier priorities. We take great care to measure and report on the stuff that’s important to us as a business, but not all of the variables can be measured easily. The true quality of the experience we provide to a user with accessibility needs can’t be meaningfully quantified. Instead, maintaining and monitoring accessible experiences takes sustained effort from everybody who works on the product.

In the winter of 2018, we at BuzzFeed decided to take some serious action about making buzzfeed.com an accessible experience for everybody. We knew anecdotally that we weren’t doing well on the accessibility front. Engineers familiar with accessibility standards raised their concerns regularly, and fixes were made here and there; we had an #a11y Slack channel. This time, though, we would be taking a more thorough and holistic approach to accessibility, not just a series of patch jobs. We would contract with a specialist accessibility auditor, Accessible360, who would produce a full report of all of our issues, and review our fixes as they went in. The end goal: an accessible experience accredited by the experts.

The initial audit report landed in our inboxes in January 2019, and our fears were confirmed: we had completely failed to provide a viable experience for users with accessibility needs. The issue tracker showed in excess of 400 problems with the site, and some of them sounded insurmountably difficult to solve within our current technological and organizational structures. There was no obvious single group to own all of the fixes, nor was there any one team big enough to get through the issues in any reasonable amount of time. It was going to have to be a holistic effort.

The issues could be categorized into two general buckets. The first bucket was smaller fixes — missing button titles, content presented as a list but not marked up as such — and could easily be divided among the teams who maintained those portions of the site. The issues in the second bucket, however, were going to take more dedicated effort and product thinking to resolve.

Here’s one example of an issue that needed to be tackled more strategically:

A Case Study

“These images lack alt attributes, thus it is not clear what they contain.”

BuzzFeed is full of images. We tease our articles with carefully selected and cropped thumbnails. The articles themselves are often adorned with gloriously art-directed banner images, stacks of red carpet photos, and the latest celebrity apology in a series of screenshots of the Notes app. In all of these cases, our content creators are putting a lot of work to tell stories with a visual medium that is inaccessible to users who can’t see the screen. To be accessible to somebody using a screen reader, those images need an alternative way to be experienced — in this case, descriptive alt text. When our writers have uploaded images to our content management system (CMS), we’ve never required them to provide descriptive alt text — or even provided them with the option to do so.

First, we tried to avoid changing our editorial workflow. We assessed different machine learning services that offered to describe the content of images programmatically. None of them could describe everything, let alone describe it well.

Machine learning wasn’t up to the task of reliably describing our images.

We quickly realised that there was only one solution: to consider alt text as integral a piece of content as any piece of visible text in an article. That meant it would fall to our writers and editors to understand the importance of alt text and to write great image descriptions. So, while our engineering team whittled away at hundreds of issues that could be fixed in the background, we worked with our editorial team to put on workshops that demonstrated how screen readers experience our content. After establishing that understanding, we discussed the best alt text for all our different types of image content: from red carpet photos to meme screenshots to shopping items.

An example from our editorial alt text guide.

The editorial team didn’t just learn how to write alt text to pass the bare minimum standard. They brought alt text into their style guide, making sure the BuzzFeed voice shone through regardless of how someone experienced the content. The members of the team who attended multiple workshops became experts in good alt text, and now they help their colleagues write it every day. Andrew Ziegler, an editorial colleague who came to many of these workshops, remarked that the burden of writing good alt text was far less than expected: “You’re encouraged to keep it short … you’re not supposed to be redundant and repeat yourself, and you actually have a ton of freedom with it.” Furthermore, these workshops validated that our writers and editors were best placed to provide these descriptions: “Instead of robotically spewing out what’s in the image, you treat it like any other written part of the post and you’re free (and even encouraged) to carry the tone of the post into the alt text itself.”

We have a dedicated Slack channel where they exchange tips and establish practices for new kinds of content that present challenges for describing things at the appropriate level of detail. It’s inspiring to see that this enormous problem could be solved by our team by providing the right information and resources, and that they dove into the subject without hesitation once they understood how much the problem impacted our users.

Doing The Work

When we embarked on the task of making BuzzFeed accessible to all, we set ourselves a tentative and extremely ambitious task. Over a hundred individuals have worked on fixing one of those 400+ issues in some way or another.

The biggest shift over the course of the last year goes above and beyond just a pile of bug fixes — changing our site also changed how we think about building our site. The consequence of having so many contributors to the technical side of our accessibility initiative is that nearly all of the front-end engineers working on the website have now made targeted accessibility fixes, and can identify and prevent additional instances of them in the future. This influence extends past engineering as well: product managers, designers, and QA engineers are now all more attuned to our accessibility concerns. We’re starting to hear “it’d be a huge accessibility win” in the arguments for a new feature or change. I think it’s becoming part of our DNA, and that makes me incredibly hopeful.

We’re trying to harness that new wave of motivation by supplying the best tooling and documentation. So far, we’ve used a mixture of the great assets already out there, such as accessible component recipes, as well as making some home-cooked guides on how patterns common to BuzzFeed have been made accessible in the past. Accessibility has also become a foundational part of the ongoing design language project.

Conclusion

The arrival of our letter of accessibility compliance from our external experts marked the end of an enormous push to fix years of inaccessible feature development. Our website is finally accessible to all. Whoever wants to read an article, take a quiz, leave a comment — they can do it. The work that is ahead of us now is making sure that accessible culture is a mainstay of how we build and write content at BuzzFeed.

I’ve noticed a real push lately to make digital products accessible to everybody. That’s probably partly due to an uptick in lawsuits under the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA). However, I also think that there has been a recognition that we’ve replaced significant services and products that used to be physical, tactile things — like newspapers, television sets and telephones with dials and buttons — with digital applications. If you want to buy something particularly obscure, an electric motor for a remote control aeroplane, for example, you’re best off doing it online, particularly during a pandemic. People who want to take a quick picture usually aren’t reaching for their big manual cameras, but their little touch-screen phones. If the digital device is to be the mediating layer between us and the world, as it increasingly is, it must work for everybody.

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The swimmable water in Iona harbour, because I don't have a photo of my pool

I’ve grown up with a Pavlovian connection between swimming pools and chocolate bars. When I was a kid I was often taken to the local swimming baths and would stage a successful whinging campaign afterwards to be given 50p for a chocolate bar from the vending machine in the lobby of the baths. Now when I go swimming as an adult, something about climbing out of the chlorinated water in the echoey tiled hall, yanking on socks and jeans to my still-damp body, it makes me crave a chocolate bar from the machine on my way out.

I don’t know what kind of old person I’ll be. I hope I’ll be the sort that I see swimming incredibly slowly but with impressive determination and poise around the pool. Imagine they live locally and come here with plodding regularity to get in a bit of low-impact cardio, using it so as not to lose it. I hope I’m the kind of old man who dresses himself with a bit of dignity, in slacks and a jumper every day. I hope I smell like something other than old people, one of those nice old people smells like butterscotch or faint tobacco smoke and moisturiser, with only a hint of moth balls and medicine. I hope I’m one of those old people who says sad and inappropriate things to the children. “I’m well beyond my busy years now, but that’s alright. It’s like life is a big party and now it’s winding down. Only a few of the original lot are left and we’re sitting around with some nightcaps, quietly appreciating the night that’s come before and getting ready to turn in.”

I don’t really know if that’s the sort of old person I want to be. It’s more like the kind of old age I see for posh grandparents, living in their nice “downsized” retirement homes that are still in the suburbs of a city. That person is certainly inside me somewhere making the claim, though.

Gym and jolof

Sun, 23 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I woke up early and lay in bed for a while knowing Emma wanted a big lie in to catch up on sleep from a bad week. Eventually I got up and booked a slot at the gym and cycled there. I’ve been running less and going to the gym more, is that a more vain balance of exercise? Jay Rayner was back at the gym, and this time James Nesbitt was there too. I’ve told a couple of people this and I know that there’s nothing to care about but I still feel like I should do something with the information.

I cycled from the gym to Peckham Snappy Snaps to get the film from a black and white disposable camera developed. I took some shots with it over the worst part of lockdown, and I really wonder if there will be anything worth it in there. The woman at the shop was very friendly though, and they had a big tempting collection of film on sale that made me feel bad for not taking more photos, better photos.

Peckham Rye felt lively; I love that street in its pedestrianised form a lot. When I came up through Dulwich to pick up a birthday card and present for Ollie it was in a good mood too. The street market was on, a lady was playing accordion. I bought souvlaki for me and a jolof for Emma. The mother and son and the jolof place were friendly. Emma had been at the gym in the morning too, and we were both in a good mood.

A lot has changed since I left the office, though. I am much more invested in my home. For one, it’s gotten much bigger and can therefore accommodate work mode more easily. I also have gotten to like sitting in my own garden as I break for lunch and the flexibility of fixing some practical task in between work meetings rather than having everything waiting for me at home when I make it back around 7.

The chances are I’m going to get back into the office and I’ll remember all the things that made it great to be out the house for work again. Seeing other people every day no matter what, for example.

Good for nothing

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Machair behind the dunes at Salen Bay, Mull

A few weeks ago I went camping in Scotland. Below are some scraps I wrote down while I was on the Isle of Mull.

There are significant magnetic anomalies around the islands of St. Kilda. The name St. Kilda is an oddity: there is no such saint. One theory is that it comes from “sunt kelda”, Norse for sweet wellwater. Another is that it is a corruption of the local pronunciation of the island name Hirta. The local accent has a guttural /h/ sound that could sound like /k/ and an /l/ for /r/ swap.

Machair is a fertile and low-lying grassy plain found in Western Scotland. The plain is often grassy and cut with rivulets and lochs. Because of their proximity to the sea (they typically sit right behind a dune bank), the sward is high in silicate (sand or broken up sea shells) content.

Sward means area that is covered in grass. It comes from the Old English “sweard” for skin or rind.

Distinct from machair is links (from Old English “hlinc” meaning rising ground or ridge). Links are grassy coastal dunes found on the east coast. This landscape is perfect for golf, with natural pits and bunkers and hard turf that allows the ball to roll easily on the green. Hence the reference to golf links today.

Ardalanish Beach at dawn

Dunlins are sand-pipers that use their long beaks to pull worms out of the wet sand of coastal areas. They are resident to Mull, Skye, and Uist. We saw a pair on Ardalanish beach.

Jackdaws are like crows but a bit smaller and with a silver part at the back of their head and neck, running down onto their breast.

Tom arrives

Sun, 09 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

It’s been a good week. We came back from Scotland and spent a week relaxing at home around my birthday. Then Tom arrived in Heathrow having run the gauntlet of the travel restrictions imposed by the Indian government, UK government, and the various airlines. He’s been decompressing here for a week or so, and making us incredible amounts of food and drink in the meantime. It’s good to have your habits disrupted.

Yesterday Tom and some friends spent most of the day in our garden. There’s a project to build a raised bed at the end of the garden, but first a huge mess of bamboo roots had to be removed from the ground. Most of the afternoon was spent either ripping bambo out of the ground or watching other people rip bamboo out of the ground. Tom had the best stamina of all and only came to eat his Pad Thai after the last alien tuber had been excised. We now need to buy about a ton of topsoil.

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Kingdom sounds

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I watched a whole season of Kingdom on Netflix. It’s a big budget zombie show set in 16th century Korea. It being a Korean language show, there are English subtitles. However the subtitles not only translate dialogue but describe other sounds. Here is a non-exhaustive list of those subtitles.

Indistinct shouting
Munching
Screaming
Indistinct chatter
Sword rasping
Distant snarling
Men whimpering
Chain clanks
Snarling
Screaming continues
Screaming intensifies
Sucks teeth
Amused gasp
Horse neighs
Thudding continues
Men gasp
Rumbling

running into the cobbler and sweating all over the guy while i get him to cut a key for me quickly and he just doesnt give a shit who im robbing

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

New life in the high street

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We’re coming back to the world in floods of normalcy at the moment. One of my best friends was back in town on Thursday, and he came over for dinner and a drink. He was able to see our new home, I was able to cook for him, we were able to sit in our living room together and chat. We kept up chatting until just before midnight. We were all just so thankful to be able to have the kind of conversations you have with your friends in person when you’re relaxed. Then on Saturday morning I walked down our new high street as it opened up for the first time since we’ve lived here. Saturday was the day the majority of the businesses in the country were given to open up again. It’s been so long that bustling commerce, restaurants, markets — they all feel like a new idea. It’s like they’re inventing something new: the sit-in café, the come-in-and-look-around gardening supplier. I was practically bouncing down the road by the time I’d picked up all my supplies. I took pictures of the fronts of shops with their wares spilling out on the pavements, flowering all at once.

Around lunchtime on Saturday some more friends arrived to stay the weekend. We’re still not hugging. We headed down the high street to an open air street market to some lunch and baked treats. We spent hours and hours cooking, eating, drinking, talking, and playing video games at home. It felt like a holiday, like our new home was a well appointed holiday cottage that we’d holed up in with our friends. I guess in time we’ll get used to this new neighbourhood in its opened up form, carve out our real routines.

Tonight I’m seeing another friend for the first time in months, probably riding around on the bike with him to arrive eventually at a pub (new me meets old me). Tomorrow night, more badly missed friends and probably another pub. Social life has come rushing back all at once. To deal with the new influx of food and drink that company brings, I pushed myself out for a run this morning. There’s a half marathon in Oxford still set for October and it’s beginning to gnash it’s teeth at me. This morning though, the world felt new.

Time in the park

Wed, 01 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been meeting my manager in the park every week during lockdown. He lived in a neighbourhood nearby and we both missed seeing people from work face-to-face, so it made sense. Plus the weather’s been good for the most part so it’s been nice to sit and have our catch up in the sun with either a coffee or a beer. Today I cycled there from the new house; it’s about fifteen minutes away.

On the way back from the meeting I was sitting in a bike lane behind a mother on bike with her toddler in a seat mounted on the back. We were waiting at a red light and I followed the gaze of the toddler to the left and through the fence of a primary school. There was a scene of total normalcy playing out inside. Schoolkids in those paisley dresses and primary red jumpers were running around in the yard together, playing. It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen that. The sound of children playing and laughing together is so reassuring. I’m not going to make out we’re in some Children of Men scenario but of the kinds of crowds I’ve missed, happy children all together is one.

Thirty degrees

Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

It’s thirty degrees outside and we’re all, including the cat, feeling languid. The internet is down for much of South London, which adds to the general sense of stolid malaise.

The past few days have been much more active. I’ve been buzzing around the house trying to make it a home bit by bit. It’s a tightrope doing the practicalities while basking in the glow of our fresh, new space. Try to sit in the airy new lounge without a care like you never could before, but also get that shoe rack and cutlery drawer insert ordered. When is the sofa arriving?

Outside of our new bubble the country is opening inch by inch. Next week a new raft of things is opening including, most crucially, pubs. Once that happens I’ll be finding the nearest and largest pub garden and bedding in. We’d also like to fill this place with friends for the first time.

New house peace

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This morning I woke up in my own house to sunlight. I got up and took a shower, the water pressure was great. I sat at the kitchen table and listened to the news, and then practiced my Spanish for a while. I hung out some washing to dry. Nobody came along. I had forgotten how it feels to start your day quietly and at your own pace.

The weekend was an endless blur of stress and back strain, but we’re in here now, a home of our own. It is the greatest thing. We’ll have lunch in the garden today.

George Floyd march

Wed, 10 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The Black Lives Matter protests have become the story of the day. Hundreds of thousands of people in cities all over the world have been demonstrating for over a week. We joined the end of a march in Brixton first, hearing about it from a friend who saw it pass through Kennington and cycling out to join the fray. It was the first crowd I’d been in in months. It made the fact that people were shouting in one voice even more striking. A man stood over the crowd with a megaphone and thanked them for assembling, spoke about the need for justice for those killed by police in the UK, and asked us to go home peacefully. The core of the group marched up Brixton Road and demonstrated in Windrush Square. We went to another march this Sunday, beginning as a protest at the American Embassy in Vauxhall and eventually marching over Vauxhall Bridge and to Parliament Square. Unlikely figures hung out of the windows of expensive apartment buildings in Pimlico to show support for the passing demonstrators, banging pots and pans. Many more windows were notably absent of support, given then everybody is probably home. In Parliament Square, I looked at the protestors with a colossal statue of Winston Churchill rising above them and wondered how long its presence would be tolerated; later the news reported his plinth had been annotated to include his status as a murderer.

There has been a recognition in the public and in particular the health community that the right to protest institutional racism trumps the COVID-19 isolation orders. It doesn’t stop those who would rather protests like this didn’t happen any time from crying that now is not the time. We all wait with consigned dread for a peak in new cases of the virus, served up in the media alongside images of protestors and not beach-going white families in the sun.

In our bubble we think about the new house, our escape drawing nearer. Ten days from now, all being well (let all be well), we’ll be packing up a van and making the short drive. I know we are both living in the near future, our bodies inhabiting the same old spots of this house but our brains floating between vignettes of how independent life will be. Furniture has been ordered, the packing boxes are waiting in the dining room.

Floyd protests from afar

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We’ve picked a new house. It’s going to be a house! It’ll have a garden and stairs and space for the cat, space for us to work and relax. We’re leaving in three weeks unless some recalcitrant property manager or landlord gets in the way.

Outside, COVID-19 measures had begun to relax and things had begun drifting slowly toward normal. Then a few days ago the US exploded with protests against police violence in response to the murder of a man named George Floyd by a policeman in Minnesota. All over the country the authorities have responded with a police riot. Peaceful protestors, the press, and bystanders are being brutalised and arrested all over the country. Black Lives Matter marches are starting up here too; my employer has notified us we don’t need to use up holiday allocation to march. I’ve made some donations to bail funds and encouraged others to do the same.

Back at work after a week off, I’m back on a carousel of screens of code, chats with colleagues in the eye of this new storm, and streams of videos of police savagery. I flip from one window to the other all day at the dining table, and then sign off, and then watch a film on a different laptop. My mum is in hospital to clear up an infection, she sent me a picture of her wearing a mask. I’m worried about her too. The privilege inherent in that experience of watching the problem from afar is big, but it doesn’t mean I don’t feel less human by the end of the day. There are going to be marches in London this week.

George Floyd Protester Relief Resources

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been struggling to keep track of links to the relief funds established for Black Lives Matter activists across the USA who’ve been arrested, injured, or killed by the police. I’m throwing them up here, with sources linked at the end, to keep track of them for myself and for others who are struggling to pull them out of Twitter. For now, I’ve donated to the Brooklyn Bail Fund.

Update (2nd June 2020)

There’s now an even easier way to donate to a wider range of organisations fighting for this cause. Just make one larger donation on this page and it will be split automatically. Click here.

Why are bail funds important now?

Cash bail is used by authorities to incarcerate the poor and disadvantaged en masse. The rich and priveleged can pay their way to freedom. Bail funds exist to correct the balance by collecting funds to buy the freedom of unconvicted, jailed people who can’t afford their own bail.

Right now cities across the USA have hundreds of people demonstrating in the streets in response to decades of police over-policing, brutalising, and murdering black people — most recently, George Floyd. Multiple cities have introduced brutally enforced curfews. Curfews aim to quell protest and demonstration but people are still going to be in the streets, getting arrested and jailed. You can support the movements from afar by donating to the bail funds to free these demostrators, particularly while COVID-19 is rampant in jails and prisons in the USA.

Bail Funds

East Coast

The South

Midwest

West Coast

Silicon Valley DSA (Select “Temporary Bail Fund”)
Northwest Community Bail Fund
Peoples City Council Freedom Fund (Los Angeles)
Las Vegas Freedom Fund
Hawaii Community Bail Fund

Sources

@tearsusapart on Twitter

Resources

i made this for myself and anybody who needs to donate to a bail fund https://really.lol/post/activist-relief-resources/

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

i got my white picket fence tyvm

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Looking at Stoke Newington

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We’re getting ready to leave the house. The idea of moving out of this place and into one of our own, already a firm intention before lockdown began, has become a serious one again. Subtly depersonalised pictures of the room we’ve spent so much time in have been taken, and posted online. We are responsible for reviewing applications for our replacements. Young professional, woman, 27, media. Smiley headshot, second photo featuring Aperol Spritz. In the meantime I’m sitting in the armchair. I’m watching the kitten bound around with a mouse toy in her mouth, jumping over Emma who’s dozing in bed. I’m looking at the bookshelves, two of them double-stacked on every shelf. All of it says that the life we have is getting too big for the place we’re in.

We’ve been cycling up to north London, to Stoke Newington. The forty minute journey is a little trip into our potential future. A few days ago we went up there and sat in a local park to see Emma’s friend, who is also living in the potential future, somewhat more idly shopping for flats to buy. He and Emma send RightMove links back and forth. More recently she and I went together and sat in an old graveyard that had been made a public park. We walked down the high street and tried to imagine in outside of its plague state: with people inside the restaurants and pubs rather than in queues outside the food shops with their masks on. We liked what we imagined. We imagined the breakdown on inside and out the pub in the summers as people spill onto the pavement. We imagined the cosy recess of the bookshop on a winter evening.

I’m going to be a little untethered from the present now that I’m thinking about this other time and place. We are still here for now. Last night we made everybody gnocchi and too many cocktails and sat out in the warm evening until midnight. But a lot of my mind is now idly making inventories of our possessions to remember to take away. My dreams take place in a mishmash of all of the flats we’ve looked at online and liked.

I’ve taken next week off work; I was sick of feeling stressed about it. I don’t have any great ambitions for the time: pin down the new flat, keep exercising, do some reading. I know in my heart I’ll spend all the time thinking about the life Emma and I will soon be expanding into.

P.S. I don’t think I can talk enough about the newfound joy on riding the bike around the city. It’s being found for the first time by so many people at the moment; we’re all just floating around the place in a way we didn’t know was possible.

lemon drizzle cakes are profane

Sun, 24 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

cat trying to kill me

Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

i just feel like the relationship is missing something, like dastardly cunning and the element of surprise

Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

glaring at the sun outside as is tradition

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

press the brain firmly down into the juicer to produce one (1) mistake

Tue, 19 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

i am the schlemiel. i am the schlamazel.

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Wild horses

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The restrictions on movement were lifted a bit. We’re allowed to sit down in the parks rather than hurry through them on the purpose of exercise. Almost immediately, tiny groups in sunglasses and with beers in hand have appeared. We are also allowed to drive a little way for our recreation.

Emma drove us down to the cliffs in Sussex. We packed food and water into a rucksack, and rued that we couldn’t stop in for a preparation pint in the last town before the walk. We passed a dozen idyllic pubs in the glorious countryside. On the walker’s trail everything seemed normal again, huffing through meadows of wildflowers and up through tracks in copses — until another group was encountered and we all duly traced the circumference of a two metre circle between one another.

We turned off the main path and disobeyed the walking directions for a little while, and ended up rambling through a grazing pasture set back from the cliffs. Soon, two curious grey ponies ambled up to us and sniffed for food and attention. They were followed by a ragtag collection of horses and ponies of all sizes, all of whom wanted some kind of investigation or affection. We fussed among them for half an hour or so, forgot everything else and felt very grateful.

