Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

Gorgeous clear blue skies and bright sun today, ready for the temperature drop. Quite refreshing.

Status:

Mostly pottering today, cleaning and I guess sort of getting ready for the winter, now the temperature has finally decided to drop closer to zero. Made sure the rabbit’s little heater is switched on – their coats do most of the work but this keeps a section of their home just above zero, like it would be at the bottom of a burrow.

Thinking more about the chat I had with my friend yesterday about his possible chronic fatigue and how, in hindsight, it was a fairly positive experience for me. It’s very easy to get depressed about CFS – it can feel like my life as I lived it is over never to return, and there’s a significant amount of mourning to be done – but there are things to be optimistic about. My mental state has improved over the last year and I am managing things more steadily with fewer bad crashes. I’m still functionally disabled and can’t do more than an hour or so of activity every couple of days, but I have help, I have advice and there’s a glimmer of light at the end.

Explaining this to someone who’s maybe at the stage I was a year ago also meant explaining it to myself, and I need that once in a while.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time - Antigone - turns out it’s pronounced Anne-Tig-On-Ee (as opposed to a spray for bringing things back).

Music:

• Client - moving up the years to more recent recordings. Still great.

Reading:

• Silos for Sunshine: we’ve mastered harvesting the sun, but storage is the gamechanger - looking at electricity as an perishable good and then what humanity’s solutions for storing perishables in the past (refrigeration, etc) can tell us about a future when we have an abundance of energy storage.
• Russell Tovey on pride, sexual power and politics: ‘The Green party slogan – make hope normal again – is what we need’ - “Things are fucking rocky [so let’s] build more lighthouses and be that fucking light that shines out, so people can find you through this dark, cold water that we’re being plunged into."
• Bimbling by Bike: A Spanish Introduction (Bec) and Good cop, bad cop (Sam). My friends Sam and Bec are currently cycling through Spain as part of their very long slow cycle trip and have been documenting it in a delightful way, highly reminiscent of old-school blogging or journaling. This is a lovely pair of posts by both of them.

Watching:

• Noah Kalina on the 1000 Year Long Exposure art/scam

Jigsaws completed:

• Badge collection - always good to do other people’s jigsaws once in a while.

Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie - I’m nearing the end and it’s getting nice and weird.
• Two Errol Morris documentaries:
  • The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography - very different to the usual photography doc. Quite touching and sweet with a lot of depth.
  • The Pigeon Tunnel - a more classic Morris interview with John LeCarre, which I enjoyed but found surprisingly slight.

A brief window of sun this afternoon on the rabbit run really brought out the damp greens.

Status:

A friend came over to talk about my chronic fatigue today. He had some kind of post-viral crash a while ago which hasn’t gotten better and wanted to talk to someone about it. Since I was in that position a couple of years ago and really could have done with having someone to talk to who wasn’t a shrugging doctor, it was the least I could do.

It’s also my specialist subject, the one thing I think about all the bloody time, so I set the timer for 30 minutes and we dove in. Obviously everyone’s experience of this condition is unique and management is a very personal thing, but I was able to give a few bits of advice I wish I’d had closer to the beginning, such as recognising physical symptoms that indicate you’re on the cusp of a crash (in both our cases tinnitus and sinus pain) and then using breathing exercises to calm them down.

We also talked about the impossibility of knowing if you’re doing the right or wrong thing, especially when it comes to brain fog which impairs your ability to make those decisions. And the importance of not getting angry or annoyed with yourself for being a useless shit-sack. Self-care and self-forgiveness are probably the most important things.

I hope he doesn’t have my level of chronic fatigue and that whatever’s ailing him clears up soon, but if he does, hopefully he can now mitigate the worst of it.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time - Charisma

Reading:

• Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units? - In my digi-art days I’d often come across silly numbers of RPis powering some installation and they certainly produced a lot of heat, so this isn’t an insane idea. Kinda similar to rooftop solar - the infrastructure and need is in place. The downside in the UK would be overheating our brick-oven houses in the summer, but I could see this working for municipal hot water, or something. via
• Why Solarpunk is already happening in Africa - I have questions about some of the conclusions and assumptions here, but the basic outline of what’s happening with solar in parts of Africa that aren’t on an electric grid is really interesting.
• Being your own label in 2025 (is confusing) - the music platforms are a nightmare and reaching audiences is hard. But it’s still feels worth it.

