Family, food, and Paris adventures made for a lovely week.
Week commencing Monday, 24 March 2025
Eiffel Tower in Paris at night
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 2/7 and Move 6/7. (71%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 56907
Life
Monday, attended One Night in Bohemia, a Jonathan Larson tribute concert at the Phoenix Arts Club. An energised performance featuring a standout cast, raising funds for the National AIDS Trust.
Tuesday, saw My Neighbour Totoro at the Gillian Lynne Theatre. A visually imaginative and whimsical stage adaptation, great puppetry and creative direction.
Wednesday is a change of office day for me. I had a hectic commute, productive meetings, and evening plans cancelled. Dinner included an inventive fridge-clear-out pasta dish.
Thursday: I worked from home. It was a quiet day. Mum and Dad arrived. It was strange to communicate with people in the office on the day I would usually be there.
Related, a large vegetable chilli dinner was created.
Friday to Sunday, family trip to Paris. Travelled by Eurostar and stayed near the Arc de Triomphe. Enjoyed smooth connections, scenic views, and good food throughout.
Saturday, took in the sights on a hop-on hop-off bus tour, failed to wander along the Seine, and admired the Eiffel Tower at night during a river cruise.
Celebrated Mother’s Day with lunch on the Bustronome, a double-decker dining experience offering panoramic views of the city as we ate.
NHS visit, theatre, social outings, art, music, and musings.
Week commencing Monday, 17 March 2025
“Lying Down” by sculptor Sean Henry
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 7/7. (86%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 56,671
Life
Another nice experience with the NHS. The doctor is very pleasant, which makes the visit less worrisome.
Tuesday’s view on the past: a last-minute decision to see Alterations at The National Theatre, a new staging of a 1978 play. Set entirely in the upstairs alterations shop, the characters rush to complete an order, keeping them close – with all that brings – for the duration. The playwright, Michael Abbensetts, was the first Black British writer to have a series commissioned by the BBC. Ambitious Walker, who runs the shop, is complex, driven, and ultimately not likeable. I don’t know how close to the original it is, but it didn’t feel dated. Are the issues of identity and the complexities of Black British life the same today as they were almost 50 years ago?
Related, there were many chatty bodies in the audience and people taking photos throughout the single act. I’m not sure if the photographer’s pictures were deleted, but the front-of-house staff were trying.
Thursday was a night out to say goodbye to one of our Polish team. Excellent company.
Friday’s view to the future: to a performance space near Bethnal Green for Séayoncé: The Oral-cle’s Prophesissy. The Venezuelan food eaten in the early evening was delicious.
On Saturday, I saw Sean Henry’s Lying Down. I also watched, via the doorbell camera, the carpenter install a new bit of the door without the need for anybody to be home.
I Can’t Dance, Against All Odds, Invisible Touch, One More Night, Easy Lover, Sussudio and In The Air Tonight – a Sunday evening of Genesis and Phil Collins at The Crazy Coqs.
London walks, birthday surprises, and AI made a memorable week
Week commencing Monday, 10 March 2025
The World of Tim Burton
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 4/7. (62%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5 Total steps: 44,027
Life
I am often asked to produce my passport or my driving licence to use as identity, but I have not needed my birth certificate for a long time. Thankfully, I found it.
I asked Google Gemini to clean up a meeting transcript. It turned a forty-minute meeting into a ten-minute passage and then read it to me. That would have been a great time-saver if I hadn’t had to hear the entire meeting.
Related: nice though it was, I am glad I heard the original meeting because that allowed me to spot where Gemini had got it wrong. Unsurprisingly, people trust AI a little too much: Would a computer really go on the internet and lie? Well, yes.
Thursday, to the office and met a former colleague in a lovely pub near St Paul’s Cathedral. I walked streets I’d never ventured down before. There are some interesting places in London.
On Saturday, for PY’s birthday, we saw The World of Tim Burton at London’s Design Museum. It was very busy, but it was really interesting to see the evolution of the Tim Burton look. Lots of films were covered in a small space, so the exhibition was very much focused on how the look evolved rather than on any particular show. Of course, I loved The Nightmare Before Christmas parts.