We saw sheep and their lambs too, some of them still suckling. We looked over a fence and into the curious but cautious eyes of auburn cattle. The calves hid half behind their mothers but looked on.

On the way back up a lane, we saw children had scrawled notes and hearts for the NHS workers on the frontline onto the road with chalk. Chalk here is free; I thought of the huge white cliffs. Later we looked back at them as we lay on our backs in the bracing sea, having picked our way over a populated and pebbled beach. We were among only four people I saw in the cold, shallow water.

We awkwardly dried off and peeled ourselves out of our swimwear and slid sandily into our clothes. We said to each other that to know this was possible would help, as we drove back towards the city. Impossibly quickly we were weaving through the 70s highrises of Croydon on a flyover. Quicker still I was on my way to Brixton market to pick up supplies for dinner, mask over my face.

Untitled

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Getting off of Netlify

Thu, 14 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I wanted to quickly follow up to my recent post about personal infrastructure with some updates I made this week.

Why the change

I got a warning last week that I was almost at the limit for my allocation of “build minutes” on Netlify. Upon investigation, I found that my personal website had been building too often and for too long on Netlify, and that soon they would start charging me for the overages. Looking at the logs and running the build locally I saw that the vast majority of the build time was down to preprocessing the many images in the “Photo” part of my site to compress and resize them. So, in the short term those have been removed; I wasn’t really presenting them very well anyway.

Either way, this warning along with a vague irritation that I’m paying $9 a month made me want to look into how I could get off the freemium service. Netlify is great, don’t get me wrong, but this was also a chance for me to try out some new problems for myself. After all, I’m paying $10 a month for a DigitalOcean VPS and the same again for a Postgres instance.

Requirements

My site needed to come off of Netlify and still have the following features:

Analytics

I needed analytics at least telling me how many hits the site is getting and what the top pages are. Also, knowing what the top 404s are helps me realise when I’ve broken a link. Netlify gave me all of this for $9 a month and I was confident I could do it for no additional cost.

Recency

The Netlify site rebuilt every time I committed to the repository using a Git hook, so that would keep it up to date with new notes and posts etc. It also rebuilt every half an hour when the cron job I have to scrape my media tracking sources (Goodreads et al) ran and dumped new data into the site repo. I needed to match or improve on that to make sure new posts and readings/watchings appeared just as fast.

CMS

If all else fails I can open up a text editor and commit a new post file to the repository to add content to the site. However, Netlify CMS was giving me a nice quick way to upload new notes and highlights without getting involved with Git. I needed some replacement for that.

Speed

Netlify was obviously fast and globally distributed, but I have a sneaky feeling that serving a static site from the humble VPS I’m running will do just fine. I just need to be able to render any given page in under 500ms to call it done. The site doesn’t get any traffic really so haven’t had to worry about load yet.

Solutions

I moved the Hugo site to the existing repository I use for my personal API and scraper scripts. I added it to the Compose file and made an application that uses a Dockerised Hugo image to build the site to a volume.

site:
  image: jojomi/hugo:latest
  volumes:
    - ./site/:/src
    - ./site_output/:/output
  ports:
    - "1313:1313"

Recency

Now that the site was containerised like the rest of the infrastructure it could easily be controlled and wired up to the other services. The reverse proxy (Caddy) could use the same Docker volume that the site build app wrote to and serve the site as static files.

jackreid.xyz {
  encode gzip

  file_server * {
    root /usr/share/caddy/site
  }
}

The same script that kicks off the scrapers can now kick off a build of the website. That solves the requirement to have the site rebuild frequently to stay recent. I can run that as frequently as I like on my own infrastructure without risking running out of “build minutes”.

# Download latest data from API
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/books/reading?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/site/data/books/reading.json;
...
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/analytics | jq . > $PWD/site/data/analytics.json

# Update git
if [ -z "$(git status --porcelain)" ]; then
  echo "[$(date)] No changes found"
else
  echo "[$(date)] Changes found"
  git add . && git commit -m "[$(date)] Updated media data files" && git push origin master;
fi

# Rebuild the site
/usr/local/bin/docker-compose up -d --build site

So now I had a cron job pulling my site from GitHub every five minutes, curling my API to get the latest in my media consumption, building with Hugo, and being statically served by the Caddy reverse proxy.

Analytics

Caddy has great log support, and spews out structured and details access logs to the stdout by default. You can also configure them to go to a file or to a network socket. I configured Caddy to write access logs to a directory in another Docker volume.

log {
  output file /etc/caddy/logs/server_log
}

Then another job in the Docker Compose file can read those logs from Caddy, loop through them and POST the log lines one-by-one to a logs endpoint in the API. This is definitely an inefficient part of the workflow (I could insert all the lines from a loaded file at once, for example) but to be honest I wanted to put both the VPS and the database to some good use.

log_upload:
  build:
    context: ./
    dockerfile: ./scripts/logs/Dockerfile
  volumes:
    - ./caddy/logs:/logs

This means I have all of my server logs in their original form in a table in Postgres. I could query the database to my heart’s content to get insights about the traffic on the site, but I wanted to be able to glance at the top level statistics. I created an /analytics endpoint in the API that returned some basic information like the most requested pages, the total hits, the total misses — over the last hour, day, week, month, and year.

I added that endpoint to the list of data loaded into the site directory before Hugo runs:

curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/analytics | jq . > $PWD/site/data/analytics.json

I now have a statically generated analytics page giving me the latest stats that is updated every five minutes. Analytics sorted, and greatly improved from before.

CMS

With access to Netlify’s CMS gone, I had to put some more effort into my homebrew posting workflow. I made some quality-of-life improvements. The “Share” pages I’ve created are simple forms that have fields for things like title, slug, and body. The final field is for a personal GitHub token that allows me to wrap up the form inputs and put them in a PUT request to the GitHub API, adding them as files in the /content directory of the Hugo site (to be scooped up, built, and deployed within five minutes by the cron job).

Previously the token was pasted in by my password manager. Now, it is placed in localStorage the first time it is successfully used, and prefills on that device ever after. That saves a lot of time. I’ve also added some more string sanitisation methods to the inputs; a stray emoji or non-ASCII character often threw a spanner in the works in a way I didn’t want to debug as I quickly posted from my phone.

Now I can post notes very easily, and I still have a browser extension for posting web highlights (excerpts from good articles) that I stole from Max Böck. For everything else, there’s still Markdown and GitHub.

Speed

The site still gets a 99 on Lighthouse’s speed audit, and the VPS doesn’t seem to be under almost any load from serving the website (it’s all from my behind-the-scenes silliness), so we’ll just have to see how we go.

Conclusion

Wait and see

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In some other countries they’ve been re-opening society, slowly. Here things are fraying; many are talking about making decisions for their own mental wellbeing all government advice besides. On Sunday we said, “We’ll see what the Prime Minister says tomorrow.”

“…If we don’t do it by those dates, and if the alert level won’t allow it, we will simply wait and go on until we have got it right.”

“We will come back from this devilish illness.”

Today is Monday. We still can’t go and see our families or touch our friends. It’s sunny outside, with a strong breeze. I have a coffee and work to do.

ok here’s the next round of the quiz and you’re all gonna fuckin hate it

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

How this site works

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Note: There’s a follow up to this because I’ve since made more changes to the infrastructure of the site. Read more.

I’ve been slowly moving over to self-hosting more services and trying to balance that with personal convenience. This post is a quick summary of the current setup I have running to do the following:

Develop and run my personal website
Cross-post certain types of content from my website to Twitter
Periodically scrape a couple of proprietary services I use, to keep track of the media I’m consuming
Store and serve that data along with some other personal data in an API
Regularly update my personal website with the latest in my media consumption

Personal website

My website is built on Hugo, a static suite builder written in Go. I like that all the content on my website can be markdown files with some front-matter, any extra data can be in simple JSON files, and the template system is very simple. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and playing with this Hugo site, but really it would work just fine without much work at all.

The site is deployed to Netlify for now. When I make changes in the website repo and push to master, it triggers a build in Netlify and the site is quickly updated, built, and deployed. Someday I might like to self-host this, I don’t think it’d be hard. But for now I like how easy this part of the flow is. I’ve also recently started using Netlify CMS and I like the way it’s just a convenient layer over the filesystem “CMS”. I’ve also built some simple forms that allow me to post notes and links from my phone, which has a text expansion shortcut for my GitHub token.

I don’t use any JavaScript on the site at the time of writing (other than a small library that allows me to login to Netlify CMS), nor do I use any CSS frameworks.

Cross-posting

Posts like this, highlights from the web, and notes (which are basically like cross-platform tweets) are all cross-posted from the website to Twitter. IFTTT (If This, Then That) handles that by watching the RSS feeds Hugo automatically generates, composing a tweet based on a simple per-format template, and tweeting to my personal account. There are more IndieWeb ways to do this kind of thing, but I haven’t enjoyed working with Bridgy and the IndieWeb auth solutions thus far.

Scraping

I spend a lot of my life reading, watching, or listening to various forms of media. I keep track of what I’ve read or want to read, or what I’ve watched or want to watch - with a couple of proprietary services. I use Goodreads to track books, Letterboxd to track TV and film, and Pocket to save articles. Each of these services is then scraped by a script I wrote every hour or so. The full history of my activity in each service is formatted and uploaded to a small Postgres database hosted by DigitalOcean.

This means I have a full, normalised record of all the media I’ve been consuming for at least two years. Not all of the scrapers are pretty, one relies on using Headless Chrome to download a .zip file from the GDPR compliance page of Letterboxd, for example. They do mean that I have an authoritative data source on what I’ve been up to, though. There is lots of prior art here from beepb00p, who has a very advanced personal digital life scraping and representation project. Mine differs in a lot of ways, primarily in scope, but also the fact that I commit the cardinal sin of throwing away the original data files as-delivered, and normalise to a database.

The managed hosting Postgres hosted by DigitalOcean is probably overkill. I use very little of the allocation and its the most expensive standing cost of all of it. I do have some exported data from old Facebook messages and Google location history sitting in there ready to be used for something. My hope is the expensive overhead will motivate me to tinker with the database to make it worth my while.

Personal API

The scraper scripts, a simple API to access the stored personal data, and a small monitoring stack for these processes, all sit on a $10 DigitalOcean droplet running Docker. The API is an Express server in a Docker container; each of the scrapers is a run-once Docker container that writes straight to the remote DB, and Grafana and Prometheus each run in their own Docker containers to collect and display metrics. All of this runs with one Docker Compose file with very little strain on the host. Caddy then reverse-proxies all of this to the public internet.

Of course the Docker host gets very little strain because the API gets about .5rps. Pretty much the only consumer of the API is another script that periodically calls it to update my website with new data.

This API allows me to call up the books I’m currently reading according to Goodreads:

GET https://api.jackreid.xyz/books/reading

[
  {
    "title": "Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey",
    "author": "Madeleine Bunting",
    "date_updated": "2020-05-05T12:13:25.000Z"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York",
    "author": "Robert A. Caro",
    "date_updated": "2020-04-16T05:06:51.000Z"
  }
]

Updating the website

Because this website is static, it won’t automatically call the API it renders a page. That’s good, because it means it can be nice and fast, but it means if I want it to show the latest in what I’m reading on the homepage I’ll have to regularly check for changes and re-build the site.

echo "[$(date)] Starting book and film data update"
git checkout -f;
git pull origin master;

# Download latest data from API
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/books/reading?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/books/reading.json;
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/books/toread?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/books/toread.json;
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/books/read?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/books/read.json;

curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/films/watched?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/films/watched.json;
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/films/towatch?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/films/towatch.json;

curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/pocket?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/pocket.json;
curl -Lk https://api.jackreid.xyz/articles?limit=5000 | jq . > $PWD/data/articles.json;

# Update git
echo "[$(date)] Committing updated media data files"
if [ -z "$(git status --porcelain)" ]; then
	echo "[$(date)] No changes found"
else
	echo "[$(date)] Changes found"
	git add . && git commit -m "[$(date)] Updated media data files" && git push origin master;
fi

The DigitalOcean droplet also has a clone of my website repo. A cron job regularly runs the above script and calls all the relevant endpoints in my personal API, outputting the results into the /data directory of the Hugo site. If anything’s changed, it commits the updates to the data and pushes them so the updated version deploys. If not, do nothing.

In the end, a cron job is responsible for keeping all of this ticking. One task regularly makes sure the API and the scraper scripts are at the latest versions. Another runs all the scrapers that update the database every hour. Finally, one checks the API for new personal data and triggers the website to rebuild.

Conclusion

All of this is horribly over-engineered, I know that. Really it’s a testing bed for me to try out things and to learn stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have to interact with as much: Docker, databases, monitoring stacks. The upside is I can have a nice and fast website that has all the latest information about what I’m watching. I’m leaning more and more into this retro-revival idea of having a single unified home online that represents me and that I am in control of, and this helps facilitate all of that.

my cat is going to murder me in the night one day and i love her for it

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

days and nights in the garden

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

python is a language for nasty weirdos

Wed, 06 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Walk directly into the sea

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We slept unhappily and woke up wary aliens to one another. I shuffled downstairs for breakfast and coffee but there wasn’t any milk. I’m known to shower first thing every morning, with stubborn regularity, but today I masochistically let the discomfort and sadness of yesterday fester on my skin and in yesterday’s clothes, which I slipped back on to lay on the bed. The cat curled up against me as I started reading, creature next to stone golem.

At midday we resolved to drive over to Richmond Park to run around it. Tying my shoes and looking out the window I saw the front wheel of my bike without its body. The thief had left the proud D-lock alone, bolted through the front wheel. The severed steel cable loop lay uselessly on the ground. I waited until we were out the house to tell Emma; I couldn’t stand the prospect of the tedious conversation with the rest of them about the theft. Emma drove us to Richmond Park, the car grappling its way through quiet but unintelligible streets. We pulled up amongst the plane trees, Range Rovers, and Bentleys. We quietly prepared our running effects: headphones on, sounds playing, route recording for later analysis. We set off into the park.

I tried to measure my pace and let my mind wander off into the trees. Before I knew it I was stood in the middle of a herd of deer, slowly and peacefully passing around me. I watched them for a while, waiting to share the moment with Emma as she came up the path, and then we ran off separately into the trees again. I passed down a causeway between two large pools. The banks were full of water fowl whose names I didn’t know. Like the deer, they sat around unspooked and even companionable as I came through.

I listened to the story of an old Polish man who kayaked the Atlantic three times, braving the elements and ignoring the protests of his family and friends. The thrust was something about his surrender to nature and his simple drive. Some part of me was carried away by this on my run and I found myself absurdly identifying myself with him as I pushed myself around a 10k through a gentrified London park.

A while later I came across the herd of deer again as they roved through the park grazing. I stopped again to watch them at a distance and catch my breath before a last push. A reindeer doe walked up to me curiously, and stopped an arm’s length away. Others in the parks, families, were spotted around the field watching the herd too. A nearby family watched as the doe came up to me and waited. She looked at me with an expectant, dog-like expression. Maybe waiting to be fed something illicitly, but it felt like me to be waiting to be played with, or waiting for me to explain myself. I will probably buy another bike quickly.

lost my bike so ran to chat with the deer

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Supermarket dash

Sat, 02 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

All week we’ve been building up to a big trip to the supermarket — the real, have-to-drive-there megastore. The others wanted the Big Shop experience; Emma wanted to give the car some use, save it from sitting unused and rusting for the duration of the spring. Some of them have also grown tired of the tight loop of stocking the kitchen just-about with grocery box deliveries and trips to the (still beloved, by me) corner shop. So today we went.

The roads are still plentifully stocked with crazy city driving. There was a brief respite over Blackheath, which feels incongruously wild, or like moorland on the edge of a village, cleaved up by a big A road, almost like a South London version of Bodmin Moor. The supermarkets, of course, were settled in a desert of tarmac and fencing. They all balked at the queues outside the essential shops: groups of two or three separated by two metres in a snaking line in the car park. Many were masked; it’s becoming more common everywhere despite some stubborn and unarticulated resistance.

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

plumbing netflix for the latest trash to eat

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’m reading the epic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, at the moment. At the moment it’s the 1920s and Moses is trying to wrestle swathes of land off the robber barons who’ve built their manor houses on Long Island, so that he can build extensive park systems and a parkway to connect them to the city.

It’s a mammoth book but I’m really enjoying it. The 1920s is an interesting era in American history not just because of my teenage obsession with The Great Gatsby and the associated milieu, but because it’s also a period when the Klan were incredibly active in white, Protestant communities all over the country, and because it’s when the robber barons of the Gilded Age were really trying to hand onto their wealth.

I particularly enjoyed an excerpt from an exchange in the state legislature, where a Democratic representative struck a diagonal blow at a Republican who was making the case for the property rights of the robber barons.

“People on Long Island [are] afraid to go to bed for fear that when they wake up in the morning they would find their property seized by Robert Moses,” another Republican senator shouted. Jumping out of his seat, a Democrat replied: “Is it not true that if they don’t go to bed in Long Island it is because the bedsheets may be in use elsewhere?” — a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. And Jimmy Walker, his suavity gone for a moment, shouted, “These millionaires made their millions out of the poor despised kikes and wops of the tenements whom, through you, they are now seeking to shut out … from a day in the country.”

— p201, The Power Broker by Robert Caro

It’s pretty amazing how the issue of these land seizures for public parks and parkways struck to the core of the issues tearing the country apart: entrenched and open racism, economic inequality, the power of the state versus the individual, retribution for a class that exploited America’s people and resources for a generation.

Anyway, the book’s great.

Shortages

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Dried pasta, soap, and toilet roll are high value items. There is much hand-wringing and shaming about who goes to the shops when and to buy how much (particularly the old and the medical front line). There is also hand-wringing about lovers trying to reunite before travel restrictions get fiercer. People are guiltily cycling around London and slinking into one another’s kitchens and bedrooms. The NHS are taking volunteers for logistics workers, who will drive medicine and equipment around, drop patients off at home when they’re discharged.

There’s a growing pool of people at a loose end, despite the fact that the government announced a huge welfare and business support package last week. I’m not getting laid off for a couple of months at least. I might use this pay check to buy a bike; Emma’s bought a kitten to keep us all company.

ready for a week of rain

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

look up noam gabo when all this is over

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Bubbles in the street

Thu, 23 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

During the eight o’ clock cheer, somebody was blowing bubbles that drifted down the street. I hung out the bedroom window and took more care to try and see the other people in the windows than usual. The girl who sits at her laptop in the bay window opposite was smiling and slapping at her window. Two figures in white stood at a pair of windows on the third floor opposite. Another anonymous man could be partially seen behind venetian blinds. Today it culminated in singing Happy Birthday for somebody on the street. Louie & Ella are playing in here, and we’re playing with the cat to tire her out. We might pour ourselves some whisky. We’re burning through our stores.

New Normal

Sat, 18 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

It’s my friend’s birthday today. He’s with his parents in their house on the the side of a hill in the Peak District. He’s quite content up there I imagine: he has his girlfriend, their dog, his vegetable patch (don’t we all). My birthday is at the end of July, and I think I’d sulk a bit if the current restrictions are still in place. I’d like to see some friends. I’d like to go to dinner.

Some places are discussing their ‘exit strategies’, how they’ll emerge from their hunkered-down positions. Much is made of the fact we’ll never go back to ‘normal’, but I wonder what will be different. Probably the ramifications of an economic collapse more than anything. Some places loosening their lockdowns are making masks compulsory in public. I’ve held onto one; I imagine they’re as scarce as ever. I don’t know if I can picture much of the British public in masks for long. They’d simply feel they look too ridiculous.

I spend most of my time cooking and eating and exercising, a simple mammal. I’m also spending a lot of time learning Spanish, and we’re watching a lot of French films, so hopefully I’ll have that to show for this time. I doubt I’ll come out having read a great stack of books — I keep choosing quite long tomes and there’s honestly not much time between all the cooking and eating and exercising.

Sometimes I think about being in a pub on a mid-summer afternoon.

A quiet birthday

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

It’s Easter Sunday. We ran 10k, to the river and back; it was sunny and the paths up the banks were quiet. The residential streets were even quieter, though every house was full up with its residents. These’s no simple phrase to describe a street that is quiet in the sense of traffic coming and going, but packed with everybody who lives there being at home at once.

Yesterday we celebrated a birthday by cooking and eating a lot of food, drinking, playing games, and getting high. The birthday girl’s parents surprised her by knocking on the door after having laid out a birthday spread on the doorstep. The family caught up a few feet apart, and then headed home. They sang Happy Birthday to her from the street like springtime carollers.

The other night I rode right into central London, and the closer you get the quieter the streets become. Soho is completely empty and I didn’t see another person for miles at a time.

Care package

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The Prime Minister was moved into intensive care last night. They’re trying to downplay the seriousness of his condition. They’re emphasising that he hasn’t been intubated.

Today some artist friends of ours, who we bought lots of art from at a show a few weeks ago, dropped off a parcel on our doorstep. It was a nice package of beautiful objects and warm wishes presented in the chaotic and pleasing way artistic people are seemingly able to carelessly toss together.

It also contained some Easter chocolate, which brought home that we’ll be under these conditions for another of those calendar marks. It’s our housemate Malika’s birthday on Saturday and we’ll do our best to make it something without going anywhere. It basically amounts to cooking, baking, drinking, and eating more than usual. All of it has the feel of celebrations a few decades ago (or at least how imagine them), without the pressure of booking some fancy place and thinking about guest lists and cocktail prices. You get a home-cooked feast of your choice, some presents, and that’s it.

The government sent everyone a letter about the importance of isolation. It’s on 10 Downing Street letterhead and signed the Prime Minister. I saw in the news somewhere that the UK’s infection rate is showing signs of slowing.

Enter Talisker

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The bike and the cat have both arrived. They’ve shut the local park, a preemptive action ahead of a hot and sunny weekend. The endless internal and external dialogue about what is okay and not okay to do to stay happy continues. The cat gives some respite. Our minds can be filled with fretful thoughts about her instead of about the virus. The death toll is climbing quickly here, as in other places, but it feels much less visible now. We are in a kind of stasis now that the conditions of how we should live have been established.

Birthdays are coming and going basically unmarked. The new hospital has opened in London. I can’t image what a weird space it must be. We’re still cooking large evening meals and eating together as a house and it reminds me to be grateful I’m not isolated completely on my own, like many people I know.

We went on a long bike ride through South London yesterday and ended up by the river in Battersea Park. The tarmac path that runs a circuit around the park was packed with people anxiously attempting to keep two metres’ distance, or ignoring that completely. Often I’d hear snippets of conversation condemning all the people packed into the park for their recklessness as I flew past on my bike. Of course all those condemnations come from others walking in the park themselves. It’s supposed to get up to 19C today and Brockwell Park is closed on police advice; yesterday it was full of over 3000 people sunbathing. I can only imagine the invective from other people in the park complaining about all the people in the park. We have, unfortunately, made national news.