Watching:

• Why movies just don’t feel “real” anymore - ‌A deep dive into the first principles of movie immersion: on perceptual realism, indexicality, haptic visuality, and cinematic qualia.
• Water Damage live at Supersonic Festival 2025
• Noah Kalina - Why I photograph fog
• Trailer: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die
• Laura Kampf - The “Bent-MagLight” Lamp

Recently faved:

• Nobody cares about the longlist, Janet!
• The current Pope in 1982: obviously a Blues Brother
• Remember as days get colder animals are attracted to the warmth of cars

Jigsaws completed:

• Stacked slabs - taken this afternoon for today’s notes and it seemed like it might make a good jigsaw.

The last leaf on the cherry tree.

Status:

I guess you call a day like today a self-care day? Other than my therapy session (went well, I think - one of those hard-to-tell ones which were probably more useful than they seemed) and a call with the niece in New Zealand (finished her degree this week) I’ve mostly been resting and recuperating. Haven’t even done much internetting, as you’ll see below. In fact I’m not really sure what I did today. Normal service will probably resume.

Overnight listening:

• Empire - Austen vs Brontë: Unmasking slavery heiresses
• In Our Time: Polidori’s The Vampyre

Music:

• Sook-Yin Lee - Wigs ‘n’ Guns - somehow I missed that Sook-Yin Lee was also a recording musician. This DIY recording from 1996 is rough around the edges, but in a good way. Later recordings are really intriguing too.

Reading:

• Thomas Pynchon’s introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction, a book I loved a couple of decades ago which I’ve been thinking about re-reading.

If we accept the notion that using power against the powerless is wrong, a clear enough set of corollaries begins to emerge. We become able to distinguish, as populations (though not always their rulers) have usually been able to do, between outlaws and evil-doers, between outlawry and sin.

Jigsaws completed:

• Big Eyes - originally photographed Digbeth, 2016

Telly:

• Inherent Vice

Big old storm blew in from the south and dumped a lot of rain today.

Status:

Feeling better today, though the weather kept me indoors. Did not fancy going out on the mobility scooter in that wind!

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story - The Labour Party pt 2
• Night Tracks

Music:

• Client, aka “what Sarah Blackwood out of Dubstar did next”. Dubstar’s Disgraceful is a favourite albums, one of the few from that specific era that stand up, so I’m really enjoying working through this new-to-me music.

Reading:

• There are no weird blogs anymore cause it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business - on the evils of private equity and hedge funds. This is what’s happening to my local supermarket and it always reminds me of the Bamboo Lounge in Goodfellas. Load it up with debt and when you can’t squeeze anymore, set fire to the remains.
• This flu season looks grim as H3N2 emerges with mutations
• 3x bloke-pinions:
  • Ian Dunt - A week of chaos, cowardice and negligence
  • Paul Krugman - The Decline and Fall of the Heritage Foundation
  • Adam Rutherford - The Irony of Hitler’s Junk

Watching:

• Strandbeest evolution 2025 - great to see Theo Jansen is still building his astonishing giant autonomous creatures and setting them loose on the Dutch coast.
• Ants Pants: New project - Making a WoodWorking Workshop EP1

Jigsaws completed:

• Bill Drummond’s wall, May 2015 - original

Telly:

• Pluribus.

