• Friday, 23 Feb 2024 11:00 pm

  Spain: Friday

  I sleep in and wake disoriented. Sam has gotten up before me and has started opening all of the windows in the house, to help clear the air, and the whole place feels preternaturally bright. I retreat to the dark bedroom and and re-emerge to use the toilet with sunglasses on.

  The daylight amplifies the sense of isolation. The town of Los Montesinos sits quiet down the shallow slope below the house, a tight cluster of whitish buildings devoid of sound or movement. A broad salt lagoon, popular among tourists for its pink water, lies beyond in the low basin between Los Montesinos and Torrevieja on the coast. Fields on fields of citrus trees—Valencia oranges and lemons—make a patchwork with empty fields and crusty scrubland. A light wind tugs at a pair of palm trees down the street. Their shh-ing sounds distantly like waves.

  We drive down into Los Montesinos for breakfast and park up next to an mechanic's garage. The mechanic inside is working on an 80s-vintage BMW; an old MG and a Ford hatchback stand nearby. A much higher proportion of cars on the road, we've noticed, are 20+ years old. Apparently Spanish drivers don't get rid of cars as readily as their British counterparts. Cars don't rust in Spain's dry, warm climate; rubber and plastic parts are consumable anyway. A Mercedes from the 70s trundles by behind us, clattering loudly over a raised pedestrian crossing, trailed by two men on carbon bicycles, wearing lycra and aerodynamic helmets.

  We sidestep a tumbleweed and meander down to the town square.

  

  A handful of people mill about in puffy vests and sweaters and canvas trousers. I wonder if I stand out as a tourist for thinking that 20°C is shorts weather. Around the borders of the square are a number of basically-indistinguishable cafes, with cerveza-branded seating under plastic awnings, and patronised by the same group of four cockney septuagenarians. We choose a cafe with elaborate Valentine's Day decorations, and I order in Spanish when the waiter comes by. I feel extremely proud of myself when the waiter returns to deliver our huevos revueltos and tostada tomate in total silence. Job dispatched, he retires to the shady side of the patio for a smoke. I eye my coffee, a cortado that I've ordered on the advice of a coworker. I don't know if this is one of those coffees that you shoot all at once, Italian-style, or sip delicately, Italian-style. I drink it down in two gulps.

  ---

  After breakfast we decide to head into Torrevieja, a salt mining town turned haven for expats. We leave the car by a park in the suburbs and walk into town. The sidewalks are paved with slick patterned tiles, which seems indulgent, but also dangerous during the rainy season.

  

  

  Low villas give way to a mix of midrise apartments and shuttered businesses as we near the city centre, coming eventually to a large square (plaza?) abutting an impressive-looking church. The square, somewhat predictably, is lined with cafe-bars patronised by groups of elderly expats—and, incongruously, a single elderly Spaniard struggling with the misfortune of being downwind of a cockney septuagenarian's high-calibre vape.

  

  Weary and bedraggled after a solid 20 minutes on our feet, we find a table in the shade and order: two beers, two individually-plastic-wrapped magdalenas, and a ham toastie. Then two more beers. We sit and listen to the wind and Sam takes a couple of pictures of me in which I appear to be unable to make anything better than a grimace of pain. Sam by contrast oozes sprezzatura.

  

  

  Glasses empty and plates clean, we pay and continue to make our way down to the waterfront. I can't remember ever seeing the Mediterranean before, but I'm pretty sure I have. The water is surprisingly clear and the marina is full of sailboats with tall clattering masts.

  

  

  We turn and walk down a boulevard lined with palm trees and shuttered stalls: most of them open, I assume, only during the high season. A single stall open for business at the end of the rank sells enormous bottlecaps decorated with logos and slogans, e.g. "You'll never walk alone" and the crest of Liverpool F.C. I'm not sure what the purpose of these are, nor the kind of person who buys them. We head back to the car.

  ---

  Sam naps while I go for a short run in the afternoon. I follow some very new cycle paths along well-paved roads between the fields. I pass an empty reservoir sitting in an empty field, and then a full reservoir surrounded by orange trees. Tall fences on all sides keep would-be citrus thieves at bay. A pair of men lounge in the back of a box truck. They look at me and I try to say buenas tardes but it comes out of my sticky mouth as mostly th-sounds. I run on.

