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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

The heat lets up with the setting of the sun, but, typically for this time of year, light lingers in the sky until late. It's my favourite time of day: light still enough to find one's path through a gate and across a field, but too dark to navigate safely among trees. The sky's a mottled grey overhead, distantly roiling with high-up wind. Rain spits and then relents. It doesn't last on the pavement.

The hills around me are dark and looming. The feeling is at once imposing and cozy. I don't know how else to explain it. I love to huddle down in the lee of a big dark hill, in the shadow of a mossy moorside as it gets darker and dimmer until it's nothing but a hulking silhouette against the sky. A while ago, Sam and I camped out on The Calf in the Howgills, deep down by an abandoned sheepfold in a pathless gully. I reckoned that no one would ever find us there by the beckside; and then lived to regret the long climb back up out of the gully in the morning.

I follow the dark road back towards the caravan park. I pass a door in a low wall, and a cemetery by a church with a spire, and a scarecrow with a white beard in a chair. I hold my phone in my hand so I can illuminate the torch if a car comes trundling past. By the gate leading back to the park, a pair of girls chatter and giggle and dive into a hedge. Ghyll barks at them.

There’s a dry, earthy, summery smell in the field. Clover mixed with dust stirred up on the hot breeze. Sun shining on clouds in the far distance, colossal in the haze. The grass on the side of the path looks a little languid.

On the way back I pause in the shade of an ash tree. A newish fence leads off on one side, and a series of weatherworn posts tied by barbed wire on the other. I can hear the A19 but I can’t see it. From where I’m standing it could be hundreds of years ago. Except that I’m picking up Ghyll’s poo using a biodegradable baggie, and sidestepping a corroded can of John Smith’s.

Last time.

I like dystopian science fiction, and I like books set near where I live. I see the Redcar wind farm pretty often and I think it looks awesome, and I love the idea that the North Sea is really not even that deep and it had humans living all over it not even that long ago: and so I thought I'd be primed to like Doggerland. But I didn't.

Because I don't like books that promise to go somewhere and then don't; I don't like books that pose questions like what happened to humanity or what happened to this guy's dad and refuse to even hint towards answers. I'm ok with you won't learn the truth but not learning the truth is the point; I don't like always going back to Infinite Jest but the whole point of Infinite Jest lies beyond the front and back covers of the book and it's still like my favourite book ever. Doggerland draws a lot of comparisons to The Road, which I wasn't a big fan of either.

I like straightforward prose, which Ben Smith does do a bunch of; but interspersed with the story there are short chapters describing how Doggerland was reflooded thousands of years ago, and these have all the hallmarks of bad AI writing, e.g.:

The only sound was the crackle of frozen mud and ice rind, which was the water, down to its very molecules, repeating its mantra: solidity is nothing but an interruption to continuous flow, an obstacle to be overcome, an imbalance to be rectified.

The ground is baked hard and the cars driving back and forth to the fishing pond kick up great clouds of dust. Fickle summer showers don't make much of a dent in the plate armour of the little trods round the field at the end of Moor Lane, but they do soak the clover and the grass and consequently my feet. Ghyll seems listless in the sunshine.

I learned what a "mackerel sky" is the other day, and then Ghyll and I saw one basically right away. Apparently they're harbingers of weather change? True to the lore, when I let Ghyll out for a wee right before bed, I found the paving in the backyard wet and muggy and warm, and I was transported instantly to the Club Med in Ixtapa, Zihuatanejo, and the warm, humid room where we stayed with the dew collecting on everything for a gecko's midnight tipple.

In the field, Ghyll bounds amid big heaps of clover, thick and dense and cream and pink. The bees are out, and the little gnats and flies that feed on pollen, and at one point Ghyll even chases a little brown butterfly.

On our walk yesterday Sam and I spent half an hour looking up trees on Google Lens, distinguishing alder from beech from elm from cherry. Now I notice that all of the cherry trees on Moor Lane look really raggedy, with holes chewed in their leaves and brown fringes and lichen caking their spindly branches. There are two tall sycamores overhanging the path, though, and the shade they cast in the lateday sun is delightful.