Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Trying to get a nice picture of the buns during the banana frenzy. Got this instead.

Status:

Recovery day 2. Funny thing about betwixtmas, it lends itself to chronic fatigue recovery days. Despite what I tell myself I still have a lingering guilt about my enforced rests, but not this week cos everybody’s at it. (For some value of “everybody” - I’ve done my time in the retail trenches.)

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

Reading:

• Entirely too many thoughts about Wake Up Dead Man - yeah, read this last night when I couldn’t sleep. Upgrading the film to the full five stars and scheduling a re-watch for the new year.
• John Allison’s albums of the year - always good value.
• In the battle against antisemitism we must accept that Zionism means different things to different people - I realised a while back that while I think I have a pretty good grasp of the rights and wrongs and have been educating myself on the history of Palestine / Israel, I just can’t have a discussion with anyone about it because I don’t know what exactly they’re talking about. Not that they need me in the discussion, of course.

Bookmarking

• Plain English ffmpeg - this looks like a gamechanger for those who rely on ffmpeg but don’t use it regularly enough to remember anything.

Watching:

• Ants Pants - Giant grease pit project ep2 : Pouring everything! - alongside being entertainingly zen I’m always impressed by Andris' cinematography and editing. The 90 seconds from this point are just gorgeous and should in a gallery. Someone do a video essay on him, please.

Telly:

• Down Cemetery Road

Another tree from yesterday’s walk. Wife and sister are beneath it.

Status:

Recovery day today. Slept for ages and had a grumpy headache, though it had mostly passed by evening. Trying to go easy on the brain and let it ride itself out. Yes, I did a bit too much these last couple of days, but I went in with open eyes and have no regrets.

Had the seasonal peanut butter and fruit cake sandwich for breakfast. It’s as good as it was last year.

Watched the new Benoit Blanc which was good. Maybe not 5* good but perhaps it’ll grow on me as I ponder it. Some good laughs with some big thinks about storytelling, which I definitely have an interest in. I shall be working through this long piece once my head is properly ready for it.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Manhattan Project

Reading:

• Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn unpack ‘Pluribus’ finale twists and reveal original ending - spoilers, obv. They definitely stuck the landing but this whole series really felt like chapter 1 of something much bigger. Really hope they get to conclude it properly because I am down with this pacing.

Telly:

• Pluribus
• Wake Up Dead Man

Trees from today’s walk along the river.

Status:

Fi got me a crochet starter pack (some wool and a hook) so I guess I’m at the stage where crochet happens. Checked out the basic beginners video and it looks fairly achievable.

I got her a Jonathan Edwards print which looks gorgeous in the flesh.

Went for a walk along the river (well, I was on my scooter) with sister.

Had a very nice meal with Fi.

Then sister and niece came over for pudding and I retired to write this up. That’s enough Christmas for one year.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• A Charlie Brown Christmas by Vince Guaraldi Trio
• A Kind of Blue by Miles Davis

Reading:

• We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years
• Years of scapegoating rhetoric has led to ‘envy and resentment’ of those with blue badges, research finds

Telly:

• Only Connect
• Gone Fishing: Christmas special

Creepy Santa on great-neph’s windowsill wishes you a merry eve.

Status:

Christmas Eve happened. Went to visit Fi’s family south of Birmingham for an hour, which was nice. Then I had a nap while she went to the Bournville carols-on-the-green, returning with a couple of chill friends for dinner. Probably reached my limit of activity and we’ll see how it affects tomorrow, but tomorrow is traditionally a do-very-little day for us, so it’s all good.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Herodotus

Reading:

• Landslide; a ghost story - long and essential looking piece by Erin Kissane about “the societal problem of collective derangement” which I will be slowly digesting this week. The first bit, about an earthquake in Alaska, is fascinating even if you don’t read on.
  • Further thoughts from Adam Greenfield, which again, I haven’t read properly yet.
• The Best Films I Saw in 2025 - my chum Joel has good taste.
• In Berlin, I took an evening class on fascism – and found out how to stop the AfD
• Truth in fantasy: what Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials taught us over its 30-year run - I haven’t read, or heard much about, the second trilogy. I love that he apparently lays into Dawkins-style atheism. In The Book of Dust, a 20-year-old Lyra falls victim to the writings of two popular authors who are determined to see the world as a collection of meaningless facts and circumstances: “It was nothing more than what it was,” one writes. The authors are so enamored of doubt that they question the very existence of daemons in a world full of them.

Telly:

• Only Connect

Five goldfinches singing in the gloom this afternoon.

