Week commencing Monday, 5 October 2026
Quantified Self
- This week: Stand 4/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 5/7. (67%). Morning walks: 2/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 53,097. 15.3 hours in meetings.
Life
- Warning: I had a mince pie. There are crackers in the shops. This is not a drill.
- Before that, on Monday, it was off to Cadogan Hall for Celia Imrie’s book tour promoting The Elegant Hustler: Adventures From a Life on the Move. The disingenuous might call it a holiday slideshow. Still, it was a relatively amusing collection of travel stories, which I assume she also covers in the book, particularly her journeys on the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic to and from New York.
- Sometimes it feels like a bit of a rush getting from home to Euston. On Tuesday, a train was just pulling into the platform at Raynes Park as I arrived, and the timing at Victoria was just as good, so I ended up at Euston station with about 40 minutes to kill before my train.
- I’ve seen more full-colour pictures of the inside of bowls than I ever thought I would or need to. Don’t expect further details.
- Unrelated, somebody who will remain nameless stuffed a pub cushion into a colleague’s bag while we were drinking, and it went undiscovered until the victim got home. At least one other colleague appeared seriously concerned he’d get the blame, but we all know who did it.
- My Meta Portal, which I’ve written about before, appears to be slowly dying as Meta withdraws its services. It’s now lost the ability to display photographs, which is pretty much all we used it for. It was a cracking little internet-connected photo album, and always a talking point when people visited. Apple is rumoured to be announcing a new home next week, possibly with similar capabilities. Perhaps convenient timing, though I’d rather not replace perfectly good hardware just because someone turned off the software.
- Related, I think the device was brilliant, but that doesn’t excuse the organisation’s failures. See Media below.
- James Cridland reckons advertising is shit now. We’re very good at targeting people with adverts, but we’ve perhaps forgotten to tell them why they should care.
Media
- Celebrity Traitors returned, and within a couple of episodes we’d had a Traitor who told everybody he was one, another who didn’t particularly want the job, and Ross Kemp taking the whole thing extremely seriously. I think this series will be fun.
- The Social Reckoning is a pretty compelling account of how Facebook’s algorithms helped spread extremism and the whistleblower who exposed what was happening. Having worked there, I found myself assessing how accurate the office scenes were. The biggest problem? Hardly anybody wore a lanyard. I also thought Mark Zuckerberg was portrayed as rather more robotic than he is in real life. Still, it’s a troubling reminder of what happens when engagement matters more than consequences.
- On Sunday, I watched the final of The Great Celebrity Pottery Throw Down, despite not having seen any of the previous episodes. The contestants had to make an entire trifle-serving set, which looked much harder than it sounds. It was all rather lovely, and Liza Tarbuck is a brilliant host. I may have to go back and watch the rest of the series.