Nostalgia, volunteering, food experiments, and sociable moments shape the week.
Week commencing Monday, 27 April 2026
World-class table tennis lands at Wembley
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 4/7. (62%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 46,862. 17 hours in meetings.
Life
I tried batch cooking on Monday. Unfortunately, my timings all went wonky. We ended up eating a pasta dish while some aubergine slices were cooking in the oven, and I spent most of the evening doing Tuesday’s dinner.
It’s a nogalia-fest this week. In Shrewsbury last weekend, I found a plastic bag marked ‘radio autograph cards’ containing about 100 DJ promotional cards from various radio stations in the 1980s, many from broadcasters I would never have heard. I thought they were an interesting time capsule, so I wrote about them.
Then there’s the Television and Radio 1983 book: a snapshot of an era when the UK had just launched a fourth television channel and breakfast telly was heralded as the next exciting development.
Relatedly, the book mentions a television relay near Tintagel in Cornwall that was built using wind, solar, and batteries as an experiment, which struck me as a green agenda way ahead of its time.
Thursday, I avoided one work-related drink to attend another: the usual mixture of putting the world to rights and losing track of how many pints of lager had gone by.
It’s 100 years since a table tennis federation was formed. On Saturday, it was my first volunteer shift at ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals, London 2026 at Wembley. I was initially positioned far in the corner, near the practice courts, with a lady who knew all about the Chinese team, the world leaders in the sport, and was very excited whenever she saw one of their players. In fact, most of the crowd around me was.
Dinner with friends on Saturday night meant I was happy for the slightly later start for volunteers on Sunday. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don’t know any of the big stars who are getting all the fan attention, so if they came to sit where I was on the door, everybody got the same “hello”.
I recently found more history in my parents’ loft: the 1983 edition of the IBA’s Television and Radio book.
The IBA’s 1983 guide to independent broadcasting, preserved.
Following yesterday’s nostalgia fest, I recently found more history in my parents’ loft: the 1983 edition of the IBA’s Television and Radio book. They used to publish one of these every year, providing an insight into the world of independent, not commercial, television and radio. Reading it now, it feels like a time capsule from a different era of broadcasting that seems familiar but, somehow, a bit off.
What’s most interesting about this edition is that it covers the birth of Channel Four (which came on air the month before publication, in November 1982) and the launch of TV-am, which followed in February 1983. It tells us that the senior presenting team at TV-am will be “informal and conversational”, while Channel Four is required to be complementary to ITV to avoid competing for ratings. The book is full of material about ITV shows. It was the era of ‘Tales of the Unexpected’, ‘The Gentle Touch’, and ‘The Jewel in the Crown’, ‘World in Action’ and ‘News at Ten’. I think only the last of those remains on screen regularly.
The word ‘soaps’ is not used; they are referred to as drama serials, which feels out of step with how television executives would discuss them today. The book says that “a tremendous amount of skill and thought needs to be put into a drama serial to make it so abidingly popular’, and we still regularly have Crossroads and Crown Court on the telly, while the word Farm remains firmly attached to Emmerdale.
What’s clear is that this is from an era when television had to be a bit of everything: plays, drama, serials, science, religion, children, light entertainment, and the arts. Yet, in the book’s introduction, we learn that the pace of technology development is quickening and the arrival of direct broadcast satellite services “now seems a likelihood for the middle of the decade” – and what a change to the broadcasting landscape that would bring. We’d end up with channels dedicated to every conceivable genre of programming.
The Original Broadcast Postcode Lottery
There are 47 local radio stations listed in the book; many were yet to launch, and the Humberside, Maidstone, and Reigate services had only just been advertised, with no contractors selected. One struck me as odd: Northside Sound was listed for Londonderry, and, given I consumed everything I could about the world of local radio at the time, I was surprised that I couldn’t recall it. The forums at Digital Spy suggest that “Northside Sound failed to raise sufficient capital for its launch,” and that the frequencies were served by neighbouring Downtown Radio. Back in 1983, I would have proudly said I could name every independent local radio station. Perhaps that’s not true.
The book is full of behind-the-scenes technical information; I think the technical standards were paramount and, possibly, more important than the content to the public service mindset. I read that a television relay near Tintagel in Cornwall was built using wind, solar, and batteries as an experiment, which strikes me as a green agenda way ahead of its time. The text service that used to accompany commercial television, Oracle, has a couple of pages devoted to it. In 1983, this was very much cutting-edge technology.