Status:

I somehow managed to marry a person who cannot stand dried fruit in any form, including fruit cake, mince pies and Xmas pudding. Yes, I know. It’s fucked up. And so around this time of year, because I don’t do the meal planning (for both our benefits), I have to make a concerted effort to get my black gold deserts in, and then remember to eat them.

A little microwavable pudding from Aldi has been lurking in the cupboard for a couple of years, maybe longer, with an expiry of January 2026. And while it would probably be good for a while after that I was determined to see it eaten this season.

Tonight I ate it. It was glorious.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Evolution of Crocodiles

Music:

• Kayla Painter

Reading:

• Just Two Things: Futures | Geopolitics - a nice chunky read to end the year from Andrew Curry. The stuff on futures make me think there’s a definite overlap with magic and spell casting. (I mean that in a constructive way.)
• Why Japan’s internet looks weird — unless you live here (archive) - I find the maximalist approach to Japanese design both hugely exciting and terrifyingly overwhelming. I want to both swim in it and hide away in a dark corner.

Watching:

• Pincers Restoration
• Underneath a Breaching Humpback Whale
• Simone Giertz’s emotional rollercoaster necklace

Telly:

• Dead Ringers
• University Challenge
• Down Cemetery Road

One thing about rabbits is they LOVE banana. If you ever need to get a rabbit to come to you, eat a banana.

Status:

Cruising gently towards Christmas day. Got a couple of short family things scheduled so I want to be ready for them.

Sister popped over today for a catch up. She’d been in New Zealand for my niece’s graduation and was just getting over the jetlag. I’d asked for some merch from the university because she was at the Auckland University of Technology, which acronyms to AUT, so it doubles as autism pride merch. I now have a keyring and a weird mug (they were out of caps). Happy Pete.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: Socialism - what’s Left?
• Night Tracks

Reading:

• ‘We’ve got more in common than what divides us’: a Muslim-Jewish kitchen in Nottingham counters hate and hunger
• Abel Ferrara and Catherine Breillat on why Pasolini’s Salò is a gift that keeps giving - realising I’ve not seen this. Adding to the big list.
• The Guardian’s 10 best experimental albums of 2025 - nobody I’ve heard of so plenty to explore. Also gives me the opportunity to share my idea for a band playing straight middle-of-the-road soft rock which only performs at experimental music festivals. Their name: The Control Group. I thenk ewe.

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge

Didn’t get any photos today so here’s a tree I photographed in December 2006, 20 years ago.

Status:

Said goodbye to a good friend who is leaving Stirchley. She isn’t moving too far and may return, but it’s still a sad day when a member of your little community departs.

I realised I never used to feel like this because I never stayed in one place for more than a 2-3 years. But since I shacked up with Fi fifteen years ago I’ve grown to appreciate what it means to have a geographically based community. It’s nice.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Shakespeare’s Sonnets - nearly skipped this as I don’t get poetry at all, but it was a fascinating listen.
• Night Tracks

Music:

• Fractures and Infinite You by Kayla Painter

Reading:

• Why British Jews are experiencing their biggest change in 60 years
• Flamboyant, furious and full of hope: CMAT is the sound of 2025
• Life on the road: staying organised
• Worldbuilding Agency week 51: tearing away the caul
• The post is the product - a brief history of rage-bait - skimmed for now but will revisit as I’m interested in different takes on “transgressive media” and what that might look like today.

Watching:

• CMAT covers Wuthering Heights - wow and blimey.
• Laura Kampf demolishes a caravan

Telly:

• Down Cemetery Road

My local park, yesterday.

Status:

Rough night and subsequent morning with disturbed sleep and weird dreams but it must have worked through some subconscious shit because I’m not feeling so bad today. Tired, sure, but not grumpy.

Fi came back from Moselele’s Xmas gig with fish and chips so we stuck on a movie and declared it date night.

In other exciting news I knocked over a hot cup of tea which splashed on my foot. Got my sock off before it did any serious damage. Phew.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Songs of Earth by Rebekka Karijord featuring London Contemporary Orchestra
• Ambient Owl Core vol.4 by Kayla Painter
• (Both heard on Night Tracks.)

Reading:

• Space Chameleons (and other chimeras of the mind) - Ed Pinsent reviews the disconcerting work of Jemma Sharp.
• Corridor8’s Midwinter newsletter
• the consequences of failure are everywhere to see
• The Komoy Noise Research Unit: Books. Loads of books. - some interesting non-fiction tomes I might check out in the new year.

Watching:

• Jack Mack Woodturning: turning a yew log into a decorative vase
• Ants Pants bought a 30 ton Åkerman EC300 excavator

Treeline along the River Rea

Status:

Better day. Made it out on my scooter to the pharmacy and popped into work to see everyone. But that was about it. Reflected on yesterday’s musings (with some nice feedback from a fellow CFS sufferer) and feel better about things.