  

  

  The sides of the road are lined with spiny little grasses and construction detritus: individual gloves, fragments of concrete block, plastic bottles, tubing, rubble sacks, metal sheeting, paint cans. The fields are mostly rock and hard dirt. I wonder idly how anything grows. An old Seat sedan trundles past, ramping a nearby raised pedestrian crossing at speed. The suspension groans audibly and the back of the car bounces into the distance. A bit later, two cyclists whoosh by in silence.

  On my return to the house, a British man wanders by and lets me know that we've left our car door open. Forewarned that the neighbours are a bit nosey, I introduce myself and namedrop Sam's dad and his partner. The man seems placated and wanders on with his little dog. I head up to the rooftop to get 7.5 minutes of sun on each side of my body.

  ---

  

  In the evening we drive out to a fancy restaurant called Kinita on the coast for our anniversary dinner. The restaurant is at the far end of a holiday park—which is the European term for a nice RV park—on a narrow strip of land between an airport and a shallow saltwater lagoon. This doesn't sound like a recipe for a fancy dinner, but the restaurant is stunning. The waiter recommends a red wine to go with our meals and we can both tell immediately that it's one of those wines that you don't find (easily) in the shops. We have a lovely time.

  After dinner we wander out onto the empty beach. The moon's big and casts shadows. We walk out to the end of a jetty and sit in the dark and listen to fish leap out in the clear black water.

  Spain '24

• ---

  Thursday, 22 Feb 2024 11:00 pm

  Spain: Thursday

  There is, to my eye, not a single Spanish soul in the queue for the Ryanair flight that will take us from gloomy Teesside to sunny Alicante on a Thursday late in February. I'm used to flights with a bit of give-and-take: flights out of Orlando a hodgepodge of Europeans on their way home from a manic five days at Disney World rubbing shoulders with Americans en route to Dublin or Edinburgh or Berlin or wherever they claim they're "from" via some great-ancestor whose name they don't know.

  This is not that: all hundred and twenty some-odd souls aboard are pastywhite, sneaking drags on vapes hidden in their sleeves, sporting sparkly sandals and neck tattoos and the cheery lassitude of someone who's just finished their third £6.50 San Miguel at the airport bar. The overhead display indicates that our plane will depart at 16:05, but it's now 16:25 and FlightRadar24 indicates that the plane that will take us to Alicante is somewhere above Sheffield. Somehow we've all been duped into queueing for boarding.

  

  The plane arrives, by and by, and the overworked Ryanair staff turn it around for us in record time. Ryanair has situated Sam and I in separate rows, middle seats both, as punishment for not purchasing some kind of aviation lootbox. As soon as I sit down, the chap next to me leans in close and asks if I'm going on holiday. I tell him I am. He explains that he's going on a holiday-on-a-holiday, which he explains is a bureaucratic requirement of his employment on a Mediterranean cruise liner. I tell him that I suppose he must get to take lots of holidays-on-holidays all over the Mediterranean. He tells me that not really. Then he tells me that he's got Avatar downloaded on his iPad Pro, and that this flight is going to be a breeze. I assume he's talking about the recent Jim Cameron flick and I tell him that it's supposed to be a real beauty of a movie. He doesn't really respond, but proceeds to put on M. Night Shyamalan's critically-panned 2010 live-action The Last Airbender. We don't talk any more after that.

  Sam texts me that the aisle seat next to her remains unoccupied after the cabin doors are shut, so as soon as we breach 10,000 feet and the Fasten Seatbelt sign is extinguished, I hightail it.

  ---

  The Spanish immigration officer speaks at extremely high velocity with his coworker and barely looks at me when I hand him my passport. He stamps it and hands it back, and when I say gracias to him, the returned gracias is barely distinguishable from the surrounding logorrhoea.

