Week commencing Monday, 9 March 2026
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 6/7 and Move 5/7. (81%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 56,584. 13.8 hours in meetings.
Life
- I wonder if I will live to see the proposed Heathrow Southern Rail. One day, I may step onto a Heathrow-bound train from Clapham Junction. The idea is back in the news again.
- Monday, we did the quiz as a threesome and fared much better than we thought we would. Tonight it was Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) that I pulled from the back of my brain.
- I am using a free trial of the food app Mob. Wednesday’s aubergine & chickpea zaalouk was delicious, but Thursday’s za’atar chicken, olive rice & whipped feta tasted like something from a restaurant. I am very impressed.
- A generous and very unexpected gift from PY’s boss on Thursday. I shall enjoy learning to cook something new.
- Friday afternoon, I listened to an AI-generated audio file about my 2025 diary, where the machine-generated hosts talked about whether they were human or not. I cannot describe how bizarre I find this. And fascinating.
- Also, these AI-generated nobodies criticise my claim that “Licence to Kill” is the greatest Bond theme. Really? Of course it is. Who do they think they are?
- Saturday started at the Design Museum for Wes Anderson: The Archives, the first retrospective devoted to his films, drawing on three decades of his personal archives. There is a display case containing a lot of notebooks!
- Relatedly, the candy-pink model of The Grand Budapest Hotel and the original puppets from Fantastic Mr Fox were on show. There were some fantastic graphics from The French Dispatch and more Asteroid City material, including the vending machines, which we had seen in a previous exhibition devoted to that film. The amount of detail in Anderson’s work that passes by in a moment on screen is quite something when you see how much goes into it.
- Also on Saturday, to the BFI IMAX to see a preview of Project Hail Mary, the new space-adventure film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and starring Ryan Gosling. The directors appear briefly on screen to introduce the film and explain that it was specifically optimised for IMAX, using the 1.43:1 aspect ratio to fill the full height of the screen. Utterly remarkable. It reminded me how extraordinary cinema can be when you see a film the way it was meant to be seen.
Media
- Finished Blue Lights, series 2. Now we can really catch up with the latest series.
- Discovered more detective stuff: Ellis on Channel 5. Watched the first two episodes of the current series as they were broadcast, then went back to the first season and watched one of those.
- I am very glad we have reopened the doors to Ted Lasso this week. A couple of series to catch up on.