-
Now: 6 - 12 January 2025
It was pretty cold this week, so we took advantage of everything being frozen over to spend a bunch of time outside. The Met Office says that the weather is going to turn this next week, reaching balmy highs of like 14 degrees and turning the country into a massive mud pit.
Reading
I liked Sam Valenti IV’s review of pop music in 2024, where he basically argues that modern pop music is so multimedia that musicians no longer get anywhere without a big social media campaign and tie-ins with e.g. presidential candidates, even if the music on its own is critically acclaimed. Also some navel gazing about quite how much new music there is to listen to. Which, yep.
Also got back into reading Scott Galloway, whom I broadly agree with and who writes things that make me feel like a real smart guy for reading them. Typical of a Brand Guy to have a good brand.
Finished Yuzuki’s Butter as well, but I haven’t written that book review yet. I’ll probably give it
Listening
- MK.gee - ROCKMAN | I really like this sort of hearkening pop music. I can’t exactly put my finger on who it sounds like (probably because it doesn’t sound quite like anyone else), but it almost feels like it inherits some of the conventions of Yacht Rock in just the catchiest way.
- MIZU - 4 | 2 | 3 | Speaking of heavy music, this feels like the heavy music that I’m allowed to listen to: headphone-oriented, vaguely intellectual, extremely crushing.
- Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk - Plain fun. It feels like they’re never going to run out of ways to make fun synth pop. I especially like the way that singer Mica Tenenbaum takes like three or four syllables to say the word much on “Vampire in the Corner”.
At home
The “check engine” light came on early in the week but seems to have sorted itself out. The car continues to get pretty miserable mileage compared to what it should do, but started without trouble on even the coldest mornings.
Inside, some combination of grease and shoe mud plugged up the sink in the kitchen, so I got the plunger out and plunged the heck out of the pipes. After two or three good plunges the whole house made a noise like a dog throwing up and everything instantly got sucked down the drain with the explosive force of an airplane toilet. So uh I think I’d call that Problem Solved.
I also spent a couple of hours finishing off the grout in the office downstairs. Next up: washing it, sealing it, washing it again, installing skirting boards. Probably washing it again when Ghyll comes in from the garden with dirty paws and an eye to eat the cat's poo. Projects continue anon.
Outside
Back on a running plan, but not taking it too seriously. My Garmin is getting whiplash from my Training Load going up so precipitously. It’s like “please lay off for a day Charles” so I’m going to take Monday off.
Lots of lemonade made from the lemons of this cold weather we’ve had for the last week: Sam and I took Ghyll out for a walk to the nearby fishing pond, which had frozen over and which we were able to walk out onto; we headed down to Yorkshire to visit the Piercebridge Roman Bridge (much more impressive in person than in pictures) and for a good old-fashioned pub meal; I ran the Commondale Clart fell race on Sunday.
Watching
Started watching Small Brained American on YouTube; judging by his follower count I’m the last one to the party. I like his approach to experiences in foreign countries, which is basically “say yes to everything and don’t worry about it too much”. I think that there’s probably a little bit of international-friction-smoothing-over that happens off-camera, and I’m prepared to discover that he (along with probably like 95% of Travel YouTube) is Problematic. Oh well, it’s fun to fall asleep to.
-
Now
Twenty twenty-five is the year I get my blogging groove back.
Listening
- Hell - Live at Roadburn, 2018, Dopesmoker - Sleep | Both of these are pretty “heavy” albums that I appreciate from an aesthetic point of view but which also I feel like I haven’t quite “earned” in that I’m listening to them on wired iPod earbuds from 2019 while at my remote deskwork job. Via The Verge.
- Inverse Field Vol. 1 - Inishowen | Airy ambient music from Ireland, apparently recorded on location in the Great Outdoors. Listened to this one with Ghyll on Saturday evening; the recording conceit probably comes across better when listening on headphones. Via Simon Collison.
Watching
Finished Wolf Hall. I feel a great sense of superiority at having read the books before I was even aware of the television programme, but not so great a sense of superiority that I forget that I read them after the first two were awarded the Booker Prize. So it’s not like I’m a champion of obscure literature or whatever. Anyway, the television series was terrific, elevating Mark Rylance to National Treasure status, perhaps.
