Week 834

 

This is a "weeknote": it is week 834 of this blog, and it has been such a long time that this post will surely have no readers. Hello.

• We went on holiday to Islay and Jura, both of which are beautiful. Great landscapes, beaches, variable weather. Every car that you drive past waves at you, which is charming. There was an entire skeleton of a dolphin on one beach.
• I read Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom on holiday: autocratic gov't decides that the way to fix the populace’s fighty and unproductive nature is to split the country into four along ley lines, and move the population around so that each of the four quarters contain just one type of people, the four types being medieval humours (choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine, melancholic). Slightly hallucinatory and good.
• One night there was an island-wide power cut. No power, cooking, light, heat, mobile signal or water because the house's water is pumped from a private borehole. We had wind-up torches but there was some Brexpocalyptic teeth-gnashing and I have started browsing Amazon for a diesel generator and a camouflaged bandanna.
• Giles is listening to 1001 albums. This reminded me of a story from my time at Football365/Music365 back in the mists of 199x. To celebrate the millennium they decided they'd review 2000 albums for the year 2000. It was a massive undertaking: they signed up loads of music journos to write reviews for months, and then wouldn't let us place the content in a content publishing platform so we hand built a massive website to contain all of these excellent album reviews. It was good work. It also suddenly disappeared when a server got switched off, probably when the 365 group was sold to Sky a couple of years later. I sometimes think about all of that human effort sitting on a rusting hard disk in the middle layers of a landfill somewhere.
• Zig and Zag came home from the pet shop with two (2) gerbils. Tupac and Biggie were firmly rejected as names. They are currently called Smudge and Dusky, though this may change.

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[Ben]

Evening.