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Now: 3 February - 9 February 2025
Led a lesson on space at Scouts on Tuesday; was very nervous leading up to it but it turned swimmingly. With a little guidance kids will basically teach themselves, it feels like. Maybe it’s just the good kind of kids that go to Scouts.
On Wednesday night I was feeling a little peckish so I made an entire bag of sugarfree cookie dough mix. The cookies tasted like chemicals and the sugar simulate made my insides roil. At least the mix is no longer in the cupboard, tempting me.
I got a new pair of running shoes at the end of last week, and spent this week breaking them in. Road shoes! Not to be found on my Footwear Bingo card for 2025. I took them out for a long run at the weekend as a sort of dress rehearsal for an upcoming marathon and was pleasantly surprised. The Shoe Industry will make a conventional runner of me yet.
Spent the rest of the weekend eating—first a Jamaican takeaway (from Easington of all places!) and then a homemade barbecue out of the 4 Rivers cookbook. I consider a ruined baking tin a small price to pay for better pork than most British people will eat in their entire lives.
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Now: 27 January - 2 February 2025
This year is quickly turning into a series of weekends where I do fun stuff and weekdays where I sit around and try to stay on top of everything else.
We spent the better part of our free time during the week watching Severance, which puts us in the one-half of the world who only started watching after Apple did a big marketing offensive, including a weird bit where Tim Cook pretends to have been severed and stares blankly into the middle distance, as if he’s not one of the wax figurines in the Perpetuity Wing. I really like Severance. I like shows where the audience gets to hold a bunch of narrative strands together and work to remember which characters know what. And they told me that I wouldn’t need to remember what dramatic irony is!
I also started listening to a new podcast called “Never Post” (should podcasts be quoted, or italicised?); it’s “about the internet”, which is what it feels like maybe 1 in 3 new podcasts in 2024 is about. Anyway this week’s episode about Cameo (the App) and some navel-gazing about cameras but had this interval in the middle about TikTok going down for like three hours that gave me chills. I try not to get involved in moral panics but listening to all these young folks being like, “keep scrolling—don’t eat don’t sleep just keep scrolling,” and “I refuse to read my posts—I’m not going to rewire my brain to read,” spooked me pretty bad. Lots of pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net good, and a few pundits out there seem to think that TikTok is a net bad—and for my part I think about TikTok nearly not at all—but I’m the teensiest bit concerned that shortform video seems to have replaced media as a monolith for a whole demographic cohort, and that this demographic cohort is about to inherit the earth while I continue to lose relevance. Ehhhhh
At the weekend I replaced the spark plugs in the Skoda in the hope that it would resolve our dwindling fuel economy woes (ChatGPT told me to—how’s that for a moral panic!). It didn’t. But I did find that the outgoing spark plugs were wildly overgapped, so I must have fixed something, right? Anyway ChatGPT says that the next thing I need to learn to replace are the O2 sensors pre- and post-catalytic converter.
Then on Sunday we dropped in to Durham to buy a pair of road running (!) shoes ahead of the Boston Marathon (not that one) in April. I’ve never had a pair of road shoes but I’m keen to see how I get on.
Then we went up to South Shields for the Temple Park cross-country running fixture. It was a really lovely day and not too tough going. There were a couple of steeplechase-style puddles to splodge through, which roused the spirit and got me good and clarty, and maybe even got some dirt in my competitors’ eyes. Finally breaking my Dry January Alcoholic Fast the night before probably didn’t do me any favours, but I finished in decent time.
Very few pictures this week; I should have taken pictures at Temple Park or while changing the spark plugs—but I didn’t!
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Now: 20 - 26 January 2025
The weather got a little warmer, then a little cold again, and then very windy.
I’ve started properly training for my marathon in April, a sort of comeback after my semi-spectacular bonk at Loch Ness last year. I think I’d forgotten quite how much running marathon training entails. Whereas I spent most of January and February last year nursing sore knees in the leadup to the Fellsman, and whereas I did most of my running in the dark after work, this year I think I’ve finally developed a habit of waking up for a run before work. Getting out of a warm bed is a high hurdle to clear, but on the flip side I do get to see the sunrise most days.
This picture was taken at 17:30! And there's still some light in the sky! Storm Éowyn blew in towards the end of the week. Sam had planned a solo trip to the bothy in Northumberland and by god she was going, weather or no. She had a cozy evening but woke up to find that a number of trees in Kielder had fallen across the road out of the forest, so she wandered down to the nearest farm and took shelter while another farmer fought his way into the forest with a chainsaw. Everyone made it out in the end (except for the trees).
Down our end, the storm raised a righteous clatter but was otherwise pretty toothless. I did find a wayward shed in the middle of the back lane on Saturday morning, but someone had cleared it away by the time I got back. And on Sunday I found some downed power lines on what I thought was a pretty busy section of footpath—though when I reported it to Northern Powergrid a couple of hours later it sounded like it was the first they’d heard of it.
After my Sunday run I went downstairs to fettle the underfloor heating once and for all, and found that there is a leak to earth somewhere on the circuit! I’m holding out a meagre hope that this is simply due to a carpeting staple somewhere on the stairs, because if the leak is under the tile floor somewhere, we’re basically SOL. I sulked about it for little while on Sunday afternoon and then went to bed at 19:30 and slept for ten and a half hours.
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Now: 13-19 January 2025
Quiet week, settling into the new year.
On Monday, I don’t think I really did much of anything.
On Tuesday, same. I sat by the window in the morning and tried to soak up a little bit of sunshine.
On Wednesday, I listened to an episode of Ezra Koenig’s podcast Time Crisis where he interviews Phil Elverum. I like Vampire Weekend and I like The Microphones/Mount Eerie (like every other millennial white guy) but holy smokes was this a rough listen. I think that maybe this whole podcast is just an opportunity for Ezra Koenig to cosplay as Joe Rogan? And maybe to try and get his foot in the door on these “parasocial relationship” things that everyone is talking about? I only got through the first, uh, 45 minutes of like a 2-hour show; it was 45 minutes of three guys trying to prove that each knew more footballers’ names than the other two. This is the masculinity crisis manifest!
On Thursday I rode my bike in to Durham to get the train down to Leeds for work in the office. I really like going in to the office and seeing all of my coworkers in person, but by bike it winds up being like a 2.5-hour commute each way, which isn’t sustainable. The weather was brisk but coöperative.
On Friday, the quick link on my bike chain failed out of nowhere. I said a quiet prayer of thanks for not getting stranded in frickin Sherburn Hill at 1am.
Also on Friday (morning), I realised that I forgot my computer charger, a big, unwieldy, 170W brick with two thick leads coming out of each end, at the office, so—
On Saturday, Sam, Ghyll and I made a day trip back down to Leeds on Saturday. We meandered around the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey and then went for a long walk along the Leeds & Liverpool Canal. Lots of narrowboats lined up in a little, well, if it were a railway or a road I’d call it a layby. Like a canal layby. Then we stopped in at the Leeds Industrial Museum, housed in a big old woollen mill and decked out with all of the Victorian-era gins and looms and mules that would have made that place a real cacophony a hundred years ago. There were little placards alongside some of these machines with testimonials from the workers, all of whom seemed to be among the most miserable humans ever to walk the Earth. It makes me wonder what life will be like a hundred years from now: whether they’ll gawk at all of the horrible facets of our own lives, like having to brush our teeth or get colonoscopies or exercise.
On Sunday I slept in, did the groceries, pottered about the house, and then did not write this blog post.
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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.
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