Day: 24 May 2026

Weeknotes #174: no stress travel

Heatwave sunshine, island travel, good food, and calm disruption recovery.

Week commencing Monday, 18 May 2026

A dark green warning sign reading "Beware of traffic" with a yellow hazard triangle, mounted on a post amid long grass and dandelions at the edge of a gravel path. The path stretches into the distance through open meadows flanked by mature trees under a clear blue summer sky at Osborne House, Isle of Wight.
Rush Hour at Osborne House

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 6/7. (%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 57,681. 14.7 hours in meetings.

Life

  • At the start of the week, I noticed the sun, which was a good indication of what was to come by the end of the week. On Monday, I was frustrated that I wasn’t up early enough to get out for a walk and enjoy it, but by the end of the week,I was enjoying the heatwave.
  • Andy Burnham, the well-regarded Mayor of Greater Manchester, was, this week, confirmed as the Labour Party’s candidate for the Makerfield by-election, due to be held next month. Why would you want to go from something a lot of people think you’re good at to something nobody will like you for, no matter how good you are?
  • The Office for National Statistics confirmed that net migration to the UK fell to 171,000 in the 12 months to the end of December 2025. Despite the figures, research published on the same day found that most of the public believed migration had risen, with only 16% aware that it had, in fact, fallen.
  • Friday, I headed to the station for what was supposed to be a straightforward journey to the Isle of Wight: train to Waterloo, onward to Portsmouth Harbour, then the ferry. The train out of Raynes Park was slow through the early stops but picked up speed after Earlsfield, which seemed good.
  • Related, London Waterloo was not good. A tree had come down on the line somewhere near Walton-on-Thames, and the knock-on effect was considerable. Everything was delayed, nothing was clear, and the app eventually informed us that our tickets could be used tomorrow instead. We made a quick decision: forget tonight, go tomorrow, do something else this evening. No stress.
  • Hence, frozen margaritas in the evening sun on the South Bank. Lovely.
  • So, Saturday to the Isle of Wight. The beach was busy. We managed to get a table at The Dell, where we had a few drinks and watched the world – including a couple of cruise ships – go by.
  • Sunday, to Osborne House. Although we have visited the house in the last five years, it was subject to COVID restrictions back then, and this time, the upstairs apartments were open, which we’d not been able to see before.
  • The weekend highlight was dinner at the Smoking Lobster. We started with a delicious tomato salad and the monkfish bao buns. My sea bass main was seared skin-side, with just the right amount of flake on the fish side; PY’s tuna was cooked to perfection, pink in the middle.

Media

  • The final episode of Race Across the World. It makes me want to travel and see more of the world. They did 51 days’ travelling, which is impressive: 12,000 miles from Palermo, Sicily, to Hatgal, by Lake Khövsgöl in Mongolia.

The Largest City On The Mediterranean Coast

I’ve been running a training course for a customer in Barcelona. Sometimes, despite the early starts and late night returns that play havoc with my social life, there are rewards.

My plane left Barcelona airport at 10.30pm last night. It was the best value flight to get me home. Given that the other taxi picked me up at 6.30am on Monday, then it’s been a very long two days, but it’s been fun.

I’ve been running a training course for a customer in Barcelona. Sometimes, despite the early starts and late-night returns that play havoc with my social life, there are rewards. Obviously, I had an early start yesterday, but managed to get some sleep en route so that I was sufficiently awake upon arrival to dive into the training.  The interesting part about this trip was that I was training a group of people to use our advertising management tools for, basically, non-advertising content. There are similarities: time-based content that rotates based on a series of programmable targeting factors; content that is managed independently of the main site, and a level of reporting required that generally does not come with content management systems. It was another fascinating example of how the kind of things that we come up with for the advertising industry can be put to all sorts of other uses.

I’ve visited Barcelona once before, also for work, but this visit I got a little time in the late afternoon yesterday to see a bit more of it. People are always hospitable, and this time was no exception. The hotel deal I had in Barcelona included free tapas, which was lovely, and it included some free Cava. I thought I’d get a glass. I got a bottle. I stayed at the Hotel Diagonal Barcelona, which I can recommend. Next door to the hotel is the 35-floor Agbar Tower. The tower was built at a cost of over 130 million euros to house Barcelona’s water company, Agbar. There are some great photos in the Agbar Tower Group on Flickr.