What strikes me most, however, is not the memory of programmes or services provided, but the tone of the book. It’s very much from the era when broadcasting was a public service. All the radio and television companies were contractors to the IBA, which was ultimately responsible for regulation and transmission and answerable to Parliament for everything broadcast. The market was not necessarily the primary driver for these services. The world has moved on; we now prize competition and choice over fewer, broader services. We have more ways to receive content than ever. At over forty years old, this book is a wonderful snapshot of a time when television and radio were run for the public good.
When I was in Shrewsbury last weekend, at the house I grew up in, I ventured into the loft to rummage through some tea chests still stored there. They’re proper old-fashioned tea chests and were used to pack our belongings when we moved in the early 1980s. They make great storage boxes in the loft, and still seem solid and robust to this day.
As I rummaged, I found a plastic bag all sealed with sellotape marked ‘radio autograph cards’. I have no recollection of this bag, so I opened it and uncovered almost 100 DJ cards; the kind of thing that radio stations would send out when somebody wrote in asking for a DJ’s autograph. To this day, there’s a box behind where I work containing radio cards from stations I used to listen to regularly. But this set was different.
What struck me about this group was that there are 14 radio stations represented in the collection, from Northsound Radio at the top of Scotland, via Pennine Radio, Radio Trent, Chiltern (Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire), County Sound, Radio Mercury around London, to Invicta Sound on the south coast. None of those stations could be received where I lived. There are cards from Red Rose, Signal and Beacon, which I could hear but didn’t listen to that often, but the vast majority were of people I never listened to on stations I never heard. And yet, the stations would still send these out to any radio fanatic who wrote a letter. As a kid, I thought it was amazing to get all the cards from across the country.
I should note it’s not 100 unique cards; there is some duplication, but not a lot. They’re all more-or-less A6-sized, although I can’t work out why 2CRs are taller than all the others, and Pennine Radio’s smaller. Although Pennnie’s are co-branded ‘Yorkshire Radio Network‘, which dates them back to sometime between 1987 and 1989, if this rather sparse Wikipedia page is to be believed. They are also the only ones where you can peel off the back and stick Tim Finlay, or any other presenter of choice, to something.
I suspect they are all from around that time. It’s fun to look back at them now and see what they tell us about the world in the 80s.
The majority are black and white, but Invicta, Red Rose and some Signal cards are in colour, so cost is a major concern when you’re printing thousands of these things to hand out from reception or on roadshow days. Some are stiffer card or better paper stock, some have a bit of a glossy feel, while Mercia’s Jeff Harris is in full colour, but on a folded bit of paper with an ad for Prontaprint branches around the Coventry area on the front. Signal stuck an ad for Pennie Kitchen Studios (“North Staffs Biggest & Best Kitchen Specialists”) on the back of some of them, whereas Red Rose have a 7Up sponsor logo and a “photograph by Images of Preston” on theirs, which might explain how they can invest in full-colour cards.
Many are blank on the back; I guess one-sided printing was cheaper. The Chiltern group cards have a mini biography on the reverse, and it’s how I know Martin Collins’ hobbies include water skiing and holidays, and that Paul McKenna was a 23-year-old bachelor when the photo was taken, with no mention of hypnotism. Radio Mercury uses the reverse to promote a list of available station souvenirs, from ballpoint pens and headphone bugs to “tee shirts” and “sweat shirts”, but sadly no prices, which would be fascinating to read today. The reverse of all the Invicta cards is laid out like a proper postcard with space for a message and an address, and a square in the top right for the stamp. I wonder if, when rebelling on the pirate ships, Roger Day thought he might end up as a photograph on the front of a postcard? I wonder who got posted around Kent more, Roger, or Julie Jambuster (was that her real name)?
Roger Day wears a tie in that photo, as do a good number of the presenters, which I think shows that the 1980s still thought professionalism meant a tie. Signal Radio’s Alex Roland is sporting the uniform of most 80s radio presenters, the silk-effect bomber jacket with his name embroidered on the front. Red Rose’s Keith Macklin is in a suit, but perched on the side of a stand at what I assume is some local football stadium. Anton Andrews, of the same station, is photographed on top of a tank, his colleague Sally Moon, whistfully looking back, on a chair, while Derek Wbster is in front of a road sign, holding a map. I wonder what that had to do with his presentation of Just The Tonic? Red Rose’s John Gillmore is the only one to have a comedy photograph, with the front of the card showing his back and his beaming face printed on the reverse, “Yes, it’s Gilly!”
