Archive: 2026
Wild axolotls
Week 276: Back to reality
After a holiday that was busy, full of new places and experiences, but also very relaxing, going back to sitting in front of a computer all day has been a difficult adjustment.
Week 275: From Athens back to London
Our journey back home started well. We reversed our steps: train to Kiato; bus to Patras; taxi to the port; overnight ferry to Bari. This time, we were on the Superfast I, the twin sister of the vessel of the we’d taken on our outbound voyage, and we even had the same room, identical except for tiny things like the placement of a few electrical sockets.
Week 274: London to Athens via Rome (and a few other places)
The London Okinawa Sanshinkai was invited to perform at Japan Festival Greece in Athens on the Easter weekend – our Easter, that is; Orthodox Easter as celebrated in Greece falls a week later this year – and I decided to take part. L— and I chose to make a proper holiday of it: rather than flying to Athens, we’d take the long route by train and ferry, and stop off at some other places along the way. The itinerary, travel, and hotels were all organised by Byway, who we used to arrange our trip to the Basque country last year, using their concierge service. It wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t all that expensive either, considering that it included travel, hotels, and first class upgrades on most of the train journeys. It was also very easy and almost certainly cheaper than the nightmare of administration that booking it ourselves would have been.
Week 273: Ill communication
I spent the whole week with a horrible cold. My nose kept running. My throat hurt. But the worst part was the lack of sleep: I slept fitfully and not very much. Four hours on Wednesday night felt like a luxury by comparison to the preceding days, and it wasn’t until about Friday that I felt actually rested.
Week 272: It’s a long way to Heilongjiang
I’m writing this sleep-deprived, having come down with a nasty cold at the weekend that has kept me awake for the past two nights. I hope it won’t be too incoherent as a result.
Week 271: Dislocation
I’m exceptionally late to write this up. Even though I was assiduous about writing my notes on paper last week, I’ve had too many busy evenings to sit down and transcribe them. I’m finally doing it, more than halfway to next week.
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.