Status:

Shite day today. Slept terribly, dicky tummy, anxiety brain… Didn’t make it to work and only managed a few minutes of therapy before mutually deciding to try again another day. Low-level activities are OK but as soon as I try to level up it all shuts down. So mostly hanging with the rabbits and mooching on the internet. Ah well. Try again tomorrow.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story - The Labour Party pt 1
• Night Tracks

Reading:

• Molly Soda interviews Joanna Walsh on amateurs, failure, and embracing clunkiness - her new book looks great.
• Bridget Christie’s The Change cancelled by Channel 4 - what the actual fuck C4? I expect this shit from Netflix or whatever but you’re a public service broadcaster. Programming this sort of thing is literally your job. (Christie is touring in the new year.)
• Andrew “2 things” Curry: Party politics is busy realigning itself - some thoughtful pondering about the recent Mamdani and Plaid Cymru wins, with a twist on the political compass which I quite like.
• Human cost of Birmingham council’s plans for Druids Heath estate

Watching:

• Impact Marble Racing Tournament E1 - the Switchback

What’s On in Birmingham:

If I had the energy I would definitely be attending:

• Flatpack Monthly: Sunlight + Q&A with Nina Conti and Shenoah Allen - Thursday 18th December, 2025

Jigsaws completed:

• Care - originally photographed at Spaghetti Junction, April 2019.
• Barber Barrier - originally photographed at Spaghetti Junction, January 2019.

Telly:

• Pluribus - the new series from Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn is so, so good.

Status:

One of the funnest things to do when you have long-term chronic fatigue is deciding which cause you want to assign to the debilitating effects. You'll never get it right - it's like trying to reverse engineer a really bland soup - but your sense of self requires you to make the effort. "What did I do that resulted in me feeling like this?" you ask yourself in an attempt to knit the actions of your past self to the present moment so you might at the minimum learn what to avoid next time.

And so yesterday I assumed it was my doing an hour of computer work that caused my evening malignancy. In hindsight, and following a night of sweating the bed, it was probably the side effects from the flu vaccination I'd had 24 hours previously. Or maybe it wasn't! Who knows! Not the doctors! And certainly not me.

Quiet day today in prep for a visit to work tomorrow. Don't want to cause any of those darned effects.

Overnight listening:

• I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue
• You're Wrong About: The Dictionary Wars!

Music listening:

• Mountain Goats - Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan

Reading:

• Zack Polanski - The right can mock my teeth all it wants – it shows the Greens have struck a nerve
• Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
• Latesploitation: An examination of recent works by Gilbert Hernandez - Gilbert's 90s comics were transformative for me. Those from the last decade haven't been of great interest but I suspect they'll warrant a deeper retrospective in time. (I rarely if ever put NSFW on links, but I will here. Definitely NSFW.)

Watching:

• bill wurtz's history of the entire world, i guess

Jigsaw:

• Jonathan Meades - photographed by myself at Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham, January 2018.

Telly:

• Pointless
• Taskmaster

Hey down there, Walter Bunjamin.

Status:

Felt like I had some spare energy today but didn’t want to burn it just yet so decided to do some of that old work-from-home and started the massive but piecemeal-able task of organising the Loaf photography archive into something usable. I’m using Lightroom again, which is a delight (I know, Adobe sucks, but Lightroom Classic is just so good). Just like riding a bike.

After an hour the brain fog kicked in though and I’m struggling to do words. Fi asked me to email an article to her and I subject’ed it “Lady Walking Article”, which is guess is descriptive.

This blog is now available as an email, so my friends who aren’t on the open internet can get it if they want it. Soft launching this week as I tweak some bits, going wide at the weekend.

Overnight listening:

• Empire - Joseph Conrad
• Night Tracks

Music listening:

• Charli xcx - House ft John Cale - blimey.

Reading:

• Predator: Badlands review: Elle Fanning is a lovable robot BFF to the sweetest Predator yet - ‌This Predator is queer and we should say it.

Watching:

• ChatGPT made me delusional - thought I’d bail fast on this but watched the full hour. Quite the ride and a damning indictment.

Telly:

• Taskmaster
• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

I don’t like photographs of the rabbits taken with flash, especially when it looks like we’re poking then with a stick (it’s tasty fresh hay), but Lav looks so perfectly evil here…

Status:

Flu vaccine today, in anticipation of a particularly bad season. Since the British learned nothing from Covid it’s probably best to be prepared for the worst. I’m not sure how much it costs as the pharmacist said I was probably immunocompromised given my history so didn’t charge me, but I don’t think it’s much. £25?

