Wally found a new cool spot in the garden, with a buffet.
Status:
Heatwave day five? Temperatures were still pretty high and the house has definitely not cooled down yet, so yeah, I reckon so. But it has been overcast and breezy for most of today, and as I’m writing this a rain shower occurred, so we’re definitely nearly done. For now, anyway. Forecast shows 30°c on Monday—week. Yay.
I managed to avoid expending my new-found joie de vivre from having rested well through the heatwave, but I have been plotting for how to keep the house cooler for the next one.
A friend mentioned they’d opened their loft hatch to get it to act as a chimney, pulling cool air into the rest of the house. Our loft is like an oven and I’m pretty sure it warms the bedrooms, but the roofers did put a couple of vents in there to help with damp so I figured I’d give it a go. No visible draft so I’m going to have a look at these so-called vents, once the temperature is less hostile up there, and see if they actually do anything.
I also remembered I have the skin of a metre-cube hydroponics tent which I had adapted into a camera obscura. It’s silver-lined so would work brilliantly as a shade and there’s probably enough of it to cover the windows on the front of our house. I just need to fix them temporarily in place and I may have figured out how to do that with just a couple of screws in the brickwork.
I really want to whitewash the roof tiles but I think that might be outside of my capabilities.
Big Read:
- The Boeing 747 begins its final descent 🪜 — Lovely article about the aircraft that is a little older than me. I have memories of flying in these in the 1970s, including going up the spiral stairs to the lounge and visiting the crew in the cockpit. (My dad flew a lot for business and sometimes took me with him, long story for another day). They seeded a sense that flying was special and exciting, one which I definitely don’t hold today where flying is horrible and unfortunate. Also I love any writing that starts in an aircraft boneyard, one of the most 20th century places you can imagine. Hello Don DeLillo, hello Koyaanisqatsi.
- (Yes, the aircraft boneyard scene in DeLillo’s Underworld is B52s, not 747s, but the point stands)
- (And yes, the 747 in Koyaanisqatsi is taxiing at an airport, not abandoned in the desert. Don’t @ me.)
Reading:
- “If you can’t stand by a feature, you shouldn’t launch it.” — Talking about Apple and other software companies releasing new features and then never maintaining them, but this applies to so much more and is one reason I don’t like the fetishisation of startups.
- Dave Eggers: ‘Once you have a machine think and write for you, you’re cooked as a species’ — Been a fan of Eggers since his audacious autobiography but especially for the work he does off the page, 862 Valencia, et al. So it was good to check in. I didn’t realise he was quite so offline. Admirable, really.
- As the tide turns against Putin, beware the drowning man 🪜 — Has some astonishing statistics about war in Ukraine. “The average life expectancy of a new [Russian] recruit — from arrival at a training ground to death in a combat zone — lies somewhere between 10 days and three weeks. Once they are sent onto the battlefield, Russian fighters survive an average of 20 to 35 minutes." Monthly casualties are 30,000. Even if these numbers are exaggerated it’s still madness.
- Dangerous, Dirty, Violent & Young by Zayd Ayers Dohrn review – child of the revolution — The son of the Weather Underground leader has written a book about them. Adding to my list — should be a good accompaniment to The Revolutionists.
- First major hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead — I’m a huge fan of the Dinorwig battery and would be shocked it’s been 40 years since we last built one of these in the UK, but that was the era of selling off infrastructure to extractive capitalists with no interest in the future. Here’s hoping we’re past that now.
Music:
- The first two pieces on this episode of Night Tracks caught my ear.