Also I used the word “promulgate” in a group chat. Always a good day when that happens.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Edward Gibbon

Music:

• Heroine by Pauline Kim Harris

Reading:

• Everything Ian Dunt got wrong this year
• Gisèle Pelicot’s power, and Dominique Pelicot’s shame
• For Every Winner a Loser - long but worthwhile read in which John Lanchester breaks down how modern finance works with some distressing facts laid bare. ‌The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless.

Bookmarking:

• How To Request And Download All Your iCloud Data From Apple - useful if you don’t have a reliable secondary backup in place and don’t trust a corporation not to accidentally delete everything on a whim. Do this every six months, I reckon.

Watching:

• Kermode film reviews
• Restoring the world’s biggest Zippo lighter
• How climate change triggered a landslide tsunami in a Greenland fjord, vibrating Earth for 9 days - fascinating bit of science unpicking this mystery.
• Timber framed barn part 36 top floor door

Telly:

• Dead Ringers
• Pluribus

Hanging with my buns in the shed, waiting for the rain to stop. (It didn’t stop.)

Status:

This has been the sixth day in a row of me feeling unable to do much, if anything. According to the pattern of “my condition” I should have been capable of stuff yesterday or today, but I’m not. It’s a good reminder that there isn’t really a pattern to chronic fatigue. Sometimes recovery will be quick, sometimes it won’t. This one seems to be on the slow side. Today’s big achievements were loading the dishwasher and putting away my laundry. Oh, and not needing an afternoon nap.

It’s very easy for this to feel like a failure. I’ve definitely gotten better at managing my capacity and my expectations over the last six months, and thanks to some good therapy I’m less likely to get angry and upset when things don’t go as I’d hoped. But the fact remains this autumn was going to see me engaging with the world again and it doesn’t look like much on paper.

I’ve managed about an hour a week on average at work and probably go out of the house/garden twice a week. I’m writing this blog, which is a major achievement in rethinking my writing practice, pacing it over the day instead of cramming in one session, but I haven’t written anything more substantial than a few paragraphs.

It’s a proper glass half empty / half full paradox, I guess. I have made progress, but I also haven’t hit the marks I was kinda hoping I might. Which just means the marks weren’t achievable and need to be adjusted, I guess. Known unknowns.

Really wish the NHS chronic fatigue centre had more capacity and hadn’t been overrun with flu. I could really do with a chat with the occupational therapist there. Fingers crossed for an appointment soon after Christmas.

In the meanwhile farting this out to the handful of you lovely people reading this will have to do.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: The Fall of the USSR
• Night Tracks

Music:

• Singing in a storm drain in Calatayud, Spain

Reading:

• Pretty birds and silly moos: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act - always worth remembering how hard-won the things we take for granted are, and how easily they could be lost again.
• Facebook tests £9.99 monthly subscription for sharing more than two links - if evidence were needed that the Facebook empire is not part of “the internet” in any meaningful way. Anecdote: I’m a member of one, and only one, FB group (for ageing 90s comics nerds) and had to be made an admin because every link I posted (and I only ever post links, because I’m from the actual internet) got flagged as suspicious.
• What the Noam Chomsky – Jeffrey Epstein e-mails tell us - Seeing Chomsky in the troves of Epstein photos and emails has been a bit of a jolt. Surely not Chomksy? This article offers some context for why he was even conversing at all, but it’s really just another reminder that your heroes are just humans who will (at best) make bad decisions and it’s probably best not to have heroes in the first place.

Looking:

• Take that Santa! This is me upside-down and naked in a fireplace – Brooke DiDonato’s best photograph - there are many more great images on her website. I like mirror photos a lot, and this is quite delightful.
• Christopher Anderson’s warts-and-all photos of the Trump administration. - paywalls abound so the best way to see the pics is on Anderson’s Instagram, if you have an account.
• How Edward Weston transformed bums, veg and egg slicers into sculpture - I’m always astonished by Weston’s photographs, doubly so when I remember how old they are. The Pepper from 1930 is just timeless.

Watching:

• Like Stories of Old’s Best 11 Movies of 2025

🎼 Pigeons in flight 🎶. Circling around our neighbour’s garden waiting for her to put out their food.

Status:

I checked my bank statement this week and saw a £10 payment from Department of Work and Pensions. I wasn’t expecting this. Turns out this is my Christmas bonus from the government as part of my PIP eligibility, which I attained earlier this year for how the chronic fatigue has disabled me.

I’m kinda fascinated by this. We live in an era when the headlines are dominated by the welfare bill with benefits under threat from all comers, yet this has presumably been going on for quite some time under the radar. Maybe it’s not worth cutting as it’s such a small amount? Or maybe the optics of cutting a “Christmas bonus” are too much even for this zeitgeist.

