Pete Ashton's Notes & Links

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 10pm.

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

Rain yesterday. Blue skies today. Rain forecast tomorrow.

Status:

Popped into work briefly to take a few photos and get some flour. We got given an unwanted bread maker a while back and it’s fantastic. Takes two minutes to load it up with yeast, flour, salt and water, press two buttons and five hours later it contains a hot loaf of bread. We’ve adopted a number of kitchen gadgets over the years – juicers, air fryers, courgette peelers – and they’ve all wound up back on the street WhatsApp group. But the bread maker is never leaving.

The joke at Loaf is that I’m the only person who works there who isn’t really that passionate about food, let alone bread. I got the job for other reasons, so it’s quite ironic that while I was signed off with chronic fatigue I started baking. Not that the bakers at work would recognise what I do as “baking”.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Battle of Trafalgar - turns out it didn’t really affect the war and Napoleon shrugged the defeat off, but it did allow the UK to endlessly milk it for propaganda purposes.

Music:

• Mogwai - The Bad Fire

Reading:

• The Outsiders: why Francis Ford Coppola’s coming-of-age drama is secretly gay
• How The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds showed the world that sampling could be an art form - When this came out I was just the right age for it to be transformative. I remember buying the album in Woolworths, of all places.
• ‘If I stopped using speed it would be a massive step back’: Life with undiagnosed adult ADHD - I was talking to someone about how ADHD medicine is basically speed and that those who can’t get a prescription self medicate, and quickly realised I had no idea what I was on about. Now I do.
• Women’s Institute will no longer accept trans women as members from April - notable that, as with the Guides, the organisation desperately doesn’t want to do this but “legal advice” says they have to in case some transphobe sues them and legal costs drain their coffers. They might want to disobey the law for moral reasons but can’t afford it. Classic chilling effect overriding common decency. A fix to the law would solve this but I can’t see our coward government doing that.
• Obsessions, Possessions: Coventry Biennial - great to see this is still going and still artist-lead.

Watching:

• Harvest my Borlotti beans with me - Gerald Stratford, aka the red cabbage guy, is bascially my late step-grandfather in every way. I sent the channel to my sister and she agrees. Quite uncanny. (I have quite strong West Country roots and can do the accent on demand.)

Telly:

• Only Connect and University Challenge

Forgot to take a photo for today and was struggling to find something in the archive but then my friend Joe posted about Jonathan Meades and I remembered in 2016 I found this stencil on a pillar under Spaghetti Junction.

Status:

Chum Daz came over today for a long overdue catch-up. He’s also on medical leave, as it were, but his instructions are to go for walks and bike rides, so we won’t be doing that together.

We talked about many things, some nice and dull, some a bit more agitating, but nothing that couldn’t subsequently be offset by some jigsaw puzzling. It was a lovely hour.

Later on I researched how best to compost a meadow’s worth of hay and reckon I’ve nailed it.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Plato’s Gorgias - Fell asleep to this the night before last, which is sort of the point of listening to IOT, but I’m actually interested in Plato so did a re-listen. The stuff on how rhetoric subverts democracy is fascinating.

Music:

• David Byrne’s Tiny Desk concert

Reading:

• Let’s see what’s going on down at the piss factory
• Erik Davis: Empathy boxed in - “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have [empathy], I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”
• Ed Yong’s special Galápagos photo essay - ‌Birding in the Galápagos … offers a glimpse at what a biological utopia might look like, in which humans pose no danger to our fellow creatures, or vice versa.
• Discourse 2000: To Live A Life Of Freedom, Machos Take A Stand: Colony Earth!

Watching:

• The Grouch - screen recording of a 90’s Mac plugin where Oscar from Sesame Street would sing when you emptied the trash. I had this! Via
• Practical Engineering - Hurricane vs. Tiny House

Telly:

• Taskmaster
• The Other One
• Ellie & Natasia

Fiona scavenged a bird drinking bowl thing from a skip. It’s significantly larger than the one we used to have on the garden table. May have to rethink its location.

Status:

Rest day before week with a few things scheduled in it. Not feeling too bad after the bonfire. Hoping the restorative nature of being outdoors offsets any fatigue.