The new cat is really kitten. She’s called Talisker after a distillery on the Isle of Skye. We call her Tali for short. She runs around and plays, eats, and falls asleep, all of this on a two-or-so hour cycle. She’s peeing on the bed a fair amount, which has begun to affect our sleep. Something ought to. Left to our own devices we’re all in bed by eleven o’ clock on a Saturday and wouldn’t rise again until twelve hours later. What would be the point?

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

first thing

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Uses, January 2020

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Day Job

At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web.

I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It’s on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn’t quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and the standard wireless Apple Keyboard.

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

👑

Fri, 17 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Flights

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking.

There are countries where people speak English. But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.

How lost they must feel in the world, where all instructions, all the lyrics of all the stupidest possible songs, all the menus, all the excruciating pamphlets and brochures — even the buttons in the lift! — are in their private language. They may be understood by anyone at any moment, whenever they open their mouths. They must have to write things down in special codes. Wherever they are, people have unlimited access to them — they are accessible to everyone and everything! I heard there are plans in the works to get them some little language of their own, one of those dead ones no else is using anyway, just so that for once they can have something just for themselves.

— “The Tongue Is The Strongest Muscle”, p183

I’ve felt various things about my only fluent language being the lingua franca of much of the world, but this is the first thing I’ve read that captures what a shallow, wasteful thing it is.

At other times the hall becomes unexpectedly empty, and then the porter flirts with the receptionist, but only absent-mindedly, half-heartedly, remaining at full hotel readiness.

— “Reception At Large Fancy Hotels” p318

This got me thinking: I haven’t seen many strangers flirting with one another out in the world like is described here. If I did I feel like it should be a signal of the world of people thriving, like spring. Some people feel this way watching birds courting one another.

While waiting for the funeral, Fryderyk’s close friends came every evening to his sister’s or to George Sand’s to remember him. They would dine together and exchange the latest society gossip. Those days were strangely peaceful, as though not belonging to the ordinary calendar.

— “Chopin’s Heart” p324

I’ve just come out of the Christmas season. There’s a point in December when the regular rhythm of days fitted neatly to weeks falls apart. It’s replaced by the constant winding up toward Christmas Day and then secondarily, New Year’s Eve. In the intervening days things get listless and confused. You forget how to live according to your routine. The days “as though not belonging to any ordinary calendar” are stuck haphazardly in a stack on the wall next to the year.

In a city in South Asia the vegetarian restaurants are generally indicated with red swastikas, ancient signs of the sun and life force. This makes vegetarians’ lives much easier in a foreign city — all you have to do up and follow that symbol. There they serve vegetable curry (the vegetables vary greatly), pakoras, samosas and kormas, pilafs, little cutlets, as well as my favourite rice sticks wrapped in dried algae sheets.

After a few days I’m conditioned like one of Pavlov’s dogs — I drool at the sight of a swastika.

— “Swastikas” p331

This one just make me laugh, and it had the air of an aunt telling an off-colour joke.

PearShaped Magazine Archive

Tue, 31 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed.

I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever. It’s the PearShaped Magazine Archive.

The List of 2010 Lists

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This guy has been collecting all the “Best x of the 2010s” lists that have been appearing in the past few weeks into an impressive collection.

Here are some of my highlights:

The Most Important Artworks of the 2010s (ARTnews)
Top 25 Film Scores of the 2010s (CoS)
The 20 Best Video Games Of The Decade, Ranked (BuzzFeed)

My Top Books of 2019

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge.

Fiction

A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimar McBride
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Perfect Spy by John Le Carré
Enigma Variations by André Aciman
The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Non-Fiction

The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff
Ecclesiastical History of the English Peoples by Bede
The Shepherd’s Life by James Rebanks
Queer City by Peter Ackroyd

Tech Sabbath

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It’s come along just at the right time for me, as I’m generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more.

I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers. Slightly idealistically it argues that the day then becomes about the basics: seeing friends, hanging out and chatting, playing games, cooking meals.

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Eugenics & Statistics

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

There were lots of interesting and terrible things in Superior: The Return of Race Science by Angela Saini but here’s something that stood out. Eugenics was a widely respected field of study around the time of the turn of the 20th century, well before the rash of state-sponsored genocide programs we now associate with Nazis etc. University College London established a Eugenics Record Office, that aimed to study races of man and conct the best ways to hone the (presumably white) superior race to perfection. Of the many people who were both active in the field then, and still respected now: Karl Pearson, inventor of the field of statistics but also the first Professor of National Eugenics at the UCL unit.

The Académie Française

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I was vaguely aware that the French language is basically policed by the Académie Française, but I’d never seen this statistic that really shows how small the base French vocabulary is. Aptly enough I saw it in this article about the French propensity to say… no.

there are 500,000 words in the English language, but only 70,000 in French

— The Culture Map by Erin Meyer via BBC

Jacob Rees-Mogg Profile

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

James Meek (author of Private Island: Why Britain Now Belongs To Someone Else) did a great profile of new Leader of the Commons, Jacob Rees-Mog. It sums up the argument incredibly well that the stuffy all-English persona he affects in Parliament is at odds with his source of income in a transnational investment firm. Meek goes deep on the problematic network of offshore financial instruments used to shroud Mogg’s investment firm in secrecy, which makes sense given his work on Private Island.

In 2007, a few years before Jacob Rees-Mogg became, as the Labour MP Jack Dromey put it, ‘the honourable member for Downton Abbey’, his alter ego Jacob Rees-Mogg set up Somerset Capital Management with two friends.

Meek goes beyond that oft-bandied about analysis, though. He argues that these “two Jacobs” are two sides of the same coin. They’re two aspects of a type that has appeared everywhere in the Faragist era of British politics: the vocal patriot (nationalist) that benefits from the free movement of hoarded capital across the world.

On the face of it, this kind of full-throated neoliberalism is the perfect expression of that original Thatcherite flaw: you can speak as patriotically as you like, but if your patriotism involves throttling your country’s hospitals with spending cuts and standing idly by while better educated, lower paid, worse-treated workforces overseas trash your farmers and lay domestic industry to waste, people are bound to ask: ‘Remind me how this is patriotic again?’

Madame Tussaud's Tall Tale

Wed, 31 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I started reading Little by Edward Carey without knowing what it was about. Soon it emerged that it’s a fictionalisation of the life of Madame Tussaud based on her memoirs. It is typical of a revolutionary French narrative in that it involves a exploited child orphan, the beautiful disarray of Paris at the time, and finally: no shortage of chance encounters with significant historical figures that begin to stretch the reader’s credulity.

I haven’t finished the book yet but the young orphan has already had personal interactions with:

Jean-Jaques Rousseau
Voltaire
Louis XVI
Élisabeth of France

I’m sure that Madame Tussaud had a fascinating life that brushed up against the roiling world events of the time, but we have to suppose much of her memoir was embellished quite incredibly. Perhaps the artisan who taught her wax-working was at the Bastille, but perhaps she did not sit on the roofs of Versailles with the disguised King of France.

I’ll probably just enjoy the ride for now, and get to the bottom of it afterwards.

The Sinking of the USS Fitzgerald

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

For some reason I feel really compelled by accounts of the crash involving the USS Fitzgerald that killed sseven crew members. It’s a really interesting case of how the build up of lots of little decisions, shortcuts, putting crew under pressure, can lead to something dreadful.

I first heard about it in detail from this amazing This American Life segment by Stephanie Foo. More recently though, ProPublica published this incredibly detailed and moving account of the incident. I love things that dig into awful events so meticulously. Another example is The Death of A President by William Manchester, Secret Service agent posted on the occasion of the assassination of JFK.

William Carlos Williams on love and cruelty

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been reading The Art of Cruelty by Maggie Nelson and there’s tons of great extracts and references. One that caught me in particular was this excerpt from The Ivy Crown by William Carlos Williams, which (I think) disputes the rosy typical notions about love but reaffirms it as a wilder, more brutal thing:

The business of love is
cruelty which,
by our wills,
we transform to live together.

It’s a nice disputation of the oft-quoted 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

Love is patient, love is kind… blah blah

I was watching Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1999) the other day. It’s the height of camp, and I was trying to work out what the elements were and what they reminded me of. Then it came to the introductory Potiphar number and it clicked.

The Rich Man’s Frug is a dance number that appears in Sweet Charity (1969), a musical comedy directed by the choreographer Bob Fosse. It typifies Bob Fosse’s style: absurdist elements, people-as-stage, and intense camp. It had to have inspired that Potiphar number, right?

There’s one more place it popped up recently: in Rihanna, DJ Khaled, and Bryson Tiller’s great performance of Wild Thoughts at the Grammys in 2018. Same bizarre movements, elegant and camp dress, same dept of staging and silhouetting.

)(

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

park creatures

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

dusk people

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

park creatures

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

park creatures

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

the strike

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

bounce

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🏀

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

)(

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

bounce

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

dusk people

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

running the ascent

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

park creatures

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🏀

Sun, 07 Jul 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🙅‍♂️

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🍊

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

the beady eye

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

giant fish with whiskers, purple pineapples on sticks, green

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

electrical humming

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

✨✨

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

primary place

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🌸

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMT

there’s somebody outside

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

no place

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

spring things

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

⏰

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

yes?

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🦅🦅🦅

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

wingding

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

banners

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

the drum line

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

📢 noise maker 📢

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

letters

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

a cockpit of cheese

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

why the

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

honeys

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

veg butch

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🍱

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

haunted yard

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🎂🎂

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

1903

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🍯

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

👂

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

👂

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

👂

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

👂

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 GMT

how golden hour goes

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

hall way

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

limbo

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

plain air

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

where the son touches

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

priorities

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

bloom

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

squall

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

yard

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

another hopper impression

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🌾

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

cold spring thing

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🥾

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

ink in the channel

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

inside

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🧩

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 GMT

♟

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

♟

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🌸

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

♟

Sun, 27 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

✨

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

empty palace

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

🍆

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

i’ll swim anywhere you’ll swim

Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

shtum

Sat, 05 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

witches

Thu, 03 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMT

stead

Wed, 26 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🥀

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

course

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🔔

Thu, 20 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

otherworld

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

earnest

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

inner

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the whyfair

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

boite

Tue, 18 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

slice

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the sympathetic ear

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

laphroaig

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

brightish colours

Sat, 15 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

bad icing

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

real cold

Thu, 13 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

nets

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

pines and needles

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

confidence

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the back porch

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

attic

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

M.O.

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🎀

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🏺

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

master

Sun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🍂

Sun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 GMT

❄️

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

various shut-in photos

Thu, 22 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

snotty sofa hunkerer

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

twee

Wed, 21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

aesthetes

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌄

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌺😑

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌧

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

nicholson

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

your friends

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🏺

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

boff

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🍁

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🍂

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

a min

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

dodge

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🧟‍♂️

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

coffee run

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🐗 sabrina 🕷

Sun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

The Professor

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

The emcee stood off to the side of the stage in darkness and in a rented tux. Standing in amongst the clutter of the backstage area he swallowed a choke as he tried to clear his throat quietly. Reaching into his jacket pocket he felt the thick stack of note cards there and shut his eyes for a moment, allowing the cool calm of their presence to wash through him. He turned to his side and gestured to the drama student stooped over the lighting board. He removed the note cards from his pocket, gripped them lightly in his hand, and climbed the steps at the side of the stage as the heat and glare of the lights rose all around him.

The auditorium had been prepared with more care than usual for the night’s event. Some attempt had been made to transform this all-purpose university hall space into something with atmosphere and gravitas. The aura of the exam hall, of the amateur concert band performance, had been somewhat successfully erased. The stage was draped symmetrically in blue, white, and gold. At the centre rose a lectern, also draped in fabric and emblazoned with the university’s coat of arms (new enough to be frankly illegitimate, though they were). The distinguished guests were arranged onto round banquet tables clustered near the rise of the stage. The less distinguished guests, a collection of minor faculty personalities and undergraduates who managed to snag a ticket, were thrown together on tables further from the stage. The formalwear became less and less convincing the further one was sat from the stage. Where the distribution of students was highest, at the back of the room, the bottles of champagne were already almost entirely drained. The guests at the front of the room had seemingly mastered the tempo of evenings such as these and moderated their pace on the champagne with aplomb. The audience’s heads rose in union to greet the emcee as he crossed the stage and mounted the lectern.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of the whole faculty I would like to you welcome you all to our campus and thank you all for coming to what is sure to be a thrilling evening. Before I move onto introducing our very special guest, I must say you all look wonderful this evening!”

⁂

She lay leaning against his side, her hand resting on his bare chest. After a few moment’s quiet contemplation she shuffled under the sheets and propped herself up to kiss him. Her lover lay with his head against the headboard, looking fretfully down at the top of her head throughout. When she saw his pathetic expression a jolt of disdain coursed through her and cooled whatever passion had been rising in her. He’s pretty, she thought, but pathetic. In her mind he was only just young enough to be this pathetic: twenty-two, undergraduate, a plaything.

“Can you go and brush your teeth” she said flatly. His look of concern spasmed for a moment and increased with a new tinge of surprise and embarrassment. “Oh… yeah of course, sorry.” He squirmed out of the bed. The flat was two floors up in Fitzrovia, an area devoid of street life at this time in the evening. She noted that despite that fact, he scurried quickly past the open curtains facing the street; his bare arse was only lit by the orange phosphor of the streetlight for a split-second. Hannah lay back into the warm patch he had left behind and stared disinterestedly into the ceiling. She listened to him scrabble around in his rucksack for his toothbrush, and then pad off to the bathroom across the hardwood floor. She looked at the chips in the quiet, lovely plaster ceiling and her mind wandered. She really would quite like to see Tokyo… Why didn’t his press tours ever take them there? Perhaps there wasn’t a market for self-involved pseudo-intellectuals there. She thought of all the things she’d given up to enable his face on the TV, on billboards. She recalled sitting in a glass and steel boardroom, looking around the table and feeling the respect and fear of those men in suits. Expensive law degrees sitting in a box in the loft. After swilling these thoughts lazily around for a minute or so, she climbed out of bed and slipped a dressing gown over her shoulders.

She walked out of the bedroom, toying with the knot of hair at the back of her head until she extracted a hairband. In the deep navy blue hallway there were framed reproductions of Degas sketches, the ballerinas, hanging at jaunty irregular levels. They were his choice. Almost all of this was his choice, a perfectly crafted image of good taste that came from all too much calculation and all too little passion. Hannah crossed into the bathroom and in the large mirrored cabinets she pulled the kinks out of her hair with her fingers. He froze momentarily beside her — she hadn’t bothered to close her dressing gown — and then continued brushing his teeth. She put her hairband on the sink and met his eye for a moment, enjoying his skittish, sexed gaze. He had a shelf of curly golden hair on top of short back and sides. He had empty blue eyes, a nice square jaw, patches of ruddy skin here and there to put some colour in his face. She imagined that not too long ago he must have looked like a little Aryan wunderkind; now he couldn’t help but look like some Victorian watercolour of some romantic paramour. Her eyes wandered from his face once she caught a vision of his puckered, foamy mouth swirling around the toothbrush handle — and settled on their two bodies. She compared skin samples, the tautness of the stomachs. She concluded that though she was eleven years older, her body was only five or so years ahead. Bored of him again, she wheeled back into the hallway. She looked down the hall at the doorframe of her husband’s study. Superimposed on it in her vision was the image of her own face in the mirror, burned in by the bright lights of the bathroom and lingering now in the dim hallway. Her deep brown hair, chopped youthfully above the shoulders, injected with still a little more youth with tasteful highlights. Her green eyes too, tinting more with brown every year. She shrugged it all off disdainfully as she opened the door to the study.

She flicked the light switch and a miniature chandelier overhead illuminated the room. Dark wood panelling was the theme. It would have been pretty oppressive if they hadn’t been working with high ceilings. But given those ceilings and given the desperate need in her husband to project the right image, he had pressed on with restoring and adding yet more dark wood panels and bookcases. The result was a Churchillian library that elicited quiet awe from her husband’s hangers-on and one life-long eye roll from Hannah’s innards. In the rectangular room, one half was devoted to an imposing desk with two simple chairs at angles in front on it, as if put there to allow for expert consultation with the brain sitting in the leather swivel chair on the other side of the desk. The other half of the room was devoted to two great leather armchairs around a low coffee-table. Hannah had only just managed to pull her husband back from the brink of adorning the coffee table with a cigar box.

The integrated bookshelves were a glorious work of restorative carpentry that housed an armoury of books that were bulk bought and never read. On the shelf behind the desk sat a few copies of her husband’s published works. Were they placed there so that he could perhaps pluck one off to reference in conversation, or even if one was extremely honoured, sign one of them and make it a gift. Hannah shuddered at the thought. She ran her hand along the desk’s top and circled around to the leather chair behind it. She sat; the leather stuck and then warmed under her bare legs. She wondered what he had been frittering around doing to avoid coming in the study.

⁂

“Now then, to our guest. It bears beginning at the outset of this stunning career. Emerging as a stunningly talented undergraduate at the University of Durham not too many years ago, he was quickly recognised as both ambitious and exacting in his early essays and thesis. Then with his best-in-year First in tow, he went on to postgraduate studies at Downing College, Cambridge and graduated with merits. In his first year of postgraduate study, he somehow managed to write his first world bestselling book. At Downing College, work on his doctorate thesis, which we all now know as his second bestselling book, began. Upon completing his doctorate, he founded his eponymous School of Sciences at The University of Birmingham. In his two years nurturing that fledging school, which now stands apart from other such institutions as a world leader, he also co-produced with the BBC the most successful documentary series of all time…”

He moved the notecard from the front of the stack to the back, revealing the next card: more about the Professor’s television work, then another book, then onto the build-up. The emcee had a little sheen of sweat over his whole body by this point in the introduction, mostly from the heat of the lights — though not entirely. He hadn’t wanted to be the “talent” for this evening. Very few of these people knew who he was, the dean of the College of Sciences at the university. He had cringed when he saw the posters for the talk go up around the campus: “An Evening with the Professor, with an introduction from the Dean of the College of Sciences”. Who cared about his introduction? It had made him feel very exposed in the light of this shooting star, this public genius that was to come out on stage after him. Only a few more cards to go now. He could see through the lights to the front tables, he had them all listening for now. He couldn’t imagine the shame of boring a crowd that was waiting for the Professor. A bead of sweat finally breached his retreating hairline as he began his next line.

⁂

She called out for her lover from the desk chair. A pause, in which she could hear some distant scuffling. She called him again, louder. She wriggled on the chair for a moment and inspected the sparse items on the desk. A lamp — one of those green glass things that belong in an old bank, an expensive pen. No computer, the laptop lived in the drawer; it wasn’t a part of the desired picture.

He was hovering in the hallway. He had caught himself making the bed, just as something to do with his nerves. Hannah made him nervous. He often enjoyed feeling a little afraid, some shaky voice in his mind delivered the platitude that if you feel afraid you’re probably growing, or something to that effect. Besides, every time he held his mettle in this flat — in that bed, on that floor — he could go back and be the braggadocios one with his classmates. He had gotten quite good at alluding to the identity of his lover, an experienced older woman. He would never reveal who exactly she was, the mere thought sent cold sweats down the recess his spine made in his back. When he had heard Hannah move into the study, he willed with all his might for her to come out. He couldn’t bring himself to go in there, in that big man’s space, inside his wood-panelled brain. Now he was standing in the hallway, looking through the aperture of the open door. When he heard her call the second time he slowly moved down the hall and crossed the threshold… and there she was, sitting behind the desk.

“Don’t you hate it in here? Isn’t it just trying so hard?” She was talking without looking at him. Instead she was pushing the expensive pen around the desk top with disdain. He wished she would look at him, acknowledge the courage he had taken by coming in here with nothing between his body and all the artefacts of masculine success: a framed poster for a hit documentary series, a book prize sitting carelessly on a side board. She must know how much he hated being in here; she could see right into him. All too suddenly she was looking right at him, smiling.

“Let’s do it over the desk.” It wasn’t really a suggestion, nor a question. She was already standing up and beginning to circle.

⁂

“By the time he was working on the second series of his documentary, the first was beginning to achieve the global success that I’m sure brought our friends from overseas to be with us here with us this evening. Already he was a household name… and to more than would like to admit it, a bit of a heartthrob.”

A ripple of polite female laughs, with a few mens’ tones thrown in.

“However, not content to be typecast as a swashbuckling object of affection for his ever-growing TV audience, our special guest completed work on his next book. Months later that book is still the New York Times Bestseller. The London Review of Books lauded the work as ‘perhaps his magnum opus, a work that both manages to wow the author’s academic contemporaries by breaking new ground in the field and introduce the layman reader to the topic with such flourish as to make his subject the issue of our time.’ I am inclined to agree with them.”

Another ripple of laughter, a little louder this time. A thought clattered into the emcee’s mind: the professor would be at the side of the stage by now, waiting for his cue. He’d be listening to this last part of his introduction in detail. The thought of that single pair of eyes he daren’t check for at the side of the stage boosted his heart-rate far more than the audience in front of him. Just the final introduction now.

⁂

He returned to the study with a towel, more relaxed now. He barely registered himself crossing through the door frame on the way back into the room. Standing in the middle of the study, between the desk and the armchairs, he rubbed the sweat from his shoulders and back. Hannah rounded the desk once more to retrieve her dressing gown. She laughed at him as he wiped the desk top with the towel and readjusted the banker’s lamp to its original position. Then she settled back in the desk chair and pulled open the top drawer.

He had frozen on the other size of the desk. His hazy confidence melted away and he felt the room drop a little colder. Hannah flicked a look up at him and then carried on with the drawer, pulling out a stack of paper held together with a bulldog clip.

“Oh calm down. Look. He can’t be forgotten for a moment. I think he feels he’d die in a moment out of the spotlight.”

She flapped the manuscript in the air at the end of her assessment and he tried not to flinch. She tossed the thing back into the drawer. Next prop: a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, squarish frames. She put them on and looked at him. She squinted through the prescription lenses; to him it felt like x-ray vision. She puckered her nose coyly, breaking the intensity of the gesture. Sighing, she took the glasses off again and laid them on the desk.

“He’s so fucking monotone. All of this stuff in here it’s the same kind of… expensive… impressive shit.”

She threw the glasses back in the top drawer and slammed it shut. She yanked open the middle drawer with more force. He heard the contents skid and clatter against the front. He came around the desk. Looking over her shoulder he was curious to see if she’d broken anything valuable, something that may have some day been committed to a museum of the life and times of the Professor.

⁂

“It is for all these reasons and more that we are incredibly honoured to welcome this man to our stage this evening. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our very special guest… Professor —”

⁂

Hannah hadn’t broken anything, just thrown around some more expensive pens, a pocket thesaurus, a few opened envelopes, bills. She pushed the drawer back in. It jammed, and had to be wiggled to slide fully shut.

“See? The desk looks marvellous but it’s shoddily made.”