Of course, a good few people are pictured in radio studios. 2CR’s Sally Winter is in front of the control desk answering the phone, while Northsound’s Bobby Hain is also in front of a desk but not pretending to be on the telephone. His very thin tie shouts 1980s. Chiltern’s Tom Hardy, “lives in Luton and is Head of Music,” and his “family man” colleague, Bill Young, are both pictured with a pair of industry-standard Beyerdynamic headphones around their necks. Any self-respecting radio presenter of the period would have at least one headshot with those headphones in their collection.
At the time, all the names would have been known locally, but I would have known very few of them. Some, like Mercury’s Ed Stewart and the aforementioned Roger Day, were big stars from other stations earlier in their careers. Others, like Chiltern’s Collins and McKenna, would go on to have national platforms, and more are very well-known names in the radio industry. Only one is not of a real person. County Sound’s Brewster Mouse looks delightful in the photo on the card, but in a picture somebody posted to Facebook, it’s human-sized and dwarfs small children, and I can’t see how that wasn’t terrifying.
While I called this post “Autograph Cards,” very few are autographed, though a small number are. There’s a “best wishes” and a “love”, and most look genuinely signed. County Sound’s Mark Walker either had a pen that matched the print’s blue colour, or it was part of the card.
But, I think, the only card that truly meets expectations, a solid black and white photograph, decent paper stock, no sponsor branding and taken in front of the pile of station “carts” and, most importantly, is personalised with an “all the best Jonathan” is Northsound’s Mike Holloway. I’m sorry I lived too far south to ever hear you across Aberdeen, Mike, but thanks for taking the time to make my day. Because I know for sure, whatever these cards look like now, back when I opened the envelope to see them, they were, to me, better than getting that missing Panini soccer sticker.
Today’s question is, “Are they worth preserving?” They are a snapshot of a bygone era. There must have been thousands of these in circulation. What should I do with them?
Quiz time. We took a gamble on the wipeout round, which didn’t pay off. That meant we were lower down the rankings than we should have been, but I think if you want to come in the top half of the standings, you absolutely have to take a bit of a risk on that round.
I’ve started photographing meals so that AI can work out my calories. I don’t think the numbers are accurate, but it’s much easier than logging everything.
Wednesday, to see Ancient Grease at The Vaults — an unofficial parody musical that mashes Grease with Ancient Greek mythology: sounds utterly ridiculous, and it is: Zeus and Hera doing the hand jive at Olympus Academy, the three Fates dressed in gold playing chaos merchants, and an evening’s worth of toga-related innuendo. No John Travolta, but some strong Australian accents!
I felt bad for the organisers of an internal work event this week; it would have been too much to rearrange due to transport strikes in London, so many seats remained empty.
Friday, I managed to secure an upgrade through the SeatFrog auction app, so I travelled to Wolverhampton with Avanti in Standard Premier. Gone are the days when you get a proper upgrade to first class for not a lot of money.
Saturday, from Shrewsbury to the Chainbridge Hotel in Llangollen. It was a beautiful sunny day for most of the journey, which is relatively straightforward until the very last stretch, where the road effectively becomes the canal towpath. I was entirely convinced we had taken a wrong turn until a small car park appeared at the end of it.
Media
Trying to stay up to date with Race Across the World. Don’t tell me.
A couple more episodes of series 1 of The Newsreader. I am enjoying it because I think they’ve captured the era very well.
Related, although anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes are recognised in law, hate crimes based on race and/or religion can carry higher maximum penalties because they are classified as aggravated offences. When a crime is considered an ‘aggravated offence’, the victim has longer to access justice, and the perpetrator will receive a stronger sentence.
Of all the things to happen in the modern world (2), it was inevitable that somebody would make a convincing AI radio presenter. I think a Top 40 countdown was an obvious place to start; the ‘chat’ is already formulaic. “Nexus James” is your AI host. I wonder how many options were presented before a human picked that one?
Related, within the first three songs I heard, I could already hear repeated production elements on Olivia Dean’s two songs in the top five. They need to work on that. Regardless, it has more depth than any Top 40 playlist on a music service.
Since our regular after-work place closed, we have a new go-to pub that we visited on Thursday. It’s a proper pub, it feels better, and it is less expensive. It has a range of areas where people can book a table. The covered bit at the back is only marginally open to the elements, but it seems to be the first part of the pub that closes at 11 p.m. Which is great news, because previously we have been in the pub when they have not called last orders until midnight or even 1 a.m., and both of those mean we all miss our transport home.
