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Now
It’s been a minute: time to reconsolidate. What have I been up to lately.
The Olympics...
...were on. I have good memories of watching the Tokyo Olympics 3 years ago, so we dropped £6 on Discovery+ so that we could watch the catchups at the end of the day, or watch the full versions of high-profile events like the cycling time trials or triathlons or athletics. The announcers on Discovery+ weren’t quite as good as I remember the BBC ones being.
I love the spirit and the aesthetics of the Olympics: people of all backgrounds coming together in one place to show everyone else just how good they are at stuff. I'm not bothered by the endless firehose of People Are Amazing YouTube videos that seem to be published at a rate of several lifetimes of footage per day, but I will get out of bed (or, more likely, not get into bed) for the Olympics every time.
Right on schedule, the Internet Content Hot Take Machine spooled up to produce a boatload of dumb Olympics opinions, and right on schedule I loaded up my internet browser to consume and scoff at them. I don’t have a ton to say about any of it except for that I agree with the proposal to hold the Games in the same place every year. Pick a summer spot (probably Greece) and a winter spot (I don’t know) and just have them there every year.
Running
Some progress on the running front. Conscious that it’s not particularly interesting to hear the news of someone’s work-in-progress, but I’ve mostly shaken free of the knee troubles that bothered me throughout the summer and I’m back on a running plan that at least temporarily nudges me into the “Productive” status on my Garmin. If the app says it’s progress, then it’s progress!
Here is a complaint about Jack White
I listened to a lot of The White Stripes in university, but when he went off to do his own thing and swapped all of his red t-shirts for blue ones I sort of tuned out. Apparently he’s been doing some critically-panned stuff since then, I don’t know. Anyway he’s got a new album out and it’s return-to-form-adjacent, mostly big licks.
I think I read Jack White described as having “beaten all of the levels of real-life Guitar Hero” somewhere and I thought that was accurate.
I listened through the new album on a run recently and I can’t help but feel like Jack White has the same kind of naive righteousness that John Lennon gives off. But like where John Lennon would say things like, “Give peace a chance,” or “All you need is love,” as if tapping a deep well of morality, Jack White says things like, “I’m backseat driving when you’re driving me crazy / But I can’t drive a stick,” as if tapping a deep well of cool. I like the sounds he makes with a guitar but I have to force myself not to listen to the words.
And here is a complaint about Siri
I don’t have the right silicon to get Apple Intelligence™ whenever it comes out, so I’m stuck with Vanilla Siri. Siri is very good for setting timers and adding things to the Groceries list and getting directions back to my house and occasionally for getting directions to a postcode if I have the patience to try three or four times.
Sometimes I find new things that Siri can do, as when I asked it recently to put on “the latest Decemberists album” and it correctly starts playing As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
Other times,
—Hey Siri, play a random album from my library.
—Okay, what would you like to play?
—A random album.
—Here’s what I found for ‘a random album’ on the web.I don’t know how after so many years it continues to be quite this bad.
Counting calories
I’ve started counting calories with an app called Lose It. I don’t know if I want to Lose It. But I want to be a little bit more deliberate about what I eat: I spent much of my training for the Fellsman just shoving back whole bags of sweets and McDonald’s on top of my regular meals and while I don’t think it’s done me irrevocable harm, I just know that one day in my forties I’m going to wake up and rue the quantities of sugar that I consumed when I was younger.
Anyway, the whole thing has been an instructive exercise in the sheer volume of calories that Asda seems to be able to squeeze into e.g. muffins, jellybeans, yogurt bars. I don’t know how they do it.
Back outdoors
After we got Ghyll, we sort of put wild camping on hold while he grew up and settled down a bit. Now he’s a bit grown up and a bit settled down, and we’ve busted the tent and sleeping bags back out for a couple of overnight walks through the countryside.
It’s gone well: it turns out that traipsing 20 kilometres across heath and moor puts a real Weariness into the bones of a mutt with an unslakable enthusiasm for such things. As a result he’s quite happy to curl up in a corner of the tent (usually the corner where we have heaped the sleeping bags to fluff up) while we cook dinner and settle in for the night.
The first night, in the Lakes, we only brought the flysheet and slept on a thin Polycryo groundsheet, which was a mistake: torrential rain descended while we slept, and I awoke to a Morning Dampness in the Sleeping Bag. This past weekend in the Cheviots we brought the full tent and he slept through the night with nary a bother. Plus I woke up dry.
The prospect of further nights in the wilderness ahead and another (admittedly farty) body in the tent to keep us warm through the lingering dark makes the upcoming winter marginally more bearable.
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Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
Published 1993 345 pages
Photo by Jon Champaigne on Unsplash In the near future of the year 2024, Lauren Olamina lives with her family in a gated suburb of Los Angeles. Climate change and economic collapse have transformed the United States into a semi-wasteland of poverty and barbarism. Society exists in name only; peace exists only insofar as it can be enforced with high walls and guns. Corporations have started taking over towns, and there’s talk of slave labour employed in factories near the Canadian border. Everywhere in between, the unhoused and the desperate scrounge and kill for another day.