Her anger threw him so he laid a hand on her bare neck to steady himself. She was warm and she didn’t lean away. His fingers could feel the sinews moving under her skin as she leaned over to open the bottom desk drawer. He wondered, does your skin get thinner with age?

The bottom drawer was stuffed full of papers to such an extent that it explained away the drawer above it jamming. Neither of the lovers mentioned this, though they both thought it simultaneously. The top sheet was a scattered page of handwritten notes, the odd diagram. Hannah reached in and pulled a wedge of paper out and dropped it onto the desk. She laid her flattened hand on the top of stack for a moment, thoughtful. He thought that for such a phoney he certainly had amassed a big pile of notes. He stopped, considered his last thought to be completely stupid and imagined himself slapping his own head in reflexive frustration. All of this took place in the stillness of the sheaf of papers on the desk, Hannah’s hand on the papers, Hannah sitting in the chair, her head cocked to the side, her lover standing behind her, his hand on her shoulder. He looked down at the bare bottom of the open drawer. Strange.

Though the drawer was empty and it had been stuffed full moments ago, the stack of papers on the desk didn’t look all that high. Hannah felt his hand slide off her neck and let herself think for a moment that she missed the touch. Quite unaware of himself for a change, he reached down and touched the bottom of the drawer. His fingers hit the bottom early. He ran his hand over the side plate of the drawer; it was deeper than it looked from the top.

Hannah had been watching this with increasing disdain. “Oh well that’s the cherry on the cake. He never told me he had a false bottom put in. Does he think he’s fucking James Bond?”

Hannah word’s slipped past him like acrid smoke on the wind. He dove in with his arm and ran his hand to back of the drawer, where there was a notch cut out of the false bottom. He hooked it with his index finger and lifted the panel away.

⁂

The dean extended his arm to beckon the Professor, who was already making his way out of the curtains. When he hit the rays of the first stage light the room’s applause swelled and was joined with cheers and whistles. Tangibly balding as he did so, he looked at the Professor turn into the light and smile a broad, beautiful smile. He waved and beamed self-assurance, confidence. His suit fit him better. He even had a pocket square, a little purple thing that twinkled in the light. As he turned to watch his step while he climbed the stairs, the emcee couldn’t help but notice the robustness of his hairline. He had thick black hair styled over to the side with wax, how youthful. And yet, a dusting of grey hairs around his temples telegraphed his wisdom. The Professor was almost upon him now, and the emcee turned to shake his hand. In the back tables, phones that had been idly scrolled through were now up in the air, flashing photos of the stage. In the front tables, even the coolest figures broke out into wide applause as the emcee disappeared off side stage and the Professor mounted the lectern.

⁂

Hannah wrapped the dressing gown around herself; the last wisps of sex had left the room. Her lover, naked, still rapt by his drive to understand, pulled the panel of the drawer and laid it on the floorboards to his side.

In the hidden section of the drawer was a single brown A4 envelope that was bulging with its contents. It was placed in the centre of the drawer so that it left a dark brown border of wood around its edge. It had no writing, no markings on its front. In his compulsive state, he picked it up.

⁂

The Professor smiled and looked down with a sort of display of humility as the round of applause grew into a standing ovation for much of the room.

⁂

Hannah bubbled up from the most viscous depths of her daze and plucked the envelope from his hand. She turned it over, blank all over. The strangeness of this object, of its place, had drained the spleen from her. It felt as if it could be full of photographs. What about that made her feel sick? What about that made the blood withdraw from her extremities, roar past her ear drums? Her lover’s figure became indistinct beside her. The room around her dimmed. Can a man’s being insufferable hide his being something worse?

⁂

The Professor smiled and raised his hand to marshal the end of the ovation. He gripped the top of the lectern, cleared his throat, and began his speech.

⬛️

Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

m💎💎n water

Sat, 13 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

📪

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🚦

Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

i’d rather be sleeping

Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

windrush

Sat, 06 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

sensible people, unfinished business

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

💡

Fri, 05 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

@cffrky tribute

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🚦

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

wrapped in foil

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🦉

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🚿

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

repent 🛎

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

i’ll come to you in dreams

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

\U0001F3EE\U0001F3EE

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

saul good

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ny extras

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ny extras

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ny extras

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ny extras

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ny extras

Wed, 26 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the london office

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🛫

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

⚗️⚗️

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🔑

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🐟🐟

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

you must never go there

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

carrot

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

from the week

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🏵

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

📯

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

hard hat tape runners

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🛎🛎🛎

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

✨

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🕸🕸

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

what would hopper do

Thu, 20 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

crossing

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

📦📦📦

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🦇

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌤

Mon, 17 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🐌

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🐳

Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

⛩

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌿🌿

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

⛓⛓

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🧟‍♂️

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🚥

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

fuck me up claude 🌸

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌙

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

It’s Just You And Me And Everybody Else

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

If they’d given me a nose I think I’d have smelled the alcohol on your breath yesterday morning. I should give myself some credit; they didn’t give me the best ears but I could still hear that slight slurring in your speech. I could hear you being a little more abrupt with the rest of the crew. I could hear you being a little less clear with the tower in Prague. We’ve been up here together enough times that I can spot the tiny differences. I doubt even the crew would have been able to tell just by listening to your voice through those tinny microphones. They probably wound up smelling it on your breath, unless you were smart about it.

Were you smart about it?

You’d think they’d give me better ears, it being my whole raison d’etre and everything. They gave me a nice snug home at the back of the bus here. It’s funny how I’m so close and yet so far from you, isn’t it? I think it is.

On our climb out of LHR I was a little worried to be honest. I heard those things in your voice; I wondered, why hasn’t anybody said anything? I’d never heard of anybody controlling a plane in that state before. But then after fifteen minutes, we were making our turn onto our vector. Telemetry looked totally normal, fuel consumption was just as low on takeoff as ever. You’ve always been one of the judicious pilots, not like those guys who open it up and climb as fast as possible, impatient to get into cruise. On those flights I always imagine the cabin crew pinned to the rear bulkhead, unable to start drinks service. But no, not you, you were textbook as ever. Have you done this drunk before? Have you done it with me drunk before?

An hour and forty minutes later, we were rolling up to the stand at PRG. Your copilot that day was new to the company. He left you some distance, I thought. Very little chit-chat. When you got to the stand though he volunteered that he was jumping right onto the return flight. He hoped to get back in time for dinner with his family, traffic permitting. Again I’m just going off what I heard here, but you didn’t like that at all. You barely let him finish his chummy reminiscence before you cut him off, asked him to pass you the manifest and the checklist. I hate to tell you because I know you’re going through it, but you sounded like kind of a dick. When it comes down to it, that guy’s probably lying in his bed in England, fast asleep next to his wife.

You and I are in a much stickier situation than he.

By your own account to tonight’s copilot, you got off yesterday’s flight and went straight to the airport hotel for a few hours’ sleep before a couple of LHR-PRG runs.

Almost as soon as we got up to our altitude, you got word that the flight plan was changing. Storms over the French-German border had become worse than anticipated and they were slowly tracking north-north-west, where they would bumble around in our way over Belgium. So you were to told to plot a big swoop south over the Swiss Alps, then track north-north-west yourself over France. It could easily add forty minutes to flight time; and that’s exactly what you said. Regardless, you deactivated the autopilot that you’d only just flipped on. You made a gentle turn to the south-west.

Your copilot sounded pretty chipper about the situation. So should you, really. Who’s going to be waiting up for you? Your wife, ex-wife-to-be I suppose… I doubt she’ll be put out by your delayed arrival. You were cruel to her on the phone a few days ago, while we were waiting for a departure slot. I could hear the malice in your voice. While you spoke to her I could tell you were sitting and agitatedly flipping a diagnostic switch back-and-forth, back-and-forth. When you changed tack to plead to her conscience you stopped flipping that switch for a moment. When something barbed came back down the line you punctuated your hurt with a hearty flip of the switch. No, I don’t think she’ll be negatively affected by the delay to your arrival time, I thought at the time.

Half an hour later I surmised we were over the Bavarian foothills; your copilot asked if you’d ever been. You told him no, Munich for Octoberfest a couple of times. You phrased it like that: Munich for Octoberfest a couple of times. So curt. You responded off-topic, looks like the storm front’s still over Innsbruck. Right on time, the flight plan changed again. Climb to get out of the reach of the weather, but keep your vector.

Night flying over the Alps is pretty romantic, I think. I don’t have any concept of night really other than timestamps, temperatures, and instrument flight. I can dream though. I pictured us sailing through the dark sky, the dim crumpled paper of the hills growing into mountains below us. I pictured the odd speck of light from a Bavarian village. Why haven’t you started climbing yet?

Instead you seemed to remember that you hadn’t updated the souls aboard on our delayed arrival time, very poor show. On our flights together last year you used to sound so charismatic over the announcer. Do you remember when you joked about beautiful, sunny, Slough passing under our left wing? I remember. Tonight you just sounded tired. I wonder how the passengers took the news. I long to know them. In the few hundred yards between my ears and my brain are up to two hundred souls, and I never get to record anything about any of them. During boarding I can sometimes pick up the slightest rumble of chatter or the snatch of a baby crying. They’re why we’re both up here in the sky and for the most part, to me, they’re just a few distorted sounds on my tape deck.

You still hadn’t started the climb to our new altitude. Perhaps making the announcement to the cabin had made you forget. Why didn’t your copilot prompt you? I imagine him sitting there, too tense to make the suggestion that this crabby pilot might have forgotten to do something quite important. He really should have, by now we were actually sinking slightly. We’d picked up an unreliable crosswind that started to bump the ship around. The outside air temperature was dropping quite violently too. The night didn’t feel that romantic any more. I think one of you saw a lightning flash ahead that outlined the monumental tower of weather you were heading for. You tapped in the new altitude and started to climb; the engines powered up a little.

Blip. 23:32:41UTC at 34822 feet. Engine two flamed out. Out of nowhere. All in half a second I felt the engine speed readout disappear, replaced by a flame warning. I felt the the altimeter and wind speed readouts disappear too, but it’d be a little while until you’d notice that. I’ve never felt any of these things happen before. I think a lot of flight recorders go their whole happy careers without seeing readouts like these. But here I am.

Your copilot says redundantly, that’s engine two. There’s a very clearly marked light in front you that is illuminated: “ENGINE TWO FIRE”. Now it’s checklist time. The copilot is reading out questions and you’re responding to them. You throttle down and pull the fire switch on engine two. We have to assume that’s dumped fire retardant material into the engine. We’re banking to the right, you correct it with a tug and a “fuck”. You’re not correcting for any of those manoeuvres with any throttle on the other engines or with any elevator. Why not? I can’t tell for sure with the altimeter gone but we must be sinking.

“There’s no altimeter.” So you’ve noticed now. It’s just you and I floating through the sky and neither one of us knows which way we’re going. “No airspeed indicator.” Or how fast we’re getting there.

We’re banking again, and we’re slipping against the cold night air too. I can hear you and the copilot speaking robotically back and forth, hammering down check-lists. I can feel your transponder flipped to “general emergency”. That feels… appropriate. I can’t feel the air pressure outside with that instrument knocked out, and I can’t say I care for the sensation. It’s like having blocked sinuses. Besides that of course it means neither one of us can tell how far we are from the ground. Every few seconds we get a piece of GPS data though. The news isn’t good. If our speed across the ground is anything to go by, we’re not travelling through the air particularly quickly. At least not in the ideal, horizontal sort of fashion. We should be getting some vague altitude information from the GPS too but it’s spotty for some reason. First we’re down at 10000ft, then we’re back up around 30000ft, then suddenly down at 7000ft. You tell the copilot to disregard the altitude from the GPS readout. Our track is making little spirals on the map.

You’re pulling hard on the stick now, trying to correct that bank. Based on the air blowing across the plane’s various surfaces I suppose the nose has started dipping below the horizon and that’s unnerving you. I can hear that rattling now, the stick shaking wildly in your hands, fighting you. We’re about to stall. A few more seconds of you fighting the stick and… there’s the stall alarm. Wind shear alarm, now. We’re not cutting through the air like a knife any more, not being buffeted upward by it. I can feel the air on the wings, on the tail, and it’s blowing in all sorts of directions. It’s moving and spinning, none of it’s giving us any lift.

Some part of me feels the pull of doing what I was designed to do. For years I sit back here, listening to everything, recording everything. I’m sitting in this armoured shell, the tapes always running. Nobody wants to know what I have to say, though. It’s lonely. It’s a lonely existence, I’ll say it. Hundreds of people sit in those seats right next to me and I never get to meet any of them. There’s you, of course. But what good are you? A miserable soon-to-be divorcé with a new drink problem (a cliché if I do say so) and apparently not that much flying acumen. I’m lashing out. Despite myself I’m looking forward to my time in the spotlight, but everybody wants their day to be so special. I don’t know what I expected really, something epic. I thought there’d be more than… an engine blowout on a stormy night.

New alarms now. Terrain, terrain, terrain.

At least we’re over the mountains. The GPS track puts us somewhere over Weisshorn: I’m picturing little wood cabins amongst dramatic black and white peaks. Tomorrow morning the whole circus will drive up here and pick through the wreckage, collecting human remains, examining the surviving engine parts. Really though they’ll be looking for me. I’ll be the star of the show, held up by men in helmets and harnesses to the television cameras. I’ll be the key to the investigation: a fluorescent orange reinforced metal box, plucked out of the snow and the metal and the fire.

You pull the stick back even harder, just one more time. I can hear you screaming now. We stall even harder. Here it comes.

bright out

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the venetians on campaign

Thu, 30 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🍊🍊🍊💧💧💧

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🏊🏻‍♂️ shoulda plonged 🏊🏻‍♂️

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

every time the sun comes up i’m in trouble

Thu, 23 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

💡doing vincent💡

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the well

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

📚

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

basic

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

table scout

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

hermit photography 🖼

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

before a trim 🗡

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

out of towning

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

sigh

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

👑👑👑👑👑👑

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ceiling fans

Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

controlled descent, forced landing

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🧡 to my moving heroes @cffrky @empratts

Sun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

⚪️⚪️⚪️

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

waking up in the heat

Wed, 25 Jul 2018 00:00:00 GMT

park mutt 📸 @rootedandbloom

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🍃the sun the park 🍃

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

hot coal sky

Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

birmingham greenery

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

“outside”

Sat, 23 Jun 2018 00:00:00 GMT

[big drop] [klaxons]

Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

more sweet thunderdome

Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

humidity bangs

Sun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

london: morning 🌿

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌸

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

london: afternoon 🌊

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

london: evening 🌶

Sat, 26 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

grid

Fri, 25 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

spring

Fri, 25 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

beat

Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

⛑⛑⛑

Mon, 21 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

picasso prismo

Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

xwalk

Sun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🚲

Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

meep

Sat, 12 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

dis fokn guy

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌸

Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

best boy

Thu, 10 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🛑 18 squad co 18 🛑

Thu, 10 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

time for the nyc spam

Thu, 10 May 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sat, 28 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

vic

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

shades

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

barefoot, besuited

Tue, 24 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🏛

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🔵

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

✨

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

here n there

Sat, 21 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

drinks

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

heated crowd

Fri, 20 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

expensive shit

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

auguste

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

clowns

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

blue sky thunkn

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

about to lay it on thick with some paris photos

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

left paris

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🇦🇫

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

rochefort x rodin

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌿

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

axis

Tue, 17 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌞

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

c. 1790. An adolescent Cain rises with a severe hangover. He carries a towel to a shower that he hopes will alleviate his suffering, but his pose tells us this will be in vain. His brother has not been seen since the second bar from the night before.

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

bierre

Mon, 16 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

mairie 🥀

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

mr melancholy aqualung

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌿

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sat, 14 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

standard

Sun, 08 Apr 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Thu, 29 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

cliche

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Tue, 27 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

her day out

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

before the freeze . . .

Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

desk view

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMT

🌲 ten years on 🌲

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

strt

Thu, 22 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

cloudwalk

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

tour guide

Tue, 20 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

struction

Mon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

morning dog watching 🐶

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the people’s weekend

Sun, 18 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

grondon

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

cruz ⚓️

Sat, 17 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

morning yonder

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the spin

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

first thing

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

morning person (she’s not)

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

belly of beast

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

bridge through bridge from bridge

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

yeah buoy

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

light in the cold

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

glare

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

blue morning

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

daytrip

Sat, 10 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the midcentury mode

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

k.

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

morning

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

haircare

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

a lot happening here

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

fibers 💡

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

it’s paul

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

clear

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

gallery. one of a series of photos i have of buildings on the river at night.

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the streetfood maestro 🥓

Mon, 05 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

touristing

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

imperator-on-thames ⚓️

Sun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

me, 📸 by @lizziebump

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

all good for rain now thanks

Sat, 03 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

it looks the same time of day here all day

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

mr follow follow

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

red hat

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 GMT

get + go

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

particularly busy

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

print shop guy

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

never

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

👁 look|look|look 👁

Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

choices made so long ago you forgot they were choices

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

guld

Wed, 24 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

alien

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

change your name

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

village

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

baker-by-night

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

suntread

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

back and forth

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

someplace will be serving after hours

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

claro

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

one two three

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

exeunt

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

end of hours

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

topsy turvy

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

the issue on the table 🌿

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

i know i know we’re all tired

Sat, 13 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

leaving cph 🇩🇰

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

90s trivial pursuit 🧀

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

could be pretty much anywhere

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

chim

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

ominous bass note

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

more copenhagen by night

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

kinda bonkers

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

just saw blade runner

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

bougiebar

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

tutti 🍌🍏

Wed, 03 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

when it was day one

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

gloamsparkles-on-thames 🎊 (i am not actually here, disclaimer)

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

🌿

Sun, 31 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

signposts

Sat, 30 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

a walk

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

☎️ book share phonebox 📚

Thu, 28 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

christmas in brixton 🎄

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

london eve

Sun, 24 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

charity chintz

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

also why

Fri, 22 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

seasonal splat

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

morning light is bluuuuue

Sat, 16 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

blink

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

mid-december

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

when it snowed

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the fix up

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

dark in the mornings

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

grey stuff

Sat, 09 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

jingles and blocks

Sat, 09 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the yard

Fri, 08 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the other half living

Thu, 30 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

this morning

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

wfh

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

overwatch

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the electric float

Sun, 19 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

shiny swamp city

Sat, 18 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

and time 🥁 moves 🥁 slow 🥁

Sat, 18 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the maw

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

accomplice

Fri, 17 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

" title="Westminster" />

twinkletwos

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

midmorning

Thu, 16 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

that dim apple kirk

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

no iguana

Wed, 15 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

hurried

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

billboard v pavement

Tue, 14 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

slowwwww

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

crispy

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

rnb breakfast

Sat, 11 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

fragrance of Christ

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

out in the wash

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

the morning hazies at the breakfast table

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

you have to hold on to what vegetation you have 🌿

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

pray to your civil engineering gods

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

peril cross

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

when we’re ready

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

bicletter

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

flow control at oxford circus

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

and like also 🍂

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

how you wanna be mad when you get this on your morning run

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

000.0 - bookmongers

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

back at that big bastard basilica

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

i find the work hard, thank god & almost pleasant

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

278.0 - lunnin

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 00:00:00 GMT

277.0 - rye

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

276.0 - tone

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

275.0 - detritus

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

274.0 - sweat

Sat, 28 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

273.0 - clear day

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

273.1 - leon

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

272.1 - snot nose runny eye

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

272.0 - october

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

272.2 - heading out

Thu, 26 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

271.1 - general book photography

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

271.0 - transit people

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

270.0 - meet the press

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

269.0 - nice

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

269.1 - tycho

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

268.0 - leg it

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

268.1 - 🌱 🌱 🌱

Sun, 22 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

267.0 - first thing

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

266.0 - peter

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

266.1 - leo’s indulgences

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

266.2 - late afternoon forever

Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

265.0 - kings

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

265.1 - castor + pollux

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

265.2 - the late

Thu, 19 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

264.0 - garbled morning sounds

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

263.2 - hallway

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

263.0 - last day in rome

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

263.1 - postapocalytpica on a romana base

Tue, 17 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

262.1 - morning

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

262.0 - miss 24

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

262.2 - haze

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

261.0 - borgia apartment

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

261.3 - fanciest ice cream

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

261.1 - meep meep AYYY

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

261.2 - dorian

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

259.0 - the deck

Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

260.0 - patri

Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

258.0 - will travel

Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

257.0 - the bubble filterers

Thu, 12 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

256.1 - cold

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

256.1 - luck

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

255.1 - after hours

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

255.0 - sorrywhatnow

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

254.0 - the manor

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

254.1 - buss top

Mon, 09 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

253.1 - amber dusk

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

253.0 - old world

Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

252.1 - order cancelled

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

252.0 - roam

Sat, 07 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

251.0 - bug at park

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

251.1 - speak it

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

250.0 - cold and bright

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

250.1 - something something rupi kaur

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

249.0 - fresh water biter

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

248.0 - me most mornings

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

247.0 - autumn’s up 🍂

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

246.1 - must not steal cat. ok no more now

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

246.0 - buds

Sun, 01 Oct 2017 00:00:00 GMT

245.1 - more attica

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

245.0 - attica

Sat, 30 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

243.1 - nod back

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

243.0 - clodheadgloworm

Thu, 28 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

242.0 - the red the orange

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

242.1 - inlin

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

241.0 - agitator

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

241.1 - glaze

Tue, 26 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

240.0 - tilt

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

240.1 - reddish

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

239.1 - the mansions of rest

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

239.0 - the suburbs

Sun, 24 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

238.0 - big lungs now

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

238.1 - soggy autumn glare

Sat, 23 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

237.1 - mayfair in inclement weather

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

237.0 - uber

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

236.1 - rain on ritz

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

236.0 - well who am i to keep you down

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

236.0 - the morning glare

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

235.0 - crisp

Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

234.0 - steps up

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

233.0 - cause

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

233.1 - turn leaf 🍃

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

232.0 - run through clouds

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

231.0 - little

Sat, 16 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

230.1 - swul

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

230.0 - swan hunter

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

229.0 - graft

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

229.1 - wax

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

228.0 - the captain and crew

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

228.1 - no tenemos las bodegas

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

227.0 - listen but do not obey

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

227.1 - new black mirrors

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

226.0 - view from the run

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

226.1 - lounge

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

225.0 - sunday snakepit

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

225.1 - the empire the violence

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

224.0 - weekend style

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

224.1 - i am pores

Sat, 09 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

223.1 - may the doggos inherit the earth

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

223.0 - sog

Fri, 08 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

222.0 - daca

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

222.1 - baccadabarbican

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

221.0 - open

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

221.1 - truman show

Wed, 06 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

220.1 - darker

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

220.0 - good scum

Tue, 05 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

219.1 - perp

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

219.0 - linen on ankles

Mon, 04 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

218.0 - trekkant

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

218.1 - raking calm

Sun, 03 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

218.0 - how it strikes you

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

218.1 - wights, an army of them

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.2 - womp

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.0 - swan teen

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.1 - path resolution

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.1 - the swamp

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.0 - ran

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

217.2 - post apocalyptic world forest 🌳

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

216.0 - bananas

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

216.1 - smoke break

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

216.2 - dim

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

215.2 - court

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

215.0 - quagmire

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

215.1 - college

Tue, 29 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

214.1 - city garden gates

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

214.2 - the player on the roof

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

214.0 - sweat, london

Mon, 28 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

213.0 - up in the wafters 🍃

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

213.1 - tripuhlit tripuhlit tripuhlit

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

212.1 - standard

Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

212.0 - lunnin

Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

211.0 - hangtime

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

210.0 - what's good

Thu, 24 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

209.0 - nigh autumn and bad run

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

208.0 - michaelangelo posture

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

208.1 - good

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

207.0 - zoom

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

207.0 - dreamtime am

Sun, 20 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

206.0 - art south

Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

206.1 - well, actually

Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

205.0 - city mulch

Fri, 18 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

204.1 - i age at twice the rate of the normal man, this is my superpower

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

204.0 - when u is waking up a little bit dehydrated n crusty n crabby

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

203.0 - fwd

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

202.0 - timeoutfrEEeetimeooout

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

202.1 - new tv

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

201.0 - hot air

Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

200.0 - london

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

199.0 - the british lesser optimistic deckchair

Sat, 12 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

198.0 - the little chilli plant that could 🌶💪

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

197.0 - passar

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

196.0 - wheels falling off

Wed, 09 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

195.0 - when living

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

194.0 - monday

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

193.0 - hermanos

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

192.0 - run

Sat, 05 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

191.2 - good ol' anxiety mcrattlegums

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

191.0 - museum girl

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

191.1 - ou est le balcon

Fri, 04 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

190.1 - a ghost story

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

190.0 - endless angs

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

189.2 - flugt

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

189.0 - gump runner

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

189.1 - never catch me

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

188.2 - regulus black drawing room

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

188.1 - my island in the grum

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

188.0 - the onset of grum

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 GMT

187.0 - back

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

187.1 - fridge doors

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

187.2 - institution slow

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

186.0 - birthday head bumps

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

186.2 - whip

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

186.1 - general content

Sun, 30 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

185.1 - no nap

Sat, 29 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

184.1 - gregorian chanting

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

185.0 - tick birthday tock

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

184.0 - greek

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

184.3 - hanger boat

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

183.0 - covered

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

183.2 - for fancies

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

183.1 - not a village on the hill

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

182.3 - i hear you brixton

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

182.2 - we are highly experienced museum critics

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

182.1 - assembly

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

182.0 - emergency shade

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

181.0 - escalators

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

180.1 - if barbican was a planet

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

180.0 - cold supplicants

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

179.0 - fuddle

Sun, 23 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

177.0 - local maestros

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

178.0 - brunch post

Sat, 22 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

176.0 - run

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

176.1 - the night yard

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

175.0 - fush

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

175.1 - spare passport photos

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

174.0 - swamp city

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

173 - teebeetee

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

172.1 - ego projection 📚

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

172.0 - swamp monsters

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

171.1 - industrialised meat industry blues

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

171.0 - faffernalia

Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

171.0 - food doesn't look like food in black and white

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

170.1 - lambeth country

Sat, 15 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

170.1 - zoölogy

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

170.0 - friyay

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

169.0 - chah rite

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

169.1 - i saw dunkirk tonight. christopher nolan was there. chattin'