Reading
Still working through Butter. It’s enjoyable but it’s not propulsive. It gives the impression of one of those video games with episodic quests. The characters all pop off the page, which is fun—except for the main character, who feels weirdly flat. Maybe it’s a reader-projection thing.
Catching up on end-of-year review posts from Simon Collison and Phil Gyford, the latter of which linked me to this interesting YouTube video about splitting a year into quarters to make life/work goals more manageable.
Outside
Ran a 5k in 19:57 on Tuesday, the culmination of a long process of training. Now I guess I need to figure out how to do this for 10k straight. Then I didn't run again until Sunday, nor felt any desire to: which is maybe a sign of something or maybe not a sign.
Spent a lovely night with Sam and Ghyll in Kielder at Flittingford bothy. On the plus side we brought in plenty of fuel for a toasty fire and we got to see an aurora, plus a skyful of stars; on the negative side Ghyll did eat human poo. I left a stern word in the overflowing bothy book.
On Saturday night it snowed heaps but was started melting before we even got up. Pottered about doing errands for most of the day, getting thoroughly cold and wet in some persistent sleet that fell all day. It's 9pm on Sunday now and my trousers are only just starting to dry out. A smarter man would have just changed trousers.
Inside
Trying to continue wrapping up projects from last year: installing a lattice above the garage door for storing e.g. plywood; finishing up the last of the grout in the back office. We will get there someday ok!
-
Flittingford bothy
Nice midweek trip up to Kielder with Sam and Ghyll to spend a night in Flittingford bothy to celebrate the new year. Parked at Black Middens and took the long way round, rather than starting in Falstone as it seems most people do (at least, based on the bothy book).
Walked in with plenty of fuel (kiln-dried from Aldi, truly the lap of luxury) so we stayed nice and toasty overnight. Wandered outside to relieve myself at the late hour of 6pm and found a stunning aurora in full glory. Stood around taking pictures of the sky until our fingers started to numb with cold, then retreated inside and learned how to play rummy with the well-worn deck of cards someone'd left behind in ages past. Popped a couple of coals on the fire to keep us going overnight; asleep by 9pm.
The walk back out was in glorious clear weather (if a tad nippy). Stopped by the Sidwood Romano-Saxon settlement on the way out; little more than some earthworks to see, and a moss-overgrown plaque. Then popped up to Black Middens to ogle The Way the Other Half Lived (the Other Half are Border farmers from the Tudor period).
-
2024
Here we are again. It’s been a busy December and in the wind-down days the house has been dim and quiet and I’ve had a chance to reflect on everything that happened this year. It’s been a full one as usual, but it’s also been characterised by a series of missed expectations and malfunctions that we’ve done a poor job of staying on top of.
Winter
January started with a fizzle. We’d decided to undertake some house work (replacing worn laminate with tiles, refurbishing the downstairs bathroom) but the work was slow going and we struggled to motivate ourselves to actually knuckle down and do it. The result was that, for much of the winter, parts of the house remained sort of semi-furbished.
We were no luckier on the automotive front; our daily driver started producing problems from nowhere and we struggled to keep the Porsche that we’d bought at the end of last year running reliably. We did do some light maintenance work, but kept getting rebuffed by bad weather: driving wind, piercing chill, endless days of rain. The waterlogged fields we took Ghyll roiled like rough sea at our feet.
Neither could I find solace in books: after finishing Jon Fosse’s bleak Trilogy I spent the following 5 months trying to fight my way through Dhalgren on a decade-old recommendation. This book broke me. I spent much of the rest of the year trying to rediscover why I read in the first place.
I found a bright spot in running at the weekend in preparation for the Fellsman, a challenge I decided to undertake back in 2023 but which I didn’t write about in my previous annual recap. I planned a few really nice runs through the North York Moors and in the Yorkshire Dales over the weekends, and enjoyed every minute of them. Not so enjoyable, however, were the increasingly long weekly runs during the week: dark half marathons undertaken with Ghyll after work that kept me away from home for hours and hours at a time. In late January one of these long runs aggravated a longstanding strain injury and I wound up not running at all for a few weeks—which was maybe just as bad as running too much. Only the frequent application of extended stretching exercises made any difference.
In February we had solar panels installed at the house, to nearly no immediate effect—in February the sun is weak and thin if it comes out at all. Still, it was exciting to watch the current flow through our house and percolate on savings to come.