A beautiful day on Saturday saw a trip to Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, and then a walk to Yarmouth.
Busy travel, volunteering, and finally fixing a long-standing website issue.
Week commencing Monday, 6 April, 2026
Rain or Shine, It’s Roast Dinner Time
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 5/7 and Move 5/7. (81%). Morning walks: 0/3. Office days: 1/4. Total steps: 55,303. 10 hours in meetings.
Life
The engineering works meant that trains returning from Shrewsbury were very busy. I am glad that I got to Moor Street early, as that enabled me to secure a seat. I would not have been able to sit in the aisle all the way to London, as some people did.
Tuesday, an after-work dash to the Co-op for a pizza for dinner because I had my first volunteer training session for the ITTF World Team Table Tennis Championships Finals, which come to London later this month.
Then, on Saturday, to the Copper Box Arena in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park for more volunteer training. We got a tour of the venue with some of the championship organisers; it was impressive how much detail they had already worked through—where walls would go up, how people would move around—and it was fascinating to hear.
Almost five years ago, in my second-ever weeknote, I wrote that I had a website that broke my rules about sustainable URL schemas. Somewhere around 2009, I’d upgraded musak.org and, in the process, broken most of the links within the site. I fixed this 17-year-old task on Friday, with guidance from ChatGPT. The task was simply waiting for the right moment to be resolved, and that moment needed AI to balance effort and output.
Related, this dead link, http://www.musak.org/entries/2003/07/another_russian_birthday.shtml, will now resolve to the right place.
My dentist now recommends Netflix shows as part of the service. Will I ever watch Younger or Jane the Virgin?
Sunday, for a “trio of meats” lunch: gammon, turkey and beef, Yorkshire pudding with stuffing. Delicious.
Media
The new Race Across the World has started, but it’s too early to have picked my winners.
I watched the first episode of The Newsreader, a critically acclaimed Australian drama set in a commercial television newsroom. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, but the major news event of the first episode is the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in January 1986. Using that real event as its backdrop made the tension feel believable.
On Channel 5, Jane McDonald went to Nashville across two evenings, where she dives into the world of country music—without the cruise ship, for once. Part of the premise is that she’s in a Nashville studio recording tracks for her new album, Living the Dream, claiming she’s always been a bit country because her songs tell stories. It’s arguably one long advert for the album, but fun.
Easter travels, good food, nostalgia, and small wins along the way.
Week commencing Monday, 30th March 2026
Moor Street: essential stop on Easter weekend journey
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 5/7; Exercise 3/7 and Move 3/7. (52%). Morning walks: 0/3. Office days: 1/4. Total steps: 39,476. 13.4 hours in meetings.
Life
Middling at the pub quiz this month. Let’s move on.
Recording a message for the West Shropshire Talking Newspaper took me a lot longer than I anticipated because every room echoed too much.
After-work beers were nice on Thursday, but it was also nice that they finished early and I could get home to pack.
If you don’t ask, and because I did, they let me on an earlier train than the one I’d booked on Good Friday. Engineering works meant I had to go via Birmingham Moor Street station.
Friday, Saturday, and Sunday lunches were all in restaurants around Shrewsbury. All different and all very good.
I found things in the loft that I had not looked at for more than thirty years. Fascinating.
On Easter Sunday, an egg hunt around the garden, and then the Easter trail around Attingham Park.
Busy weekend of theatre, music, and cultural outings across London
Week commencing Monday, 23rd March 2026
Four costumed skaters at Starlight Express, Wembley.
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 5/7. (71%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 51,141. 16 hours in meetings.
Life
Third time to the Starlight Auditorium: the biggest change from the previous visits was the audience. With the show closing on 3 May, many fans are clearly doing what we did and coming back for one more go. This was the busiest and most enthusiastic crowd we have been part of there.
The cassette digitisation project continues. The little tape machine records directly onto a USB drive, which is convenient. The alternative, recording directly to the computer, requires a special cable, which arrived but does not work with my cassette player.
Friday, I saw an advertisement for Duran Duran at BST Hyde Park, headlining the Great Oak Stage on 5 July with the Scissor Sisters as special guests. Another thing booked.
Saturday, brunch at OXBO Bankside offered a lot of food choices. Later, the Backstage restaurant at the Old Vic, the theatre’s new annex that opened a few months ago, had fewer choices. Both were delicious.
