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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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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!
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Now
I haven’t done one of these in a while. Haven’t written much lately. I haven’t made time for it; it hasn’t felt important. I haven’t quite felt myself lately, and one of the first things that gets cut when I’m in Survival Mode is self-reflection (which is pretty much the whole point of this website). Also on that list: joy in music. When I find myself doomscrolling through my music library I know that I’m having Another One of Those Days.
I suspect it’s the time of year. I get terrible hay fever in the fall (or, I don’t know, generic hay-fever-adjacent sinusitis), and this year has been worse than usual. Since the clocks have gone back, we only get about an hour of useable sunlight during the day — from noon onwards the sun is still technically present but its attention is elsewhere.
It occurs to me that I never wrote about the Loch Ness Marathon, which I ran at the end of September. It was a stunning day in a stunning part of the country. But the wheels came off just after the halfway mark, and I hobbled the second half at a walking pace.
It helps to try running interesting places... 
...and ensure as many runs as possible end with a pint Since then I just haven’t had much motivation. My running history has perhaps overindexed on Long & Slow runs, so I’ve been working on speed in an attempt to shake something loose. My running form has improved a bit, and I put up a good showing at the Brampton to Carlisle 10 mile race a couple weeks ago. I like that distance, and I like the carbo-loading pretext for scarfing an entire box of flapjack at once.
Still working towards a 20-minute 5k before the end of the year.
Around the house we’ve been checking more jobs off the list, with the goal of starting 2025 with a fresh slate. Our latest: there are now nice plush carpet runners on the stairs, replacing some awful tatty beige stuff that the house was assembled with back in 2008 or so. In a year of tiling, wallpapering, and carpeting, I like carpeting the best: it’s relatively tidy work and you can mask a lack of experience with a surfeit of staples. would carpet again.
The gaffer admires the handiwork 
John's Cafe as it is now... 
...and as it was For Sam’s birthday the other week, we both took some time off and enjoyed ourselves in the (admittedly meagre) sunlight while the rest of the world toiled at their desks. We went to a fancy breakfast in Durham with the retirees and the posh students, then took a tour of the Cathedral (no tower climb, unfortunately—under renovation) and castle buildings. We spent a day at Beamish and visited the new 1950s town; John’s Café is now open after having languished here on Wingate Front Street for years.
At the end of the week we made a chilly trip to the Lake District for a run with Ghyll across a couple peaks of the Helvellyn ridge. Clouds rolled in on us along the very tops, but on the hillsides we had wonderful solitary views over Grasmere.
I’ve just returned from a walk with Ghyll. It has been dark for hours (approximately 5) and the thermometer has dropped sufficiently that puddles are freezing over. In the field near our house Ghyll sauntered into the dark, from whence little crunching noises emerged at intervals as he wandered around in the tall, frozen grass. When we got home I had dinner and he curled up on the sofa.
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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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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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