Am breaking with the usual posting format for this post because the usual posting format is the wrong posting format for today.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Plato’s Gorgias

Four in the morning rabbit-holing:

Cornish language to get same protected status as Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic > Cornish language > Brittonic languages > Breton language > Goidelic languages > Insular Celtic languages > Cumbric > Yan tan tethera

Discovering:

The other day I linked to a delightfully readable article on an art website called Corridor8. I then had a poke around said website to see what it was all about and was astonished to discover it was founded by Michael Butterworth. Michael is a British counterculture legend whose work in the 1970s within the orbits of Michael Moorcock and JG Ballard is recounted in this piece on the site, but I crossed paths with him in the 1990s when he was actively publishing comics with David Britton as Savoy Books.

I first came across one of Savoy’s Lord Horror comics in 1990, high on the back shelves of a comic shop in north London, the sort of shelves where the weird and radical would bleed into an unsuspecting world, tempting young Pete with taboo delights. Within a few years I’d come on their radar through my zine reviews and was put on the new publications mailing list, meaning I have pretty much everything they put out in that era. To say it’s strong stuff is an understatement (Britton even went to prison for obscenity) and I’d consider it the sort of culturally and historically important work that is tricksy to contextualise in the modern era. It often feels to me that the deeply transgressive nature of so much pre-millennial counterculture material means it fails to connect with the rebels and outlaws of today, and that this is a shame as so much baby is being thrown out with the nasty bathwater.

So I was delighted to see that Corridor8, while honouring the roots of its octogenarian founder, is not some throwback, nostalgia vehicle but an actively progressive, contemporary journal of art as it is practiced today, with a refreshingly young voice. I like what I’ve seen and have slapped it into my feed reader.

I’ve found a valuable thread connecting two worlds of great importance to me, and that makes me happy. It only took me 15 years to notice it, though to be fair they only started covering the Midlands last year. Long may it continue.

Reading:

• What I Know is What I Am: Jimmy Cliff (1944-2025)
• Can a 50-year-old book on Paris help repair your attention span? - yes, Georges Perec’s psychogeographic masterpiece An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris is 50 and it’s lovely to see it still inspires. (Fiona did a variation on the theme in 2019.)
• Anarchist Monopoly with Bakunin, Kropotkin, Goldman and Nozick.
• Minute papillon! The 285 Manifesto girlcott halts the 2026 Angoulême Festival
• Garbage Day: Your kids are watching nazislop on TikTok - dispatches from the internet I no longer want anything to do with thank you very much.

Not listening to just yet:

• The Quietus Albums of the Year 2025 - 100 albums to go through at some point.

Looking:

• I put all of Scotlands Sheep into one Mega-Sheep, here is how big it is.

Watching:

• Join me and my 15 pound red cabbage

Telly:

• Pointless
• Only Connect and University Challenge

Status:

Woke up grumpy and decided today needed to be a bit different. We’d already planned to do a compost drop-off at the allotment but decided to also have a bonfire, since this is the month when bonfires are allowed on Birmingham allotments. A rotten shed needed to be disposed of, after all.

As has been written many times before, fire is a primal thing. Some of my favourite memories involved sitting around a fire with good friends. Watching a fire is something all humans benefit from.

So we sat and watched a fire. For five hours.

It’s good to be outside.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Decadent Movement - Beardsley and Wilde oh my! Nice bit at the end where they disagree on how elitist it all was - reminded me a bit of the left/right anarchist divide.

Watching:

• Laura Kampf bought a camper for $1
• How copper gets recycled from wires and cables

Telly:

• Taskmaster
• The Other One

Status:

A much needed rest day. Tired and grumpy and just waiting it out. It will pass. It always passes.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: William and Caroline Herschel - 18th century amateurs revolutionise astronomy.

Music:

• Radiohead - Kid A / OK Computer

Reading:

• You know someone with Long COVID. They need you to ask about it genuinely.
• Discourse 2000: I Was Shocked To Find What Was Allowed: THE VISIBLE MAN
• Recomplicating Place with Social Practice - a nice (and surprisingly readable, given that terribly Art title) overview of the Growing Project, a long term revitalisation of a toxic canal bank in Digbeth which I was involved with in the first year before Covid knocked me out. Wish I could have stayed involved.

Watching:

• Clay Plaster, Infrared Heating Panels And More | Greenhouse Transformation Part 3
• Patching up a Concrete Parking Spot
• True Facts: How Tiny Animals Use Electric Fields - “butt spiders”

Jigsaws completed:

• Old door
• Forest

Telly:

• Taskmaster
• The Other One

Send more lawn. This one’s nearly done.