It’s miserable.
For Lauren, whatever misery she avoids by living within tall walls in counterbalanced by her hyperempathy, a neurological disease that causes her to physically feel whatever those around her feel. She has inherited it from her drug-addicted mother, long out of the picture. She has a grip on it most of the time, but woe betides confrontation with a would-be attacker: anything she inflicts in self-defence is inflicted also in self-offence.
Life changes from one day to the next. Lauren watches her once-secure neighbourhood come apart at the seams: first from within, as her brother gets involved with drug dealers on the outside—and then from without, when the neighbourhood is attacked by vagrants addicted to a drug that impels its users to burn anything they can get their hands on. Her home is destroyed and her family is slaughtered. She reconnects with a couple of survivors of the attack and with them casts off north, hoping to find a quiet spot to start anew, maybe where water isn’t so expensive, where life can be lived in a bit of peace. She also tentatively starts sharing with her travelling companions the foundations of a nascent religion—more of a personal philosophy—that Lauren calls Earthseed. It encourages self-reliance and self-determination and is oriented around the koan-like tenet of God is Change.
On her northbound way, she forms an unlikely community with a dozen or so others, gently preaching Earthseed along the way. Though they’re a bit of a motley bunch, they share a common abiding sense of inner kindness (and a healthy dose of commonsense strength in numbers). Lauren emerges as their leader and shepherds them through a few moments of serious peril.
And yet—for a world that we’re told hangs on the brink, and where the next peril seems always around the corner, Butler seldom puts her characters in the path of serious, imminent danger. The high points are never very high, but the lows are never particularly low, either. Lauren’s group is attacked—several times—but the action never seems serious, somehow; the baddies are talked down or chased off offscreen. At one point the group is nearly overtaken by a wildfire, and we wonder if one of the older or weaker members of the group is going to make it—but then the winds change and the wildfire moves off somewhere else. The world is full of peril and death comes nearly indiscriminately—just not for Lauren’s group 1.
Lauren’s hyperempathy also feels somewhat unplumbed as a concept. It’s a fascinating conceit that should open the door to all sorts of interesting scenarios—but it mostly just plays as a reason to pan away from conflict resolutions. When attacked, Lauren fires her gun until she’s completely incapacitated by pain, and then catches up on the action on her recovery. I wish we’d have gotten a scene where her sharing helps her connect with someone on a level that no one else can. A couple of other sharers join her group late in the story, but remain feebly truculent through the final pages of the book.
Where the story shines, however, is in the details. Lauren’s observations of her travelling companions, the forethought into making it through the night, the offhand comments about toilet areas, or the price of water, or bathing—all of these make the world leap up and press on you. There’s a tense moment where the group is hiding from a firefight in the night, and a baby makes just enough noise to draw the attention of one of the survivors. The group watches the figure move around a burning truck, and look out into the darkness. The moment hangs with the distant figure and the fire and the whirling night all around. The texture of the world is grim but it’s very nearly tangible in its quality. It doesn’t feel like another world—it feels like ours. It feels like a few bad decisions could make it so.
- This is not strictly true—one of Lauren’s group does die, but they’re not part of Lauren’s Core Team, and they’re mostly mourned over the course of a single chapter.↩︎
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Garmin HRM 1G not pairing
In the spirit of writing a blog post when you search for a problem and the search results consist exclusively of generic manufacturer troubleshooting pages and AI-adjacent advertising vehicles: here is what to do if your Garmin HRM 1G heart rate monitor won't pair with your {watch,phone,computer} after changing the battery:
Use a paperclip to short the battery contacts for 5-10 seconds, then reinstall the battery and pair the device. Here is a link to the YouTube video that taught me this.
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The Custom of the Country
by Edith Wharton
Published 1913 331 pages
Undine Spragg wants only two things in the world,
two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability
Both, she's certain, are bestowed by inclusion in the glamorous old money New York social scene, which she's uprooted her upper-middle-class family from Kansas to join. She's been in New York for two years when The Custom of the Country starts, but she's had no luck: she's on the outs.
That is—until she captures the attention of Ralph Marvell, a dazzling gentleman from an old money family, who takes her for a simple girl and snaps her up. Marital bliss quickly sours, however, as they realise that they have nearly nothing in common. They have a child, Paul, in spite of their mounting displeasure in each other's company; Undine pays him almost no mind at all but Ralph loves him dearly and raises him solo (well, inasmuch as a Gilded Age American aristocrat can raise anyone solo).
Too soon, Undine spends Ralph's meagre old-money stipend, and after a downturn in Business her father's allowance dries up. Ralph gives up an—admittedly limp—interest in an artistic career for a job in real estate to try and cover the mounting bills that Undine racks up on dresses, jewels, and parties. The debts accumulate, and by and by the game wears thin. When Ralph can (or will) no longer provide the life that Undine believes she deserves, she wangles a fake illness and sweeps herself off for Paris to woo someone who can (or will).