  Later, in the multistory car park, the lady at Budget tries to upsell us on automatic rental car. We've just walked past a row of fifteen gleaming Fiat 500s and tell her that we want the smallest, most economical car they've got. We get a Hyundai crossover. It's fine. It has nearly zero torque and all of the controls feel like they're conveyed through a council of algorithms that determine whether or not to increase speed, shift gears, turn corners, etc. At seemingly random points on the highway, Lane Assist will subtly try to direct me into the centre of the lane, which is frustrating e.g. on bends or near a big truck; disabling this setting only works until the car is turned off, at which point Lane Assist is re-enabled.

  When we arrive in Los Montesinos, the night is cool and clear and the town is almost totally empty. Opposite and a little ways down the slope from the house are a row of derelict holiday homes; beyond them, a dusty little park and a farm compound in the midst of a field of lemon trees. Dim streetlights trace the roads down into the town and to the highway beyond, where a modified car's distant whine is the only indication of life to be found. Far off in the distance, more lights in geometric patterns reveal the city of Torrevieja on the Mediterranean coast. Dark cragged forms on the horizon indicate isolated mountain ranges of indeterminate size. Southern Spain is much hillier than I'd thought.

  Unwilling to contemplate the logistics of dinner as midnight approaches, we both agree on the nearest available fast food, which turns out to be a Burger King. We're pleased to find that Burger King is exactly the same in Spain as it is in the UK. The big panels for ordering even come in English. We eat our food in the car park. A cat wanders out of the brush, eyes us with disinterest, and wanders off through a gap in a fence. We finish our food and negotiate a call with Sam's dad, who is following our progress with keen interest using the Find My app. He asks if we're at Burger King. When I respond in the affirmative he tells me that he saw that we used the service road to get down. It's hellish, isn't it? he asks. I agree that it's hellish, but it's midnight and I couldn't see nearly enough to determine its hellishness.

  Spain '24

• ---

  Sunday, 31 Dec 2023 11:58 pm

  2023

  In my review of 2022, I gave a whole section to the downtime that I spent "scrolling on algorithmically-generated feeds", kicking myself gently for wasting time. I think I called it "futzing". Late in the year, though, my main algorithmically-generated feed (viz Twitter) got nuked and I stopped using it. I joined Mastodon and I enjoy catching up with the meta at intervals, but my interest in the latest & greatest in web browser technology seems to have evaporated with my Twitter usage.

  The result being that 2023 has been a very busy year.

  

  Writing

  Let's start off with this blog itself. I wrote 117 entries—posts, book reports, walks/runs. I struggled, last year, with the direction to take this blog; did I want to be a poster of tech takes? Did I have anything worthwhile to say about design? Did I just want to share fun stuff I found on the web (and with whom)?

  I decided that I was mostly writing for myself and resolved to write down just what's going on with me. I'm egregiously forgetful, so I've turned this website into a sort of light public journal, jotting down things that I've done, things I've thought about more than a couple times, things too good to forget.

  I dropped the monthly review format early in the year in favour of shorter, more frequent posts—if I'd have included an event in a monthly or weekly review, I write an independent post instead. The beginning of the year was also a bit lighter on writing, mostly because...

  I broke my hand

  ...on Collier Law, early in March, on some ice. This was a pain. I do a very poor job of appreciating quite how well by body works most of the time, but I hope that I do a slightly less poor job now that I've been deprived of my right hand for a month. I wrote about the nitty-gritty, picking at the keys with my free index finger, back in March.

  After the cast came off, I had quite a bit of pain and stiffness in my hand, but I was told I'd healed well and could get back to regular activities with a bit of care and regular stretching. Other than a couple of ill-advised handshakes, the rest of the year has passed without incident.

  Outdoors

  Hand newly freed, I laced my running shoes back up and Got Serious. After reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Murakami at the end of last year, I started running with purpose, which is to say, more frequently. Something about it clicked with me this time (as opposed to all of the other times I tried to start running Seriously), and I've been running pretty consistently ever since.

  

  I joined a running club midsummer to help meet other folks who run, and it's been a pretty much unalloyed success. Running with others is tremendously motivating. The performance boost you get while running a race is present, to a degree, when you're just running at a track with 20 other people.

  It's not all track sessions and group headtorch runs, though: being involved in a club has encouraged me to get out for races a little bit more often, as well. I'm still solidly midpack, but my position at the North East Harrier League cross-country fixtures has been slowly improving. I'm faster than I was this time last year, which is progress.

