Latest from the blog mines

Sunday, 9 Aug 2026 12:56 am

Friction

I’ve been trying to introduce friction into my life.
I’ve spent the last maybe eighteen months in a totally frictionless zone and it’s led me down a totally frictionless slide of saying Yes to things and now I’ve got altogether way too many things going on. I woke up in the middle of the night the other night because Sam punched her nightstand (“someone was coming at me in my dream”) and then I wound up just lying awake in the dark for 90 minutes with my eyes darting pretty much all over the place and my mind doing a full-on floor routine over everything I was trying to keep in my head for the following day. Waking nightmare-type stuff.
I put my Garmin away in the drawer of my desk. I’m back to a quartz Timex that I got at Sears in like 2007. Sears doesn't even exist anymore and I’ve had to replace the battery precisely once. When I lie on my stomach with my arm wedged up under the pillow I can hear it tick as I fall asleep. It has an Indiglo backlight but no date function. When my phone buzzes I look at it instinctively for the contents of the notification, but it just ticks back blithe and notificationless. The friction of not knowing is good.
I’ve gone back to notebooks. I’ve filled up a good few notebooks over the years, first Moleskine and since 2013ish Leuchtturm. Dotted ones all. The first one I got at a Coach and Four in Kitami, bright red, and then a few black ones, and a yellow one and a green one in there somewhere. The current one is lightgrey. I’ve taken thousands of digital Notes in the default Notes app on my computer but I rarely reread them. Writing things by hand is slower, but somehow I remember it all better. (But guess where I am writing this blog post.)
I’ve dug out a Zebra Filare pen that the head of the Yubetsu Board of Education gave me before I left Japan. I told people, when I left Japan, that I wanted to be a journalist, and so he got me a nice, heavy pen from a stationary shop, and had it engraved with my name. I remember sitting in his office with my boss, with the light coming in slantways, with the wood panelling and the desk and the binders of documents behind him. I miss them: my boss, the head of the Board of Education and the vice-head. I miss sitting around on the floor with them taking sips of beer to wash down food that didn’t suit my palate. But anyway for the last 10 years the pen has sat in the drawer unused with the ink drying up. I bought new ink cartridges at a specialty online store, and I’m using the pen now, with my name on it and a little dent on the body that I don’t know where it came from, to write todo lists by hand. When I feel overwhelmed, I write down that I feel overwhelmed in my notebook. I don’t know if it helps. It’s a bit of friction and it slows me down.
I’ve been taking pictures with my father-in-law’s old Pentax camera. It’s all manual: manual focus, manual shutter speed, manual aperture. I watched a YouTube video about taking pictures with film but I don’t want to be an artist: — I just want to slow down and look at things. All of the pictures on this blog post were taken with that camera. There’s an obvious light leak; the camera needs servicing. I guess that’s friction.
Is reading a physical book friction? Is reading Tristram Shandy friction? Sure feels like it!
I guess the whole point of this is that computers seem to be made to smooth things over and reduce friction as much as possible, and I still have a Claude subscription and Claude seems to want to jump in and smooth over friction whenever I ask it to do anything, and I’m sort of sick of all of it because it’s made things possible beyond the potential of my soft brain. Someone with their head screwed on right, mid-tech career, with no dependants except for a dog and a cat and even a $20/mo subscription to a LLM can do pretty much whatever they want: — & what I want is to be useful — & so I've committed myself to being in maybe 4 or 5 places at the same time, being only half as useful as I ought to be because the biggest source of friction is me.
And like I’m still going to work and trying to reduce friction for people trying to access healthcare, and I think that’s right: people shouldn’t have to write things down on paper forms and make phone calls through switchboards: healthcare really ought to be frictionless — but for me, after midnight, Saturday night, four Duvels deep — things maybe could be a little bit harder.

