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.