After the second day of training, my work was done. But given the very late flight departure time, I had an early evening to kill in Barcelona. I also had all my bags with me, but decided that sitting in a restaurant wasn’t something I wanted to do. So, I took one of those open-top bus tours. Usually, they are a great way of getting your bearings in a new city, even if you don’t get a great insight into any of the tourist attractions. They’re also a pretty expensive way of getting around. However, when you have a small suitcase, a laptop, and various bits, and you have 3 hours before heading to the airport, an open-top bus seems the easiest way to get yourself (and your luggage) around the place without worrying about it. It was about a 90-minute round trip. The conductor told me that it was hop-on, hop-off, so I could get off at anything that took my interest. I was more interested in knowing whether it really took 90 minutes. Anything more would have meant I risked missing all the connections to the airport.

So, I saw Barcelona even though I didn’t really experience it. The tour is quite good, showing you old and new. It was timely that we visited the stadium.  The Barcelona football stadium is the 3rd-largest stadium in the World, after those in São Paulo, Brazil, and Mexico City. Barcelona’s Camp Nou has a capacity of 110,000. The Champions League result was still in the air. How many times was I asked if I was an Arsenal supporter?

One day I shall head back and be a proper tourist!

Danny Baker Shuts Up His Tree House

Danny Baker is taking what the station described as “an extended summer holiday” after three years on his BBC London breakfast show, during which he will work on a film script for Channel Five.

So, I get back from my vacation and try to settle into my regular routine. Firstly, it’s disrupted by a strike by BBC journalists, although I was amused that somebody quipped you could hardly tell, and thus proving they’re over-staffed anyway.

I digress. What I came back to was the news that Danny Baker won a Sony Radio Award and promptly went on to quit his breakfast show:

The ebullient presenter is taking what the station described as “an extended summer holiday” after three years on the show, during which he will work on a film script for Channel Five.

He told listeners: “We will reform and come back in another shape one day. People thought we were crying wolf … we were just crying. We’ve been saying it for a while now. We’ve been doing it for three years. We’re packing up the tree house at the end of the month.”

[The Independent]

Now that’s going to mess up my morning routine something rotten – there’s nobody else on air, anything like Danny Baker. It’s not just the fact that he is the only speech-driven presenter that’s not news-based, it’s because he is bloody entertaining. Ahhh. I think a paragraph from another article in The Independent says it all,

Such confidence that radio requires unique skills will always make Sony award-winning breakfast presenters highly sought after. But they have to be carefully looked after when they arrive. Getting up in the middle of the night to sound fresh at the microphone can become gruelling for even the most dynamic broadcasters. BBC London’s breakfast ace, Danny Baker, proved it with his response to Sony Awards triumph. Named DJ of the year, beating O’Connell, Baker announced his departure from the airwaves within the day. He is going to write a film script for Five. Radio executives searching the market for proven breakfast talent are hoping it flops

[The Independent]

Palme d’Or

Michael Moore wins an award for a film most people can’t yet see.

Congratulations to Michael Moore for winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes for Fahrenheit 9/11. Previously I have enjoyed his books and films not just because, personally, I often find myself agreeing with his points but also because I believe it’s important for any democracy to have people who challenge the accepted wisdom. The fact that the film has not been distributed yet suggests says a great deal. I find it amusing/ironic/scary that we will happily criticise countries where government media censorship is quite clear but when censorship happens by the back door we don’t stand up to it. When big business censor media does this really make our democracies any better than when government’s take their scissors?

UPDATE 25 May:Just came across an interesting piece at BBC News today about documentary films: Documentaries turn up cinema heat. I am quite interested in seeing ‘Super Size Me’.

Apparently, there is also a film in the works,Michael Moore Hates America and the makers can’t get an interview with Mr Moore.

An identity crisis

A surprising take on identity cards over at The Telegraph

Latest Link: Telegraph An identity crisis

The issue of national identity cards is being raised again. What I am surprised about is this piece in The Telegraph – I thought they would be in favour of ID cards.

See also BBC NEWS: ID cards will ‘infringe civil liberties’. In all the hysteria about terrorism and ID cards, it is worth reminding ourselves that, “The terrorists who committed the atrocities in America on September 11 had legal papers”.

Still, I am unsure what to think about the whole ID card issue. What is telling is that, according to Charter 88, “Countries that already have identity cards have a written constitution and have those rights protected – we don’t”.

(Related: Entitlement Cards)