Then to Oh, Mary!, Cole Escola’s Tony Award-winning dark comedy, which reimagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a miserable, alcohol-dependent would-be cabaret star in the weeks before her husband’s assassination. I know it gets strong reviews, but I did not really take to it. The overall conceit is interesting, but the execution is the broadest, most unrelenting kind of farce — not a trace of subtlety anywhere.
Sunday, BFI Flare: Madfabulous follows the true story of the flamboyant and rebellious life of Henry Paget, the 5th Marquess of Anglesey, as he squanders his massive fortune on lavish theatrical productions and gender-defying fashion. Mad and fabulous.
Then a visit to the Handel Hendrix House. The museum brings together the former homes of George Frideric Handel, who lived at 25 Brook Street from 1723 until his death in 1759, and Jimi Hendrix, who occupied a flat next door in 1968 and 1969. Two buildings and about two centuries of musical history are separated by a wall (which has been knocked through to create the museum).
The weekend ended with a visit to The Crazy Coqs for The Bells and the Barricades, an evening of songs from Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and other French-themed musicals.
Media
Obviously more Game Changers Radio this week. Kyle filed a claim in the Australian Federal Court, arguing that his termination is invalid. And the episodes kept coming.
We started watching Loot on Apple TV+, the Maya Rudolph comedy about a newly divorced billionaire who finds herself running the charitable foundation she had apparently forgotten she founded. Early days, but it seems decent enough.
A week of culture, nostalgia, discoveries, and quietly satisfying moments.
Week commencing Monday, 16 March 2026
HP Sauce bottles from the 1910s to 1990, Museum of Brands.
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 6/7; Exercise 4/7 and Move 5/7 (71%). Morning walks: 0/4. Office days: 1/5. Total steps: 48,912. 21.5 hours in meetings.
Life
Diamond Geezer’s been to Shrewsbury, and likes it. Man of taste. I learned that there was supposed to be a roof garden and restaurant on top of the market hall.
I watched one of those videos where someone has used AI to place famous people next to their younger selves. There is a great one for Duran Duran, except they used the wrong Roger Taylor. Oops.
Monday, finally, to the barricades! We saw Les Misérables. I’m glad I finally went. It’s a great show, and I can’t quite account for why it took me this long, nor why I got a bit emotional at the end. I bet anybody reading this has seen it.
Thursday afternoon’s work outing was to the Museum of Brands. I have always meant to go and never quite got around to it — which made it slightly amusing that PY and I already have tickets booked for next Sunday.
What struck me most was how many brands simply endured: HP Sauce and Daddies Sauce, both still on shelves today; Ty-Phoo Tea, still familiar; Coleman’s Mustard, Cadbury’s, etc., etc.
Friday evening, I updated my blog-checking software, built using AI. Should I find it reassuring that it continues to find spelling errors in past weeknotes?
For the second Saturday in a row, we were at the Design Museum — this time for Blitz: the club that shaped the 80s, the exhibition about Blitz, the Covent Garden club in a wine bar that ran on Tuesday nights between 1979 and 1980 and, in doing so, generated the entire New Romantic movement. Perhaps a bit too fashion-focused for my liking.
At one point, a large screen showed footage of Spandau Ballet performing at the club — playing To Cut a Long Story Short, which was the first record I ever bought myself.
Sunday’s second visit of the week to the Museum of Brands taught me that the phrase “keen as mustard” actually predates the brand; it was the popularity of Keen’s Mustard in the 18th and 19th centuries that is thought to have cemented the idiom in everyday English usage, rather than the other way around.
I found myself puzzling over a box of “toilet pins” until I looked it up: they are dressmaking pins used for sewing or securing garments during fitting, and the word “toilet” here is from the French toilette, meaning personal grooming or dressing, with no connection to the room. Perfectly ordinary, once you know.
Sunday evening to the BFI on the South Bank, and a screening as part of BFI Flare, the LGBTQ+ film festival. The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel, a documentary portrait of Tony Powell, a former Norwich City defender and 1979 Player of the Year, who effectively vanished after his playing career ended. It turns out he moved to West Hollywood rather than face the consequences of coming out as gay at the height of his career. The documentary is more moving than I think the filmmakers originally set out to make. Recommended.
Media
Episodes of the podcast, Game Changers Radio, keep coming as ARN, the radio network, officially terminated Kyle’s contract and cancelled the show, tearing up the record-breaking 10-year deal (valued at a reported $100 million each) that both hosts had signed in late 2023 to run through 2034. So far away. So gripping.
Friday evening was spent with old episodes of Yes, Prime Minister, and I still laughed.
