Status:
While out in the garden with the rabbits I happened to lean on the fence and saw two pigeons having sex. Spring is here.
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time: Archaea - was expecting an Ancient Greece episode but this is microbiology and pretty fascinating. Will have to give it another listen as a lot of it went over my 1am head. I enjoyed the bit about the Asgard archaea, named for being found in the Loki’s Castle hydrothermal vent: Lokiarchaeota, Thorarchaeia, Odinarchaeia and Heimdallarchaeia. Nice.
Music:
- How Pet Shop Boys sold city glamour to queer suburban kids - I feel like I have an essay in me about growing up in suburban Croydon in the 80s listening to the Pet Shop Boys, so this essay about growing up in suburban Croydon in the 80s listening to the Pet Shop Boys got me quite excited. No, I wasn’t a queer kid, but I was an odd kid and for an odd kid Croydon was stifling in its conservative conformity, especially the bit of Croydon we moved to in 1985, bordering with Bromley and Beckenham. I understood why punk and David Bowie came from around here and I knew from an early age this place would not define me, or at least I would define myself against it. The Pet Shop Boys were not an explicit influence – I wouldn’t pretend to understand what Tennant was singing about - but they were ever-present. I would do my paper round with those first two albums on my walkman, keeping pace with Chris Lowe’s beat as I shoved rolled up freesheets through the letterboxes of identikit semis (my friend Molly, who is fascinated photos of me as a nerdy kid for some reason, finds this vision so potent she sees it whenever the PSBs come on). I could write so much more but this is already a long paragraph so I’ll end with signing up to Friends Reunited in 2001 and noticing that half the people from my year stayed in Croydon and got a job in the bank or something, and the other half left did something fucking odd. I met up with a couple of them – one was a missing persons private detective while the other had returned from working on fish farms in Africa. The more I think of it, the more I think the Pet Shop Boys were just part of a potent mix. Growing up in Croydon in the 80s was either going to crush you or inspire you. We moved away after my GCSEs in 1989. I think my mum always regretted those four years in suburbia but I was always a bit grateful. It was a perfect place to be a weird teenager.
Reading:
- “This is not the computer for you” - great-neph M is currently going through this with all the discarded smartphones in the family drawers and is loving it. Soon he’ll move to a proper computer and then we’ll be in some glorious trouble.
- Baraka time: Positive psychic power sources left to us by our cultural ancestors - I always enjoy a swim in Jay Babcock’s countercultural detritus.
Looking:
- Longevity and obsoletion impress upon Alexander Endrullat’s intaglio prints - A laptop declared obsolete by its manufacturer is repeatedly pushed through a printing press, producing evidence of its incremental destruction.
Watching:
- Primitive Technology: Hut with underfloor heating (ondol/hypocaust) (14:50)
- the entire Beatles album discography but it’s just numbers (2:51)
- Torbjörn Åhman: Forging a Curved Chisel (7:14)
- Rusty grindstone restoration (16:35)