Status:

Mostly a rest day today, although I did find myself re-wiring the lights outside the shed this afternoon. A quirk of my condition is as I get tired I can get what I’m assuming is an adrenaline boost, which translates as a determination to do a thing even if I maybe shouldn’t. I’m better at managing this than I was but even so I didn’t feel great after and this evening has been one of thick heads and sore limbs.

Still, the lighting in the rabbit run is now somewhat less unsatisfactory, and the rabbits got an extra long session on the lawn, so that’s something.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: The Song of Roland

Reading:

• Ethan Hawke and Richard Linklater on power, combovers and Blue Moon
• ‘We had six MPs and four factions’: inside Your Party’s toxic power struggles
• Ian Dunt: Budget 2025: This is how you lose the world
• The men who raised the flags - I’m shocked, shocked I tell you, to learn they’re not nice men.
• Giant of the Attic - On the Majesty of Alan Moore - An impressively well constructed and readable profile of his life and work that, despite knowing 95% of it already, I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

Watching:

• Smote x One Leg One Eye live at Supersonic Festival 2025
• Kermode’s film reviews - Simon Mayo’s discomfort at Pillion is delightful.
• Toto’s Africa on a mechanical organ

Jigsaws completed:

• Pink Door
• Locked Out

Telly:

• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• Taskmaster

Lavander wants to know if the camera is food.

Status:

This afternoon was mostly spent setting up the Loaf online shop for December. I’ve been able to hand over all of my pre-CFS office duties except this one as it’s far to complicated to document, especially as it only happens once a year. So one of the gang came over with the numbers and I slowly worked through the horrifying hodgepodge of Wordpress workflows.

The issue I ran into with an online shop for a bakery was all the standard e-commerce packages assume you have a warehouse full of non-perishable items. The Amazon model, basically. They don’t adapt well to pre-ordering fresh bread with a one day shelf life. So you either go bespoke or you get in there and hack, both of which mean the system gets fragile over time.

Apparently we’ve had a guy in to talk about re-doing the website next year and he recommends Shopify. I remain sceptical, but he seems on the level and, crucially, it’s not my problem any more!

(This is also why there’s bugger all links to click today. Brain too pooped to surf. Crash probably incoming…)

Overnight listening:

• Empire: Tintin, Nazis, & Soviets - always interesting to hear people discover something you’ve known about for ages. This is a pretty fair appraisal of Herge’s journey out of a colonial mindset.
• Night Tracks

Watching:

• The Tick - the original 1990s cartoon series, not the (equally good) more recent Peter Serafinowicz live action.

Jigsaws completed:

• Rustic door

Telly:

• Documentary Now!

Hard frost this morning. Also I note the squirrels have once again not tidied up their mess.

Status:

Had a dentist appointment today, my first in 6 years it turned out. He took one look and pronounced my teeth perfect. It was almost embarrassing how little he had to do. And I have to say, with my body not being at its best these days, it’s nice to have something that works.

Since I was on the high street I popped into work with the camera to take some photos. Didn’t stay for long, obviously, but spent a bit of time in the cookery school, looking for nice compositions.

Also noticed this nice effect through the cooling racks in the bakery. Couldn’t get it to work in colour though so stripped it all back. Probably won’t be used for marketing, this one.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Corals - very interesting, but essentially three scientists repeatedly saying coral reefs are going extinct.
• Night Tracks - Opens with a piece by ZRI, named for the Red Hedgehog Tavern in Vienna which I have now learned about.

Reading:

• Space Travel’s In My Blood: Dan Dare ’78 - Discourse 2000 continues.
• Make Culture Weird Again - caught my weird-radar attention, obviously. Was wondering how long before Mark Fisher would be mentioned, and there he is. What’s missing from this analysis is rent. If artists are to ignore the market they can’t also pay rent.

Watching:

• Securing a old oak tree from splitting apart

Jigsaws completed:

• Old wooden door - so much blue…

Telly:

• Pluribus

My shed door.

Status:

Next week I’ll be running a short composting workshop for an RSPB site so I spent a bit of time today getting my notes in order. I was a bit wary of taking on this job, given my condition, but I’ll have help and Fi says talking compost makes me happy and that’s as good a reason as any. I’ll be keeping the subsequent few days clear for a crash though.