I’m going to assume it’s never gone up because inflation would not allow it to remain a nice whole number. When was it introduced? How much would it be worth in real terms today? And will it ever go up?

(And because I can’t resist answering questions, it was introduced in 1972 (it’s that year again!) and has never gone up. It should be worth £119.12 adjusted for inflation, it costs the state £185m and there are no plans to increase it.)

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Sinners was the hit Hollywood didn’t want - ‌Ryan Coogler’s bloodsucker blockbuster is all about Black creative freedom. No wonder the industry saw it as a threat.
• The magical life of Toni Basil: how she taught Elvis, enchanted Bowie - and had a smash hit with ‘Mickey’ - I love these profiles of the weirdos behind the scenes of the 20th century, nudging greatness along.

Watching:

• Sleaford Mods Ft. Sue Tompkins - No Touch
• Ants Pants: Building a giant grease pit - part 1

Telly:

• Fallout

Haven’t posted a picture of a rabbit for a while so here’s Wally, keeping an eye and ear on the bastard squirrels.

Status:

Much better today. No tinnitus or grumpiness though I’m proceeding with caution, banking the batteries for seeing a few people later in the week. And of course next week for which I would rather prefer not to be grumpy, for Fiona’s sake if nothing else.

We put the tree up today. Is nine days early or late? Whatever, it’s better than last year when it went up on Xmas eve. Decorating was a bit of a low priority in-amongst all the CFS shit. Having accumulated a couple of families' worth of decorations going back six or more decades our trees lurch from classy to tacky depending on the mood. This year it’s more classy, I think, though if you look closely there’s some proper tat in there too.

Can’t get a satisfactory photo though so hopefully the awful frame will distract you from that.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Mindful Mix: Christmas Carols - tree up music.

Reading:

• Discourse 2000: I Got Everything It Takes To Be Your Everlasting Friend: WALTER THE WOBOT
• ‘We hate it. It’s desecration’: the real cost of HS2 - Patrick Barkham walks the long construction site between London and Birmingham. Interesting that, despite the obvious sheer fuckupery of the project, I was left with a sense that it could have been worse.
• Josh Safdie on Marty Supreme, latent Jewish anxiety and why men are lost - I do appreciate how Josh Safdie talks like his films. Some interesting stuff about the anxiety of a historically nomadic culture too. “But amongst the culturally Jewish there is a sense of constant rebuilding. The idea of ‘we might have to move at any moment’. It’s a nomadic culture that’s been moved around a lot. That impermanence is actually quite spiritual, but I do think there’s a latent anxiety in that lifestyle because of it."
• Microbes at work - composter Cass Marketos stored 500lbs of cubed butternut squash in a wheelie bin for a week with quite foamy results. Also, from the other week, how to compost a t-shirt.

Watching:

• Sawing a Dam in Half (on Purpose)

Telly:

• Only Murders in the Building

Yesterday’s later afternoon sky in the park. (Definitely not today’s. Today was shite weather all day.)

Status:

Feeling pretty grumpy today, so trying to just ride it out and hope for a better tomorrow.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Existential Comics: Aristotle on Democracy - the fear of the poor voting to take money from the rich, and how in modern times that curiously never happens.
• Coffee biochar makes for lower-carbon, stronger concrete - sorry to say the concrete won’t smell of coffee, but this is kinda interesting. I wonder if it’s the massive internal surface area of charcoal that gives it the strength, and if you can make it with any charcoal.
• Gramsci’s Nightmare: AI, Platform Power and the Automation of Cultural Hegemony - long transcript of a talk that I’ve mostly skimmed but which caught my eye for the acronym WEIRD, standing for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, and used to talk about biases in academic research. I find this fascinating, and not a little delightful, as that kind of bias would probably not include my definition of “weird”.

Voting:

• Worst Person In Tech 2025 - Kinda telling that some right bastards will get voted out in the first round. This is basically a poll of who is marginally worse.

Watching:

• The Ex live at Supersonic Festival 2018
• Always sing in a storm drain
• Getting Started

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge

The charcoal we accidentally made during our bonfire.

Status:

Relatively quiet day, feeling the need to retreat somewhat, which is no bad thing. I’ll save my reading for tomorrow.

Did make it out to the allotment for a bit of fresh air. Took the mobility scooter off-road for the first time, which was a small adventure as it’s definitely not designed for that. It made it up the hill eventually, which opens up a whole new gradient for me to explore.

Wanted to see how much charcoal was left after the bonfire the other week. My sister had dug a pit so we could try this method but we never got around to it, so we just piled everything on the pit and had a normal fire. But of course the pit still did its thing and because we doused the fire a decent amount of charcoal was left behind.