Haven’t have any notable side effects but to be honest they’re probably no different to a standard day with chronic fatigue. LOL!

The pharmacy was a little chaotic, at least to my mostly agrophobic senses. I always forget to bring earplugs etc and should really prep a leaving the house go-bag.

Overnight listening:

• Dream Time

Music:

• Dawn Terry live at Supersonic Festival 2025
• Fine Young Cannibals - She Drives Me Crazy and Cameo - Word Up to check if one sampled the other (they didn’t). That Cameo video though… Phew!
• The United States of America - The United States of America - new to me (via Couthart, natch) and very reminiscent of Broadcast, etc.

Reading:

• Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani - Journalists gonna journalist.
• The populist assault on the BBC - You can’t appease fascists. Stop trying to appease fascists.
• Talking Oglaf with Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne
• temple of doom - A review of their first Sunn0))) gig. I’ve seen them three or four times now. The first couple were ecstatic, joyful, transformative experiences. The last I had to leave early. I think it’s an age thing.
• ‘The most desolate place in the world’: The sea of ice that inspired Frankenstein

Filing away

• Community Rules - PDF book - a collection of examples of how communities have organised themselves to avoid “the tyranny of structurelessness”.

Watching:

• Why Didn’t Disease Flow Both Ways in 1492?
• Edible Acres - Free Water Heater for farm - A twist on the old trick of passing water through a compost heap to heat it up.

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge

Status:

Grumpy day today, which is common the day after recovery day. It's like I'm recovered enough to function but not enough to not get frustrated with silly little things.

Not helped by my thinking more about how to distribute this little blog of mine. A few friends have said they like it but don't remember to check it, to which I reply, well, it's on the open web. You can add its feed to whatever you use to monitor websites and the like. And of course hardly anyone does that, because the web is a minority interest game and everyone's in walled gardens.

So I'm coming to the realisation that this is not my problem to solve. If people want to follow this blog they can figure out a way that works for them. I might write a little guide for the about page (probably a variant of About Feeds) but there's not much I can really do.

Well, other than offer a daily email option, which I plan to do soon.

Insomniac Listening:

• In Our Time - Walter Benjamin - after whom our rabbit is named.

Reading:

• James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers - ‌ He co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism
• Welcome to 21st-century politics: a bitter revolt against power that will consume Labour and the Tories - John Harris

Watching:

• Taskmaster: A Masterpiece Of Existentialist Philosophy: Sartre, Kierkegaard, Camus & Horne
• Laura Kampf - The Clever Work Light

Telly:

• The Other One
• Taskmaster
• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

It’s quite hard to photograph two loaves of sourdough and not make them look like breasts.

Status:

Recovery day so mostly sofa and jigsaws. Fi went clothes shopping and picked me up some fleecy things to replace my increasingly threadbare fleecy things, so I have a new wardrobe which I will doubtless be wearing every day now for the next couple of years.

After 15 days the cold appears to have mostly cleared up. I am ecstatic. Yay.

Insomniac Listening:

• In Our Time: The Sistine Chapel

Music listening:

• Sleater-Kinney - The Woods

Reading:

• Heavy metal is healing teens on the Blackfeet Nation
• Grace Jones’ Slave To The Rhythm at 40 - we’re at the point where stuff that came out when I was on the cusp of teenagerdom is having 40 year retrospectives. This is a nice one.

Watching:

• Jack Mack Woodturning - Elm burl into a decorative vase
• Marbula One Season 6 GP1 - this really is surprisingly tense stuff.

Telly:

• The Other One - Fi’s watching this and I’m getting invested. Main character reminds me of one of our friends if her life had taken a normie turn and she hadn’t been able to embrace her weird.
• Taskmaster
• The Pursuit of Love - not as cutting a satire as I remember but still fun to revisit. Emily Beecham’s facial expressions are an acting masterclass.