Later on in the month we decided to give ourselves a break and flew to southern Spain for a long weekend at a family member’s villa. I can take or leave Spain as a country, but the trip was just what Sam and I needed at the time: an opportunity to neglect our responsibilities at home and spend some time together in the sun.
Spring
February turned to March and a faint blueness returned to the sky in the last minutes of my workday. Light was, gradually, returning to the North East of England. This coincided with an increase in weekly mileage ahead of the Fellsman in an attempt to make up for missed training during my injury recovery period. If I’m honest, I don’t remember a lot of March and April: I ran nearly constantly, through forest and across fell, traversing ancient trackway and erstwhile railway, under and over bridges, through mine workings, past pubs and holiday cottages. Many of these were truly lovely runs, but so engrossed was I in trying to stick to my training plan that I don’t think I really appreciated them at the time. I was constantly on the internet looking up ultrarunning race reports, rereading mandatory kit lists, packing and unpacking my running backpack in anticipation. The whole season was unhealthy: I was burnt out on running.
In March we received a bothy report indicating that someone had knocked a hole in the flue of the stove at Haughtongreen, so we went out to investigate: it turned out that someone had simply misplaced the hatch cover for sweeping the flue (it was later found hanging from the ceiling). This whole saga—investigating the hole, measuring for some repair, finding the hatch cover—took a couple of weeks to puzzle out.
At length, British Summer Time began and the days suddenly got much brighter. Fellsman training wound up and then it was time for the race itself. After the ordeal of training, the race itself almost seemed like an anticlimax—especially given quite how much of the race I wound up walking due to a tendon issue in my left knee. In the days and weeks after the race I continued with some light running but couldn’t motivate myself to take it seriously; as a result I suffered during a pacing run for a friend’s Bob Graham attempt a few weeks later.
Summer
Summer rolled in without fanfare, a scattered handful of sunny days and warmish temperatures. On these days the solar panels kicked into overdrive and we wound up generating far more than we could produce. Still, the projects that we’d undertaken over the previous six months continued only in fits and starts.
The tiling that we’d gotten started with back in January remained unfinished—the tiles had been laid, but we didn’t get around to applying the grout until May. Once the grout had set, we discovered that the grout clings to the natural stone floor tiles we used, and had to spend a couple more weekends on hands and knees scraping grout residue—followed by the relatively easy but time-consuming process of painting and installing new skirting boards. But by midsummer, the flooring work was (mostly) complete.
Around this time as well, the Porsche sort of conked out, cutting out and refusing to restart. I suspect that it has something to do with the fuel system, but I haven’t gotten back around to properly diagnosing it, even today. With everything else going on, we also neglected to take the motorbike back out for a ride; the expiration of our Compulsory Basic Training certificates in May put the kibosh on any further riding over the summer.
At the end of May, we jetted off to the States for a week to celebrate my sister’s engagement party. We’d been away from the family for a year and it was wonderful to get to celebrate with them, even briefly. We spent most of the time in the pool and stopped in Atlanta on the way home for some awesome barbecue. Back in the UK I started counting down the days until we returned for the wedding proper in December.
Another couple of weeks, another trip—this time to France on a motorhoming expedition. I’d originally planned to participate in a sprint triathlon in Chantilly, but I’d done no training in the pool or on the bike up to this point and decided to skip it and loiter around in the Ardennes with Sam and Ghyll and fancy beer and cheese instead. In retrospect this was definitely for the best.
We whiled away the rest of the summer on short walks and runs with Ghyll. Later on in the summer we even took Ghyll wild camping a couple of times, the first time we’d been out in the wilderness with him overnight. Over the past year, he’s either calmed down a lot or we’ve gotten better at identifying and avoiding his triggers. I can’t tell which.
Autumn
As the summer faded into autumn, we were back up at the bothy to finish up some jobs—painting, tidying, splicing a doorframe, clearing out some overgrown nettles. We left the bothy in good shape for the winter ahead.
I also ramped up my running again, this time in preparation for the Loch Ness Marathon. The first few weeks of training went well, but a trip down to the office in Leeds shook my schedule up, and then Sam and I were struck down with covid—and in the end I never really wound up getting back into the swing of things. By the time that the marathon came around, I didn’t think that I was in particularly bad shape—but poor sleep and nutrition caught up with me and the wheels came off halfway through. I wound up missing my target pace by like half an hour and came home from Inverness pretty bummed.