Way back when I had my NHS chronic fatigue assessment the doctor mentioned they used to offer tai chi sessions before a round of cuts nixed that, and it’s stuck with me as a way I could do exercise without exerting too much. I’m not going to make a class anytime soon so I went to the YouTube. As expected, there’s a lot of wellness bullshit in the search results but I found this wholesome looking video where Ian from Wokingham borough council stands in an empty echoey hall and going through the basic moves. It looks perfect. To quote the comments, “no music, no plants, no leotards.”

I’ve only made it five minutes through so far though. A chum who has also found himself on enforced rest will be popping over next week for a catch up. Maybe I can convince him to try it with me.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time: Colette
• ‘Round Midnight

Reading:

• The long and winding road: Stuart Maconie on why our opinions about the Beatles keep changing - I’ve lived through a few Beatles mythologies. As a small kid playing (ruining) my mum’s 7" singles they were fun pop, as a grumpy teen they were embarrassing hippies, especially Paul. Then as an adult I had the realisation they were actually really good, and more recently that Paul was actually a genius, not a twit.
• Construction starts on UK’s largest Christian monument - If someone wants to pay for a 51.5 metre tall and 80 metre wide concrete möbius strip to be built just outside of Birmingham I don’t care what religion they do it in the name of. This looks amazing.
• What’s the difference between an artist and a creator? - or, why do artists sometimes not get paid?
• How to build a hibernaculum for amphibians and reptiles

Watching:

• Does Harrison Ford know his lines?
• Simone Giertz - This plant will die if I’m on my phone too much
• Washington’s Dream - Fi asked me something and I replied “nobody knows” and it took us a good five minutes to remember where that came from.

Jigsaws completed:

• Boat Hound - originally photographed in 2006.
• Redyk in Podhale - half the sheep being out of focus nearly defeated me.

Telly:

• I Love L.A.

Noticed this old archway was clear of leaves and catching the winter sun in a nice way the other day.

Status:

I appear to be doing a few days of recovery, which I have to keep reminding myself is OK because I am in recovery and will be for the next few years. But despite being a year into accepting this I still can’t get over the feeling that I should be doing more than pottering, stretching and resting. Damn this productivity ethic I somehow got from somewhere.

I wasn’t at all surprised to get a response to yesterday’s idle speculation about the role of Quakers in the Temperance movement. Living in south Birmingham, and particularly so close to Bournville, one comes across Quakers in the same way residents of East Grinstead must come across Scientologists, only ours aren’t creepy and evil. I’ve always liked Quakers, both personally and spiritually, and count a few as good friends. After one sent me a couple of links about the Temperance question I asked:

Does Quaker = Temperance, or is it that some Quakers do Temperance, but not all? And what sort of proportion is it?

To which the answer was “yes”. It seems there are as many variations of Quakerism as there are Quakers. But one of the key tenets appears to be for abstinence and moderation, so many when the Temperance movement gained momentum many found it a cause worth supporting. Which is how the likes of the Cadbury family built their chocolate empires, promoting hot cocoa as an alternative to booze. These days the Friends Temperance Union has evolved into Quaker Action on Alcohol and Drugs.

I still find it curious that there was no mention of this in the In Our Time episode. Maybe they too got tied up in the minutia of it all and decided to skip it.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time - The Gold Standard - a surprisingly boring subject.
• Dream Time

Music:

• Zu - Carboniferous - revisiting after a long while. Holds up. Now to catch up on their back catalogue…

Reading:

• Dance Our Way Out Of Our Constrictions: INTRO ’78 - Tom Ewing’s insanely comprehensive exegesis on the minutia of the comic 2000AD is back.
• The Little Movie That Couldn’t: Mallrats turns 30

Watching:

• Zu live at Supersonic Festival 2025

Jigsaws completed:

• Jackson Pollock’s Convergence - unauthorised, of course, and a terribly low-res reproduction, but it’s a nice way to spend time with a complex piece. Apparently it was a best-selling jigsaw in it’s time.
• Fungus fingers - from a fungi walk in 2021

Telly:

• Documentary Now!

The clouds were particularly silvery today. Impossible to photograph, of course, but they were.

Status:

A friend let me know that confirmation email for subscribing to this blog went into her spam folder. Which email service, I asked. Gmail. I was not overly surprised.

Spam filtering is hard to get right. I’ve been using Fastmail for about a decade now and every day there’s a one or two pieces of unsolicited junk in the inbox for me to process, which is not bad given my email has been harvested off my various websites by nefarious actors for decades. I don’t mind this as ultimately I’d rather they err on the side of caution that delete something potentially useful.

