Day: 2 August 2026

Weeknotes #184: records, reading and relatives

A productive, cultured week of family, music, reading and creativity.

Week commencing Monday, 27 July 2026

Quantified Self

  • This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 5/7. (57%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 42,230. 15.5 hours in meetings.

Life

  • I had a co-working partner for the first two days of the week. While I did my day job, ChatGPT quietly got on with enhancing my blog review tool and created a WordPress plugin for me. Part of the result was this page featuring a series of posts about London.
  • Related, by Saturday, I’d turned some of the work from the review project into a blog post, which has a very niche audience of me.
  • The nurse didn’t like the fact that I tried to move the seat when I sat down to have my blood test. I wonder if that’s why it hurt more than usual?
  • Heard for the first time this week: Sam Fender and Olivia Dean’s Rein Me In has now spent 18 weeks at No. 1, equalling the all-time UK record set by Frankie Laine’s I Believe in 1953. As James Masterton points out in his Chart Watch commentary, it has taken 73 years for anything to match it. One more week and the record finally falls – all the more remarkable for a song that took eight months to reach No. 1 in the first place.
  • Related, on repeat for me this week: Little Miss Twain, by Shania Twain. It’s an older Shania looking back at growing up in Ontario, her mother’s ambitions for her, poverty and her route into music. A really good album.
  • Sunday brought a lovely afternoon with family. The dishes I served – turkey burgers and slow-cooked pulled pork – worked very well and had largely been cooked in advance, so there was no stress.
  • Jeremy King, on dining alone: “The problem is that you think that the restaurant is looking at you with pity, whereas in truth it is with admiration. It is so elegant and confident to eat alone, and they envy you?” – Without Reservation, highly recommended.
  • Related, by Sunday, 2026 was 58.63% complete, and finishing that book took me to 67% of the year’s reading challenge. It’s not often that I am ahead.

Media

  • Linear TV won on Tuesday night when, after we’d seen the end of The Great British Sewing Bee, the following programme about a murder in Shrewsbury piqued our interest and we stuck with it.
  • But streaming won my Friday night. I watched Heartstopper Forever, the final film in the Heartstopper story. I liked it, but I did think there wasn’t as much original content as in the earlier instalments, although it is always very nice when a story reaches a conclusion that everybody can buy into.
  • Then I thought I had an hour, so I would watch the first episode of the second series of the Australian drama The Newsreader. Having seen the first, I was intrigued to see where it would go. I ended up watching all six episodes into the early hours, the last couple from bed. I really enjoyed it, and I can see why the programme ended after two series, because its beautiful story arc comes to a close in the final episode.

Among The Trees, Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery’s “Among The Trees” exhibition, reopened after COVID closures, explores our relationship with trees and forests.

The brutalist concrete of London’s Southbank Centre, some of it originally set for the Festival of Britain in 1951, seems a place at odds – if not an odd place – to hold an exhibition that asks us to think about our relationship with trees and forests. But, that’s what the Hayward Gallery’s ‘Among The Trees’ is asking us to do.  It reopened yesterday after being closed at the start of the COVID crisis and is now extended until October, so ignore the out-of-date dates on promotional banners.  Visitor numbers are limited, and there’s a one-way system introduced so that social distancing norms can be observed. 

I’m no art critic, but I think I am with the ES Magazine’s “there’s much here to absorb, unsettle and even, occasionally, provoke wonder” over Time Out’s “the rest just sort of blurs into one, and by the end, you can’t see the art for the trees”.  Most reviewers seem to agree that Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s six-screen, horizontal video of a giant Finnish spruce is the most powerful piece, and it is visually very impressive.   Eva Jospin’s forest from cardboard, which is one of the first exhibits you come to, reminds us of both the beauty of the forest and the damage caused by humans.  Later, Steve McQueen’s Lynching Tree, depicting a tree that once served as a gallows for slaves, provides another reminder of our cruel and destructive nature.

In many ways, that grey concrete architecture – a material which itself replaced the need for wood in some construction projects and is the core of the Hayward Gallery – is the perfect backdrop to the trees that form the exhibition. Perhaps my only criticism is that there’s not enough of the contrast, the hard and the soft, exploited within.

The restrictions caused by timed entry and fewer people in the gallery space may not be great for the gallery’s finances, but they make the experience itself very nice indeed.  No real queues, except to get into the shop afterwards,  and no crowds around the big art pieces. And, given how much of the world is closed off to us right now, the reopening is a real treat. Although perhaps we should be spending these beautiful summer days in nature for real.

Bang Bang For Gately

Former Boyzone star Stephen Gately is set to show an evil streak as The Childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

Stephen Gately

It’s been a long time since I placed any comment on here about one of the Men of the Moment. I haven’t updated that section since Andrew Kinlochan, and with all the spam comments the section gets, I have thought about removing it. Still, I read Stephen Gately is to start in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (which I saw and didn’t really rate). According to the article in The Scotsman,

“This role is so unusual for me because everyone is used to me playing the cutey. It’s great to get my teeth into an evil role,” Gately said

Gately begins a four-month run on September 7, with former Neighbours star Jason Donovan playing Caractacus Potts. [source]

So it may be worth seeing just to see both Stephen and Jason in the same show!

A Weekend Airbourne

A weekend flying is ahead for me.

Weekend plans. I am going to a christening, which in itself does not seem an odd thing to do at the weekend. I am, however, flying at 0630 tomorrow morning to Amsterdam, then to Stavanger and then on to Kristiansand, Norway. I arrive mid-afternoon. The christening is on Sunday. Come Monday morning, I board the 0700 for Copenhagen and then on to London to get me back to make it into my office mid-morning. There are several people who think I am somehow unbalanced for attempting to do this and stay awake.