The final two episodes of Heated Rivalry. Now I understand all the references to The Cottage. The series is positive in a way that sets it apart from many gay love stories, which is genuinely refreshing. It does teeter on being too nice at times. The ending, predictably, is set up for a second series.
Quiz triumph, inventive cooking, Anderson artistry, and astonishing IMAX cinema moments.
Week commencing Monday, 9 March 2026
Houston, We Have a Ryan Gosling
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.
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.
My new monitor arrived. It’s large and curved. It replaces two separate monitors, which means that, technically, I have less screen space than before. It’s taking some getting used to.
The best bit was surprising PY with a new monitor set up in the other room.
My Uber arrived, and at nearly two in the morning I was home after a 20-minute journey that cost £29.93. Cheaper than I remembered from last time, though the hour made it a fairly expensive way to end a Thursday.
Friday, the aubergine chilli miso, paired with special fried rice, was excellent — the depth of the miso with the softness of the aubergine made for a really good combination of flavour and texture.
Saturday on The Island, BBC Two had given over the evening to One-Hit Wonders at the BBC. Three volumes, which seem like a lot when written down, but there are a lot of one-hit wonders.
Also on The Island, the sky was overcast, and the Solent had all but disappeared into a thick grey haze; Portsmouth, usually visible, had vanished.
Media
Go watch A Friend of Dorothy, an Oscar-nominated short film starring Miriam Margolyes and Stephen Fry. Twenty minutes of loveliness.
This week, another episode of Heated Rivalry. I found this one a little odd: everything that happened at the end of the last episode seemed to have been set aside entirely.
We picked up Blue Lights again. We do tend to spread series out rather than rushing through them. It is a bit like how television used to be, when you had no choice.
I only heard the Kyle and Jackie O Show briefly when I was in Australia a decade ago. As Australia’s highest-rated FM breakfast show implodes, I am hooked to Game Changers Radio.
Daffodils, culture, nostalgia, and small victories over self-doubt
Week commencing Monday, 23 February 2026
Orchids glowing after dark at Kew Gardens.
Quantified Self
This week: Stand 7/7; Exercise 6/7 and Move 7/7. (95%). Morning walks: 3/4. Office days 1/5. Total steps: 59,055. 20 hours in meetings.
Life
Good sign: there were daffodils on my Monday-morning walk. Does that make it spring yet?
Bad sign: the third tax-bill revision. Every time I provide more information to claim they are overcharging me, it goes up. I’d be daft to try to fight it again.
New audiobook: Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years by David Litt. So far, loving it.
Pub on Wednesday to meet a former colleague. The place brought back memories. I used to go there in a previous job when colleagues and I did not want to be in either of the two bars directly next to the office. Given where it sits, surrounded by offices that have long since disappeared, it is impressive that it is still going and still very busy.
Lessons I can’t seem to learn: I did need to get over the guilt that takes me to a pub and results in a missed train and a bus that gets me home at 1 a.m.
Friday night: Orchids After Hours at Kew Gardens. The theme this year is the biodiversity and cultural heritage of China. There are a large number of native Chinese orchids on display, but I imagine it’s only a fraction of the 30,000 orchid species that one of the videos said have been discovered. Not sure I’d identify orchids without labels.
Saturday: Guinness 0%, which I found indistinguishable from the regular pint, but it seems to take even longer to pour.
Midnight is a new pop-opera by American singer Todrick Hall. An advanced workshop version is being performed at Sadler’s Wells East. Wow, it’s amazing, even though it needs to shed 30 minutes of running time.
Media
Watched the final episode of Small Prophets. Surprisingly captivating and confusing in roughly equal measure.
Also saw Banned in the 80s: Moments That Shook Music, a documentary revisiting the controversies that reshaped music during the 80s: Relax, I Want Your Sex, I Want to Break Free. Plenty of Mary Whitehouse references. Oh, the culture war!
Episode three of Heated Rivalry. Yes, we’re not binge-watching it like the rest of the world. The focus shifts in this one, away from the main Shane and Ilya storyline, to follow hockey player Scott Hunter. Another life lesson: apparently, adding an extra banana to a smoothie makes you extra attractive.
Where do I begin when looking back at 2025? I try to summarise the year as a way of celebrating the good stuff. Daily or weekly writing is often weighed down by the minutiae of life; summarising a longer period can pick out themes or big moments.