Realising I hadn’t done it for a while I had a look in the spam folder to see if there were any false positives. Nope, nothing. All genuine spam. The filters are working well for me.

I can’t speak for why Google can’t do spam filtering properly. Maybe they feel that maintaining zero spam in the inbox is worth falsely flagging the occasional useful email. Maybe they just don’t care about email from outside the Google ecosystem. Maybe they’ve given up on email like they’ve given up on search and not being shite.

Death by a thousand tiny enshittifications.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time - The Temperance Movement - surprised not to hear any mention of the Quakers, although maybe that was just the Cadbury family.

Music:

• Hannah Peel - Fir Wave - Put it on to sleep to last night and again to jigsaw to today. Lovely.

Reading:

• I’ll never forget the horror of the Covid wards
• They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity - “They have turned [the Son of God] into a gun-toting, gay-bashing, science-denying, money-loving, fear mongering fascist."
• How inflation and the two-child benefit cap has increased poverty. - ‌“Once the goal of food banks was to work themselves out of a job. Now they have become a necessary part of the welfare state.” Any society that accepts food banks as normal is a broken society.

Watching:

• Video Update Cha0sHof Week W165 167
• Laura Kampf - I Love Working With Trash

Telly:

• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• Documentary Now! - just discovered a fourth series came out in 2022. Fantastic!

Lots of rain last night.

Status:

Recovery continues with another gentle day. Nearly there.

My shed has been leaking, not from the roof but through the corner wall which is most exposed to the driving wind and rain. It’s very annoying as I’ve been trying to sort it for the last year but haven’t had the capacity to do anything properly. A fix I put in place in October failed last night and while it’s not an urgent problem – the shed is ventilated so it dries out pretty quickly – it’s frustrating that I can’t just make it better.

The weather looks pretty good for the next few days and I don’t have anything in my diary til Wednesday. Maybe I’ll be able to burn a bit of battery and work on it without crashing too badly. Or maybe I should just leave it and focus on the self care.

(What’ll likely happen is I’ll burn myself out worrying about whether I should do it or not, and then feel shit for not doing anything. So let’s maybe avoid that, hey?)

Overnight listening:

• I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue
• ‘Round Midnight

Reading:

• Whistle up - a key part of the resistance to immigration raids in the US has been whistles, distributed widely and used “as a call to action to neighbors to come out, and as a rapid warning for those that need to take cover.” This is a mutual aid guide to acquiring, making and distributing them.
• Look for the helpers: Americans come together to protect immigrant neighbors - more on the whistle tactic and the actions it supports.
• A hedgehog friendly festive season - gifts from animal charities tend to be, well, pretty shit to be honest. This selection from Hedgehog Street is definitely not shit. Some of them are quite delightful.

Watching:

• Buying another Kirovets tractor - K701 - includes a good half hour of pressure washing a vintage Soviet tractor.

Jigsaws completed:

• Peeling Wood

Telly:

• Sisu - the only good Nazi…

Caught Lavander being startled by something. Probably a squirrel or a plane or a ghost.

Status:

Crash day today. Slept badly (tired but wired, as a friend put it) and then spent most of today in bed. But it was expected and it will pass, because it always passes. Just need to wait it out.

Overnight listening:

Full on insomnia last night…

• If Books Could Kill: Sapiens - tearing Yuval Noah Harari a new one.
• Night Tracks
• Round Midnight - first time properly listening to Soweto Kinch’s jazz show and it’s really good.
• In Our Time: The Arthashastra

Reading:

• Mani’s writhing, relentless bass was the Stone Roses’ secret sauce – it taught indie kids how to dance - and dance we did. I hadn’t fully clocked that he was responsible for sticking a rocket up the arse of Primal Scream for those awesome millennial albums.
• The Wind is Screaming Around the Trees: 40 Years of Psychocandy
• A clown government elected on a seriousness ticket

Jigsaws completed:

‌Jigsaw Planet’s recommendation engine is sending me flakey paint jigsaws and I’m here for them.

• Old Door
• Colourful Buildings

Telly:

• Pluribus

Status:

A good day, but a busy one. Went into work to take some photos and talk about my gradual return and how that’s going. It’s going OK and they’re happy with the progress.

And then this evening was my final session with my current therapist which went well. Apparently I’ve made great progress over the last 6 months and she’s proud of me. So that’s nice.

Buns are fine. Switched their hay and greens and they seem to be eating normally again.