In short, the wood in the pit will get hot enough to carbonise but no oxygen can make it through the fire above it, so the carbon doesn’t burn to ash. It’s so simple you can even do it by sheer accident.

And so we have a hefty bucket of charcoal now to make biochar with. Permaculture win!

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Booth’s Life and Labour Survey - I’ll be honest, I took very little of this in.

Music:

• Zu: Carboniferous - to drown out the infernal charity Santa wagon that comes around each year.
• Low: Christmas - because I’m not a total grouch.
• A Very She & Him Christmas - because the Low Christmas album, while quite beautiful, isn’t actually that Christmassy.

Reading:

• ‘It’s fun to go to war with God’: Will Sharpe and Paul Bettany on their sweaty, sacrilegious take on Amadeus - this is getting a lot of hype but I’ll allow it. I’ll watch anything with Will Sharpe involved.

Watching:

• Video Update Cha0sHof Week W168 170
• Greenstone GP5 Race | Marbula One S6
• Laura Kampf: Exoskeleton!

Telly:

• Only Murders in the Building

Some more trees from yesterday in the park.

Status:

A rest day, mostly pottering around doing small chores and online jigsaws.

Overheard a visitor, who like most sane people is ignorant of corporate tech shenanigans, describe the new iPhone operating system as something they were tricked into upgrading to, horrible to use, and reminding them of when novice users go overboard with Powerpoint effects and transitions. I can’t think of a more damning criticism than to be compared to Powerpoint…

I’m still on the one before the liquid glass nonsense (who knows what number it is) and will remain so.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Kant’s Copernican Revolution - I never got my head around Kant back in the day and it seems nothing has changed. I think I get what he’s trying to do but then, nope, brain shuts down.

Music:

• The Croydon Spaceport Tapes by British Experimental Rocket Group (BERG) - The is nice. Kinda Boards-of-Canada-y.

Reading:

• Robin Ince forced to quit Radio 4 over pro-trans views
• Who is Al Carns? Former Marine and Labour minister with sights on leadership - always odd to read a profile of your MP. For what it’s worth he was parachuted in at the last election and has been resolutely milquetoast in his opinions. Not particularly impressed tbh.

Exploring:

• The Sherwood Forest Zine Library and their archive of downloadable PDF zines.

Watching:

• Jack Mack Woodturning - Tree Wart.
• Ants Pants: Removing an old maple stump.

Telly:

• Only Murders in the Building

Trees are so much better in the winter.

Status:

A good day! Went into work for an hour on my little scooter, took a bunch of photos of bread and pastries being made, and on the way back the sun was shining so I got some nice shots of the bare trees. If I only ever photographed rabbits and trees ever again I think I’d be happy. Needed a nap in the afternoon but otherwise feeling OK.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: Che Guevara

Music:

• Cottleston Pie jumped into my brain for no reason today. There are many versions but the best has to be Rowlf on the Muppet Show. “For singing when his brain felt fluffy.”

Reading:

• Ian Dunt: Ask Me Anything: The Bastard Answers - as often with Dunt, 30% nah mate, 30% but of course, and 40% hmm that’s thought provoking. I’ll let you decide what goes where.
• People and Blogs: Nick Heer - I’ve been following Pixel Envy for years now and it’s always nice to have a peek behind the curtain.
• “Kids today are always sneaking into caves!"
• AI Killed My Job: Copywriters reveal how AI has decimated their industry - this came to me from various directions today, one with a note from Fi saying “read what’s happening to your wife’s job”.
• ‘Soil is more important than oil’: inside the perennial grain revolution - interesting article about multi-season crops that don’t require the earth to be disturbed each year. This strengthens soil health and prevents erosion. The picture comparing root structures is dramatic.

Watching:

• Cory Doctorow explains “Enshittification” on The Daily Show
• The Nativity Strikes Back

Telly:

• Pluribus, followed by my learning about the Darién Gap. I had no idea there was a rainforest acting as an impassable barrier between north and south America.

Nice purple sky last night.

Status:

Still not quite up to snuff today. Thought I might be good to do some work but nope, somethings off. Got the tinnitus warnings and the mild brain fog warning me to keep things light. Looks like the recovery from last Friday’s workshop is a full week.

After posting last night I watched Breathless, the Goddard film that Richard Linklater has made a film about the making of and which I realised I’d not seen. In fact, other than Jules et Jim and Weekend, I haven’t seen a lot of the French New Wave, which is something I should probably rectify.