  Beyond running, I completed two sprint triathlons, which sorta counts towards this year's goal of completing an Olympic-length one. I hadn't been properly swimming in years before training, but I got up to speed with open water quickly enough and finished both in respectable, if not stellar, times.

  

  I also spent plenty of time on my bicycle, buying a secondhand touring bike to ride the C2C from Whitehaven on the west coast to Tynemouth on the east with a buddy of mine. Not much riding in the latter part of the year, though, which feels like a shame. I'll have to turn that around in 2024.

  Travel

  Triathlon training was punctuated by a short trip back to the United States for a good friend's wedding in South Carolina, and Sam and I took the opportunity to do a bit of a tour of the southeast and to visit family in Florida. The wedding was beautiful and it was fantastic to spend time with old friends; I'm always heartened by how quickly we can fall back into step with people we haven't seen for years. What a gift to be able to see family twice in one year, as well—although I'd forgotten quite how hot it can get over there, even in May. As a bonus, Sam and I got to see big stretches of the Georgian interior, staying at a couple of campsites and driving miles and miles of old highways. What a funky part of the world.

  Other highlights from earlier in the year: a couple of weekends spent with Ghyll and friends up at Polmood, finally climbing down into the Devil's Beef Tub wherein we found a rusty old overturned VW van from a road incident years and years ago; a visit to Alton Towers on a slightly damp day off work in September.

  After I'd gotten the triathlons over & done with, we thought it was time for a bit of a break, so we took advantage of cheap flights after school got back underway for a trip to Stockholm. I wrote plenty about it elsewhere on the blog, but my takeaway is that Sweden's just a terrific country. I'd like to go back.

  Ghyll

  On return our return from Sweden, we brought Ghyll in for his appointment to be fixed, and in the veterinarian's waiting room he clipped his tail on something and split it open. Blood everywhere. The vets informed us that, being the cheery, tail-waggy kind of dog that he is, it was unlikely to heal; the advised procedure was to amputate the injured bit and stitch up the remaining like 85% of his tail.

  This worked well—until it didn't: Ghyll tore off the bandage and pulled out his sutures, and had to be brought back to the vet to amputate most of the rest of his tail.

  

  Having most of your tail removed is a traumatising experience for a dog, and Ghyll didn't take it very well. He kept tearing his bandages off and trying to get at it; he'd tear it up, spinning and spinning for hours trying to reach it. He was put on a pretty tough course of medication to help it heal and ease the pain; meanwhile, Sam and I (mostly Sam) traded off sleeping downstairs to prevent him from chewing on it through the night. It was an exhausting ordeal.

  By and by, though, it got better; he's generally back to his old self now. He sleeps through the night without us, he doesn't chase his tail (too much), he bounds about and gets into mischief. He still makes fast friends at doggy daycare. He's maybe a bit too free with climbing on people for affection and attention, and his recall is gone: calling his name prompts him to look up, take note, and wander off. But he's a good dog.

  

  At home

  Ghyll's recovery coincided with the boiler conking out just as the weather started to turn cold. Given that it's the time of year when boilers conk out across the country, we could only get someone in to mend the situation after a week or so. The country conveniently suffered a cold snap during that very week—so we were chilly indeed, overcoming only by sheer grit and the combined warmth of three or four sweaters worn simultaneously.

  We'd originally wanted to have an electric boiler installed, but the cost of electricity is still prohibitive. It feels quaintly backwards to have a new gas boiler installed instead—but it heats up water and it doesn't break the bank, and we try to use it judiciously.

  Elsewhere in the house, we had new oak doors installed, and we've torn out the downstairs bathroom for a proper DIY makeover. That's, uh, a work in progress.

  Loss

  Late in the year, Sam's grandma Alwyn died. She'd been ill for for some time, and at nearly 94 years old had seen more of the world go by than almost anyone who ever lived. She was the head of the family and a pillar of the church at St. Luke's, and she's missed every day.