Status:

Made it into work today because there’s a late shift at the bakery today so I could wait until the phlegm had cleared before heading in. Managed a good hour of photography and really enjoyed being there with everyone, but crashed horribly this evening with the good old post-exertion malaise. I mentioned to someone earlier how it’s been perversely nice to have a bad cold because at least it’s a proper illness that has recognisable symptoms and eventually passes. The cold has shoved the chronic fatigue on to the back seat this last couple of weeks, but it’s back wth a vengeance. Yay…

The post-exertion thing is weird as it’s totally unpredictable. I got home feeling pretty good, cautiously confident I could do some small jobs around the house. Fi came back around the same time, we cleaned out the rabbits together but as she updated me on her day I felt my brain shutting down. Watching Taskmaster, - usually a refreshing distraction - became a chore and putting this post together has been like wading through treacle.

It’s not as bad as it’s been, but it’s still massively disabling.

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Orwell pt 3 & 4

Music listening:

• Mountain Goats - Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan - new album!

Reading:

• Alex Winter on fame, AI and reuniting with Keanu Reeves: ‘Sometimes we’re on a groove and go, ‘God damn, that was good!’ - buried the lede here - their Waiting for Godot is midway through its Broadway run. Really hope there’s a recording.
• Actually existing solarpunk
• This feeling is called hope
• Only Connect host Victoria Coren Mitchell drags Graham Linehan over trans remarks - not wanting to give publicity to the hateful man but three cheers for Victoria. Only Connect is one of those shows where I see My People, the sort of weirdos that look like my friends, on the telly and it’s lovely to see the host being protective of her flock.

Watching:

• Andrew Scott’s iconic dance in The Pursuit of Love - For some reason the Mitford sisters have been on my mind this week and Fi has no memory of seeing this, which she surely would, right? Thankfully I grabbed it before it left iPlayer.

Telly:

• Taskmaster

I made this photo 19 years ago today. The year prior to this saw my photography take off in some really interesting ways and I’m hoping to mark it somehow. But for now, enjoy the first Tree Quadtych.

Status:

Didn’t sleep too well - woke up pretty much on the hour for no good reason - so today was a bit of a write-off with a thick head all afternoon.

Weirdly warm, isn’t it? I think the rabbits know something is off as they were acting more strange than usual today.

Had a good therapy session today. Feel like we covered a lot of good stuff.

Of all my photos I’ve made online jigsaws from, this one has been the most satisfying.

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Orwell pt 2

Music listening:

• Night Tracks
• The Magnetic Fields - Distortion

Reading:

• ‘It’s for the girls and the gays!’ Rachel Sennott on her hilarious comedy about the grotty glamour of Gen Z life
• Anil Dash - Turn the volume up
• The Lowdown’s Ethan Hawke is always chasing the feeling of being Lee Raybon 🔓 - his character in this really hit me in the feels. I both wanted to be him and was so glad I didn’t turn out like him.
• The Lowdown — Vulture episode recaps

Watching:

• Primitive Technology: Wood ash & crushed terracotta mortar

Telly:

• Taskmaster
• Celebrity Traitors - Fi’s been enjoying this as have friends of mine so I thought I’d give the final a go. Nope, really don’t get the appeal. Left halfway to do the dishes. Ah well.

Hay bale delivery day always gets the buns excited. New food smells!

Status:

My recovery might be at the stage where I can start doing small jobs again and I’m considering popping into work tomorrow.

My brain is definitely waking up as I’ve been thinking about mutual aid again and how it might work in my local community. The Peter Kropotkin In Our Time was particularly useful - if you’ve been following my Listening habits there’s been a fair bit of Marx &co recently, and last year I did all 100+ episodes of Mike Duncan’s Russian Revolution podcast, and while I find Marxist analysis interesting with plenty of value, I can’t say I like the guy or his authoritarian mates. Kropotkin I do like, so far anyway.

Mutual aid isn’t too weird a concept for me to be into. It’s a foundation of the cooperative movement and underlies a lot of counterculture activity and activism. It’s totally my cuppa, and if we’re going to stand any chance against the forthcoming fascist insurgency we’re going to need it.