Night
Tuesday, 28 Jul 2026 11:24 pm

Night

Out with Ghyll at night for the first time in a while. Night comes rarely at this time of year. Day was muggy and overcast, down in Leeds for an Office Day. Earlier, when I shut my overheating computer and left the building for the promise of a cold pint of lager, I was staggered, just a little, by how warm it was outside.
Now the sun is down and there’s a bit of a breeze up and the world is quiet. There’s a smattering of light left in the sky but the ground is dark enough that I can’t make out detail, and the trees are big black splotches on the verge. Ghyll keeps turning around and looking behind us as if someone’s coming: when he was much younger this gave me the creeps, but nowadays I'm not bothered so much. I still look every time.
We turn around at the dog bin and make our way back. No one would be able to tell I was there except for the scuffling of my old shoes on the dusty gravel. As if to make my point, I see a bright bicycle headlight coming for us in the distance so while Ghyll barks in alarm I grab my headtorch just to make myself known. I'm trying to be a good neighbour, so when he passes I say a friendly “yeaarright”.
Near the cutthrough I notice for not the first time the highpressure sodium lights, two of them, in front of the row of old turn-of-the-century row houses on Moor Lane. I’m in a picture-taking mood so I stop to take a picture of them just as a woman opens her front door to call out for her cat: it sounds like he’s called Tybalt, which I think is a terrific name for a cat but which also is not very probable. I try not to look sketchy, with my black dog and my phone out, gazing Copernicanly up at a 30-year-old streetlight; but turns out after all not to be very hard as I’m a pretty distinctive guy with the mustache and the denim jacket and the black dog, and the uniform of sketchy guys in this town is total nondistinctiveness, i.e. grey joggy bottoms with a grey zipup hoodie and a balaclava or a neck gaiter, oh and an electric bike and two or three other guys dressed basically the same as you are.

Walking Ghyll Night
Monday, 13 Jul 2026 8:44 pm

Yellow summer

We’ve now totally moved on from green summer to yellow summer. Maybe, between the flowering and fluffering of the thistles, with an intermediate stop at purple summer.
Rain has forborne pretty much all summer, so the fields are dry and golden. The barley and the wheat look ready to go, but I am not a farmer so ???? All that’s left of the hogweed on the side of the road are dark brown husks, and little plants that I thought were pineappleweed have grown waisthigh and burst into little golden flowers all across the meadow. (They’re actually ragwort.) I’ve stopped calling it a field and started calling it a meadow, the little unenclosed wildland at the end of Moor Lane with the ploughed-up mounds of dirt adjoining the new estate.
Someone has spread what looks like sharp sand on the playing field where Sam and I throw a ball around with Ghyll; I wear my sandals and get little gritty bitlets stuck between my toes. I think this promotes healthy grass or something. I keep getting YouTube shorts advocating putting sand on your lawn.
The heat has broken, at least temporarily: I slept with the covers on last night, and wore a jumper with the sleeves rolled up at my desk today (plus shorts).
Plus look at this fun door I spotted at the Take It Easy Film Lab in Leeds

Summer Outdoors
Monday, 13 Jul 2026 8:25 pm

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library

by Michiko Aoyama
Published 2021 247 pages

Good — quaint. Sometimes it’s nice to read a book with little stakes and nice endings. People find themselves at inflection points in their lives and navigate those points with the help of books that nudge them in just the right direction. People open to new possibilities and opportunities, willing to do a little bit of openminded self-reflection.
I like the bit at the end about how society is just the connections between different people — and how characters from earlier and later in the story sort of wander by and through each other’s lives. I like anthologies like this. Good and comforting.
Friday, 3 Jul 2026 8:40 am

Ely

First time in Cambridgeshire. First proper time anyway. There’s a free car park in the middle of the city and on a Thursday night the people of town trek back and forth between their mk. II Skoda Fabia Combis and their wellness classes. There are a surprising number of wellness studios in Ely, and a surprising number of pubs also.
We walk up to the cathedral; a mixed group of parents and older folks dressed nicely but not formally mill on the cathedral green. Groups of lads in threes and fours jaunt by in full tuxedos. They’re students at one of the oldest schools in the world, apparently. A mother and her daughter dodge out of their way, and the mother says in an upperclass accent, “Keep your wits about or these men in black will get you.”
We get dinner at a Greene King pub. The burgers have that “flame broiled” smoky flavour. Ghyll begs for a morsel. Then we go across the street and nurse a slow one each at The Drayman’s Son. Sam reads Trivial Pursuit cards while I take pictures of the walls.
After dinner we wander up to have a look at the medieval motte & bailey but find that it is now a big wide open park and that the motte at the top has been fenced off after the council ran out of money to do more archaeology back in the early 2000s. A group of young people bounce a volleyball together below.
The road between Ely and our campsite is wonky with subsidence from the drained fens and our headlights carom all over the road with the wobbles and waves.

Summer Tourism