Day: 25 June 2026

Heatwave lock-in

Heat, locks, pasta, wine confusion.

An AI-generated cartoon-style illustration split between a sweltering London street scene and a stuffy living room interior. Outside, a white locksmith's van is parked on a sunny suburban street beneath a railway bridge bearing an Underground roundel sign reading "Mind the Gap"; a melting ice lolly lies on the doorstep beside a locksmith's holdall and tools. Indoors, a sweaty man in a yellow "Too Hot To Function" t-shirt sits in an armchair fanning himself with a hand fan, holding an iced drink, and daydreaming of a tropical beach holiday. Around him are a electric fan, a Union Jack mug, a thermometer reading 33.7°C, suncream, a bowl of ice, and a copy of the Metro newspaper with the headline "Heatwave!". A Wimbledon poster hangs on the wall.
Locked in, sweating, and dreaming of anywhere but here, obviously and AI-generated image.

If you were to believe the “news” media, then you’d be cooler sipping cocktails under a parasol, dipping your toes in the sun’s molten lava, or whatever the sun is made of, rather than staying in suburban London.

Yesterday, I was laughing about some version of this with colleagues, opining reassuringly, to myself, maybe not them, that of course I’m brave enough to get up before the sun is blazing and take the two air-conditioned trains to a place near my office. From there, I can skip most of the outdoors by walking through the shopping centre, where the lack of natural light means it could be any time between January and the end of days; you can only know for sure by observing what people are actually wearing and checking for seasonal decorations. And then, of course, I can spend my day in an 80% empty office that’s 100% chilly, since the temperature will not have been set correctly.

And yet, here I am, in a 32°C room with a mildly cooling fan, and I am quite happy about it.

Last night, returning from the theatre, we had a bit of difficulty getting the keys in the lock, and this morning, as I was thinking about leaving for the office, I tried my key in the lock, and it was going nowhere.

I decided to stay home and call the insurance company again. I was informed that my last call-out to fix the lock was just over 30 days ago, but I was basically trapped in the house because I couldn’t lock up. A locksmith was dispatched.

The initial diagnosis involved a can of WD-40 and a bit of what might, professionally, be called wiggling. But the cylinder remained a bit stiff, and eventually a new lock and keys were retrieved from the van and installed. Twenty minutes, five new keys, and I was once again free to come and go as I needed.

So, in the evening, while PY was at a work summer party, I walked out into the balmy evening heat, locked the door, noticed the sun beneath the bridge at Raynes Park station, bought some pasta and re-entered my own house without issue.

No issues with the locks, but when the pasta was cooked, I reached for a little drizzle of olive oil and instead grabbed a nearby, part-drunk bottle of red wine and started pouring it onto my dinner. I managed to drain it, but it wasn’t quite the same.

Weeknotes #22

Week commencing Monday, 19 June 2023

View from Richmond Hill

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 3/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 3/7. (38%, shockingly poor). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 45,711

Life

  • Tuesday was my boss’s leaving drinks. Nice to get a group of us from the office together. It was the first time I’d been out with some of them in almost 10 months of working there.
  • My Tai Chi class was held outside on Wednesday. It’s very different practising the form in the open, as we are not used to uneven ground. Playgrounds are not as flat as you might expect. On the way, I saw one of the Red Bull minis. Somehow it seemed entirely appropriate for summer.
  • Thursday and Friday evenings, I went to the supermarket to pick up food for the evening meal. I feel like we have really broken the spell of the Saturday morning shop, which was formed during the lockdown years, but at least Friday night was the first night we were able to sit outside and enjoy the weather.
  • Saturday, we met Phil & Wei for a walk. The weather was sweltering, but Bushy Park was wonderful, and the deer knew how to cool off in the water.
  • Full marks to Ma Cuisine near Kew Gardens Underground Station for the delicious dinner: even on the hottest day of the year so far, I had French Onion Soup.
  • Sunday was equally hot, and we spent the day outside in the sunshine with Mark and Rob. We watched Elton’s closing set at Glastonbury. It was much better than I expected.

Media

Archive

To save the links getting lost in the future I checked the Internet Archive to see what they had saved for the posts linked here. If the original source above no longer works, these should.

Dear Digital Diary

Dear Diary is an exhibition at King’s College, Somerset House, until 7 July, which is a celebration of the art of diary keeping in all its forms.

Dear Diary Exhibition

In the archive, you’ll find that I posted an entry from 2002 entitled “Give Us Our Daily Blog“, which is a collection of daily blogs that I read. Most of the links are now dead, and I don’t recall that much about many of them. I do know that one thing that appealed to me in the early days of web publishing was the very personal nature of the content; it was the kind of window on the world I don’t think we had seen before.

Since then, we have become used to a never-ending stream of personal thoughts that pour onto the screen from blogs, social media and now YouTube videos. In the first days of the web, it was like opening the padlock on somebody’s secret diary and reading their innermost thoughts. Of course, we’re all used to it now, and we all move the first things that pop into our heads onto a screen via a keyboard.

Dear Diary is an exhibition at King’s College, Somerset House, until 7 July, which is a celebration of the art of diary keeping in all its forms. From the early almanacks, through the diaries of Pepys, Kenneth Williams, online journals and, now, YouTube, they are all covered in an interesting collection that forms this small exhibition. If you are in London before 7 July 2017, you should go and see it (and you get to see inside one of the wings of Somerset House that you would not otherwise have access to unless you were a student).

It was a thought-provoking exhibition and made me think about what element of these journals I’d like left behind. After all, a printed version of this site could hang around, but eventually, nobody will be paying for the hosting, and I imagine my hosting provider will hit the big delete button. I’ve already commented this week in the post about satellite dishes in New York, about my early online life, which has already disappeared. What version of history does the web give us if much is deleted?

How do you preserve an online diary for future generations?

#SOLS

Sermon Of the Last Sunday is my attempt to ensure that there is something published on my site every month in 2017. You can read about my attempts to force myself to write or review the full #sols collection through the handy site tag, sols. In an earlier post, I wrote about a visit to Japan, or maybe you’re more interested in digital advertising. #sols has it all.How do you preserve an online diary for further generations?

#SOLS

Sermon Of the Last Sunday is my attempt to ensure that there is something published on my site every month in 2017.  You can read about my attempts to force myself to write or review the full #sols collection through the handy site tag, sols. In an earlier post I wrote about a visit to Japan or maybe your more interested in digital advertising. #sols has it all.

Why Would You Be Interested?

I’ve had a good day and feel compelled to mention it.

It’s been quite a bizarre day as I have churned out a ton of documents at work. I particularly hate writing proposals to customers, work orders, and other documents related to my work, but today I have cleared a nice backlog, which makes me happy. There is, of course, no reason to tell you any of this except that I feel I am ending the week on a high.

In totally unrelated news, I am still trying to work out what to do with my new Gmail storage. However, I did read a fantastic idea over at Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Google should make an instant messaging product, but make it open so other people could connect to it. Finally, I would have to stop updating Trillian every time Yahoo changed a protocol or two.

Entertainment Trivia

To take your mind off the football I present some useless entertainment trivia.

After last night’s disappointment on the football field, regular readers will be pleased to hear that ITV is bringing back Popstars to make our lives better. This time, according to Digital Spy, the show will aim to create the UK’s next male-female musical duet. To make it even more depressing, the same source also reports that ITV are planning an ITV3 show – presumably so we can have Popstars on ITV1; Popstars Xtra on ITV2, and an additional behind-the-scenes-of-the-behind-the-scenes show on ITV3.

While I was reading the excellent Digital Spy, I had cause to update the Man of the Moment entry for Colin and Matt.