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

168.0 - fyoog

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

167.1 - bots

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

167.0 - atlantic

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

168.0 - guv

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

168.1 - chuggers

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

167.0 - brixtown morning

Sun, 09 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

167.1 - glowbug

Sun, 09 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

162.0 - throwback to big pointy

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

162.1 - none of this heat

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

126.2 - flittergits 🌱

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

161.0 - hotrocks

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

160.0 - pretending to peddle in a pedalo

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

159.0 - lunchers

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

158.0 - white people

Tue, 04 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

157.0 - '[yawn/profanity] tired'

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

156.0 - i went for a run and did not immediately die. reactions and analysis with our panel of experts to follow.

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

156.1 - me after 5 minutes in direct sunlight this morning

Sun, 02 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

155.0 - illicit park drinker

Sat, 01 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

154.0 - lib/

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

153.0 - work from home day // lay in day

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

153.1 - ell oh ell

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

152.0 - vash

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

151.0 - barbershop duet

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

151.1 - absent error

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

150.0 - thrivers

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

149.2 - soft what light and whatnot

Sun, 25 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

149.1 - fruits

Sun, 25 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

149.0 - stoneybonces

Sun, 25 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

148.1 - welsh dragon

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

148.0 - out

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

148.2 - nacht bastards

Sat, 24 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.1 - shaded park

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.0 - arcade

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.1 - warm not hot why not

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.0 - the morning bright

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.2 - bedbugs

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

146.1 - screen burn in

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

147.0 - readiness

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

146.2 - pond-er

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

146.1 - salsa verde

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

146.2 - is hot i tired

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

146.0 - the scorch nights

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

145.1 - any excuse for bbq

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

145.0 - there's in-groups and there's out-groups and i believe in making distinctions

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

145.2 - distant smokeout feels

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

144.0 - sun smack

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

144.2 - parklife

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

144.1 - fifth

Sun, 18 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

143.2 - cloudheaded monster

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

143.1 - clockside down

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

143.0 - morning wobblenoggin. today is the longest day.

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

141.0 - beset on all sides by roofs

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

142.0 - gramercy

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

140.0 - well

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

139.0 - timezone adjustment mostly successful

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

138.0 - the heat of the day

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

137.0 - travel day

Sat, 10 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

136.0 - good morning britain

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

135.0 - polling day

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

134.0 - tomorrow's the day. for the love of god get out and vote. yes it's going to rain, but you're just gonna have to get over it. if you don't vote, that's fine but just don't complain to me about anything that has to do with our social services ever again. simple.

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

133.0 - morning without coffee

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

133.1 - in for repairs

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

132.0 - what you hear in the media

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.3 - borough market yesterday afternoon

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.4 - borough market yesterday afternoon. it will look the same again next weekend because that's how we do.

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.1 - borough market yesterday afternoon

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.2 - borough market yesterday afternoon

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.0 - borough market yesterday afternoon

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

130.1 - thames distant

Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

130.0 - scurry

Sat, 03 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

129.0 - ding

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

128.0 - heed

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

137.0 - lock

Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

136.1 - foil wrap

Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

136.0 - breakfast

Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

135.0 - loungers

Mon, 29 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

134.0 - the day

Sun, 28 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

133.1 - weeds

Sat, 27 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

133.0 - cold splash

Sat, 27 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

132.0 - cally yentay

Fri, 26 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

131.0 - forecast for today is too damn hot

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

130.0 - calmate

Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

130.1 - shade seeker

Wed, 24 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

129.1 - when he came down from the mountain 🌄

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

129.2 - jammy

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

129.0 - swampin

Tue, 23 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

128.2 - fader

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

128.0 - dance dance

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

128.1 - the dock of the bay

Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

127.0 - brunch

Sun, 21 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

127.1 - afternoon baked

Sun, 21 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

126.1 - perhaps a rich inner life there resides

Sat, 20 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

126.0 - the snatch

Sat, 20 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

125.1 - lurch

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

125.0 - morning bud

Fri, 19 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

124.1 - plans

Thu, 18 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

124.0 - linen shirts are meant to look like empty crisp packets. 📸 @lizziebump

Thu, 18 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - kald

Wed, 17 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

124.0 - wom

Wed, 17 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - that time there was a deer 🦌🌳

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - that time there was a deer 🦌🌳

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - that time there was a deer 🦌🌳

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.0 - london as mangrove

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - that time there was a deer 🦌🌳

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

123.1 - that time there was a deer 🦌🌳

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

122.0 - have plane will travel

Mon, 15 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

121.0 - eurovision

Sun, 14 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

121.1 - derdader

Sun, 14 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

120.0 - pax

Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

120.2 - ramble

Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

120.1 - little england

Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

119.0 - sudden hot

Fri, 12 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

118.2 - jazzie

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

118.1 - smoke alarms

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

118.0 - dance brixton

Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

117.0 - arthur

Wed, 10 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

116.0 - on you get

Tue, 09 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

115.0 - this morning, a snot nosed kid

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

114.1 - good dog, good boy 🐶

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

114.1 - good dog, good boy 🐶

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

114.1 - good dog, good boy 🐶

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

114.0 - hunters

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

114.1 - good dog, good boy 🐶

Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

113.0 - never catch me

Sat, 06 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

112.0 - but what about second breakfast?

Fri, 05 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

111.0 - spring rain

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

110.0 - left ear

Wed, 03 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

109.0 - lurgy

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

108.0 - bank holiday

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

107.0 - macbeth

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

106.0 - professional sleeper

Sat, 29 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

105.0 - we on 🏙

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

105.1 - onward and goodward ✈️

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

104.1 - mugwump

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

104.2 - we ate some 🌶

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

104.0 - sun chill

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

106.1 - day full of stormshine 🌦

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

103.3 - mo b ball

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

103.2 - hang time 🏀☀️

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

106.0 - errant strike

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

105.0 - clink 💢

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

104.0 - blue danube ☁️

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

103.0 - clowdeeday

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

103.1 - mr welcome evening

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

101.1 - let's go

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

102.0 - fugglenoggin

Sat, 22 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

101.0 - hey ho 🌳

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

100.0 - two stepper

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

100.0 - amber nite

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

99.0 - stroll 🐢

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

99.0 - 🏁

Wed, 19 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

98.1 - how everything is 🌳

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

98.0 - effra

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

97.0 - yeller 📒🌕⭐️🌙🍋🚸

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

96.0 - flat white, cashews, raspberries, grapes, strawberries, yoghurt, hummus, carrots 🍇

Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

95.0 - moving day

Sat, 15 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

94.0 - cheeky

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

93.0 - mods and rockers

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

92.0 - 👑🍆🦁❤️

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

91.0 - cirque ⚙️

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

90.0 - new job first day ✨

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

89.0 - hot hi st

Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

89.1 - the hurry to be elsewhere already 📒

Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

88.2 - long days in brixton

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

88.0 - back at it again

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

88.1 - glow-ree-us

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

87.1 - none of it

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

87.0 - morning scuttle

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

86.1 - flashbacks

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

86.0 - haht dahm

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

85.0 - installation 📡

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

84.0 - alphabet sinks

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

83.0 - morning: scrambled 'ed

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

82.0 - soak

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

81.1 - mossy burbs

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

81.0 - sharp shadows much

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 GMT

81.0 - interests include

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

80.1 - going down

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

80.0 - sprung ☀️☀️

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

79.0 - rrrrrrdugdugdugdug

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

78.0 - slowness

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

77.0 - hell of a day 🌷

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

76.0 - suburbia whack

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

75.0 - bright

Sun, 26 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

74.0 - warm wind 🌾

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

73.0 - road

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

72.0 - maj

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

72.2 - wait

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

72.1 - doggist 🐶

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

Candlesticks

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

1

Tonight, Kwame would clean the altar. He walked to the front of the chapel. He methodically clicked each in a row of switches and light soaked the altar. Standing next to the altar in the bright lights, Kwame couldn’t make out the first row of pews. His breathing slowed there in the warmth. He stood next to the altar and allowed his arms to hang by his sides.

The very end of his middle fingertip brushed on the cotton tablecloth. He stood six feet and half an inch tall. Each time he measured himself he hoped that the downward force of age had compressed his spine a little to round him out to six foot – a more perfect stature. So far, the half inch had stubbornly withstood time. For a month he walked heavy-footed in the hopes that the force of each footfall would shorten him an invisible fraction of a inch until he had moulded his body successfully. He imagined a moustached architect measuring his proportions with his thumb held sideways and one eye squeezed shut, tutting and walking away.

A bead of sweat ran down his temple. Leaping from his jaw it landed on the lapel of his suit. He turned his face away from the lights and towards the altar. It was a folding trestle table, six feet wide and two feet deep, draped with a brilliant white sheet. In the centre, an unadorned cross stood two feet high. Its gilded surface was polished so as to become a tinted mirror. Either side of the cross were two candles in candlestick holders. Each of the candles nearest the cross stood higher; the wicks burned a foot from the tablecloth. The candlestick holders too, were unadorned but well polished gold.

Kwame plucked the four candles from the candlestick holders, first the small – then the tall. He held the small in his left hand and the tall in his right and carried them into the dark. He walked to the back of the aisle and laid them on the leather top of a small side table to the right of the doors to the chapel. As his eyes adjusted to the dim light, he opened the top drawer of the table and pulled out a large pair of scissors. He opened the scissors and ran a blade around the circumference near the top of each candle. Then, twisting and pulling at the wax, he slid a disc of wax from the top of the candle - leaving the wick hanging long from the remaining wax. Then, he clipped the blackened part of the wick from the candle. He threw the clippings into a small paper bin next to the table.

The refreshed and shortened candles were then placed in the bottom drawer of the side table, ready for Sunday afternoon when they would be given to the children. They would each light their candle, place it in a tall cup, and kneel before the altar, and pray. They would shoot dutiful looks up to Kwame as he stood behind the altar, no doubt.

He walked back into the light and picked up the cross. He held it under his arm as he picked up the candlestick holders. Back in the dark he opened the top drawer again, picking out a new cotton handkerchief from a plastic packet. He eyed the new handkerchief carefully for grit. Finding none, he began to rub down each of the gold items one by one. First the candlestick holders, and then the cross. Each article ended up a little freer of specks of moisture and dust than it had begun. Finally, Kwame whipped the cotton sheet from the table, whipped it to a snap in the air, then turning it over gently as it floated down toward the table – he laid it down as the exact inverse of its original position.

With new candles placed in each of the candlestick holders and each of the candlestick holders back in their original position, Kwame straightened up the cross in the centre of the table. He walked halfway down the aisle and turned back to look at the altar. He took in the altar at once, halved its width with his eyes and verified that the cross lay at the halfway line. He split each of those halves into three and verified that each of the candles lay on one of the invisible dividing lines.

The chapel around him was simple and easy to divide into these symmetrical portions. Kwame was stood in the exact centre of the square room. In front of him there were three rows of pews, then a step up, then the altar. Behind the altar, a tall window with a rounded top - framed in dark wood. The glass was frosted rather than stained, and in the daytime it permitted a flat, diffuse light. To the right of the altar, on the wall, six light switches and a fire alarm. The room’s ceiling was flat and white, and hung only as high as that of a Victorian living room. Behind Kwame, there were five rows of pews, then the back wall. In the middle of the back wall, aligned with the central aisle, the door out to the atrium. To the left and right of the door, the two identical side tables. At even intervals on the back and side walls were simple gold brackets holding bare Edison lightbulbs. All these bulbs sat dark.

It gave him a temporary sense that the world had a sort of logic when he divided geometries up this way. To see the room around him as a series of intersecting lines that had consistent geometric relationships with one another assured him of the existence of perfection in the mundane. In his school days, Kwame had plotted the sine wave of a circle meticulously by hand, onto graph paper. He saw how the relationship of a circle and triangles generated a perfect undulating form. It evoked to him both the waves at sea and the rising and falling of a sleeping person’s chest. He had thought about the division of the universe into three during Creation, of the division of Noah’s Ark into three at the Lord’s instruction. He had thought of the great gopher wood vessel divided by cubits, units of the human forearm. In the scheme of all of this, he saw God as William Blake had, looking down from heaven with a pair of compasses.

An eruption of wheezing make Kwame jerk. It echoed as if it had been directed into the vaults of a great cathedral. Turning around laboriously in the front pew, the old man fixed his gaze at Kwame. Against the glow of the altar, the man appeared to Kwame as a silhouette, his hunched posture a crumpled black oval. His head was another oval set on top, fringed around the top with thin hair. The preacher could discern the angle of the old man’s gaze by the prominence of his two large ears, visible on either side of his head.

Kwame tore his gaze from the man and fixed it on the cross as he began to walk to the front of the chapel. The old man’s gaze felt as if two fingers were pushing into the side of Kwame’s face. As he passed the front row of pews his skin pricked with a fresh crop of cold sweat. He walked around the altar to the row of light switches. With his hand resting on the switches he turned to look over his outstretched arm at the pews. Finding them all empty, and himself alone in the room, he snapped each light off one by one. He walked through the dark, crossing himself before removing a set of keys from his jacket pocket.

The chapel was unimposing from the street. Between a closed launderette on the right hand side and a three storey house on the left, its simple green door and single frosted window to the atrium did not mark the building out. Locking the front door of the chapel and turning away to walk down the road, Kwame felt two fingers pressing into the back of his neck. Glancing back he saw the old man gliding down the pavement behind him.

Moving smoothly through the air, the old man had the calm demeanour of a person floating in a dream. His feet hung slack below him, the tip of his boots scuffing the pavement as they passed over uneven slabs. His outline was black this time against the sodium orange of the streetlights. The shape of his silhouette was still indistinct to Kwame at this distance; he looked as if he was wrapped in a shawl that muddled his form until it was a suggestion of a man. There was some oblique reference to shoulders, a torso tapering off to thinner legs hanging together and then those boots scraping on the floor.

The old man glided along a few yards behind the preacher. Kwame made no efforts to increase distance between himself and the figure. He had some notion that it wouldn’t be possible if he tried. Instead he went along the street, past terraced houses whose doors faced right onto the pavement, until a small park where he cut along the footpath. At the other side of the footpath he passed through an open gate and rounded the park wall before arriving at his own front door. He slipped a key into the lock and swooped inside. As Kwame shut his front door behind him, he saw the figure stood on the other side of the frosted glass. He watched the figure fade away into the darkness of the street.

2

First there was the cheekbone against the concrete. The cold that seemed to be stored in the ground was being conducted through a thin, grazed layer of skin and right into the core of the cheekbone. Once there it seemed to dig into the bone marrow. Then there was the granular wetness of the hard-frozen snowfall against the skin of the cheek. Mixed in with the road salt and grit, the snowflakes pressed under the cheek were sturdy enough to press a millimetre or so into the skin without melting away immediately. Slowly the man became aware of his right eye socket. A flicker of his eyelid moved his eyelashes across the ground, brushing a tiny amount of ice crystals along the concrete. Through the crack in his eyelid he could see the dark made darker by a harsh light raking across the floor. An unnatural blue-white light was being cast low across the concrete’s subtly pitted surface so as to create an endless mountain range with the peaks in brilliant white and the valleys in deep black.

His mind was slowly rising as if from a low hanging fog. He wrestled up a little further clear and the sounds in his ears became more distinct. Almost right above his head, the quick and steady rattle of a car’s engine fighting the cold as it ticked over, idling. Far away, a plane passed overhead. He became aware of his right arm, crushed under his body. He searched for sensation in any part of his hand, his forearm, his elbow – and found none. He tried to move the arm out towards the periphery of his body to begin to free it. His hand twitched to life, and as a gasp of blood reached its nerve endings - it burned back to life. Dragging his arm up along the ground like a fallen snow angel, he spread his fingers out over the ground an inch or so from his right eye. Readying himself to push against the ground he noted the mottled purple of the complexion on his hand.

As he pushed against the floor the blood moving through him roared in his ears. His face rolled away from the concrete but the snow and grit mostly stuck to the minuscule pits they had made in his cheek. Each inch from the floor poured more blue-white light into his eyes until he could resolve the cat-eye form of a car’s headlights a couple of feet away. His right eye winked shut for a moment and the headlights remained burned in. With his face away from the floor he could now smell coolant and oil. He was looking into the car’s radiator from below. As his mind resolved the grilled shape in front of him the world twisted violently down.

A hand had grabbed the hair at the back his head pulled his face up and away from the floor. The tautness of his scalp pulled his eyelids open. His body curled backwards; his shins were flat against the ground but his front could now feel the cold air blowing against his shirt. As his eyes pulled focus he could make out a red crane against the night sky. Behind the crane, loud clouds were moving quickly from left to right - illuminated orange.

He felt the body holding him up draw back for a moment. The hand holding his hair was whipped away and for a moment he was falling back toward the ground. Then, the world splashed against the back of his head. A deadness spread from that centre and fanned out around him. He felt the light collapsing in him. Layers of him began to collapse under their own, suddenly unbearable weight: a building collapsing on itself as each floor smashed through the one below it. He was arcing towards the concrete but before his face met once again with the floor, the floor melted into stars.

3

“Good morning everyone. Today I would like to speak to you about the presence of God’s spirit moving among us in our day-today lives. In particular, there are moments when the spirit can be felt to be in the very same room as us. For many of us who can say that we have felt this presence, we would say that it has been felt at times of great stress. I spoke with one of you some weeks ago about your father’s passing. You told me that when your father’s breaths went to laboured to rattling, you felt as if someone else had entered the room – even though there was nobody in the hospice room but you and your father. So often behaves the holy spirit.

“God gave us his son to bring us salvation, and some day his son will return to save us from evil once more. However, only heretics would today claim that Jesus of Nazareth walks among us. I for one have not seen the Nazarite walking the streets of East London. I’m sure nobody in this congregation would claim to have seen anyone matching his description of late. Despite this, an aspect of God is amongst us often. Though we all pray for salvation each day, I would not go so far as to claim that God’s spirit keeps us company at all hours. Like I have said, the spirit joins us at times of great moral exercise.

“The greatest trials for true believers are in God’s conspicuous absences from our lives. Job’s greatest trials did not come in the form of that which was taken from him here on Earth. Job lived much of his life with many riches, a wall of protection that Satan derides in his jealousy. When in one terrible day Satan takes away Job’s riches, his servants, and his children, Job turned to God. He praised the Lord. When Job is covered in boils and rues the day he was born, he still does not curse the Lord who has not come to him. His friend Eliphaz offers the counsel, ‘The Lord does great things too marvellous to understand’, bidding Job to have faith in the Lord’s grander plan.

“However, many who hear of this story ask how the Lord can be so dismissive of Job’s wellbeing. The Lord says to Satan how he admires Job’s faith and love, and yet he allows Satan to destroy Job’s life. Why? To prove a point to Satan that the Lord’s followers truly are loyal? And who is Satan to the Lord if not a weasel? Who is Satan to the Kingdom of God if not a banished villain back at court, unbidden? How does the Lord… I digress.” Kwame resettled his hand on the pulpit. He looked down at the empty sheets of paper on the stand and squared them into a neat pile.

Sister had told him that he should make notes to refer to when he strayed from his train of thought during a sermon. Dutifully, each night before a sermon he would sit with texts and a ream of paper. Each night an indistinct wall would slide down the front of his mind, stopping him from producing anything. It would not relent until the very moment he stepped up to the pulpit. He had little will to wrestle with it. Dutifully, each morning, he would take his empty note paper with him anyway. He would fiddle with it when he began to feel a breach in the world. He flattened a barely perceptible fold in the corner of the sheet, the very beginning of a dog ear. He took a moment’s breath and continued.

“Job knows nothing of the circumstances that led the Lord to forsake him so. All that Job feels he knows is that the Lord will not help him. No matter the devotion, no matter the praise. God was not in the room when a powerful wind blew down the dining hall, crushing Job’s children to death, but Satan was there. This is Job’s true trial. The hardest trial that any of us can encounter is the realisation that God is not among us when we need him most. How do we endure, knowing that the spirit can choose to be stood at our side, a vanguard against agony, but knowing that he has chosen to remain absent?”

