We don’t have a sink or a hob, but we do now have an oven and a microwave, which means that we can heat up food that can be cooked in the oven or microwave. It’s an improvement. It will be even better when we have running water.

I set up our thermostats and radiator sensors. I managed to do so without connecting them to the internet, and I set up Home Assistant integration that also works directly, without any interposed “cloud” nonsense. This was one of my criteria when choosing the system. It means that I can have some fairly sophisticated automation of temperature without depending on a third party, but it also means that it won’t all stop working if the company that made them loses interest.

Everyone was out to kill themselves or me on Thursday morning as I cycled to work:

  • A van driver raced round a blind corner, then had to emergency stop to avoid hitting me head on.
  • A car driver decided to drive through a red light straight at me as I was crossing the perpendicular road on a green phase.
  • A pedestrian, wearing a kind of fluffy deerstalker hat that obscured all peripheral vision, veered abruptly into the cycle path in front of me.
  • A few metres later, another pedestrian (hatless) did the same thing.

It’s enough to make one give credence to morphic resonance.

We had dinner at naïfs, a small vegan restaurant in Peckham. It was somewhere we’d wanted to go for a while, and it lived up to our expectations. Recommended.

I spent Friday afternoon at Tate Britain and saw a couple of exhibitions.

Sargent and Fashion, which featured both John Singer Sargent’s paintings and some of the garments featured in them, was beautiful, technically outstanding, but also left me unsettled at the opulence on display. The subjects were immensely rich, and the dresses expensive: one gown from 1880, by House of Worth, cost the equivalent of £25,000 today. These were the 1% at a time when the richest 1% owned over 60% of all property. (It’s about 20% today, which is still too much.)

Now You See Us: Women artists in Britain 1520-1920 is fantastic, and full of amazing works I hadn’t seen before. It’s infuriating to see how many talents were suppressed by misogyny over the centuries, and how many women were shut out by institutions, prohibited from painting by their husbands, or struggled to work as professionals because of their gender: in one particularly egregious example, Messenger Monsey responded to Mary Black’s striking portrait of him by refusing to pay her fee (itself half of what a man would have charged) and referring to her as a “slut” for requesting payment.

What do you call the study of meteors? Someone at lunch the other day said, “Meteorology is the study of the weather, isn’t it?” It is, but that made me ask, “If meteorology is the study of weather, what’s the study of meteors?”

The answer is meteoritics.

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