Status:

Back when I was first getting signed off work for chronic fatigue I wasn’t getting any medical advice other than to “rest” and certainly no specific support as I sat on a waiting list, so I naturally tried to fill the time between crashes with projects. One of them was to make a shelf for the kitchen, only I would carve the brackets from wood like I’d seen in one of those homesteading YouTube channels where you’re invested and fascinated but you’re also waiting for the trad/nativist shoe to drop. Suffice to say the shoe did drop in the end and I never finished the carving. But I did make a shelf and it’s been propped up in the shed ever since, waiting for me to put it up with some basic metal brackets.

Today, armed with some paracetamol and a decent amount of breaks, I put it up.

Only took me two years.

Reading:

• My mother was forced to give me up for adoption. But when we finally met decades later, it was far from a fairytale ending — I’m not normally a fan of this sort of writing but something about this hit me in the feels. Possibly due to now being in the dead parents generation and realising there’s a shitload of history I’m now never going to be able to properly access.
• The Americans who saw all this coming but were ignored and maligned — Been looking at previous pieces by Toby Buckle and this one from December last year is a good one, interviewing “Cassandras” in the US who saw Trump’s fascism coming a decade ago but were told to stop being hysterical.
• The most predictable edit in history — An astute explanation of the drama at Wikipedia using the cathedral and bazaar metaphor to understand the relationship between Wikimedia’s management (cathedral) and it’s volunteer members (bazaar), what assumptions it’s based on and how it broke down.

Listening:

• The Miles Davis Story 3. Miles in Blue — The story of A Kind Of Blue, an album that temporally renders all other jazz irrelevant. Indeed, my awareness of most of Davis’s output is pretty poor due to this album being more than enough.

Music:

• Gabble Ratchets by Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra — Found via Weird Walk’s Gnome newsletter this is a group of primary school kids working with “the stuff that lies around gathering dust in school music cupboards”. The Gabble Ratchets of the title are “a pack of hellhounds who, at least in the version of the tale told in Todmorden, run their wild hunt each Halloween; from the zoomorphic outcrop Eagle Cragg to the summit of Stoodley Pike, a hill now marked with a monument to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, but perhaps once the site of a prehistoric burial mound. That ‘gabble’ may be an old term for ‘corpse’ has led some to speculate that the hounds’ spectral journey may be an echo of an earlier corpse road or burial route and it is this idea that the PPYO have run with." Two tracks out now, rest of album follows on 26th.