My Instagram feed has often been a good summary of the year. At the end of December, I briefly talked about my Instagram Top Nine for 2025, but this time around, I don’t think the feed is representative of the year as it has been in the past. Maybe the Stories highlights are better, but the thirty stories are only a little improvement.
So, in the main, I am sticking to the same format as last year because I have not yet found a more inventive way to present it.
Moving
I have to face reality. I have lost a lot of motivation to exercise, and as I’m ageing, that is bad. My step count was down 11% from last year (and 15% from the year before), and I moved 1,225.5 miles (256,482 kcal). I am trying to do better in 2026. I want all those numbers to be up in next year’s report.
Places
Yes, I am the person still checking in on Swarm. The year in review isn’t great. But I did get to Paris, Spain (and the Guggenheim Museum), and Argentina, where I had one of the best meals ever at Fogón Asado.
2025 in music
This year, I discovered that Apple Music does not count music played via its Sonos integration. That’s a lot of music Apple’s not reporting on, nor featuring in my recommendations. Somebody should tell Tim Apple that you can’t have a music service making recommendations based on historic listening without knowing everything I listened to from that service. He probably doesn’t care. I guess ‘Money, Money, Money’ is top on his recommendations.
While I suspect it’s the classification of country as my most listened-to genre is right, 15,464 minutes and 1,304 songs are likely off the mark. And marking the Starlight Express album as my favourite because it’s long, and I listened to it before we watched the show again in November, is just off.
So, to Last.fm, we go. 5,287 tracks recorded; the most listened-to artist is Johnny Mathis; the most listened-to album is Breland’s Cross Country. I’m so disappointed I was too ill to see him in concert earlier this year. Apparently, Ella Langley’s Weren’t For The Wind is my top track. That’s algorithmic playlists for you: I can’t hum that tune, but I’ll put it on as I write and confirm at the end if I recognise it.
All the socials
I’ve already mentioned Instagram, and what I said last year for other networks:
I (still) have a Mastodon account, but I have yet to pontificate there. Ditto Bluesky, although I keep promising myself I’ll move to a custom domain.
There are now over 100 feeds in my NetNewsWire reader, but many of them remain silent. London Centric and The London Minute are still very much on my reading list, as are Diamond Geezer, It Just Gets Stranger, and Daring Fireball, and I regularly read them. I added a bunch of radio-related feeds this year. And I read about the lives of people I don’t know via their weeknotes.
There’s always so much good telly that I don’t know which shows to call out. We started the year watching The White Lotus, which was recommended, but it didn’t quite work for me, and we never progressed to the second season.
A conspiracy thriller with a mathematician as the central character might not sound gripping, but I liked Prime Target, and similarly, Slow Horses and Down Cemetery Road both had me hooked. The new Bergerac was, perhaps, not as gripping as those other shows, but we stuck with it. The Åre Murders was a crime in another language, which I thought was great. I started rewatching The Blacklist at the start of the year, but after a couple of binge evenings, I seem to have lost interest again.
We started the year in Birmingham watching The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra – CBSO Explores: Friends in Love and War, and then a complete contrast with a big, glossy Palladium panto with Julian Clary and Jane McDonald, which, as always, was an absolutely brilliant spectacle.
I never thought I’d like watching dance, but a contemporary dance piece at Sadler’s Wells East, Birdboy, proved that thought wrong.
I keep trying to make dietary changes. As a result, I listen to quite a bit of the Zoe science and nutrition podcast, but I think I am still eating the wrong things.
Other writing
In 2025, I published fifteen blog-like pieces on my site, from the frictions of everyday life to open skies and festival fields. I started asking what we hold on to and why in Usable, but only just, struggling with my ageing AirPods. Modern life was the subject of my second post last year, the fatigue of headlines in All the news. Back to tech writing with High bar for tech, where I talked about how the Meta Portal is both a device and a memory frame, and, even though it’s by Meta, I really wish they still made it.
As we headed through autumn and into winter, theatre and seasonality came into view in Curtains up on October, followed by a moment to take a whistle-stop trip north to reflect on sounds from my teenage years in Piccadilly Magic and, finally, a photographic review of the year in Top Nine 2025 that I’ve already mentioned.
I am not sure what, when taken together, these tell you. But I always enjoy writing them. Because some of these pieces can get lost amongst the weeknotes, I have started a new archive page just for my more recent words.
Other counts
Let’s look at what else I’ve counted. I did 355 TfL London transport journeys, 42 of them on buses. That’s down on trips from last year, but more buses. JetLovers, once again, counted my flights. There were 9 (7 of which related to my Argentine holiday). I kept my AWS fees under £5 in 2025, but over £140 was spent on postage. And, last year, I woke 2% of the time in Shrewsbury.