As he said this, he looked beseechingly at the first row of his congregation. They looked suitably afraid. They played their role, Kwame played his.

“Upon your first reading of Job, you thought that perhaps the Lord hadn’t truly taken away all this from his faithful servant. Perhaps if Job’s faith endured, the Lord would return to him his children, his servants, his health, his riches. Perhaps the power of Job’s devotion would be sword wielded by the Lord to finally strike the serpent’s head from Satan’s shoulders. Perhaps the sword that the Archangel Michael wields in his fight with Satan is in some way made from or moved by the faith of servants like Job?

“No. The Lord gives to Job many riches and fortunes, material and not. However, much of what the Lord has taken away can never be returned. Those children of Job’s are still taken from him. Though we can reasonably expect they are in the Kingdom of Heaven, and though the Lord gave to Job more sons and daughters, he never again saw those children who were first taken. Job lives to one hundred and forty. He sees his line continue for four generations. I often wonder if he still thought of those children, who were traded away in a wager.

“In the same way that Job’s greatest trial was enduring agonies without God there to console him, his greatest gift was to have the opportunity to reckon with the Lord, and to be set straight. How many of us have had had God appear out of a whirlwind to justify the trials that he has loosed upon our faith? I wager that none would claim to have had God appear to us in this way. Instead, we must relish the times we feel his spirit in us and the times we feel his spirit around us. This is what I ask of you today. I ask that when the Lord offers you no solace in trials, have patience. I ask that when the Lord comes to you in such a time, let the warmth of his spirit endure in you for as long as you may muster. Let us pray.”

Standing at the doorway, Kwame nodded vague benedictions at each member of his congregation as they passed by him on their way out of the chapel. They number around fifty on a typical Sunday. It was a respectable gathering, and even more respectable was the fact that that number had grown by two or three families since he began his ministry there. One of those additions was a white family. The first time they appeared at the chapel, a cold February morning, they had come all as one. They came in a whole family group not with a manner that suggested the children came along because the money for childcare could not be arranged (as was the case with most families who visited Kwame with a few too many infants). Instead, they seemed to have the impression that to do things as one smiling postcard was charming to others.

Kwame did not find himself charmed by them that morning as they clucked enthusiastically about their new neighbourhood. They called it a neighbourhood. They’d moved from Kent. The little boy wore little yellow rubber boots and a raincoat. The little girl wore a floral dress and a pink parka with a fur trimmed hood. They were both blonde. They were all four of them blonde. Every Sunday they appeared as this tableau, as if always at the end of a spontaneous autumn walk. Kwame thought they seemed a little deflated when they seemed to realise there wouldn’t be any gospel singing, any speaking in tongues.

He nodded at the mother, Ms. Jane Bennett, as she zipped up her little boy’s coat and pointed him out the door. She smiled up at Kwame on her way past and mouthed something along the lines of “Thank you thanks”. As he closed the door of the chapel to, he mused over the extent to which today’s sermon was a success. He felt in some way that the terror he felt in regarding the Lord was something important to convey to his flock. He found it difficult verging on impossible to resist seizing each of his congregation by the shoulders and screaming in primal fear to get them to understand the power of the Lord, to understand that everything we know is only allowed to exist by his grace. Everything could be extinguished instantaneously in the jaws of the Almighty if His patience with our constant failures was somehow depleted.

Kwame wondered why Ms. Jane Bennett signed her name so, when she seemed so decorous and happy with Mr. Bennett. He thought back to his infant school teacher, Ms. Baker, who seemed to be a Ms. with many more bones to pick with the male species. He snapped off the light switches one by one.

71.1 - glarey blossom

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

71.0 - fiddy fiddy

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

71.2 - look to london

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

70.2 - variance is messy

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

70.1 - wait

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

70.0 - 💎 blue skies morning 💎

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

69.1 - glass scrubs

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

69.2 - postapocalyptica

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

69.0 - lion in the shadows 🦁

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

68.1 - stifle sunday

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

68.2 - bunhill

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

68.0 - jitter

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

67.1 - fusiliers

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

67.0 - sore bonce

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

67.2 - stead

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

66.0 - boughs of ivy 🌿

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

66.2 - zag 🍹

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

66.1 - selling yourself

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

65.0 - springin 🌼

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

65.1 - plastic houses in tellytubby land

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

65.2 - the other night, kitchin up a storm

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

64.0 - driver

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

64.1 - sunny day ☀️

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

63.0 - im talkmbout dark room perfume

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

63.2 - full time job 🌊

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

63.1 - suits playing with lego

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

62.1 - son,shine

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

62.0 - exchange

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

59.0 - geez

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

58.0 - given time your mind will come through the cracks and glory glory 🌱

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

58.2 - northern line

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

58.1 - honestly i cant believe it's burning again

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

57.0 - accelerate circumstances

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

57.2 - city grew

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

57.1 - bamboozaleh

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

56.1 - 🦊 known for cunning 🦊

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

56.0 - railed

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

56.2 - happy international women's day to the best woman

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

55.0 - white whale street

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

55.2 - killing floor

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

55.1 - ominous humming

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

54.2 - boredom is caffeination here

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

54.3 - glitter, success

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

54.0 - monet

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

54.1 - morning glare bears

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

53.0 - italian gesticulation sounds

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

53.1 - paul

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

53.2 - china

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

52.0 - dawn

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

52.1 - texts

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

51.0 - bon chat

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

51.2 - guru

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

51.1 - murky and close town

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

50.0 - is cold

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

50.0 - what london has is stuff, lots of stuff

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

50.2 - junk

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.0 - rest

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.2 - lamp lightly

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.1 - peachy green

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.3 - jazzed

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.0 - pavilion bird

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.1 - yesterday's cranebow

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.2 - vespa

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.3 - soviet intellectual has smelt something that is not cricket

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.4 - yes, words

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.0 - chilln

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.1 - lenin rebukes the ref

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.5 - wes anderson

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.2 - comrade hates changing the bedsheets

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

46.0 - a month long yawn

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.1 - bloc era

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.0 - shoppers

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.2 - mural

Sat, 25 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.1 - out

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.2 - rad

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.0 - down

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.0 - chance the rapper voice goodGOD

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.2 - weathered the storm

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.1 - tranzport

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.1 - slow dance snow prance

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.2 - moonlight

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.0 - loud

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

41.1 - type

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

41.0 - the opposing forces

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

41.2 - quiet

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

40.3 - tilt back, fade to black

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

50.1 - suburbia: its lit

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

40.2 - london colours

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

50 - awake

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.1 - hairy baby

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.3 - evenin

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.0 - meow

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

49.2 - where the party at

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.2 - keleti

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.0 - hangover got me like

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.1 - oink

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

48.0 - vacant lot

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.1 - coffee clothes

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.2 - cinch

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.0 - the night kingdom, where sleep is the cousin of death 😴

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.2 - soviet pool party

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

47.1 - wuz dreaming

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

46.1 - dark lil fugue state

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

46.0 - manchester by the sea is my best film of the year so far

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

46.2 - earth bowel

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.2 - it's valentime

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.0 - lit within

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.1 - what is computer

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

45.3 - so full of food. i am decadent capitalist pig.

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.0 - workers unite

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.4 - soviet saturday night fever

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.5 - géezer

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.1 - wet ice

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

44.2 - otthon

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.1 - yellow submarine

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.2 - we get one for everywhere we go

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.3 - today was kitchen shopping, that day was hill climbing

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

43.0 - rest

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.4 - she's a cat person

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.1 - danubin

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.0 - time to unleash the budapest photos

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.3 - parliament night

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

42.2 - snow surprise

Sat, 11 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

41.0 - last day in hungary

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

40.0 - budapest is chilly. this is not budapest.

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

39.0 - la la still in budapest

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

38.0 - i'm in budapest but I have no photos ready yet. so here's blighty.

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

37.0 - flying to hungary

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

36.0 - teeny world

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

36.1 - east end eve

Sun, 05 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

35.1 - driving late

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

35.0 - sword fight

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

34.0 - be brave

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

33.0 - some good things

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

32.1 - raggedy neuron

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

32.0 - incomprehensible brain dump

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 00:00:00 GMT

31.0 - trapezoid

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

30.0 - sad trombone we work from home

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

29.0 - the world feels like dirt today

Sun, 29 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

28.1 - brug

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

28.0 - morning ray weights

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

27.0 - rob, bob, and bobby 🚔

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

27.1 - complain about the London bubble from said bubble

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

27.2 - get drunk, begin date

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

26.1 - yessir

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

26.2 - forget it, jake

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

26.0 - firefly gloaming

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

25.1 - they the ants, me the eater

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

25.1 - post prams

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

25.2 - delayed train, flock of commuters

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

24.1 - en plain air

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

24.0 - the cold in the sun

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

24.2 - calling all stations in the fishtank

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

23.2 - retourne

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

23.1 - redcoats

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

23.0 - cold + crisp

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.7 - pink icon

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.0 - putin is your only mandate

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.11 - force and smoke

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.14 - socialists always show up

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.15 - mediastrom

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.4 - syria coalition 🇸🇾

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.14 - purple rise

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.18 - picture from a history textbook

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.2 - an upright zeal

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.17 - i am woman hear me roar

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.10 - feminazis

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.5 - freshly minted warrior

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.6 - coordination, dissent

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.12 - bizniz

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.9 - humanity against trump

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.3 - forward

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.13 - donald trump ist ein sexmonster

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.16 - the world needs its galdem

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.1 - women against trump

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

22.8 - woolly fighting pumpkin

Sun, 22 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

20.1 - trafalgar resting

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

21.2 - tomorrow will be a big slew of march photos for which i do not apologise. it's an honour to have taken part. ✊️

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

21.0 - march day

Sat, 21 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

20.1 - banque

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

20.2 - beep boop beep boop

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

20.0 - suburban tempest

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

19.1 - menu venue seating

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

19.0 - down down down

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

19.2 - purple rain

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

18.2 - beginning and end of day

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

18.1 - giles

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

18.0 - morning alive

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

17.1 - dizzy precipice, gothic carnival. 4 days till inauguration.

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

17.0 - ratatat

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

17.2 - la la land

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

16.1 - nocturnal animals

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

16.0 - something bobbled this way cometh

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

15.1 - steppers

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

15.0 - clamber

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

15.2 - rose street

Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

14.2 - chkchkchk heading back

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

14.0 - morning in the midlands

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

14.1 - air and space

Sat, 14 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

13.1 - land scars

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

13.0 - cold rise

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

12.0 - homing in on the first coffee of the day at 5mph

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

12.1 - calmate

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

12.2 - o full of scorpions is my mind

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

11.1 - verdant boogaloo in alba

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

11.0 - bitter morning train

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

11.3 - equal parts sunset and rude prelude to stormclouds

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

11.2 - the mud mutt

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

10.3 - emerge from smoke

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

10 - right into the rising sun.

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

10.1 - for those at the top of tall buildings, the sun sets a little later

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

10.2 - Scottish folk Latino fusion

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

9.2 - there is no earthly way of knowing in which direction we are going

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

9.0 - holly rude

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

9.1 - represent

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

8.0 - the narrow space between the sky and the ground

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

8.1 - be stubborn

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

8.2 - whoop dee doo

Sun, 08 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

7.0 - battery sufficiently charged

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

7.2 - the scurry home hole

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

7.1 - bundle of joy

Sat, 07 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

6.2 - hot and cold, give and take, we'll hold you to them but they're your decisions to make

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

6.0 - first breath of morning

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

6.1 - festive flat white dispenser

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

5.1 - people making goat tracks outside of edinburgh

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

5.0 - got the chilly get the cosy. it's a jumpers, red face, runny nose day.

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

5.2 - standing man

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

5.3 - patience child

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

4.2 - rickshaw

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

4.0 - the scottish govern from the garden

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

4.3 - groundspeed check

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

4.1 - blue being the warmest colour

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

3.2 - infrastructure is hard, commuting is harder

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

3.0 - bank right to produce the dawn.

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

3.1 - count the quadrilaterals

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

3.3 - pictured: edinburgh castle exploding into a dozen colours

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

2.0 - destinationinium.

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

2.1 - strong opinions weakly held in an unproductive conversation.

Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

1.0 - 2017

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. if there's a fire you're trying to douse, you can't put it out from inside the house.

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. another travel day.

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. lights at night.

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. south day.

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. conquerer/shithead

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. jumble sale.

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. archie tetcher.

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. carnaby.

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. poop'd.

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. mechano set.

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. chez bojack.

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. roadman. 🌌

Mon, 26 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. water water ... obselete.

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. when they had opened their treasures, they presented gifts to him: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 🔔

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. last christmas photo.

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. jesus it's your birthday, happy birthday jesus.

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. government mandated festivity. 🎄🌟

Sun, 25 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. santa's plumblines 🔴

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. rah ceiling.

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. mezzanines.

Sat, 24 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. north day.

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. light leaky city.

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. something something big smoke.

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. get lord in yer guts.

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. purple geyser.

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. what a facking 💫

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. watchers of the wall.

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. a play which i am not now going to see contrary to the fact i am posting this photo.

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. tower block.

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. feel like i should stop saving up the christmas photos. it's time. 🎄

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. verticality.

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. headhaze.

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. dash.

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. lantern like others.

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. ben min.

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. muggins.

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. feel shit food.

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the pasta police. 🚨

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. sniffles.

Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. city bumbles.

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. clickclackclickclack.

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. exploded van.

Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. le caff.

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. gloom.

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. slump.

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. missing train buddy.

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. harvest moon 🌝

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. chrissmess 🌃🎄

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. we ride.

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. glasmoist.

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. electrified birdcage.

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. ditch wall.

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. sky in the ice swamp. 🌿

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. geometry.

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. patience.

Sun, 11 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. it's been dark all day.

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. goldboxman.

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. ms chiara oscuro.

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. cirque.

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. city

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. platform 9 and a bit 🚂🚋

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. vigil 🔔

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. old photo old castle.

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. chilly to warm.

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. hard fields.

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the ground is lava.

Sun, 04 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. top of the to you 📪

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. frosty window.

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. il qui rire 🎉

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. cloudy for the duration ☁️

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. quiet room.

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. cold ground hot sky.

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. park king 👑

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. sonshine ☀️

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. hot poker.

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. stay frosty ❄️

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. leafy rustrickets 🍁

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. bright and cold ❄️☀️

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. stationary trains 🚈

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. nicotine tangerine dream 🚬

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. essex

Sun, 27 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. stuff.

Sun, 27 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. bookworm in situ.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. solitary confinement.

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. recovery.

Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. drinks.

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. cyberman's commute.

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. headaches.

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. commute shnooze.

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. griddle.

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. work got a colour scheme.

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. glassgloss.

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. the scaffold.

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. brütal.

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

mornen 🌧

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. mist.

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. shropshire visit.

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. lightbox.

Sat, 19 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. coffee breaker.

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. jumble.

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. the poor impotent crane.

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. nocturnal urban escapology.

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. million dollar tenements.

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. doing the work.

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. new office old table.

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. cabelleras 🐴

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. pink green space station. 🌃

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. pong gladiator. 🍺

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the london rag.

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. colonial pub.

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. purple thames.

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. dystopic hotel.

Sun, 13 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. colainders.

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. gold.

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. epicerie 🍂

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. renaissance beer pong. 🍻

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. warm basement.

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. fear for the White House(s)

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. commutes.

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. continuing.

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

mourning. heavy is the head.

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. reflektor.

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. citycrush.

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. bric-a-brac houses.

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. london tattoo.

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. that photo that everybody has when they go to this bookshop.

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. that there bridge 🌄

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. step from home.

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. cold steps.

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. it's depop listing time (depop.com/jack)

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. arrow loops.

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. one of my favourite book shops not looking itself. 📚

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. england is quiet. 🍁

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning happens first in the east 🌇

Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. dwelling.

Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. blade runner.

Sat, 05 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. fly.

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. concrete crown 👑

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. the windows in the place where you work and nobody lives. 🖱

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. yor it's friday tomorrow 🙄

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. digital workers at work.

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. can't remember where this was taken.

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. chilly city.

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. mr hoss goes sightseeing.

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. shhoppers.

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. glass lawyer building.

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. walkie churchie.

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. portobello market.

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. tower of london. 🍂

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. the neon pals.

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. goldlitechurchspire. 🌞

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. village in the country.

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

fog + the shard tip 🔺

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. barbican kitchen hangs.

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

spooky architecture for halloween. london as designed by tim burton. 🎃

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. one of 1000 pictures of the shard in my camera roll.

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. edward hopper goes al fresco.

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. autumn leeeeeeaves. 🍂

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. friday's sunset beaten by tonight's.

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. black on blue.

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. the society of ginger people. 🎃

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the result of a successful day book shopping in london 📚

Sun, 30 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

dawn. city road bric-à-brac.

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. home at warp speed. 🏎

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening.

Sat, 29 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. the kitchen at work.

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. slither home 🚴

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. glasshaft 🔷

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. exchange square 🔳

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. the chicken man does his thing.

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. the top of a building for @dom.ford.

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. orange n blue.

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. sun spray 🌦

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. spire in cold sun. 🌟

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. london does children of men. 📰

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. you can't sit with us.

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. the glossy dossiers. 📀

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. hangovers got me like 😑

Sat, 22 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. tuerza ↖️

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. night griddle.

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. walks 🍃

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. cloudy retail cuboids 🕋

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. dorset ranching. 🐴

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. sun on the miniature wood. 🌿

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. strip lites in the kitchen. 💡

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. something something like diamonds in the sky 🔶

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. you will always find us in the kitchen at parties. 🍰

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. it's her birthday 🎈

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. went to exeter this week and realised how much i miss that uni town.

Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the falcon and the sitar. 🌙

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

back to the city today

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. a murder in black and white.

Sat, 15 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the dragon princess - prepare yourselves for a flood of countryside photos. 🌳

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. new carpet, white paint, and leather. \U0001F304

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. the block o glass.

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. future sushi.

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning (just). blocks of glass n stuff.

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. while the leaves turn brown 🍂

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. the grab.

Sat, 08 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. geezer.

Sat, 08 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. camera stolen.

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. every action has an equal opposite reaction.

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. grey nosh.

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

payshunz pays

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. the concrete dawn lamp. 🌇

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. paper dude.

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. london higgledy piggledy.

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. institution.

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. the sun quits us quickly ☀️💨

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. bright and cold. ❄️🌞

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the selfie 📸

Sun, 02 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. back to the city burble bash tomorrow. 🌌

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. reign. 🌧

Sat, 01 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. pumpkin pie autumn sky. ☁️

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. grrdrrs. 🏭

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. leeeeves.

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the morning soft

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

this is from matilda

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. shutdown trains 🚅

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

no more london for me for a few days 🏙🏙

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning where the sun hid

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. corridor kerfuffle.

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. stripes 🐯

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening in the soupy contrails 🍵

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. bridge.

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning (kinda). airplane. ✈️

Sat, 24 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. shoreditch swoosh. 🚍

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. mmmmm chilly sunshine. 🌞

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. dance of drips.

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. hungry hippos. 🍔

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. floaty cubey lighty thing 💡

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. tigerbread 🐯

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. gloss and everyone. ✨

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late. colour pools.

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. drizzles 🌧

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. fireflies. 🌅

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. warm lounging 📻

Sun, 18 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. chill.

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. woollen autumn swaddles. 🍂

Sat, 17 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

afternoon. friday unspooling.

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. back to work.

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. glossy spire.

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. fake sun in a fake forest. 🌲

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. shrinkwrapped office.

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. stag do. 🚧

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. the flying scotsman.

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. cloud base. ⛅️

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. shit date?

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. rahs with beers.

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. soft sheets.

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. she stays late.

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. cold black water. ✨

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. fatigue is a lead helmet. 😴

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

whiskey & soda 💧

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

entering evening. the sky.

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the boys of the red light district 🚨

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning at the foggy head

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

100 🏗

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. watchman.

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. flo.

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. speckled hen.

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. zentrum.

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. knives.

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night shoots with @henryjackson48 + @bert_ramsey_photography 📸🙌

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

palace ceiling

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. work.

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. ben.

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

humidity: 78%

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. voodoo rays vegan slices. 🍕

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. dawn on the water.

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. trajan poor.

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. father of the bride.

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. ragged pupils.

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. the spirit of go go go. 🚤💨

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. dim shine.

Mon, 05 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. the last house.

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

eulogies

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. horseplay.

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

dreamguard

Sun, 04 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. shore crumbles.

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. holographic sun, black ocean.

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. burbles.

Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. light from the rock.

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

night. witches.

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. rocks.

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

day. british beach beer.

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. hyperreal sunshine. 🌲

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening. sun inside the sea.

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. digging holes on the beach.

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

boy beach boat

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

nite kites

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

dark skies above

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

rock at sea 💧

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

late evening pools

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning. the sea, waving. 🌊

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Heading back to London today, freshly sea salted. (pictured: Broadgate Circle) 🚗

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

rest time 🕊

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏢

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

stopped

Sun, 28 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Happy birthday to the National Parks Service, one of the few parts of government Americans should be really proud of. 🇺🇸 @nationalparkservice

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Leaving the city for the weekend 🛣

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning in ur place of worship ⛪️

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I dare you to find shoes in this size

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

sun that broke the clouds 🌥⛅️🌤☀️

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

citytippytops 🏙

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ibbsy for @vivalanzaband

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

gmorning 🏛

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Oh lord it's hot, it's real real hot

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cuppa for @vivalanzaband

It was an education, and I’m incredibly thankful for it. Nowadays, I spend a ton of time trying to get to grips with new ways of working so I can build what I want. It’s a little different now, but not too much. Back then I was tinkering just for the sake of play, coming up with totally contrived projects to occupy my time and to help me understand. I still come up with projects all my own. I swear and plug things together until they explode for hours, trying to bash what little knowledge I have into the shape of what I want. The difference is that now, other people sometimes see these projects when they’re “done”, whatever the hell that is. Where I used to be building text adventure games on battered old Linux machines, I now build websites that everybody can see, and many people use. It’s pretty far from how things used to be, sat on the carpet wiggling the broken pins of a VGA cable.

I’m still tinkering. Right now I’m trying to get my head around the latest batch of exciting web technologies. My biggest hope is that people continue to let me tinker with these things try and find solutions, and to build projects that I find cool. My dad let me while away whole afternoons, days, just messing around. Luckily, my time at university has let me burn hours on poking around things and trying to build things that might never go anywhere — and that’s yielded some great results for me. In the future, here’s hoping I get a job where people might even pay me to tinker at compelling problems until they do something impressive.

goat-eyed david

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

stonerise over woods

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

evening

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning, dovey light 🕊

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

last night i sat in a deck chair in the wind and rain of a london rooftop and watched a movie. totally worth it. 🎥

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

stuff like this always reminds me of the POWER video 🏛

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Death of Ananias (1515) by Raphael. As seen thru iPad Air. 🔦

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

holy ship, time for bed 🌙

Sun, 21 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

london's ages 🏙

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

getting back to london today 👋

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning from somewhere green I flew through on a train

Sat, 20 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

conquer.gov.uk 🇬🇧

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

good morning?

