We went on a relatively big adventure today, driving out to Compton Verney with my sister and bro-in-law. I think it’s the furthest I’ve been since December? Fi gave me loads of opportunities to bail before and on the way there but I made it and was delighted to discover they have a “tramper” mobility vehicle to hire for a fiver, so I was able to traverse all the grounds without fear of fatigue. Total game changer.

The house itself, which is basically an art gallery, was a little aurally overwhelming so I stayed out in the gardens while the others had a visit, slowly puttering around and taking photos.

All my photos from today are in this post.

Today would have been my mum’s 80th and it was good to have spent it at the sort of place she would have liked visiting. Although to be honest I didn’t realise today was the 11th until we were leaving. This is fine though as we’d long reconciled ourselves to my always forgetting it was her birthday. It would have been wrong to have remembered.

I was pretty nervous about today. Fi gave me plenty of escape routes and we could have left at any time, but once I had my chunky scooter and the freedom to get away from any obligations, I was fine.

Once returning home I realised I was pretty wiped. Strong tinnitus and a papery desiccated feeling, which I haven’t felt in a while. So while it was good to get out and be normal, I now have to be careful for a bit and rest.

A bee’s-eye view: art installation beside the Thames celebrates crucial pollinators

When the pandemic came along in 2020 one of the paths I was on was to do camera obscuras in Birmingham again (after my previous work with Jenny Duffin). I had a couple of projects lined up, one with the Flatpack film festival that would have been pretty spectacular had we pulled it off, and a bunch of ideas, all of which got crushed by lockdown and then erased by my post-Covid chronic fatigue. One of the ideas was quite similar to this installation — an array of small camera obscura that resemble the inside of an insect’s eye — so it’s great to see it realised here by Luke Jerram. I wish I could get down there to see it.

The beauty of this kind of mini-obscura is you can make them with ordinary magnifying glasses which have a throw of about 20cm. The trick is to fabricate the screens in an aesthetically pleasing way, which is what Jerram has nicely achieved with these semi-opaque ballon shapes. My prototypes used tracing paper, which works and gives a nice textured finish, but is hard to manipulate smoothly.

I still have a box of plastic magnifying glasses and a big roll of tracing paper upstairs. If anyone in Birmingham fancies building a crappier (or not!) version of this, and is prepared to do all the actual work while I sit in a chair and give advice, hit me up.

• Why holding a placard is a terrorist act, while causing disruption in a balaclava is not — I was hoping this would go into more detail about how this situation came about, but it’s a good, if brief, start.
• Fantastic interview with a long-distance swimmer who just broke a record
• Kottke on the move — Our boy has left Vermont and is travelling the world (while still blogging).
• The Nerd Reich — No idea if this blog about “the tech authoritarian politics of Silicon Valley plutocrats” is any good but you have to give a big round of applause for coming up with that title.
• Jez’s August linkfarm