April 26, 2026 – Hello Curns

Weeknotes #170: theatre and towpaths

Sunny travels, theatre laughs, small gambles, and gentle everyday reflections.

Week commencing Monday, 20 April 2026

View from the Chainbridge, Llangollen, looking along the River Dee. Three kayakers navigate white-water rapids amongst rocky outcrops in the foreground. To the right, the white multi-storey Chainbridge Hotel sits alongside the riverbank, its tiered balconies and glass-fronted dining room overlooking the water. A stone arched bridge crosses the river in the middle distance, backed by a tree-covered hillside under a clear blue sky. — Kayakers brave the Dee as diners watch on, Llangollen.

Quantified Self

This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 6/7. (86%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 37,451. 17.3 hours in meetings.

Life

Out of a job (kind of): Tim Cook is stepping down as CEO of Apple. “Here’s to the mild-mannered, responsible and rapacious ones”
Into a job: Sara Cox getting the slot she had been “waiting in the wings” for on Radio 2 Breakfast.
Quiz time. We took a gamble on the wipeout round, which didn’t pay off. That meant we were lower down the rankings than we should have been, but I think if you want to come in the top half of the standings, you absolutely have to take a bit of a risk on that round.
I’ve started photographing meals so that AI can work out my calories. I don’t think the numbers are accurate, but it’s much easier than logging everything.
Wednesday, to see Ancient Grease at The Vaults — an unofficial parody musical that mashes Grease with Ancient Greek mythology: sounds utterly ridiculous, and it is: Zeus and Hera doing the hand jive at Olympus Academy, the three Fates dressed in gold playing chaos merchants, and an evening’s worth of toga-related innuendo. No John Travolta, but some strong Australian accents!
I felt bad for the organisers of an internal work event this week; it would have been too much to rearrange due to transport strikes in London, so many seats remained empty.
Friday, I managed to secure an upgrade through the SeatFrog auction app, so I travelled to Wolverhampton with Avanti in Standard Premier. Gone are the days when you get a proper upgrade to first class for not a lot of money.
Saturday, from Shrewsbury to the Chainbridge Hotel in Llangollen. It was a beautiful sunny day for most of the journey, which is relatively straightforward until the very last stretch, where the road effectively becomes the canal towpath. I was entirely convinced we had taken a wrong turn until a small car park appeared at the end of it.

Media

Trying to stay up to date with Race Across the World. Don’t tell me.
A couple more episodes of series 1 of The Newsreader. I am enjoying it because I think they’ve captured the era very well.

Can You Say Verulamium?

It is quite hard to say Verulamium – the Roman Theatre that I visited last Saturday.

Last Saturday, PY and I went to St Albans to meet some friends. While we were there we went to the Roman theatre of Verulamium (which, I am reliably told was found in 1847).

Built in about 140AD it is the only example of its kind in Britain, being a theatre with a stage rather than an Amphitheatre. Initially, the arena would have been used for anything from religious processions and dancing, to wrestling, armed combat and wild beast shows. From about 180AD the stage came into greater use and the auditorium extended. By about 300AD, after some redevelopment work, the Theatre could seat 2000 spectators. [Source]

The sign amused me – I got to imagining lots of chariots rushing past with urgent messages from the Emperor at some distant end of the road until I was reminded it was a thoroughly modern sign aimed at us!

Web Mail

A quick scan of my webmail services surprised me.

I don’t use branded webmail systems a great deal. All my mail is handled by my hosting provider, which provides a thoroughly adequate web-based mail service for times when I am not using an email client. Still, with all the web ramblings about Google’s Gmail service, I thought I would review some of my web-based mail services and see what was in them and realised that most of the accounts have long since been removed or disabled due to lack of use.

To my mind, the premier web-based service is Fastmail, which is a very well thought-out and usable mail service. If you’re looking for a new mail provider, you should seriously consider them, and there’s no advertising!

The only other service active is Yahoo Mail– simply because I have had that for ages, and it used to be my way of reading normal mail accounts in a browser. Some of my mailing service lists still go here. Today I logged on and reviewed some of the settings and cleared out some of the junk, and I realised it is an excellent mail service. I really like their new feature AddressGuard, which allows for disposable email addresses that can be removed if they receive too much spam.

So, will I sign up for a Gmail account to compare it? You bet I will.