At work, we completed a long-running project to transition from an old system to a new one. I also spearheaded a project to modernise the UI of an internal application, addressing a bunch of accessibility and experience issues—which felt like progress! I can tell, however, that I’m moving into a period in my career where I no longer really care about What’s Going On in JavaScript. I’ve spent a not-inconsiderable amount of the last seven-ish years trying to keep up with the meta, listening to podcasts and following blogs, wondering whether I should lean more into producing Web Development Content—but I just don’t care anymore. Liberating.
Around the time that the clocks went back, Sam and I, along with her dad and his partner, started volunteering with a local Scouts group in Hartlepool. It’s been a fun way to get involved in mentorship for kids, though I feel like we haven’t quite had enough time to properly make a difference yet. More to come in 2025.
At the end of November, Sam and I took some time off for her birthday and we did some local sightseeing, including a tour of Durham Cathedral, a night out at a fancy restaurant, a day at Beamish, and a walk with Ghyll in the snowy hills of the Lake District. There's so much to see and do in our little corner of the country, and we'd spent so much of the year in our home or out on running trails in the dark that giving ourselves the space to enjoy a week without expectations was expectedly refreshing.
Winter again
And so it started getting cold again, and dark. Since the Loch Ness Marathon I’d decided to focus on more speed work in my running, to positive results at the Brampton to Carlisle road race and at the one cross country fixture I’ve made it to.
With the prospect of a full December looming, we made one last push to finish the projects that we started at the beginning of the year: stripping the remaining adhesive spillage from the tile floor, fitting the remaining hardware in the bathroom, laying carpet runners on the stairs, sorting out the bedroom where, in a few short weeks, dad and his partner would be coming to visit.
Before that, however—a return to the United States, for my sister’s wedding in south Georgia. We flew into Florida and celebrated an early Christmas with my family before heading up to Georgia for the wedding at a stunning hunting lodge (with stunning taxidermy). The whole wedding weekend was magical and transportive, an interlude in a world away from the last year. I found myself unexpectedly sorrowful on our departure—whereas much of 2024 didn’t quite go my way, I felt (and feel) that my family has grown a lot closer over the last year in a way that’s surprised and touched me.
We had only a couple of days back home before dad and his partner showed up in the UK to visit for a few days. We spent most of the time in the pub, but managed to get out for Christmas dinner with Sam’s family and for a walk up Roseberry Topping on what turned out to be the capstone of a spectacular week, weather-wise (and experience-wise).
And so it goes
It’s a dark December night once again. The years are passing with increasing speed, and I feel I’m struggling to keep hold of them. I find myself looking back on the way I’ve changed, the differences I’ve made, the people I’ve impacted, in a way that I didn’t think I would until I was in my 40s, at least. These questions of, How have I changed? or Whose lives have I touched? or What difference have I made in the world? are middle-aged person questions—I'm not middle-aged yet, right? The past year wasn’t bad—but the prospect of another string of years like this one, another forty or so, doesn’t excite me. I feel that something needs to change in 2025.
-
Waffle House - FFSR
Fast Food, Slow Reviews - Sam's ongoing mission to review all of the USA's fast food establishments, one at a time, over the course of years of trips to the States.
We’ve been before but not done a FFSR so we returned to the notorious breakfast diner joint. It was a bacon, egg and cheese hashbrown bowl for me and an all-star special for Charles (eggs: scrambled, toast: white, waffle: plain, meat: bacon, side: grits with cheese).
I thought the hashbrown bowl could have been better seasoned and the cheese could have been either more plentiful or more powerful. But the bacon was really tasty and was the standout item. The hashbrowns are something I just can’t get at home so it’s always a pleasure. And of course the eggs were cooked just right.
I had some of Charles’s cheesy grits and yum yum yum! Again the cheese left something to be desired but grits have such a wonderful texture. Smooth and creamy but with a little bite in there too. I think I’d like to try adding grits to a Full English back home and see how it works. Maybe include some American diner-style hashbrowns to complete the melange.
Pecan pie was our dessert (which we needed like a hole in the head but when in Rome 🤷🏻♀️). Sara Lee does some fantastic things with sugar. The texture is of molasses or tar or something but with a deep sugary, nutty flavour. And then there’s the candied, crunchy pecans on top. A real treat :)
Archive
2024
December 2024
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
Currently showing latest 20 posts