Overnight listening:

• Origin Story: the Labour Party pt 3
• Night Tracks

Music:

• Hannah Peel
• The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses - mostly scrubbing to those fucking baselines without which the early 90s would have been so much poorer. RIP Mani.

Reading:

• How Dennis Potter’s TV plays were guides to the purgatory of the modern age
• The Meanness of Production 65daysofstatic dude on degrowth communism and how it might apply to music.
• Cartoonist John Allison on the realities of living the dream
• London’s giant AI artwork to be torn down - I’ve been lightly following this because it’s kinda like the sort of glitchy work I used to do a few years ago before ‘AI’ got boring, so the revelation that it’s an actual Artwork, not low-budget slop, is quite tasty. The fact that it’s been removed due to racist Facebook twits is less tasty.
• ‘Too little, too late’: damning report condemns UK’s Covid response - The Guardian’s choice of photo caused me to revisit my Coronavirus Press Conferences book from 2021, my last artwork of note. I think that essay still holds up.

Watching:

• Woodturning - Old Glass Bottles

Jigsaws completed:

• Pink house lock - not mine but lots of fun, even if the pink looks like GenAI flesh (it’s not).

Telly:

• I Love L.A.

“Do I look unwell to you?” (This is the forage box where we sprinkle healthy treats for them to dig for.)

Status:

Rest day, not out of choice, but it is what it is and hopefully tomorrow will be better.

Fun with the rabbits, who decided not to eat their leafy greens last night or much of their hay during the day. This is usually an alarm for a digestive issue, but they seemed fine and were otherwise eating. Rabbits don’t show when they’re unwell because then they get picked off by predators, so you have to look for subtle signs, and none of those were showing. So we’ve just been monitoring all day. Still no interest in greens tonight, but they wolfed down the grassy pellets and took hay when offered. As is so often the case with rabbit behaviour, big ¯\*(ツ)*/¯

Overnight listening:

• Empire - Asterix and Obelix, Babar The Elephant, & colonial cartoons
• Dream Time

Music:

• National Shite Day (lyrics)

Reading:

• The grounding power of having a purpose - this is why I always preferred to work an event rather than just attend it.
• The Once and Future Riot by Joe Sacco review – a masterclass in visual reportage - new Sacco on the legacy of Indian partition.
• Giant Platforms of Shit - Dave Mandl reviews Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification.
• Why the time has finally come for geothermal energy 🔓 - long piece that starts in Iceland (I once visited the Reykjavík plant and it’s very impressive), visits the post-fracking scene in Texas and a cathedral in New York, and ends in Zambia. Lots to chew over.

Watching:

• The pool of the Titanic is still full?
• Marbula One Season 6 GP2

Jigsaws completed:

• Hinge - photographed in France in 2010

Telly:

• Tuca & Bertie - all done. That was such a delightfully weird and touching programme. Would watch again.
• I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson
• I Love L.A. - I’m getting used to this now. It’s basically your “awful people make bad decisions” comedy, just for a new generation. It’s not supposed to be deep or profound - just dumb fun.

I know there are people who only check this blog for rabbit photos, and it’s been a few days since the last one, so you’re welcome.

Status:

A friend popped over today for a chat and to use some of my shed tools to fix his bike. Was nice and relaxed and we kept it short, but afterwards I got “busy-brain” so we must have been talking about something interesting enough to cascade my neurones, Kessler-style. Jigsaws didn’t help so I decided to go to bed for a bit and let my subconscious sort it out. Which it did! One mildly disconcerting dream later and I’m feeling OK, or at least functional again.

Overnight listening:

• In Our Time - Feathered Dinosaurs

Reading:

• Hit by a Truck
• Joanne McNeil: levers that have grown rusty - ‌I don’t know if it helps, but I have found myself thinking about power differently lately as I realize there are no kings.
• My next chapter with Mastodon - Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon, is stepping down in the least tech-bro way possible.
  • TechCrunch: Mastodon CEO steps down as the social network restructures - more details.

Watching:

• Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L’error
• Impact Marble Racing Tournament E2 Funnels

Jigsaws completed:

• Five - originally photographed in Birmingham’s Chinatown, 2006

Telly:

• I Love L.A. - I’m a big fan of Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby and Bottoms are so good), and this came recommended by my 20-something niece. I liked it, but fuck did it make me feel old. Which is probably a good thing? I think I’d acclimatised by the end of the first episode so will definitely stick with it, but wow, I clearly have nothing in common with (these) young people.

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.