Related, the themed afternoon tea, rooftop cocktail bar with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral, and Argentinian steak dinner were all surprises. My timings all worked out, even with a delay on the Circle Line.
Friends of Sunday Lunch, PY has planned individual beef Wellingtons. After the Argentinian, that was a lot of steak in one weekend.
We completed watching Prime Target. I’m glad we stuck with it. I don’t think many of the characters were nice enough to root for, but it was very enjoyable.
I want to stay informed but don’t want to give my days over to the endless vibration of not-news.
There’s always news. Arguably, everything is news all the time. Right now, it feels like the world is changing by the second because some people in the news are pretty loud, and everybody has an opinion. Should I check my phone for the ‘breaking news’ alert?
Back in 2013, in response to an online discussion, I opined that the generally accepted definition of news was changing from something an editor in a far-off city decided and placed in a newspaper, radio or television bulletin for us to consume to something each of us curates for ourselves using tools the internet has made readily available. I asked,
If I’ve opted to prioritise Formula 1 news or tech stories from Silicon Valley over today’s political posturing over the ECHR (which is front page on the newspaper next to me) then I’ve made a decision that’s no different from the editor that decided to pop that story in the paper. Isn’t Facebook’s timeline just news from my ‘community’ (which is what the news was for most people prior to rise of the mass national press in the late 1700s)? // source
I stand by what I wrote more than ten years ago. I still don’t know why the – relatively recent (in human terms) – phenomenon of an editor is more important than our community. But, in recent years, I have found myself avoiding news altogether: both the views from far-off editors and my curated view. This is where I may concede that social media, as a news service, might be to blame.
The other day, I read How Much Do I Really Need to Know? and it really resonated with me. The news is exhausting. Not just a bit soul-destroying but draining.
When I was younger, the news came on television after The Magic Roundabout at about 5:40 p.m. It lasted twenty minutes on BBC1. John Craven had told me about the world on Newsround an hour earlier, but that was for little kids. There was a lunchtime bulletin, and, of course, adults could watch the Nine O’Clock News. Somewhere in the mix were Look North West and Nationwide. A little later, a revamped Six O’Clock News was launched with snazzy computer graphics, where Nicholas Witchell would end up sitting on some lesbians protesting Section 28, but the new time didn’t give us more news; it was so that we could have Neighbours and then Wogan or EastEnders.
The news was contained; you knew when you’d get told what had happened today, and that’s how it was digested. You waited, and a well-spoken newsreader, who most of the time wasn’t sitting on a protestor, told you what had taken place during the day and provided a little analysis. There wasn’t a studio argument on every topic, and if you missed it, then you waited until the next scheduled bulletin or turned on the radio for the three-minute catch-up.
American radio has had all-news radio almost since the medium’s invention. According to Wikipedia, 1010 WINS is the oldest continuously operating all-news station in the United States, reporting to New York since 1965. In the UK, LBC, the country’s first legal, commercial radio station, was news-based from its opening words in 1973, but the news talk format included many phone-ins. Those early years didn’t quite count.
But then came CNN, and the concept of rolling news arrived worldwide. When I started work, I was often on shift through the night. I used CNN and Sky News as company while alone in the building. Overnight, Sky News had half an hour of locally produced content and, from half-past, thirty minutes of something from America, usually CBS News. It was on all night. So much of it was prerecorded that, come morning, I pretty much knew the overnight scripts off by heart. Not quite continually breaking stories.
Of course, we’d had all-night election coverage for a few years, but my first true appreciation of rolling news was during the first Gulf War. Radio 4 adopted an all-news format, and Radio 1 ran with the line, “When news breaks out, we break in”. It was exciting. On 31 August 1997, I was up very late trying to write copy for some web pages when the programme I had on in the background was interrupted to say that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been injured in a car crash in Paris. It was a late Saturday night, and gradually the channels moved to rolling news. That signalled it was an important story. I flicked between Sky News, CNN, BBC 1, ITV and whatever else was available on the analogue Sky satellite service. But I didn’t stay awake all night, and the news was more sombre in the morning.