  Stray observations

  Here's a handful of other things that happened this year but that don't deserve their own sections:

  • Vroom vroom | Cars came & went: we traded our Volvo C30 for a much more practical Skoda Fabia station wagon in February: it's been great but it needs a brake service. Midyear Sam decided that it was becoming impractical to keep her Renault Clio around any longer, as rust ate it from various corners; this was an emotional one as it was her first car and a source of solace in difficult times. She'd wanted a classic car for a while, so late in the year we bought an old Porsche 924 for a reasonable price; it's been an exciting car to drive but requires a certain amount of finessing given its age.
  • Sleep | In my 20s, I could get by on six or seven hours of sleep a night. I'd yawn through the day but I'd be fundamentally OK. Since the pandemic, though, I've struggled to get myself out of bed after less than 8 uninterrupted hours, ideally closer to 9. I don't know how much of this is attributable to age, how much to overextending myself, how much to general malaise. I'm trying not to think too much about it, but the concept of missing like an extra 8 hours of wakefulness each week weighs on me a tiny bit.
  • The year of AI | In 2023 people got very into the idea of AI, and some people even got it to do useful stuff. I did neither, though I'm dimly interested in how it all works. I watched a couple of Andrej Karpathy videos about gradient descent, I followed half a guide to turning your iMessage history into a group chatbot, I installed Whisper locally and had it transcribe a couple of voice memos. The problems I have regularly, unfortunately, don't seem to overlap with the problems that AI purports to solve.
  • Spending | We've been unreasonably spendy since Sam got a job in the last third of the year. I think it's probably the giddiness of having bigger numbers in our current account—but it's still something we'd like to rein in.
  • Chess | I am, somewhat famously, remarkably bad at chess. But I've always been interested in it; I like how the game demands total focus. Watching Sebastian Lague's chess programming tournament at the end of the year rekindled my desire to actually play, so I've got a Lichess account and an ELO that can, in very literal sense, only go up.

  

  

  Reading

  I'm three for three in achieving reading goals: 20 in 2021, 26 in 2022, and 36 in 2023. I started tracking my reading on Goodreads this year in an undirected attempt to introduce a social aspect to reading, but I'm not sure whether I've gotten anything out of it. Probably not going to post over there in 2024. It's just overhead.

  After discovering that my reading list for 2022 was egregiously weighted in favour of men, I tried to do a better job balancing things out this year. Of this year's 36 books, 19 were written by women—which is better! Not best, but better than last year. 11 were nonfiction, 26 fiction. I don't know if I'm bothered too much about that balance.

  Some standouts, in no particular order:

  • The Idiot and Either/Or by Elif Batuman | A fantastic look into the head of the terminally self-aware as she discovers what kind of person she wants to be during her first couple years at Harvard University.
  • JR by William Gaddis | Dense and experimental but never uninteresting, life and information coming at you hard and fast, unpredictably apt in the age of the internet.
  • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin | A book about video games for people who don't play video games, about love in a nontraditional sense, about work and play and making stuff.
  • U.S.A. by John Dos Passos | Maybe the longest book I've ever read, a tremendously dense and politically charged account of the state of the USA in the years leading up to, during, and after WWI. Too bad about Dos Passos's politics later in life.
  • Ducks by Kate Beaton | An account of Kate Beaton's stint of work in the oilfields of central Canada, about the toll that working on the sands takes on people—especially women. Soul-crushing but leavened with Beaton's characteristic awkward humour. Probably the best book I read all year.

  Work

  I used to write a lot about work, but I don't anymore. Partly it's because I feel a duty not to reveal too much about the infrastructure underpinning public health in the UK, and partly it's because it's a job, and the changes it effects in the world are nearly-imperceptible, and there are countless other people doing the same thing, and there's just not that much to say.

  And partly it's because I've sort of gone off the constant grind, gone off trying to keep up with the latest developments in the browser. In retrospect, getting up to speed with programming was exhausting: constantly listening to podcasts or running tutorials or lurking on Twitter or sifting through repositories on GitHub was a lot. Leaving Twitter helped make a clean break, and if there's one thing that I've learned about trends on the web, it's that long-term, responsible approaches to building for the web don't leave people behind. I can catch up once a year and still build performant, accessible websites.

  

  So here we are

  It's the last day of the year. It's dark outside; it's been dark outside for hours. We spent the day tiling in the kitchen; tomorrow we'll apply grout and caulk. Sam's been downstairs working on the bathroom. The rain's stopped briefly; it rains pretty much constantly at this time of year.

  I've decided not to set any goals or resolutions this year. I'll come up with goals as I go, and I'll probably write about them proudly at the end of next year. Ghyll needs to be taken for a walk so I'm going to go get my headlamp and my jacket and Sam and I will go take him down the beach or something. See you in 2024.

  

  Year in Review

• ---

  Friday, 20 Oct 2023 6:32 pm

  Classy Bear

  When we lived in Japan, Sam used to collect these mugs that would show up every now and again at recycle shops (that is to say, secondhand shops) with a little painting of a teddy bear in Ivy League-style outfits, labeled The World of Classy Bear. All of the mugs had a little trademark at the bottom indicating that the eponymous Classy Bear was the property of Takara, a Japanese toy company that I remember from ads growing up.

  

  The mugs (and other associated crockery) seems to be relatively available on eBay, where they fetch decent prices.

  Anyway, we've still got the mugs, so imagine our surprise when we spotted Classy Bear—unmistakably Classy Bear—on a £180 t-shirt at Gatwick Airport, labelled (rather unimaginatively if you ask me) "Polo Bear by Ralph Lauren".

  

  Who the heck is Polo Bear?

  Japan

• ---

  Monday, 16 Oct 2023 9:25 pm

  Stockholm kanelbulle ranking

  I've made no secret of my abiding love for Sweden's kanelbulle, and while we were in Stockholm this fall I just about gorged myself. But even in the throes of cinnamon joy, I managed to jot some quick notes on the bullar that passed my way; here they are, presented in order of best to worst.

  Note that even the very most abysmal kanelbullar, are, by British standards, still pretty good. Kanelbullar are, like pizza and pancakes, still good even when they're bad.

  Skansen

  

  Skansen makes kanelbullar the way that kanelbullar want to be made: tied in a knot, dense and chewy, tall, a little stocky, with plenty of flavour and just the right amount of pearl sugar on top. Magnificent.

  Under Kastanjen

  

  Not quite enough sugar on this one, but the flavour was there, and the shape was right. Maybe a bit more crust than I'd like but the perfect texture on the inside. Absolutely marvellous with a coffee: an excellent fika bulle.

  Skeppsbro bageri

  

  I expected much worse from such a touristy spot, but Skeppsbro knows their bullar! Plenty of character forgives this one its flatness. Sticky, super-dense, with a heaping helpful of cinnamon. An ideal bulle for Americans.

  Thelins

  

  A respectable bulle. Very light on the inside—almost a cake. Delicate flavours as well. Feels like it was made by a French person. That's not a bad thing, but it's not quite what I'm looking for.

  Bageriet Kringlan

  I regrettably forgot to take a picture of this one. To be fair it was pretty much middle of the road. Not a ton of character, no real flaws, went well with coffee.

  Bröd & Salt

  

  Surprising amount of cardamom in this one. Cardamom bullar are a thing on their own, but I can appreciate a bit of experimentation. Maybe a bit too much cardamom, though. And not enough pearl sugar. I think there was more sugar on others in the display—maybe I just had bad luck of the draw.

  Gateau

  

  Points for its novel shape, but this was an otherwise unexceptional bulle. Picked up in a hurry at the train station on the way to the airport.

  Pressbyrån

  We are now proceeding into the realm of the not good kanelbullar. Pressbyrån is a convenience store and this was a convenience-store-grade bulle. Dry, a little stale, not particularly flavourful. I neglected to take a picture of this one either, so bland was it.

  Airport

  

  This was mostly a formality. Dry, light, cake-ish. The only thing to recommend it is the correct shape and the generous helping of pearl sugar.

  Lidl

  

  Lidl is perhaps famous in the UK for its bakery section, but it did not fare well in the bulle ranking. You can tell from this picture how dry and flavourless it is. Using the conventional spiral shape helps, perhaps, in cranking out prodigious numbers of these things to ship out to grocery stores nationwide, but it does not recommend them to me.

  7-Eleven

  

  Not a bulle, and neither particularly nice to look at nor to eat. The guy who sold it to me called me maestro, though, and that was a lot of fun.

  Sweden Food

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