Week commencing Monday, 16 February 2026
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 7/7 and Move 7/7. (100%). Morning walks: 3/4. Office days 1/5. Total steps: 81,336. 15.8 hours in meetings.
Life
- Oh, look, back to the morning walks. How long will I last? It really is better to be outdoors first thing.
- As a long-time fan of radio, I’ve wondered how we’ve got to a point, almost 30 years after DAB’s introduction, where FM is still a thing. The government is consulting again. Reddit is, of course, saying, ‘but what about in an emergency’, which is really a rather bogus argument, as James Cridland once pointed out.
- Relatedly, on that same Reddit thread, somebody talked about building a crystal radio: “There’s probably something to be said for having a communication medium that you can receive on bits of household scrap.” And that tells me that we all live in a bubble where our own experiences are deemed the norm.
- I finished a book. It was Jonathan Glancey’s Concorde, The Rise and Fall of the Supersonic Airliner. I started this in lockdown, so it’s been five years of reading. I faltered in the early stages because it was quite technical in its history of supersonic flight, but I found it easier once Concorde arrived. It ends with the author’s downbeat take on the bland planes in our skies today and a lament that, in the UK, the infrastructure that helped create Concorde is no more.
- Thursday, to St Martin-in-the-Fields for Space by Luxmuralis, a light and sound show. It begins outside the church before moving into the Crypt, and then up into the main body of the church for a fifteen-minute piece set to music that traces the creation story, the Big Bang, and ends with an image of Earth seen from space beneath a galaxy of stars. I enjoyed it. We sat through the light show twice.
- To L’s postponed Christmas party on Saturday night. Great to catch up with people we only see once a year, and the curling was on in the background — it turned out that quite a few of us had been following it. Team GB’s men had made it to the final, though it wasn’t to be gold for them.
- Best not to check about the crazy man at the bus stop on the way home. Quite relieved there was security on the bus.
- To the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for To Maury With Love, a one-off celebration of the composer Maury Yeston’s eightieth birthday. There was a full orchestra on stage, and the music, however unfamiliar, was lovely.
- Yeston wrote a Phantom musical based on the same source material that Lloyd Webber adapted. The interesting backstory is that Lloyd Webber’s version became a phenomenon in part because the novel was already in the public domain in Britain in 1986 but not yet in the United States, where the rights holder had originally approached Yeston to work on it. Yeston has called his Phantom “the greatest hit never to be produced on Broadway”. I guess you have to have an ego.
Media
- My YouTube week: I watched the final DownieLive episode of the train journey from Europe to Asia, which sent me off to watch the stunning luxury train journey in Vietnam and the impressive ways you can use a Swiss rail pass. The lot is going on my bucket list.
- More Olympics: the Women’s Freeski Big Air final from the Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic Winter Games at the Livigno Snow Park. The commentators’ enthusiasm helped make it a fantastic watch.
- Really enjoying Small Prophets, Mackenzie Crook’s BBC Two series about a man who turns to alchemy and homunculi in search of answers after his girlfriend disappears.