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Florian Gadsby makes pottery
A balm for my sour millennial soul: Florian Gadsby (a posh London name to match his posh London accent) makes beautiful handcrafted ceramics, and films much of it. He gently intones over close-ups of pottery wheels, he shoots with extremely short focal lengths, he pans nonchalantly over a shelves of visually-cohesive vases, bowls, mugs, and teapots. He wears French chore coats and heritage leather boots around his meticulously organised studio. At the end of this video, he makes his own tape.
His videos include all of the Millennial Aesthetic Greatest Hits—casual references to time spent in Japan, man buns, an appreciation for fine pens, premium prices, cRaFtSmAnShIp. If someone hit the Gen-Z talking points this well everyone on TikTok would think they were an industry plant. I'm so Here For It.
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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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T. S. Eliot on causes
for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
From T. S. Eliot on F. H. Bradley, via John Ganz
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New Hartley mine disaster
A coal mining accident took like the lives of 204 miners in New Hartley, north of Newcastle, in 1862. The massive cast iron beam of a steam engine used to pump water out of the depths of the mine (which extended out under the North Sea) snapped and fell into the open shaft of the Hester Pit, entombing the workers within. The men survived some time in the earth but succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning before rescuers reached them nearly a week later.
A record of the event, taken some years later, puts the aftermath in some admittedly florid but touching language:
On the 26th the last sad phase of this fearful tragedy was completed by the bodies being solemnly interred in the silent grave; and so great was the number of persons and vehicles composing the procession, that although Earsdon Church is four miles from New Hartley, the first rough hearse had arrived at the church before the last had left the colliery. The burial ground attached to the parish church at Earsdon was totally inadequate to the extraordinary requirements made upon it, and provision had consequently to be made outside the church-yard for nearly the whole of the bodies. The ground for the purpose was given by His Grace the Duke of Northumberland. After the bodies had been laid in the graves, there were sorrowing friends anxiously inquiring the exact spot at which were laid those for whom they mourned; and the tender flower and gloomy cypress, planted by the hand and watered with the tear of affection, will bloom there when the memory of those who sleep peacefully beneath shall have passed away from the earth.
Further reading
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Domain squatting
This. “It me,” or whatever. When I first started doing computer stuff I bought charlesharries.com from a scuzzy site that wouldn’t let me transfer it out, so I let it lapse and bought the (much more aesthetic but also much more difficult to say aloud to another person) charlesharri.es.
I’d intended to re-purchase the domain through a Reputable Domain Retailer but it got squatted immediately.
In the end I did get it back once whoever was squatting it realised that I have nearly zero authority on the web.
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