Archive: 2026
Week 270: Foot soldiers of Yankee tech imperialism
It’s hard to focus on work sometimes when there’s so much war going on. It’s not helped when the end of our fixed mortgage term is coming up and we have to remortgage while the future is complete chaos. I did some work with spreadsheets trying to work out what the various deals will actually cost us, what the effective cost is when you count in any upfront fee, and how they work out with overpayments.
Week 269: The bombings will continue until peace improves
It’s been so long since I last went to Shoreditch that I had to think about my way around from the station. I was on my way to the Strongroom to see Mount Forel play live in the UK for the first time in nearly a year. I only caught a bit of Interlaken’s set before, but they sounded pretty good and I wish I’d heard more.
Week 268: Suspension of disbelief
The week started badly: I opened my laptop for a 9am meeting only for it to run out of battery and die seconds later, before it even had time to tell me it was running low.
Week 267: Mouldy cobs
L— requested corn on the cob for dinner so I did my best. Co-op didn’t have any. The greengrocer didn’t have any. Tesco had a few corn cob sections, in plastic bags of four. According to the bags, they were still well within the “best before” date. According to the black mould growing on them, however, … I decided to cook something else.
Week 266: Dreich days
I cycled past someone else on a bike with a child on the back just in time to hear her say to the child, “It’s a dreich day”. And it was. In fact, there have been a lot of them, though it’s not a word you hear too often down here.
Week 265: Concerto
I went to see a podiatrist (they used to be called chiropodists) on Monday to get my toenail sorted out. At some point in the summer, I bashed my big toe, leaving a black mark under the nail that was slowly growing out. However, the trauma also left the nail weakened until it came away from the bed and started to split last week, and I was worried that it might split and delaminate further, or get caught and damaged.
Week 264: An old world dying
The madness on the other side of the Atlantic looms like a spectre over everything, and it’s sometimes difficult to concentrate when a rogue superpower seems intent on wreaking colonial violence both outward and inward. Trump’s threats against Greenland were finally rowed back a bit, but thinkpieces that ask questions like “would invading Greenland mean the end of NATO?” seem to miss the point: if you’re worried about your putative ally invading, you don’t really have an ally. Meanwhile, the stormtroopers of ICE murdered yet another person as they kidnapped and brutalised and carried out the regime’s weird vendettas in Minnesota.
Week 263: Look up
Tuesday was damp and it was so cold overnight that on Wednesday morning I struggled to unlock the frozen lock on the back gate. The entire bolt was surrounded with ice that remained after I had succeeded.
Week 262: Back to work
Christmas is over. The tree is gone and I started work on a new contract. I’ve only done three days, and most of it was taken up with getting set up and acquainted with the codebase, but it’s going well so far.
Week 261: A good rest
Thus begins the sixth year of these weeknotes. The world is in some ways better than 2021 – we’re not all living under biosecurity house arrest, for one significant thing – but in other ways it seems to be taking a turn for the worse.