No real capacity in my brain for coherent thoughts though, let alone deeds, but seeds are sprouting. Time to crack open Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse again…

Listening:

• Empire - Orwell pt 1
• In Our Time - Seismology
• In Our Time - Peter Kropotkin

Music listening:

• Dream Time

Reading:

• America’s Dumbest Billionaires Fail to Stop Zohran Mamdani
• Garbage Day - We did it, Zo

Watching:

• Smarter Every Day - Refueling a Nuclear Reactor
• Zohran Mamdani’s victory speech following historic NYC mayoral win

Telly:

• The Lowdown - finished this, and it’s SO GOOD. Probably my best show of the year. Highly recommended.

Status:

Hey, guess what? My cold is marginally less worse than yesterday! Although my sinuses might tell you otherwise. Once this is posted I'll back over the steam bowl with a towel over my head.

Accidentally re-opened the rift between myself and Jez over whether Roy Lichtenstein was a genius artist (me) or an elitist copyist (Jez) before mutually realising we were too tire for this right now. Amusingly it came from a slag of Damien Hirst who, per Jez, "isn't even bothering to paint his own Ben Day dots".

If there's one thing everyone can agree on it's that Damien Hirst is shite, right?

Insomniac Listening:

• Origin Story: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin part 3: Terror

Reading:

• Garbage Day: Cancel culture for thee, not me
• ‘You can’t eat electricity’: how rural solar farms became the latest battlefront in Britain’s culture war
• Brief Encounter at 80: why we’re still falling for David Lean’s 1945 romance
• Mycelium Newsletter - October 2025 - for spores, seekers, pilgrims, 400-ers, psychonauts, RAWheads, august members of the Illuminati and Cosmic Coincidence Command Control Centre.
• ‘How did we get here?’: documentary explores how Republicans changed course on the climate
• Words we love: Pebbling – a new love language - ‌the new term for when people share memes and gifs to those they are thinking of.

Watching:

• ️Who wants to see what’s inside this giant tree wart?
• Practical Engineering - Concrete’s Greatest Weakness
• Yoshinao Satoh - Papers

Telly:

• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• Tuca & Bertie
• Letter to Brezhnev - bonus Ken Campbell as a creepy reporter
• The Lowdown

Status:

Still got a thick head but felt able to do a few little things today, which then resulted in a little crash because I still have CFS, duh. But at least the kitchen is cleaner now.

I've been thinking about whether these daily updates would work as an email. I have a strong reticence to sending newsletters that aren't High Value Content because that's email and going into someone inbox is a big deal that shouldn't be taken for granted. But then I get emails that are basically short blog posts, and there is a decent amount of stuff down below this bit. And the vast majority of people don't use RSS, Mastodon or even Bluesky, the only bits of internet I'm mentally prepared to engage with.

So, should I add email distribution?

Music listening:

• Southern Culture On The Skids

Reading:

• Reissue of the Week: The Unutterable by The Fall
• Internet Archive’s legal fights are over, but its founder mourns what was lost
• Raffles, the gentleman thief
• Warren Ellis on Bugonia
• My Truck Desk

Watching:

• Vienna's war on parking
• Auralnauts: We're Breaking Up - end of an era for the best producers of Star Wars parodies (and other stuff) on the internet.
  • Star Wars: The Acolyte - Curse of the Flow of the Knight of the Dragon (A Kung Fu Fan Edit) Part 1
• Why City Benches Are Becoming More Hostile - an old problem but always worth reviving until this toxic shit is reversed. If you can't have a nap on it, it's not a proper bench.

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge
• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

Status:

Incrementally feeling better again. I won’t horror you with the outputs though.

Chum Andy came over to chat with Fi about some art stuff and we had a nice catch up in the sunshine. Otherwise, Sunday innit.

Insomniac Listening:

• In Our Time: Seismology
• Song Exploder: The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??