Previously
Oh, and if you’ve read all these words, yes, I recognised the song.
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.
Thriller collection: where plot twists live in rainbow order.
Last week, I finally got around to photographing the books I read last year. They can go to a charity at the weekend. I know I am unlikely to re-read them. I failed my reading challenge: on 12 of 15 books read. At least it’s the equivalent of one a month.
As always, there’s a mix of books that I think are interesting and detective stories, which are a guilty pleasure and, when on holiday, I can read in a day or two.
I started the year reading Bent Flyvbjerg’s How Big Things Get Done. Does it contain the secret to delivering large-scale projects on time and on budget? Maybe. Get your team right and plan to the tiniest degree. Don’t be the Sydney Opera House, be Frank Gehry. I read it because we have a large-scale project coming up at work; not sure how much I actually took away.
I spent a few years working at Facebook and was interested in Sarah Wynn-Williams’ Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work, as she was at the company when I was, working at very different layers of the business. I wondered how much of the company she writes about I’d recognise. I think what’s most scary about this book is that, for most of the people I worked with and me, we wouldn’t recognise this from our experiences, yet it rang weirdly true. The villain is very one-sided in this story.
The villain in the next book is a bit less clear, although at the time, the world would have pointed to Rupert Murdoch. The End of the Street by Linda Melvern might have been my favourite book that I read last year. It’s the tale of how the Fleet Street unions were defeated and how the newspaper industry changed forever. There was passion for the newspaper business from both sides. News Corp. felt it couldn’t change the business incrementally, so it adopted an extreme modernisation approach. Perhaps newspapers survived a little longer because of it, perhaps not. Given where the newspaper industry is today, it feels like a historical story. But the innovator’s dilemma is real. Whether this was the right approach remains unclear.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn is a very well-regarded novel, but this was my second attempt to read it. I am glad I stuck with it. Gaunt and Ellwood, at a public school and in the trenches. All their friends are dying all around them. Eventually, I was hooked. I really enjoyed this even though it’s not the kind of novel I’d usually read.
Another book I tried to read before is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And I nearly gave up this time, too, but somewhere along the line, I got hooked. Is the Ministry of Truth even more real today than it was when it was imagined?
Warnell & Vastmans’ Agile Bullshit was another book I read because of work. Agile ways of working are a nice theory, and I’ve seen them successfully implemented in practice, but when the process generates more discussion than the outcome, then something is wrong. I thought this book would back up some of my thinking. It didn’t. And I still think the word ‘ceremonies’ to mean meetings is one of the most pompous things about agile.
The next four books are all detective-based and a cracking good read. Mark Billingham’s The Wrong Hands is the second of his books that I read. An easy read, with a decent plot, if you don’t mind severed hands in a briefcase. Next, it’s back to The Thursday Murder Club in The Last Devil to Die. This time, the case leads the team into the antiques business, which practically screams ‘cosy murder mystery’, and this gives you exactly that, with Richard Osman’s brilliant, engaging style.
I believe one of my great discoveries of the past few years is Christopher Fowler’s Bryant & May series. They always seem to be on the verge of the Peculiar Crimes Unit being closed. In Off the Rails, they have a week to find a killer, with the twist that they’ve caught this killer before. In On the Loose, the unit is closed, yet the case must be solved. I love this series and wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. The intricate London details are phenomenally woven into all the stories without seeming out of place.
As a fan of Robert Ludlum’s Bourne series, I found The Janson Directive at the back of the shelf featuring a new character. Paul Janson, a former undercover agent for a deniable government agency known as Consular Operations, is asked to do one last job: rescue the billionaire Peter Novak. Today, we know just how bad the world’s billionaire class can be, and their views on reshaping the world are best ignored. I don’t think it was written as a manual for bored rich people to do bad in the world, but 13 years after its writing, bits of it are strangely contemporary. Also, another cracking good action adventure.
I ended the year by completing On Intelligence: The History of Espionage and the Secret World, which somehow got recommended after Nineteen Eighty-Four. There’s a lot in this book, and it offers fascinating insights into how intelligence works, with real examples from throughout history. If you want to know how intelligence (on both sides) ensured a successful D-Day landing, then that’s in one of the chapters. It’s an accessible telling of the espionage world, but as with all things secretive, you can’t help but wonder what’s not being told.