Rolling news seemed groundbreaking, exciting, and futuristic. It did not yet seem vapid, vacuous, and bland. We hadn’t yet noticed that the airtime was filled with speculative nonsense. It more or less stayed this way for twenty years until the internet became a source of news, and every publication started to compete to be the first to tell you something. And, when mobile social media was added, everybody was a reporter—or at least had an opinion—and they shared it continually via a device that we all carry with us constantly.
Now, news is information and entertainment combined. Its immediacy is more important than accuracy. A hot take is pushed out simply for attention or to score political or culture-war points on any and every topic. News outlets need your attention and click-bait you into scrolling.
I want to stay informed but don’t want to give my days over to the endless vibration of not-news. What we all need is an informed summary presented calmly, preferably by somebody like Sue Lawley, while Nicholas Witchell subdues a studio invasion. Then we can get on with the rest of our day.
This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 4/7. (71%). Morning walks: 0/4 (days in the office don’t count). Office days 1/5. Total steps: 48,172
Life
I continued to feel unwell for much of the week. Wednesday, I tried to go to my Tai Chi class but my coughing fit on the train to Waterloo persuaded me it would be better to return home.
I did do Monday’s pub quiz. We were 4th. That might be the best placing for a long time.
Last week I mentioned that I managed to get a GP appointment on Monday. Not only did I do that, I got a walk-up x-ray appointment on the same day and there was nobody else waiting when I arrived. The NHS worked for me.
Oh, the excitement: the boiler was serviced. The engineer turned up at just the right moment between two meetings. And tested the carbon monoxide alarm, which, I think, is the first time I’ve ever heard the noise it makes.
I did go to the office on Thursday. Lots of meetings about the next phase of work. Nothing concrete yet, but progress is being made.
Thursday evening to The Island. A smaller boat than usual on the crossing to Ryde, which meant the 8:20pm sailing felt very busy.
Related, we turned-up early for the return voyage on Sunday, and made it on to the boat but it was full.
On Friday, I succeeded and presenting my ID to the solicitors and failed to get the carpenter to remove the box surrounding the electricity meter.
Saturday, to Newport to see Out on an Island: Pride In Self, Pride In Place, an exhibition to celebrate 20 years of LGBT History Month in the UK. Fascinating. We ended up buying the book (and the lunch at Quay Arts was good too)
Sunday, to Hedge End and Sunday lunch with T. The pub he found was excellent and the portions superb.
Media
The concluding episode of the new Bergerac was good. I didn’t see it all coming together until the end, which I think is the mark of a good detective series.
We’re sticking with Prime Target on Apple TV, even though Edward belief in the maths in spite of all that is going on around him, is annoying.
So, let’s think about something less important: if you use GitHub’s standard of minima for GitHub Pages, and you want to adjust some of the layout, then layout: default just may be what you’re looking for and not later versions which specify base.
Weblog was the answer to a question on this week’s Mastermind. I’m glad it wasn’t the only one I knew.
Thursday, after work, I decided to go home rather than go for drinks. I thought I was just feeling grumpy; turns out I was getting a three-day cold.
Related, my GP has appointments for next week on the app when I decided to talk to somebody about it.
It didn’t stop me going for lunch at Rovi on Saturday with family. Good food and very friendly staff. I was glad, however, when I got home for rest.
After the show, all the pubs around were busy, so we went to The American Bar and spent too much on two drinks each.
Media
In my two-day man-flu state, I powered through the last few episodes in Series 1 of The Blacklist. Thoroughly enjoying the nonsense.
I never watched John Nettles as Jim Bergerac in the 80s TV series. This week, we just started watching Damien Molony playing the same role in the revival on the streaming service that’s bizarrely called U. We’re hooked enough to finish it next week.