Afterwards I did the Wikipedia deep dive, as I do, and my jaw dropped at the horrors Jean Seberg experienced over her short life. For supporting civil rights groups including the Black Panthers she was subjected the FBI’s COINTELPRO programme to a campaign of harassment and defamation that ultimately led to her miscarriage and suicide.

It reminded me of how in the 80s, when I was growing up, there was this general sense that the FBI were the baddies and how curious and confusing it was that, as we moved into the 90s, Clarice Starling, Dale Cooper, Johnny Utah and Mulder and Scully were portrayed as good-guy FBI agents. I’ve never looked into it but I wonder if, as J Edgar Hoover’s legacy faded, there was a concerted effort by the agency to clean up their image in popular culture. Or maybe I was just coming to the age where I noticed this sort of thing.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: A Christmas Carol - I’m methodically working through the archive so this coming up now is just a nice coincidence.

Reading:

• Land War or Self-Terrorism? Trump’s likely next step - by Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny.
• Bournville Radio Sailing and Model Boat Club Boathouse and associated concrete boating pond - just got listed status. I spent some nice times photographing trees around here in the 2000s. Never seen inside the boathouse though.
• Gnome #2 - Weird Walk’s new “hand picked digest from the weird margins” is shaping up nicely.
• Adam Greenfield’s Dispatch - “What I’m going to do … is identify some small-scale cultural projects I profoundly admire, and ask of each one of them: in what dimension did they achieve something I would have liked to, and for whatever reason haven’t (yet) been able to?" Good brain food.
• Aging out of fucks: the neuroscience of why you suddenly can’t pretend anymore - an interesting companion to why autism/ADHD diagnoses spike in middle age.

Watching:

• Oatmeal Stout - short film about Gordon Hush, a bottle hunter who digs in Victorian rubbish dumps. via
• Dodge & Burn - by the same filmmaker as above.
• Photographing the Andromeda galaxy for 10 seconds vs 10 hours

Telly:

• Breathless
• Only Murders in the Building

I was pretty sure we were done for laundry weather til the spring but it’s a sunny day with a stiff breeze, and it’s a bit too warm for the radiators to kick in, so what the hell eh?

Status:

This morning I had a message from my GPs surgery saying that because of the flu “we have been told to ask all patients attending surgery to wear face mask” which feels like a very long sentence for “please wear a mask”.

Shortly after that I had a call from the Chronic Fatigue centre saying my appointment with the occupational therapist this Friday had been canceled because she has the flu. Hope it’s not too serious. I probably won’t get seen until well into the new year now.

Our local hospitals declared a Critical Incident yesterday due to too much flu in A&E.

We had the flu vaccine a few weeks back mostly because Fi was worried about me getting ill and it making my CFS worse, not because it was recommended or anything. It cost £25 which was certainly a sum of money but not a crazy one.

I’m finding myself wondering how much time and money (not to mention lives and quality of lives) would have been saved by rolling out the vaccine a bit more thoroughly and being a little more firm about masking when unwell. It’s not like we haven’t had a lot of practice in recent memory, or had a recently concluded enquiry into that period which said maybe the government could have acted sooner.

Or maybe that’s the problem.

Overnight listening:

• Dream Time

Music:

• Anno: Four Seasons by Anna Meredith & Antonio Vivaldi ft. Scottish Ensemble

Reading:

• The WI and Girlguiding have been pressured to exclude trans women – yet the law is clear as mud - ‌"Does it even matter what the law actually says? As a lawyer, I would hope so. But in reality, frightened of being sued, I can see how organisations would be tempted to capitulate"
• The Kevin O’Neill interview - by coincidence I’ve been re-reading the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this last week so LMG reposting this epic Comics Journal chat was nicely timed.
• Discourse 2000: I Will Not Be Treated As Property: M.A.C.H. 1 ’78 / M.A.C.H. ZERO

Watching:

• Buying the Old TO-11 Loader frame for the K-701 Tractor - kinda fascinating that there are still hunks of Soviet-era farm equipment scattered across the Estonian countryside.
• Restoring an Instrument You’ve Never Heard - prototype of the first electric piano from ~1933.

Telly:

• Only Murders in the Building

Dark and stormy afternoon in the garden.

Status:

Crash day today, somewhat unexpectedly as I was doing much better yesterday. But there it is - CFS recovery is never linear I find. Spent most of the day in bed and with a drained lack of joy when awake. Roll on tomorrow.

Overnight listening:

• Dream Time

Reading:

• The Ten Best Films of 2025 - Roger Ebert.com - and so the list making of films I’d missed begins.
• Grayson Perry, Don McCullin and more on Britain’s national photographer Martin Parr.

Watching:

• Working on my woodshop - Finishing all the interior work

Lav in her “bunny burrito” so we can syringe feed her the recovery food that she clearly didn’t need as she ate it out of the bowl.