Reading:

• Destroy History: NEMS part 3 (Patrons advance PDF before serialisation begins on badmachinery.com tomorrow)

Watching:

• Video Update Cha0sHof Week 161-164
• Public Secrets with Lee Roy Chapman - the series of short Tulsa history programmes made by Chapman and Sterlin Harjo that inspired the main character in The Lowdown. So great to see the original driving around in his beat-up van.
• Meat Grinder Restoration
• Laura Kampf - The Clever Workbench
• Patton Oswalt - Bad Guy Good Guy

Telly:

• Riot Women

Status:

Continuing to slowly get better. Not much else to report. A friend asked on the group chat for telly recommendations and I had a disturbing amount to recommend. Almost like I've been signed off work for a year and instructed to rest...

Nice bit of sunshine in the afternoon so I was able to sit with the buns and not risk a chill. Most of the big trees are pretty much bare now and the bugs are enjoying mulching the fruit we neglected to pick in time.

Insomniac Listening:

• Origin Story: The Story of Socialism: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin Part Two: Power

Reading:

• Dithering - part 1
• This Post Should Have Been Shorter
• Why is Hebden Bridge the lesbian capital? - while watching Riot Women I wondered out loud if everyone in Yorkshire was a lesbian, then Fi pointed out it was set in Hebden Bridge.

Watching:

• True Facts: The Science of the Praying Mantis
• Which MARBLE will escape the spiders? 🕷️ Halloween Marble Race 2025

Telly:

• A House of Dynamite
• Riot Women
• The Lowdown

I’m still not up to taking many photos so this is one from 31 October 2006, around the time I started taking my photography a bit more seriously.

Status:

Getting better? Maybe? Definitely having moments of clarity in-between the hacking coughs and sweats, however brief they may be. And while the coughing is nasty it is productive, as they say, and having now seen what’s in my lungs I’m glad it’s moving on out.

Of course this is all playing out on top of my chronic fatigue and is my first major secondary illness since I got that diagnosis 18 months ago (being unable to socialise has some advantages I guess), so all bets are off as to how long it’s going to drag on. I give it maybe til the middle of next week at the earliest?

Still, I’m getting plenty of telly in. We were due some new series to watch together and I’m dead pleased with both of this week’s choices. Fi chose Riot Women, thinking it was a light-hearted romp a-la Lady Parts. It’s not, but it’s so much better that I’d dared hope. Joanna Scanlan in particular is fantastic. And I’d been waiting with anticipation for The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo’s big new series after Reservation Dogs, and it does not disappoint. We’d been watching a fair amount of prestige-esque stuff that hadn’t really delivered recently and to have two shows on the go that are written and performed so bloody well is a delight.

Reading:

• This physicist says we don’t take COVID seriously enough - “We may be living through a slow-moving immune decline crisis.”
• ‘The nuns were convinced they were possessed by demons’: goth and metal stars select the scariest music ever made
• Second Order Slop : Yr golygfa o Hescwm Uchaf, rhif 29

Watching:

• When You’re Late for Your Own Medal Ceremony
• How Marlon Brando Changed Acting
• Mark Kermode reviews Bugonia - looks good!

Evening Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie
• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• Riot Women
• The Lowdown
• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

Status:

Still under the weather veering between sweats and shivers, but it’s potentially entering the final phlegmy stages. I’m all about the steam inhalation and cough syrup today. Get that shit moving and out of my lungs please.

We had the great-neph over for a bit of half-term monitoring, hence Adventure Time on the telly listing below. I also shared with him my shockingly recent realisation that the 9th, 10th 11th and 12th months of the year are named seven, eight, nine and ten in Latin which blew his 9 year old mind. At least he won’t spend 40 years in ignorance like me.

The 10 year calendar is kinda interesting. The Romans had a thing for decimals, so 10 months made them happy, but there are 12 lunar cycles in a year, so what about the spare two? Well, they happen in midwinter when nothing happens anyway, so who gives a fuck?

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Gaza

Reading:

• Culture Wars, episode 1: The Fascist Menace

Watching:

• Hubelino Marble Tournament 2025 – All 8 Events

Evening Telly:

• Adventure Time
• Riot Women
• The Lowdown

Status:

Woke at 5am drenched in sweat, like my side of the bed is a bath now, which is supposed to be a good thing right? The fever has broken? Except I haven’t really had a fever? I don’t know how this shit works, point is I feel a teeny bit better today, which I’ll take. Also got some fancy pharmacy gel for my mouth ulcer which means I can chew food again. In other news, I have no other news.

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Gaza

Reading:

• Burning Shore: Demons and Christians

Watching:

• Simone Giertz - With this motorized umbrella, I will never have to clean my outdoor furniture again

Evening Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie
• Riot Women
• The Lowdown

Status:

I am quite unwell. It’s not Covid, thank gollygosh, but it’s fucking debilitating. I’m beyond useless right now. And as a cherry on top I managed to chew the side of my tongue and have an ulcer which makes eating painful. Yay!

Insomniac Listening:

• Dream Time

Reading:

• To the Beach

Watching:

• “There may not be as much humanity in the world as one would like to see, but there is some. There’s more than one would think." James fucking Baldwin, man…

Afternoon / Evening Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie
• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• Chad Powers
• Set It Up - yes, I’m reduced to watching Fi’s post-work decompression romcoms with her. (Not too bad this one.)

Status:

🤧

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Gaza

Music listening:

• Night Tracks

Reading:

• ‘People thought I was a communist doing this as a non-profit’: is Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales the last decent tech baron?
• Anarchy in the “yookay” - How the new right came to loathe Britain even more than the radical left.
• The Democrat Tea Party is here

Watching:

• The Welsh town that saw off Nigel Farage

Evening Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie
• Only Connect and University Challenge
• Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing

On this date five years ago I was photographing sunsets in Druids Heath.

Status:

Still properly crashed and nothing can fix it but waiting it out. I’d be bored if I had the wherewithal to be bored.

Insomniac Listening:

• Empire - Gaza pt 4: Gaza & The Islamic Conquest
• Empire - Gaza pt 5: Crusader Gaza: Saladin & Richard The Lionheart

Music listening:

• Mindful Mix

Reading:

• Do populists always crash the economy?
• Why do we yawn? It’s almost certainly not for the reason you think
• Walkmans

Watching:

• Woodturning - Some Crazy Bark On This One
• My Tool Wall Has A Secret

Evening Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie
• Nosferatu - Very good but wiped me out. Do not watch when exhausted!
• Chad Powers

Caught an hour of warm sunshine in the garden today as the clouds raced by.

Status:

Total crash day with additional lurgy. Utter write-off. Can’t focus, can’t deal with the most minor of problems, just watching telly and grazing the internet. Saw this coming of course - I’ve been dealing with this boom-bust chronic fatigue for a while now - but it’s still dispiriting. Fingers crossed for tomorrow.

Insomniac Listening:

Apparently I listened to the Empires: Gaza podcast last night but tbh I can’t remember anything about it.

Music listening:

• Night Tracks

Watching:

• Relocating the Zipline
• Lego Cars vs Bigger Potholes
• Like Stories Untold - 2020s Blockbusters that we’ll Rewatch Forever

Afternoon / Evening Telly:

• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves - real GOTG vibe, which I didn’t see mentioned before, and which I’m here for.
• Chad Powers
• Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost

Clouds from a couple of weeks ago. Definitely not from today. Today’s clouds were much less pretty.

Status:

Successful rest day. Managed to do nothing and think about very little. Not that I had much choice. Engine fully out of gas.

Insomniac Listening:

• In Our Time: Early Christian Martyrdom

Music listening:

• The Grid - Evolver
• Sun Kil Moon and Amoeba (Apple | Spotify)

Reading:

• Where’s her Pulitzer already? Joanna Newsom’s 20 best songs – ranked!
• Dystopias Now - Kim Stanley Robinson - File under “how we beat Farage”
• ‘When I told him I’d secretly seen his films, his eyes filled with tears’: Isabella Rossellini remembers her father Roberto
• Liquid Glass Is Cracked, and Usability Suffers in iOS 26 - I’m actually quite relieved that I’ll likely never buy a new iPhone due to this nonsense. Then the one I have will slowly lose functionality, weaning me off until I no long need the bastard device. Sweet bliss.

Evening Telly:

• Chad Powers