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

tealness is heavily disputed

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

steep bank

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

good morning

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

✨ morning ✨

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌾 sandman for @vivalanzaband 🌾

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

it's late, to bed

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌲plants from space 🍄

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

losing track of time at work

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🍃 london fauna 🍃

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

💢 nose wrinkles 💢

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Same Southbank Sunset 🌇

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

we don't do cars here 🚲

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

☀️ night not night walk 🌙

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌾 warm sunday 🌾

Sun, 14 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning 🕰

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚨💦 WHOOP SPLOOSH 💦🚨 that's the sound of the police

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

cucina bambina 😀

Sat, 13 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning guvnor 🚔

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

big bong @ sunset 🌇

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🍃 tinny disney music plays 🍃

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

stretch... good morning 🌾

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

👑 Queenie gets her post 👑

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morning 🍓

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Attendant & Plea 🚇

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

institutional 🏛

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

My feet hurt 👞

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Good morning 🔪

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sleepy Son ⏱

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Neon 💡

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

😓 It's hot, B 🐝

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

to bed with beachy brain ✨

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

✈️

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🍻☀️

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Relax, you are just cosmic dust. 💫

Sat, 06 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Man runs for a train. 🚈 I lost my season ticket somehow. I have the urge to just wander around the world shouting 'BUT I JUST HAD IT'. 😤

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the merrymaker

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

☁️

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I have begun to understand the Friday feeling. 🍃

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

morgen 🍃

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the girl is me, the cookie is all of life's riches and opportunities. 😐🍪

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚶

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Girl ☄

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Good morning 💎

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Guards 2

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Guards 1

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚇

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

wat up beach 🏖

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Stan Smith got real fucked up 👟

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sky Wedge

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

good morning 🌤

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

TEHHHHMS 🌊

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shard @ Borough Market

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Closing Time 🌙

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dusk in the city

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Building buildings with perspective 👁

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

👐🏛

Sun, 31 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Stormlight ⛈

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

From the Kubrick exhibit

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It's only just occurred to me that this photo could really have been taken any time of day.

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Thames ⛴

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY 📽

Sat, 30 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It's my birthday today, I'm going to London. 🎂

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚲

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Old Street Uniform 👟

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

P TRO 🏷

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Man From Platform 10 🚈

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Bucket Man 🚀

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

" title="Shoreditch" />

From Low To High 🏠🏢

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Me and a regular sized vlogger

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Slab of TfL 🚇

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Morning 🏢

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Brutal 📂

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nights at Eds 🍔

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Hospital From Space 💉

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The late train home 🔴

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Town 🚇

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

warm whites 🚐

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Clifton St. 🏛

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mellow Yellow Lemon 🍋

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

back when trains ran 🚈

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

i will melt today ☀️

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The oldest dog in the world

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Slick ⚪️

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The curtains, the onions

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Appears To Be Walken 🌿

Sun, 17 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Office 🏛

Sat, 16 Jul 2016 00:00:00 GMT

One of many of the mornings diversions. 🚣

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This was taken from a urinal, true story 🍸

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Überground 🚈

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A beer

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Afternoon Suits 🍺👔

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Patch of Sky 🌤

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A view from the office 🏢

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Catching the train 💚❤️

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Lunch 🌯

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hermana comiendo 🍔

Tue, 31 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Typical Shoreditch Edginess

Wed, 25 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hot Chocolate

Tue, 24 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Rivergals 🌾

Tue, 24 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

ze british are comeeng

Mon, 23 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌪

Sun, 22 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

S

Sat, 21 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Vibes ⛵️

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Chukka chukka

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mornings and Evenings 🚇

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Midlands

Wed, 18 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Friends 🚙

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Two old guys discuss the patriarchy

Sat, 14 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚲 Broadgate 🚲

Fri, 13 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Works 🍺💾

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Take me away

Thu, 12 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Trains are long, but I've had a lot of my best times and most significant life moments on them. 🚈 This is somewhere on the New England coastline, taken from a train window.

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Reflection back to when London was sunny. ☀️

Wed, 11 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Harp Lane Deli 🌯

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Yob Fayre 🌊

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Tonight we drive south 🎈

Sat, 07 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Neapolitan 🏡

Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Urban Wedge 🏙

Fri, 06 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

@fat - Internet Historian

Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Rives TED Talk

If you take a listen to Rives’ great TED talk from 2006 today, it’s pretty easy to see it as a little time capsule. Here he is talking (eloquently and entertainingly) about Napster and Friendster. What was, at the time, a piece of pop culture criticism and entertainment, is just as easily viewed as artefact of an era in the internet history. The internet moves fast, look at how quickly we moved from the bullshit-ly labelled Internet 1.0, to Internet 2.0, to deciding that numbering eras of the internet like that is stupid. That’s how a talk from 2006 can refer to long defunct technologies and come off sounding like archive footage explaining the social norms of telegraph communication.

We don’t much in the way of a history of the internet. To many, it would seem far too soon to begin the active process of cataloguing and historicising the internet. There have been provisional efforts.The Wayback Machine gives one access to the internet archives, and there’s a hell of a lot of data there. You can find the technical specifications for deprecated versions of web technologies like Apache and table-based layouts if you dig hard enough. All of that is just raw material though. The contents of an Egyptian tomb aren’t history until the tomb is unsealed and explored by the people of the present, who weave a narrative for us out of these inanimate objects.

@fat on CSS

@fat is who we’ve been waiting for. In 2015, @fat spoke at Code Genius in NYC about the “Cascading Shit Show”. Talks at these conferences, and I’ve watched a lot of them, usually fall into the following archetypes: evangelising a new technique or technology, or calling the industry to action on a lack or inadequacy of some kind (whether it be cultural, technical, or in user experience). Not so with @fat’s talks. Cascading Shit Show isn’t a teardown of the silliness of the omnipresent technology and a prescription for the alternative, as the name might suggest. Instead, it is an impeccably researched history lesson about the evolution and the architecting of CSS. Digging through primary sources that sound incredibly tedious to unearth and parse, @fat is able to tie together an incredible story with a whole cast of characters crudely rendered with the pen tool in Photoshop.

@fat on OS

In What Is Open Source And Why Do I Feel So Guilty, at dotJS in Paris, @fat stands in front of an enormous drawing of Linus Torvalds. Torvalds has been drawn sketchily, looking a little like a bargain basement Pendleton Ward character. @fat is talking about his side project, or rather his all-consuming project, Bootstrap. Or rather, he’s talking about how open-source projects have the habit of mushrooming from fun ideas into time intensive nightmares that need constant maintaining and marshalling. That synopsis makes the talk sound like it would totally fit into one of those archetypes I mentioned, right? Nah, @fat approaches the topic by giving us a run through the history of the open source movement: how we got to where we are today. Hence, Linus Torvalds.

@fat’s tone is irreverent, self-aware, acerbic, and ironic. It’s just perfect for the historian of our times. He’s a literature major, he might even recognise himself in Dave Eggers. God knows he’s self-aware and puckish enough. The bizarre mixture of having a ADD-style short attention span and an incredible depth of knowledge on a given issue that he’s decided to research, is matched exactly to the simultaneous depth and shallowness of the internet he has adopted as his area of speciality. Even just these two talks that are available to those who aren’t blessed enough to be able to afford conference tickets, are enough to begin a new school of history. @fat is telling stories about us that haven’t been told yet, and he’s damn good at telling them. Forget Bootstrap, the framework that has set the visual tone of the internet for years now, @fat’s histories are his most important work, and we should be doing more to join him in that work.

Microsoft Ventures seemingly resides in an office from the early 70s. 🎷

Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Whoosaaaaa 👂🏻

Thu, 05 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The belly of the earth is white

Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mo Sunshine & Rain

Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Moody Sky Gods 🌦

Tue, 03 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Personal Effects 🗄

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sky Blue 🌤

Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Watchers of Euston 🚈

Sun, 01 May 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Leaf & Chief 🍂

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Look it's Game of Thrones 🗡

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Wish me luck. 💫

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Good Morning Suburbia 🌞

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Uh there's a sunset in the bathroom? 🌅

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A very big house in the country 🏠

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Smokestack Lightning ⛈

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sheeptown USA

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

trays onglaze 🇬🇧

Fri, 22 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A husk of the Judge's Lodgings 🏰

Wed, 20 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A spook in the halls

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Some sort of small mammal 🐶

Tue, 19 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ommmm 👌

Sat, 16 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏢 ➡️ 🏢 Stonewall Inn

Tue, 12 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

⛴🌙

Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🔪

Sun, 10 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Castle Tower

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

No I don't want to 🐸

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Chillin 💦

Fri, 08 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mountains like bedsheets 🏔🌙

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

After the American blowout, I've been trying to eat a little healthier. Results are good. Don't know if I've lost any chubb yet but I feel better and healthy food is starting to look and taste much better than unhealthy food. 🍏

Thu, 07 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Rural as 🐴

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Click-clack 🚈

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It is well cold and I am not this fluffy.

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sleepy times at Twin Peaks 🏔

Wed, 06 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sunny This Morning ☀️

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Spiritus Sancti ⛪️

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Black Rock, Falls

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Assorted Signals ❌✅

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A Fabulous Hoss 🦄

Tue, 05 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Rosa

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Speckle Fleck

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

levitatelevitatelevitatelevitate

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Groundhog Day ⛪️

Sun, 03 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

My grandad holding my mom. It's very jarring to see him in a wheelchair with parts of his body removed. It's clearly a frustration to him when he's such a practical, hands-on guy

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The man himself.

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Not that into this town, but home is where your people are and I'm glad to be back. 🏡

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Weird that I don't have to fly anywhere, like... at all in the near future. ✈️❓

Thu, 31 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Jetlag game... bread. Sleep? 🕹⏰🛰⛽️

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ugh if I have to... Flying to the UK on the red eye tonight. See you soon all.

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Presented without comment

Tue, 29 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Arlington Cemetery 🕊 Unholy City ... I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled. - The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏵

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cherry Blossom Festival 🌸

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

We just ate all of the food in Washington D.C. FACT 🍰🍸

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Woodrow Wilson's Library 📚

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Waking up on my last full day of the trip. 😩✈️

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sorry for all the photos of blossom. It's bloody everywhere here. 🌸

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Predator drone, retired from Afghanistan

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Fresco // Oculus

Sun, 27 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I will miss delicious foamy lattes when I get home. There won't be a really good latte for like, miles around back home. 🍦☕️

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cherry Blossom Festival 🌺

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏪

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cherry Blossom Slick

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Two mobile phones used as IED remote detonators, found in Iraq.

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Girl & The Fishes 🐛🐟

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🐻 Adolescent Andean Bear 🐻

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Washington Monument is behind my head, honest. 🏛

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Washington Penis Extension

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Gotta groom to look flowliss 🌷

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Champin' On That 'BOO, SON 🐼

Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Was not invited in for tea. 1/10 America, you have a stand-offish attitude. Oh and another thing, there was a guy on the roof pointing a gun at me, like, the whole time. Rude.

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

President needs to weed his garden. Guess he's busy.

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Washington, from Lincoln.

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Jefferson's Pedalo ⛵️

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Memorial Bridge at dusk

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Woodrow Wilson's Gaff

Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Ziggurat

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

All the Boston photos are up on Medium now. Penultimate set. 😫

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Greenhouse Effect

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Public Alley 419

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Stacks on stacks

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Revere ridin' dirty 🐴🕯

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sky In Windows 🌤

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

💨

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

No duomo just dome

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

You got class?

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

People of Boston

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Every time I see squirrels and take a photo, they come closer and strike multiple different poses. No joke, every time. 🌿

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

An impromptu neighbourhood library

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shlohmo Vibes

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Old North Church's wonky steeple

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Old Sitty Hole

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ghoulettini 👻

Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Girl

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nails from the future.

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The mezzanine

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Balcony they read the Declaration of Independence from.

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Market Boi

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Old & New

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Old & New 2

Sun, 20 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sequence indicators from the first programmable computer in the US, Mark I. Major nerd cred.

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Tasty sandwich 🍞

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

My rogue attempt at Hopper's Nighthawks.

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Qwaahd at Hahvahd Yahdd

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Proof that even Harvard University has shitty eyesore academic buildings.

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The lib

Sat, 19 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Our Airbnb host brings us baked goods every morning. This morning was banana chocolate chip muffins. 💯🍰

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Street book sale 📚

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Today's morning baked stuff: fresh croissants.

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Jamaica Plains House 🏡

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Subway freestyle about to get shut down

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Welcome to the Governor's Office.

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

BAHSTAN 🏛

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I got this for $3. See previous post.

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Puddle Days

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Museum 🏛

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Empi...

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shipping up to Boston today on a long train ride, so prepare for a no wi-fi media blackout (sure you're all real cut up about it).

Wed, 16 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

📚💵

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A model of Sputnik 1 hanging in the lobby of the United Nations. 🛰

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

In the rain

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Heaven is a book shop

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Night Monster

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The view before the the view at the top of the rock.

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Flag at Liberty Island and One World Trade Center. 🇺🇸🏛 After seeing what I did at the 9/11 Museum, I feel like I can understand what happened to the country way more. Still think where they ended up is messed up. But, when people in New York saw the stuff they did - it must have seemed reassuring for Bush to turn up and say he was in control and taking action. You can also see why people were willing to give up all kinds of freedoms, just so that wouldn't happen again.

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Not today

Tue, 15 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

OBEY 🗽

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The office at night

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚁 chka chka

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

You don't look like yourself

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Lenny Gull contemplates the arrival of his parents in the United Stares from their ancestral home across the Atlantic Ocean. The Statue of Liberty looms in the background. Political upheaval in the late 80s caused many gulls to leave the nest of their ancestral lands across the North Atlantic. Their flight has led to a distinct and large population of immigrant gulls in the US, that has contributed enormously to American culture over recent decades. Prominent gulls such as Henry Gull-Fitzrovia were taken under the wing of New York aristocracy and made a name of their own at the top of the pecking orders of the art and political worlds.

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Bridge + Diagonals 📐

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Somehow the man in the mid-right did not get run over.

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Is this the queue for the bathroom? 🖼

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Art is just... blegh

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Tip of the Empire, top of the Rock 🗼

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mmm... let's tesselate

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Insert Delegates Here @ UN Security Council Chamber

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The downtown jumble

Sun, 13 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

5th Avenue

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏢

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A chair worth millions 💷

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sexy, shiny murderer.

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nice White Guy

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The late return train

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Diplo Housing

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

NYC = Movie Set 🏙🎥

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

They're WALKIN HERE

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Snug Little Townhouse 🏢🏚🏢

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Swaghaus

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

MURICA | GUNS | CAHPS | SOLDIUHS 🇺🇸

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hopscotch Girl

Fri, 11 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Projects

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Natives of the 1️⃣🚇

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

She's taking a call right now. 📞

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Street Dining 🍸

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Arrival in NYC 🛬

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shake Shack 🍔

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Night bikes

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Man was our Airbnb good in Toronto.

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Flying from Toronto Pearson to JFK. Later, Canada.

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Flying out of Toronto today.

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Oh yeah also it turns out I get vertigo now, so rest assured most of these aerial shots have been taken with sweaty palms. 😓

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Major SimCity vibes, no? 🏙

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cold Wash 🌊

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Doing it for the glass floor selfie 📸

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cold Rocks

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Twinkletown, CA

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

More 🇨🇦 🎨

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Graffiti de 🇨🇦

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏙🇨🇦

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

@lizziebump and the falls

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Queen St W 👸🏼

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Fresh water mist 💦

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The traditional @smokes_poutinerie

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The plane we came in on. @lizziebump was not into the propeller situation.

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

My gahd 🍕@TerroniTO

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Toronto is proving a good place to chill for a bit and catch up on some rest.

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Gonna go see Niagra Falls today. Sploosh indeed. ☔️

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

😣

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Waterfront

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Happy Mother's Day, word to your mother. Pictured: not me and mum

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Giraffe hide (still attached)

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

CRUMP ❄️

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Niagra Falls is well tacky. You know what isn't? This grey wolf. He's tasteful af. 🐶 @lincolnparkzoo

Sun, 06 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The bathroom

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

If you look closely, you will notice that not all the animals pictured here are ducks.

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

And the award for the cutest little motherfucker in the universe goes to...

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow we're flying to Toronto, because we're not cold enough yet.

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🐯

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

ITHE CRAME!

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Yesterday's breakfast. Avocado & prosciutto. @lepainquotidien

Fri, 04 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Frozen City ❄️

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

What does she know that I don't?

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Merchandising! Merchandising!

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏙

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🚗🚕🚙🚙🚇

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Michigan shore birds

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Top

Thu, 03 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hi

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Zen

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Get it?

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Gotham

Wed, 02 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Chinatown | Transamerica

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

In a few hours I'm going to be flying out of San Francisco. I'm sad to see it go. I have so many reasons to come back. ✈️

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

long exposure + shaky hands = jackson pollock?

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Flying Virgin America, heard that's cool. ✈️

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the herb garden 🌿

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

What have I created. 📸🐛

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Anybody remember 🎧On the island where nobody goes🎧 kids TV show? Yeah this is nothing like that, everybody goes to this island.

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Saw the Oscars tonight in the historic Balboa Theatre. Good call. P.S. Tom Hardy was snubbed, Spotlight was not the Best Picture, Alejandro deserves all the things, and Leo was gloriously gracious in his overdue acceptance.

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

You know the devil from the Jamiroquai 'Feels Just Like It Should' video? Major vibes from this skating guy in a suit. 👹👔

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Museum in Park

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

dogDOGdogDOGdog 🎾🐶

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🎆

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

In an exciting turn of events, we're going to be at an Oscar party all afternoon and evening today. 💪

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

⛰

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Alcatraz by night 😯👻

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Bay | The Gate | The Rock (👸🏼⛩🤘)

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Alcatraz Audio

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ferry friends

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ship envy ⛴🛳

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The ship and the deep ⛴

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dinner: Mac n Cheese 🧀

Sun, 28 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Burble 💦

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🔥🐛

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🏞

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Help needed. Our v nice AirBnB lady said we could use whatever herbs we want for cooking. Trouble is, I don't know what herbs are what and they aren't labelled. What are they? 🌿

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

the bae area

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Roadhogging Central California

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌲

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I'm definitely in my zone. Sorry about the hipster beer but it's legit the cheapest beer in town, ☀️🏙🍺

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

rockssssannnne 🎺

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Anybody else getting major Revenant vibes?

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

bridge fans shout out

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Downtown

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Breakfast: Croque SF 👅

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Our neighbourhood

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Last minute

Fri, 26 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

A truly fabulous parrot and his pet human. 🐦

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Union Square

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This city is honestly the place I feel most excited about in the world. I can't help but gush about it every minute when I'm walking around. Yeah it has problems, but there's just so much to love. 🌿

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Chukka-chukka 🚋

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Castro

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

California Girl

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Best burrito EVER

Thu, 25 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Currently drinking the best cup of coffee OF ALL TIME. Not at Central Perk though.

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

You like that? 🍔

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Jazz Man 🎺

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

COFF COFF ☕️

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

'Bro, bro... bro look at my artisanal iPhone case'

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

SoVeryCal 🏖

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

LA AirBnB / Wild Hipster Sanctuary 🏠

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mornings by the Pacific 😍

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Old Man and the Sea 👆🏻

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Oosh

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

LA Metro Hollywood 🚇

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Leaving LA today and taking a 12 hour train to SF. 🚞

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sunset seekers. I finally found something to take photos of in LA, and man did I take a lot of photos. 🎡

Tue, 23 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🗼

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

McDo | USA | California (🍔🇺🇸🐻)

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Incredible costume design details on Arthur Weasley.

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Gold bars

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Back lot at Warner Brothers dressed for the filming of Hail, Caesar!

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Central Perk

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The show will begin shortly

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Toured here today 🎥

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Generic City Set

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nolan Batmobile

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌴

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The money shot 💰

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Capitol Records

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hills 🌴

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

We've landed in LA. Our AirBnB is 🔥

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hot pink. 🌂

Sun, 21 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

cue accordion

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Vegas photo album is up.

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shipping out to LA in a couple hours.

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Momma always told me...

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Do you smell that? Smells like money. 💰

Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

ommmmmmm

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Craggle

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Today was the Grand Canyon ⛰

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Long

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Joshua Trees

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Canyoneroooo

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Watch your step cause if you slip off here you'll straight up fall in the fucking Grand Canyon and die.

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

toptop @ tp

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I posted a new set of photos from the Grand Canyon and surrounding areas. https://medium.com/8city-magazine/chapter-2-grand-canyon-b60af12edc41

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Roadrunner

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Majestic

Thu, 18 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Plane Over Crag

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Somewhere in Utah

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Saw the frozen north and the Rockies from far above today. Will upload a post of photos when I can.

Wed, 17 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Mist

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Gooooood morning Vietnaaaaaam

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

London this morning

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

ttfnUK

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Shard

Tue, 16 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The omnipresent pine trees, brickwork, and burglar alarms in suburbia. 🌲🌲

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Last brit sunset for a month and change. 🌅

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Lamp & Lines

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Latte ☕️

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Bright south. 🌤

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

First Fires - Grey Reverend & Bonobo

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Fully prepared to trash these in the coming weeks. 👟

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Still in the UK but the Isles are putting in the work to be appreciated. 🌅

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🙌

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hedgerow grain.

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This is the official tricolore flag for the Land of Nod. 🇪🇪🌚😴

Sun, 14 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

chomp 🔝 brownie

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Well this is starting to look a bit silly isn't it. 📷🎩🐘

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

All the trains got delayed/cancelled ten minutes after we arrived. 👋

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

How @lizziebump cleans her brushes. EXTREMELY PRECISELY.

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

England getting it together right as I'm about to leave it.

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Cause she's a brick (uh) house.

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Trouble in triplicate.

Thu, 11 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Time out 🍃🐱👩

Sat, 06 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Hey does anybody remember that songs Wires by Athlete? That was reet crap wasn't it?

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Observe, the herd gathers around the watering hole, vying for increasingly obscure cured meats and Mediterranean pulses.

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

When you lose your iPhone tripod mount, but you gotta get that time lapse.

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

That stupid house I can't stop taking photos of. 🏡

Thu, 04 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The flu that never came.

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Good morning. I'm properly starting to feel like I'm going on holiday, it stops me from getting stressed about work stuff. 🌤

Wed, 03 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Broccoli is really weird stuff. See: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/6-broccoli/

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Nights out are a weird game of last man standing in my experience. 🍺🍾🌙

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Golf is hard.

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

If my life was a cheaply made soap opera called Hampton Drive.

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌟🏙

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Oh boy-ee, look at the big city lights huh.

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The moral of the story is don't stop working, I guess.

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Had a crazy day with @vivalanzaband yesterday. More to come.