Status:

Lav went to the vet this morning who found nothing obviously wrong. Head tilt can be caused by any number of things so we’re monitoring, but she seems absolutely fine this afternoon. Since her overnight poops were a bit small, and on the vet’s advice, we prepared a feed of recovery food which is basically a grassy paste fed by syringe, and which Lav usually hates (she has very sensitive whiskers so getting anywhere near her face without a flinch is hard) but she wolfed it down with no complaints. Kinda annoying as preparing it is a ballache, but at least she’s OK!

Realised that we’ve had Lav and Wally for a little over five years so they’re around 5 and 6 years old now. A decent lifespan of a domesticated rabbit is 12 so, sudden keel-overs and terminal illnesses permitting, we’re nearly half-way through this chapter. Feels odd as I still see them as kittens, unlike our previous rabbits who were all clearly grown up.

(The lifespan of a rabbit in the wild is about a year, because they’re food. This is probably why, over their decade in our care, pet rabbits will randomly get ill and stop eating – evolutionarily speaking they’re not supposed to still be alive.)

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: The New Left pt 2 - Children of the Revolution

Music:

• Django Django by Django Django - thanks, Sods
• Wild At Heart by Pauline Kim Harris

Reading:

• Why did Seymour Hersh quit the film about his earth-shattering exposés? - New Laura Poitras movie klaxon.
• The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner Interviews Santa Claus

Watching:

• Kermode reviews Eternity - this looks so good. Big fan of Elizabeth Olsen.
• How Laura Kampf makes her neato tape-measure clips
• The fascinating map of fungi - a nice 20 minute overview of the fungal kingdom. I learned stuff!
• Easy to make wood mallet

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge

Lavander Graph Generator, to give her her full name, shortly after we first adopted her in 2020.

Status:

Rest day 2: Rest harder.

News today is Lav is showing signs of head tilt. On a Sunday afternoon when all the vets are closed. Because of course. Wally had this last summer so we know what to watch for and it doesn’t seem too bad so far as she’s eating. We’ll phone the vet first thing in the morning and take it from there.

Otherwise we’ve got sucked into the snooker today. Never been a fan and have no real idea what’s at stake but watching the quiet men knock the balls around while the commentators sound like David Attenborough is a good way to spend a rest day. Switched it on early afternoon and it’s suddenly 11pm.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: The New Left pt 1 - Generation Next

Reading:

• Martin Parr obituary - knew this was coming after the recent documentary but even so, a great loss leaving a great legacy.
• John Harris: The right’s mental-health overdiagnosis bandwagon is rolling. Wes Streeting should not be on it - you give Streeting too much credit, John. “There are more people being diagnosed with anxiety and depression because of an education system and model of work that are so harshly competitive and inherently precarious, and the still-overlooked effects of the pandemic."
• The Line was the zenith of our age of insanity - a while back I had a passing interest in Superstudio whose Continuous Monument is a clear predecessor of The Line, except that was a parody and The Line was just sheer hubris. “Somewhere out in the Saudi Arabian desert, a mad prince with a bottomless sovereign wealth fund actually carved a 150-km gash in the sand, and exclaimed that he would build a 500-meter tall, mirror-glass-clad linear city and fill it with 9 million people." via

Watching:

• Turning a giant bark bowl

Telly:

• Snooker

All the leaves may be on the ground and the sky may be grey but the trees are ready for spring when it comes.

Status:

Rest day, so very little to report. Had the expected crash after yesterday and have been surfing the bad moods that come with it. It used to really get me down but recently I’ve decided to just let any thoughts just burn themselves out, figuring they need to happen and they’ll pass in time. And it seems to be working. Yes, I’m grumpy and incapacitated today, but I’m not upset about it. That’s a win.

Overnight listening:

• Night Tracks

Music:

• Heroine by Pauline Kim Harris

Reading:

• YouTube is awful. I’m not posting there anymore. - I’m very aware, when I post YouTube links here, that my experience of YouTube is radically different to most, given the insane number of plugins and content blockers I employ to make it tolerable for me. If I was blogging more I would share my strategy, though tbh it’s mostly Social Focus at the moment. But for those without psychic armour I do apologise for putting you through it.
• Why are diagnoses of ADHD soaring? There are no easy answers – but empathy is the place to start - people with ADHD have always had ADHD. It only becomes a problem worth diagnosing when it becomes disabling. So why has it become more disabling recently?
• Molly Soda’s 2025 .gif guide - ‌Who is this mystery woman popping out of a sewer?
• The original theatrical cut of Star Wars is coming back to theatres - as a proper nerd I of course have all the despecialised versions but I’ll definitely be considering a trip to the multiplex for this.
• Nicolas Nova (1977-2024): Anthropologist, design researcher, and writer - I attended many conferences and festivals in my time as a digital artist. One of the few speakers that affected my work and has stuck with me since is Nicolas Nova who died too young last year. His close friends and family have turned his website into an archive which I look forward to exploring.
• Trans women to be barred from main Labour women’s conference in 2026 - sadly this is one of too many reasons I can’t support Labour going forward. They are literally the party in power with the ability to change the law on this.