This doesn't quite work out for Undine, and she suffers from a bit of a low period—one of a few throughout the novel—where boredom overtakes her and she finds her social station somewhat reduced. She manages to land on her feet by catching the eye of Raymond, Comte (and later Marquis) de Chelles, a French aristocrat who, as a Catholic, insists she annul her marriage to Ralph before he can marry her.
Here, Undine is guided by an old acquaintance from her Kansas days, Elmer Moffatt. He's been a sporadic presence throughout the novel, waltzing serendipitously into offices and tearooms with an American swagger to compromise someone's ethics with a shady-seeming deal as a remedy to a key moment of strife. He's the template of the modern capitalist: confident, business-savvy, adept at landing on his feet even when the money doesn't go his way. In a novel full of flawed characters just trying to get their way, he's probably the most enjoyable to watch.
To Undine's limbo woes of being stuck Catholically attached to someone she never sees, and Catholically unable to marry a man who might re-elevate her station, Moffatt innocently suggests leaning on Ralph's attachment to Paul—Undine, after all, technically has custody—to get him (that is, Ralph) to pony up the money for the annulment. Undine does get her way in the end, in a series of scenes that metamorphose Undine from a cunning and spoilt but fundamentally uncomplicated protagonist into a truly awful person, and see her wind up with the annulment she wanted, the money she needed, and the son she never cared for in the first place.
Suitably equipped, she contrives to marry Raymond but quickly comes to realise that a life as the Marquise de Chelles isn't all it's cracked up to be. Raymond is freer with his money than Ralph was—but not by much. Family troubles eat up the family's finances, sequestering Undine in the de Chelles country home, far from Paris society where she longs to be. Raymond quickly loses interest in Undine as well, and where her previous beaux were ever-eager to please, Raymond is quick to dismiss her as a foreigner. Here again Undine is struck low, before Moffatt reappears with a final deal to grant her everything she ever wanted.
* * *
Much of the book is presented almost lightheartedly, the whims and trials of the fabulously wealthy and spoilt. I think that this is what makes the book fun, instead of tiresome and upsetting. But Wharton puts moments of deep pathos at key points throughout the story, as if to remind us that these are people, after all.
There's a scene near the end of the book from the perspective of young Paul, now nine years old, wandering around the rooms of his palatial home, bored and confused and lonely. He wonders what happened to his father and why he never sees him anymore. He laments his missing stepfather, Raymond, no longer in the picture. He gets told off by a servant for trying to read one of the thousands of books on the shelves—they're rare editions and too precious to touch. He longs for the days when he was surrounded by family who loved him. His mother comes home but she can't be bothered with his evident interest:
Paul, seeing his mother's softened face, stole his hand in hers and began: 'Mother, I took a prize in composition—'
'Did you? You must tell me about it tomorrow. No, I really must rush off now and dress—I haven't even placed the dinner-cards.'
Throughout the book, we're meant to sympathise only halfheartedly for the men that Undine leaves wrecked in her wake, but in this moment of pathos for Paul, the impact of her awfulness is made real.
'Why, hullo, old chap—why, what's up?' [Paul's step-father] was on his knees beside the boy, and the arms embracing him were firm and friendly. But Paul, for the life of him, couldn't answer: he could only sob and sob as the great surges of loneliness broke over him.
* * *
Inconsolable children notwithstanding, The Custom of the Country is a very fun book. Undine is despicable, and it's hard not to relish her low moments. It tends a little bit towards the hamfisted on European/American relations late in the book—one character even delivers a monologue/tirade against Americanism—but the commentary on capitalism and business and money is good and sharp and only a little upsetting. The book is well-paced and quick, skipping over years at a time and catching us up on the interim over the course of a quick chapter—though we're sometimes told more than shown, which feels a little clunky. Familiar characters also have a tendency to wander unprompted in to wherever Undine happens to be, and this sort of contrivance repeatedly drives a not-insignificant amount of the plot, but I guess this kind of thing is expected in a book of this era and at any rate it's not distracting. A well-constructed and fun, if at times a bit heartbreaking, romp through some terrible people's lives.
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Willow Miner trail race
Ran the Willow Miner trail race hosted by Elvet Striders last week. It's a fantastic race on an exciting course winding through the woods, parks, and hillsides south of Durham. I'd wanted to run it but missed the signup window—as a popular race it sold out quickly. I was able to race thanks to a fellow Strider dropping out a couple weeks before the race, and made my way to the starting line with 200-odd other runners in all colours of race vest.
The race went well—I ran my darndest, paced it well, and finished strong. The downside of running such a popular local race, however, is that it attracts the best of the best—and so what feels to me like a well-run race often winds up looking pretty mediocre in the results. Still, I don't reckon I could have run it much better than I did. Now I'm going to go back and try running it on my own to better my time for next year.
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