I gave blood on Wednesday. I usually go to Stratford, but they’re currently refurbishing the donor centre, and the temporary replacement (a van in a car park) has far fewer slots. And, of course, it’s a van in a car park, which is not such a pleasant experience. But on Tuesday, as I was looking for slots for Friday, I noticed that there was a session in Peckham the very next day, only a minute’s walk away from where I rent a desk. I booked in for mid-afternoon and spent a relaxing hour reading (A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, loved it) while I waited, donated, and ate crisps afterwards. Maybe it doesn’t sound like a relaxing afternoon break to most people, but it was for me.

I started trying to tidy up my office at home, which has been a disaster since I dumped everything in there after our house was renovated. There’s a long way to go, but it’s a start.

Everybody loves the London Marathon except for those of us for whom it’s an annual inconvenience. We don’t live near the marathon; no, we’re surrounded on three sides by it. You can’t cross the road; you can’t take the tube without queueing for hours to get into the station; there are crowds hooting and hollering everywhere. And, even worse, apparently they want to make it a two-day event next year.

At least we have a few underpasses and bridges that cross the route near here, so we were able to escape to the riverward side of the route and cycle along the Thames to the South Bank.

At the Hayward Gallery, we met a friend and visited a combined double exhibition.

Yin Xiuzhen’s installation was charming, and varied in scale from tiny and whimsical cities stitched from old cloths to a vast heart in which a dozen people can sit.

Pictures can’t capture the sheer amount of thread in Chiharu Shiota’s installation. It’s like several cat’s cradles, each the size of a room, and had me puzzled just trying to work out how you’d even construct such a thing.

An art installation. There are old-fashioned beds covered in a web-like structure made of interlocking threads like a massive cat's cradle

Threads of Life by Chiharu Shiota

If you time your visit well, I hear that you can even see performers get in and out of the beds through some invisible gaps in the webs. (We didn’t.)

I’ll be playing sanshin and guitar and singing with London Okinawa Sanshinkai at Yokimono Market in Stratford this coming Saturday. We’re doing two half-hour sets, one at 12:00 and the other at 15:30.

Fun fact: the Japanese word for set in the context of a musical performance is ステージ (sutēji), from English stage. And stage shouldn’t be mixed up with スタジオ (sutajio) which means studio. It can get confusing in a multilingual setting.

I slightly regret missing Haggis Ruby. It would have been an excellent excuse for a trip to Glasgow, and I was tempted.

However, I’m avoiding conferences this year because I can’t face the prospect of being trapped in a room having AI explained at me. I would be very keen to attend a 100% Generative AI Free conference somewhere reachable by train, if anyone wants to promise such a thing.

Slow Horses is good, isn’t it? We’re very late to the party, but that means we won’t run out for a while. I have a lot or respect for Gary Oldman for making himself quite so repulsive in it: I fully believe that that shirt wasn’t washed at any point during the making of the first two seasons.

I have a prediction: some time between now and the local elections on 7 May, BBC News will run another set of migrant-bashing headlines like their recent “undercover investigation” into immigration lawyers.

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