Watching:

• Timber Framed Barn part 36 back wall cladding and doormers

Telly:

• Pluribus
• Slow Horses

The three bay composting structure at RSPB Sandwell Valley, built to my design, but by someone who normally builds bird watching hides, so significantly improved!

Status:

Did some compost training today at the RSPB site in Sandwell Valley, because this is what I do sometimes. It went very well - I like talking about my special interest! Fi came along to support and I had assistance from the person who hired me, so the stress levels were low, but this evening I’m knackered even though I was only really “on” for about 90 minutes.

Tomorrow will be a write-off – I can already feel the hard-to-describe fuzziness in my brain. Hopefully I won’t be too grumpy. But it was worth it. For a short period of time today I was a useful person, good at the job asked of me.

Overnight listening:

• Empire - Rudyard Kipling

Music:

• Dream Time: Synthesised sounds… with Zakia - a special edition of my favourite Radio 6 show, celebrating the centenary of Daphne Oram, the first full-time electronic music composer in Britain, cofounder of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, and the inventor of her own synthesiser. Loads of really fun and weird music including Sister Irene O’Connor’s Mass which I don’t think I’d heard since the Incredible Strange Music or 365 days eras.

Reading:

• Here’s how much money Los Camp! make from streaming… - I use Apple Music for my streaming mostly out of convenience (though I may return to mp3s next year, we’ll see) but it’s nice to see they don’t pay artists as badly as Spotify.
• TIL: Button cell battery names are actually codes include the chemistry, shape, diameter and thickness. e,g, CR2032 is C lithium, R round, 20mm diameter, 3.2mm thick
• Is Gen X Actually the Greatest Generation? - went into this sighing like a disinterested slacker but found the whole thing a rather enjoyable read.
• Thank God for Bluesky - I enjoy Ian Dunt’s writing and podcasting even though I don’t always agree with him (always read people you don’t always agree with, btw) but I must raise an eyebrow at calling out people who still use the Nazi-bar-that-was-Twitter when your newsletter is on Substack and your paid journalism gig is the i Newspaper owned by the Daily Mail. (No criticism for using the platforms available but have some self awareness man!)

Watching:

• Primitive Technology: Grate furnace, wood fired smelting experiment

Telly:

• Slow Horses

The weather was shite all day and then, just before dusk, the sun burst through the horizon, coating the grey with a spooky gold. (Photo by my friend Fran)

Status:

Rest day, mostly pottering, bit of prep for the compost workshop tomorrow but it wasn’t too much effort. I know this stuff inside out so it’s no pressure on my brain.

I started writing something about Wesley Streeting’s latest bullshit but started to get lost in incoherent rage, and since this is supposed to be a rest day I’ll leave it for now. (In short, diagnosis is medical, disability status is legal, ones does not equal the other.)

One of my social media posts went a bit viral. In the old days I’d have worried about it escaping my context bubble and probably have deleted it, but thankfully Mastodon has no rage-bait algorithm so it’s all cool.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The May Fourth Movement - slept through most of this, though what I heard was interesting. Notable that I’m sleeping better these days (though I have been waking at 4am with sore legs again). I probably need to find a new slot in the day to do my podcasts.

Music:

• Heroine by Pauline Kim Harris

Reading:

• ‘A mini Battle of Cable Street’: the English neighbourhoods still grappling with the meaning of the flags - The Guardian visits my neighbourhood, might have interviewed my friends (names have been changed to avoid fascist doxing).
• Hammersmith Bridge - where did 25,000 vehicles go? - a deep dive into the bridge in London which has been closed to traffic for six years and is in limbo while the city around it adapts. Lots of interesting stuff about how infrastructure gets (or doesn’t get) built in the UK.

Watching:

• Science fiction’s most terrifying prediction - notes that Cuarón’s Children of Men is coming true on schedule, which it is in the UK, but it’s worth remembering Cuarón was transplanting the contemporary reality of the global south onto London. It wasn’t speculation, it was reportage. (One to watch at 1.5x speed)
• Permaculture High Tunnel Heating - I am thoroughly invested in this compost heated, solar powered fan assisted polytunnel setup.

Telly:

• Slow Horses