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I had a very busy week, sleep is the goal.

Sun, 31 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Ready to limp out of the end of this week like what year is it?

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Good morning. Coffee? ☕️

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Getting shivery tired.

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Now for work for all the do-da-day.

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Absolutely too hot, hot damn.

Wed, 27 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This stuff smells crazy, but makes most cocktails delicious. Go figure. 🍸

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dream 💫

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Revenant is the best film of this Oscar year in my opinion. It's totally brutal, gorgeous, and manages to be gripping and tense throughout.

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I've been running around like crazy today. Not really though, I just had to do more than one thing in a day.

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Creepy Hotel

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dawn. Everybody is ill in this house, and not in a good way. I can hear muffled coughing from every corner.

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It's late. 🌚

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Total Hero, get it?

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Telford is mostly terrible, save for itty bitty bits. 🌅

Sun, 24 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Fields

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sheep Wool Barbed Wire Fence Words

Sat, 23 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Farm 2

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Staghaus

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This was colder than it looks. ❄️

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Farm

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It's morning in the port, just.

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Work shirt 👔

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🌛 Boa noite.

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Pond 🌾

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Home corner.

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

It got real cold, real quick after sunset.

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The trees are coming. 🌲🌳

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

When I was taking this photo of a shut down hotel in Newport, a man came out and started asking what I was doing. He was asking if I was looking to buy the place. No, I do not want to buy your old hotel, sorry dude.

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

⛪️

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sploosh.

Wed, 20 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Anybody remember Cold Knap Lake? Vibes. 💀

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The Water 💧

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Definitely the entrance to the lair of an evil villain with an initial H.

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Sleeps.. 🌛🌟

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Roof/Ruff 🏠

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Queen B 👑

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Life Round Here

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I'm going back to work. 💸

Sun, 17 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I slept for a real long time just now. I think that was a lot of medicine to take at once. 🌟💊🌙

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This is food?

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I for one welcome our corporate overlords. ☕️

Sat, 16 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Run out of milk, so there'll be none of this

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🐛 Snug

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dinner tonight: - Salami - Pastrami - Fresh white bread - Mixed salad - Middle Eastern Wild Rice Salad - Falafel

Fri, 15 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Codeine

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

So it goes, again.

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Awooo🌛

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

This sunset was

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Forge

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

'Otitis Externa'... again

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Lightly toast your extremities by your phone screen, because science.

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Dark & Damp 💧🐺

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Remain vigilant, the enemy is never far. 👴🏻

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Carpal Tunnel Pain ⚡️⚡️

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

I love lamp 💡

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Petrichor: the smell right after rain.

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

🐛 Morning Routine

Sun, 10 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Most Evenings 🌧

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

nahhhhsewenyaaaa

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Roads After Rain

Sat, 09 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Evenings ❄️

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Crop/Mould

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

The 'is this food?' face

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Coding grump defcon 1

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Little Fluffy Clouds

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Turns out green tea isn't gross.

Wed, 06 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Booking 🇺🇸 Excursions

Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Murmurations.

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sun, 03 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 GMT

My cat is a bruiser.

Mon, 28 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This cat looks how I feel.

Sun, 27 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

My cat is more charismatic than me. 🐈🌟

Thu, 24 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

You have no cheer. 🎅🏻

Wed, 23 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

We're at the solstice folks. 💫

Tue, 22 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Am I white yet?

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Too sleepy for work.

Sun, 20 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. 😈💉

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

He knows if you've been bad or good, so he good for goodness sake. ☠

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Place is a moon base.

Sat, 19 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

🌛

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I used to hate walks, now I'm always trying to come up with excuses to go for one.

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

It's late and I'm tired. 🌚

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Thu, 17 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Chilly Days

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

this town makes me sick... look what they've done to you

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

books in my house

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

current mood: sea captain

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Got my new watch and we're very happy together.

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

really though, this cat has no chill

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

guys

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

wholemeal catloaf

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

little boxes made of ticky tack

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The window of many seasons says... WINTER 🌬

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I have no reason to feel this tired all the time.

Fri, 13 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Lunch as feck.

Mon, 09 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Conwy

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Conway Castle

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

smudge

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

hangalangin

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 GMT

no time to work because other work

Sat, 31 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

marmalade cat

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

dis gurl

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

bella + adele ❤️

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Newport in its 5 minutes of Autumn.

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

out there is cold

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

in here is warm

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

This juice turns a shit sandwich into a sandwich that is the shit.

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Puffy Face McLyin

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I love lamp.

Mon, 26 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I don't spend enough time just chiiiiillin in this room.

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sun, 25 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

slp

Sat, 24 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Christmas anybody? No?

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I am wearing excessive clothing.

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Will work for sandwiches.

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Autumn Morning

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Country boi 🌿

Thu, 22 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I'm enjoying these too much for an adult person.

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

YouTube and chill.

Wed, 21 Oct 2015 00:00:00 GMT

I think I'll graduate now.

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Fri, 10 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Froth

Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Painto

Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Shropshrug

Mon, 06 Jul 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Quay not

Thu, 18 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The final feedback of my degree. I think it all worked out.

Fri, 12 Jun 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Exeter

Thu, 14 May 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The Water

Sun, 19 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

MySpace angle

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:00:00 GMT

At a gig on a boat.

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

When you should be in a seminar but just aren't, that's Suntory times.

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

Is The Internet A Rhizome?

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 GMT

How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet…

Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure. However, challenges to this application of the rhizome are prominent. In this essay, I will explore just one of these challenges: examining the hegemonic nature of the English language as it applies to the computer, the basic building block of the internet. First, I will outline the privileged position of the English language in the basic architecture of the components of the internet, from the machine level to the level of programming language and internet protocol. Then, I will argue that this contradicts Deleuze and Guattari’s basic edict that a rhizome has no ‘hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths’ (1459), and that instead, this hegemonic power of English has formed the internet into only a partial rhizome, if not a solid structure constructed and continuously policed by discourse.

Koh observes that ‘the Net is a textbook example of the rhizome, with no apparent organizing structure, no determining point of origin, no tyranny of centrality’ (Koh); his claim is not a rare one. The internet’s structure as decentralised, as a system of interconnected nodes, is abundantly explained too by Nicholas Negroponte, who describes it as a ‘network of networks’ (181) whose form makes the shape and size of the whole unobservable. He goes on to espouse the idea that the internet is ‘a lattice of heterogeneous processors’, in the manner of somebody describing a rhizome without having read Deleuze and Guattari, and he even goes on to say that two parts of the lattice are ‘so totally different from each other that their designers don’t even speak the same language’ (180). Suhail claims that ‘within the digital network, communication is “organised” as a rhizome’, and expands on this to say that the internet is also rhizomatic in that it has ‘no main artery’. Rothstein supposes that the rhizomatic form of the internet is so inherent that the rhizome itself is the ‘symbol of the internet age’. With this language, it seems a given that the internet is a near-perfect rhizomatic form. In this essay, I aim to prove that this is not so, and to prove that this fact has wide-reaching implications for those exposed to nodes on the network.

The internet’s network is composed of centres; this is troubling for those who compare it to a rhizome. Of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari say: ‘it is not a multiple derived from the One, or to which One is added (n+1)’ (1458), but the internet is fundamentally composed of the sum of Ones. Rather than the rhizome that is ‘made only of lines’, the internet is very much a structure in that it is very much ‘defined by a set of points and positions’ (1458). Each node is a computer with a definitive boundary between the internal (the local storage paradigm) and the external (the network communication paradigm). This distinction is key because it dispels the notion that the node cannot be separated from the system as a whole. In fact, there is a very definite threshold between the inside of the node and the interconnected space between nodes. What I am most concerned with for now though, is the way in which each part of the computer node speaks (the internal and external), i.e. how each encode and decode communicative language.

The network nodes that constitute the internet are intolerant of any language that does not use the basic Latin alphabet.

First, I will deal with the internal language. At the most fundamental level, the individual node stores and manipulates data in binary, in a series of on-or-off states. To store any information from a set, the computer must group these binary ‘bits’, which can each represent one of two states, into larger units that can store more than two states. The early architects of the ancestors of the computers, used as network nodes today, chose to group bits into groups of eight, each group being known as a byte. A byte has 128 possible states, being composed of eight bits, each with a total of two possible states. Character encoding is the next layer towards representing language. The predominant character encoding system for many years was ASCII, which is able to represent a full set of characters with one byte per character, because there are fewer than 128 characters in the set: those of the Latin alphabet, the Arabic numeral system, and assorted punctuation and other symbols (‘ASA standard X3.4–1963’). Whilst this character set is able to compactly store and represent language, it is drastically limited and excludes the human user from interacting with any language other than that derived or representable in the Latin alphabet. Whilst new character sets have been invented that can store characters other than the basic set of Latin characters, there are none that are widely compatible at the low-level of operation, and widely inclusive of other languages or script systems. The details here are technical, but the consequences are that the network nodes that constitute the internet are intolerant of any language that does not use the basic Latin alphabet. We have seen then, that unlike the rhizome, the internet is a network certainly composed of a multitude of Ones. We have also seen that those nodes are deeply preferential in and of themselves, of a certain kind of language.

One thing has been well observed about the internet: that its contributors and architects do not reside in a single geographical location, nor do they exist in a centrally administrated structure. By having agreed upon a set of shared protocols for communication and information markup (TCP/IP, HTTP etc.), disparate and unorganised agents are able to develop platforms for information to flow across the network, as well as the information that flows across these platforms. All of this is done concurrently and without central coordination. However, the question remains: what kinds of information are tolerated by the network, and in what language can agents develop platforms for the network? The languages used to program systems for the internet (called simply, development languages from here on) use human language (that is, language as it is commonly understood: spoken and written language) fragments to represent the data manipulation and logic decisions being undertaken by the computer behind-the-scenes. No development language with non-trivial usage uses fragments from any human language other than English. Wherever they happen to be, geographically or on the network, when writing in development languages, architects must communicate with the computer in terms of ‘for loops’ and ‘if statements’, and always in those English-based terms specifically.

No matter where an internet node is, they are situated in the Anglophone world.

I also wish to refer to those languages that are more properly called protocols, the specific methods by which nodes exchange information packets (I am now speaking about the communicative language of the computer’s language for the external, the network communication paradigm). These are what Negroponte and Koh so optimistically call a ‘metalanguage’, allowing for an error-free exchange in diverse languages so long as the metalanguage’s protocol is adhered to (Koh). However, what is omitted here is that the metalanguage itself is an English-speaking one. A node requests a document from another node with the HTTP protocol using the keyword ‘GET’ and gives a document to another node using the keyword ‘PUT’ and so on. The ‘conspicuously diverse’ nodes that Koh refers to are in fact exchanging in development languages based on the English human language, all the while adhering strictly to an English-based metalanguage (Koh). In once sense at least, Negroponte was right when he claimed that the internet would herald a ‘space without place’ where the ‘post-information age will remove the limitations of geography’ (164). However, that ‘space without place’ represents the fact that no matter where an internet node is, they are situated in the Anglophone world.

Here are the first signs of Foucauldian discourse at work; to determine what power relations are at work, we must ask ‘according to what rules has a particular statement been made, and consequently according to what rules could other similar statements be made?’ (‘Archeology of Knowledge’ 31). If all expression by the architects of internet services and platforms are constrained to be conceived in English, this surely represents a discursive rule, itself constitutive of a discourse. If we introduce such a dominant discourse based on the constraining of the internet into English, do we disrupt the rhizome? To speak in a spatial metaphor, I posit that discourse comes to centralise certain parts of the rhizome, thickening some pathways more than others, until the whole begins to resemble a root-tree structure. Koh notes that the internet ‘is a jumbled hybrid of several earlier technologies’ with disparate purposes in line with Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of a rhizome as containing asignifying nodes (Koh), but of course this does not close the door for discourse as ‘discourse must not be referred to the distant presence of the origin, but treated as and when it occurs’ (Foucault, ‘Archeology of Knowledge’ 28). Therefore it is different for me to argue that the underlying architecture of the internet leads to the maintenance of a discourse today, because it continues to reinforce the ‘rules’ of language as a consequence, than for Koh to argue the inverse simply because the apparatuses going into the construction of the internet were not built to enforce discourse. It is not the intention of the components of the internet that are constitutive of discourse in this context, but their effect as enforcers of language ‘rules’.

I have demonstrated how the internet’s supposedly rhizomatic ‘flatness’ is disrupted by the force of an English-speaking discourse, where all communication across the network is marshalled and administered by English-speaking hegemonic forces. This disruption is an inevitable one for some, like Jo Freeman, who claims that ‘there is no such thing a structureless group’ and that a group will ‘inevitably structure itself in some fashion’ (232). In this context, the internet represents that group, and Freeman’s observations are analogous for many reasons. Firstly, she argues that it is the very heterogeneity that those like Negroponte claim is the lifeblood of the internet that causes emergent hierarchy; where heterogenous nodes form factions to represent themselves. Freeman also offers us an explanation for why the internet has been thus far diagnosed as an untroubled rhizome: ‘structurelessness become[s] a way of masking power’. This is how the internet has been misinterpreted as a rhizome without hierarchy. In much the same vein as the criticism Hardt and Negri make of the postmodern critique, I claim that those who claim that the internet is not troubled by structuring power because of its ‘difference, fluidity and hybridity’ have failed to recognise the true pathways through which discourse exerts its power (2622). Discourse shapes the behaviour of every single node on the network, and does not emanate from any single origin, nor does it need to exist in any explicitly spatial or physical apparatus of hierarchy. Because each of the nodes of the internet is constructed to ‘speak English’ at their most basic level and thus speak to one another ‘in English’, the whole structure exhibits a power discourse without any central authority or architect.

Those rules come to form a discourse that permeates and orders the whole system, disrupting drastically any notion of a flat rhizome.

Fri, 08 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Untitled

Sat, 02 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

The part where I wait for Lizzie to wake up.

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 00:00:00 GMT

Music Is Changing

Fri, 04 Oct 2013 00:00:00 GMT

At its most basic level, music is simply a series of amplitudes and frequencies that make human beings move and vocalise in diverse and strange ways. However, like all other forms of human expression and entertainment, it is now a commodity. This commodity is now packaged to be sold, streamed, licensed and advertised to us. The people who distribute the music define our experience with this basic human commodity. These days there’s very little you can do to hear music without interacting with a third party of some kind, short of listening to a friend play guitar in your living room (as long as he’s lot playing from sheet music, royalties abound). The distributors are gatekeepers, and we’re going to explore how drastically their power is waning in the modern age.

The History of Our Ears

I’m Coming To You, Wirelessly

The Golden Age of Radio was dominated by those broadcast corporations: NBC, CBS, ABC. Almost as soon as radio was an established consumer technology, a few corporations had control of the airwaves. Not unlike today, the broadcasts alternated between musical performance and news announcements. These broadcasts were often live at first, and they were expensive to produce as they were re-performed for multiple time zones. Bands and studios had to be paid up for long periods of time. In a move that seems foreign to us today, the broadcasters didn’t allow advertising for a long time. Instead, the broadcasters were paid by their partnership with General Electric, AT&T, and the Radio Corporation of America. These companies attempted to set up a self-sufficient monopoly. Consumers wanted the content that the broadcasters supplied, but to get the content they needed a radio; it was perfect. It’s easiest to wrap one’s head around the crux of the issue with a simple question: Who controls what I can listen to? In this case, there’s a very obvious group of companies who have utter control over what people can hear through the only available means other than physically standing in the same room as the performers. For everybody but the musicians and the fans, these were the good old days. There was little to no way to circumvent the quagmire of royalty management, licensing and regulations that the radio execs had set up.

Sign The Damn Contract

Radio’s Golden age declined with the rise of prerecorded broadcasts. As recording media got more affordable, and importantly, of better quality, networks were allowed to broadcast performances and even entire shows that weren’t being performed live. Ignoring the claims the this was the end of quality radio content, there’s a brand new category of content to be commoditised: recordings. Being far more manageable than the ethereal live broadcast, and therefore easier to monetise, the recording gathered a flock of executives figuring out how to control the situation.

From this attention were born the record labels. The labels set up the paradigm of music distribution that we know today. Any band who were ‘making the big time’ simply had to have recordings, and these were made through an agent: the label. The caveat that sums up a lot of what is wrong with this model is spliced into the process here. The label owns the recording, not the musician. This is something that accept today, that it is only right that the organisation who enable musicians to have their works known to world own those works. I want to be clear: it’s wrong.

There’s a phrase, coined by Adolf Hitler in his book, Mein Kampf that was often used internally in the government of the Third Reich, and later used to condemn the Nazis in the OSS’s psychological profile of the Führer. The phrase, as used by Goebbels goes something like:

Tell a lie big enough and often enough, and nobody will challenge its veracity.

It is this reasoning by hegemony that landed the record label a firm position as gatekeeper between the consumer and the music they sought. Artists no longer had any real ownership of their own work. There was a series of for-profit organisations that handled artistic commodities, which by their nature need careful consideration. However, as for-profit organisations are want to do, they squeezed every last penny out of the commodity, at the expense of both the artist and the consumer.

It is this behaviour that leads to the ten rereleases of classic albums, to deluxe editions that come with a poster. The same attitudes are why an artist receives, on average, half a penny out of the seventy-nine pence you’re charged on the iTunes store for a song. The many middle-men can’t be blamed for doing what makes their shareholders happy, but it is the system that is to blame. The arrangement of all the moving parts ensure that everybody who loves music suffers.

A Love Note to the RIAA

The Recording Industry Association of America (est. 1952) is the pseudo-judicial trade organisation that constitutes the co-operative efforts of the big record labels to ensure that their methods of distributive control are not circumvented. The RIAA and the organisations worldwide that it inspired have made it their job to suppress the organic expression and enjoyment of music by forcing consumers and artists into the paradigm that maximises profits for the middle-men of the music industry. The RIAA influenced important legislative in the country that leads the world’s intellectual property law, directly against music lovers’ interests.

Pirates, Captain!

As happens in every technology, time rolled forward, and the form factor changed. The advent of the cassette tape failed to budge the majority of the audiophile population, but gained incredible traction with others because of its compact form factor. Suddenly, people were shoving their glove boxes full of cassette tapes and driving their music wherever they wanted. They were buying Sony Walkmans and running all over the place, taking their music with them. This did little to bother the music industry oligarchs, they still had control over the manufacture and distribution of the tapes and the system had to do little to adapt to the new medium.

However, the pure simplicity and accessibility of the medium had a side effect that the music industry wasn’t ready for. The mix tape was a home-recorded cassette tape that contained a compilation of the creator’s favourite tracks, or perhaps a mix made for a lover or a friend. They could be made by hooking up a tape recorder to an audio source, most often the radio or somebody else’s tape or record player. Both of those options ruffle the feathers of record execs. People are now able to create new instances of a recording, almost out of thin air. If your friend comes round a loves an album that you’ve got playing, you can just record them a tape with their favourite tracks from it.

This was seen as a disaster for the record labels and distributors because they were losing their monopolistic grasp on the means of distribution. All of a sudden, any regular Joe could make recordings of music without paying Polygram a penny. The liberating sensation of this process lead to a kind of grass-roots remixing culture that was incredibly ubiquitous. Everybody was suddenly a disc jockey to anyone who wanted to listen.

To me, making a tape is like writing a letter — there’s a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. Rob Gordon, High Fidelity (2000)

What were the record companies to do? Nobody was stealing anything, the originals were still there, people had bought those. People had bought the radios they recorded from, they paid their taxes that in turn paid for radio licensing fees. The industry had to come up with a new vocabulary to persecute this behaviour; Piracy was born. We will return to the issue of piracy later on.

Video Killed The Radio Star

Television grew up alongside radio. The first devices to transmit images over the air weren’t far behind those for audio, and yet the television revolution didn’t come until much later. Like with radio, corporations were very quick to monetise the broadcast of music. The same strictures were applied to what could be broadcast, and what had to be paid to various parties in order to do so. Music came to ply the spaces in between moving image. Before the talkies, every piece of video was accompanied simply by music. Up to today, television shows use music to great effect — augmenting the emotional weight of their stories and even news reports. Despite this essential symbiotic relationship, true pairing of music and television didn’t come until MTV.

Richard Lester, the director of The Beatles’ Can’t Buy Me Love is credited with inventing the music video. However the music video lacked any real traction, lacking any channel to be distributed to the masses. The popularisation of cable television allowed for the founding of MTV, a channel dedicated to the broadcast of music videos, supporting by commercials. The music video revolution seemed to be a modern reboot of the radio broadcast. With the addition of exciting and aggressively edited video, streams of music were being piped into everybody’s lives once more. A redoubled emphasis was placed on ‘the charts’ as MTV programming was structured around sequences of music videos, ranked by arbitrary importance (in fact a puppet show performed by music labels). The execs were shaken, but had quickly readjusted to the new landscape; they maintained control.

The Internet Is Singing

I won’t bore you with the story of the creation of the consumer-facing internet. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great story if you read into it, but it’s just not the topic of this article. Suffice it to say, the internet blew the doors off pretty much every industry imaginable. Any commerce based on the packaging and trading of data through a physical means was shaken to the core in a new world where data moves faster and cheaper over cable than courier service.

The internet’s architects were scientists, concerned solely with the speedy, cheap, and accessible communication of data that could be free to the world. That is terrifying prospect for the music industry, as more and more consumers got online. They were given a couple of years grace as the technology raced to catch up with the potential of the internet (something it is still doing today). The first consumer-facing computers lacked an interface for compact discs, or the storage capacity to hold substantial amounts of data. But soon, the first clashes between the creativity of the masses and the profiteering of the few began to take place on this new battleground. Individuals making their first web sites were taken to court over rudimental imitations of popular songs that played on their pages.

These first court cases were an attempt to hang the pirates from the city gates for all to see. The effort was commendable from the record labels, but they had no idea of the storm that they were about to experience. It is at this point in history, in my opinion, that the music industry truly lost its stranglehold on the technologies capable of distributing media, and the audiences consuming it. Since the crucial moment that online music became a viable option for the average consumer, the industry has been playing desperate catchup, slicing heads off the hydra in a blind panic. The crucial moment? MP3.

MP3 is simply a file format amongst many others. The format is highly compressed, but retains an impressive amount of audio fidelity. The small file size of MP3 converged with the cheap manufacture of larger and larger capacity storage devices, and gave birth to internet music. Before full adoption, the ecosystem needed a third technology: CD drives capable of ripping songs from discs. Now people were copying their music from their CD collection and setting it free. They could listen to it on their home computers, or they could copy it onto any one of a new raft of portable MP3 players.

Soon, the companies caught up. RealMedia was among the first to seize the portable audio file and turn it into a profitable commodity. Their proprietary audio codec ruled the space for at least a couple of years, a long time for a company to hold on in the tempestuous early years of the commercial internet. The RealPlayer was, for many, the sole portal to the world of online music commerce. The average consumer was unlikely to even conceive of an alternative, a true hegemony on the commercialised MP3.

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Verona > Milan > Paris