Monday was a bank holiday, the last one before the depressing stretch of uninterrupted holidayless months up to Christmas. The sun turned out for the occasion and L—’s brother came to visit with his toddler daughter.

She was initially so shy that she refused to come in, but after a bit of crying remembered that we weren’t strangers after all. She took delight in helping to post a letter on the way to the Bermondsey Carnival in Southwark Park, and enjoyed the trampolines and a couple of very sedate merry-go-rounds. Or is it merries-go-round? Don’t write in.

I had planned to work from Peckham Levels on Tuesday, but that plan was scuppered when I received a message telling me that the company that runs the building had gone into administration.

It wasn’t as apocalyptic as it sounds: Southwark Council, who own the building, have appointed a new company to manage it, and all the existing tenants and staff have been carried over, including Hatch where I rent a desk.

The previous operator have blamed the company’s failure on an Employment Tribunal decision that obliged them to pay £65 thousand to an employee they unfairly dismissed. My free advice is to avoid such unexpected costs by simply not treating staff unfairly. I hope she did receive the money.

I went in on Thursday for the day. I saw someone roaming the building taking meter readings, but other than that it seemed superficially back to normal.

Our new pane of glass was delivered and fitted into the trifold doors. When the old pane came out, it was immediately obvious why it had failed: there was a small chip on the edge, which had expanded into a larger crack under the thermal stress of direct sunlight. I suspect that the people installing it had chipped it but decided that, as the chip was hidden, it wouldn’t matter.

They were wrong.

With luck, that was the only hidden flaw.

We went to a friend’s poetry reading on Sunday. I had to rush off early, so I took my Brompton in order to have a quicker journey.

Unfortunately, I picked up a drawing pin in my tyre just as I arrived, so I had to leave earlier and take the bus instead, and the bus was unbearably hot, and it was hard work holding onto both the rail and my folded bike under constantly changing gravity while the driver demonstrated the acceleration and braking capabilities of the bus’s electric drivetrain.

The pin left three holes in the inner tube, which I discovered through a miserable and laborious process, one at a time. I could just have changed the inner tube, but taking off the wheel is a lot of faff. But then, so was unmounting, patching, and remounting the tyre three times.

Nonetheless, the poetry was good, the people very friendly, and almost all the food turned out to be vegan and delicious.

I left a battery on our table and it leaked and left a huge black mark on the wood and I’m extremely annoyed with myself.

Is it just my imagination, or are alkaline batteries made to a lower standard these days? They seem to leak much more readily.

I always wondered why my mobile phone pictures looked so terrible when zoomed in until I installed Open Camera and turned off the default “sharpening”, something not possible on the stock camera. Gone are the weird artefacts and glowing borders, and my photos now look like they were taken with a camera. Sharpening imposes hard edges where they should not be. It’s OK for things that aren’t in focus to be blurry!

This week’s links: