Lavander goes through phases of digging and we’re happy to encourage it. Then we fill in the hole so she can start over again.

Psychotherapy day today, alongside a need to rest, so mostly pottering in the garden. Sister came over to borrow something from the shed so we had a brief catch-up. I mentioned my therapy had moved onto some quite specific family stuff and she reacted in a way I couldn’t quite pin down, so I guess a chat is on the horizon!

A friend with Long-Covid emailed about my CFS crashes, wondering if it might be better if I never crashed at all. I think it would! But then I wouldn’t do anything, and the process I’m following is to slowly try and find that point where I can function but not crash. This is not as easy as it might be because I’m not very good at monitoring.

In fact in many ways I’m a terrible CFS patient. When I’m fatigued I make bad decisions which make me feel worse, and when I’m restored I want to seize the moment and finally get something done, which is often also a bad decision. Except when it’s not. And all of this is impossible to judge causally. I’ve had crashes that clearly came from a specific activity and I’ve had crashes that seemed to come out of nowhere.

So yeah, I’m aiming for no crashes, but I also have to be cognisant my personality and what I’m realising is a 50 year habit of boom and bust. (Yes, I’m on an ADHD assessment waiting list.)

Today’s linkage

• Andy Burnham addresses Labour party conference (1hr-ish) — I wasn’t expecting to watch this all the way through and really wasn’t expecting to be impressed. Just goes to show how rare it is for a politician to give a really good speech. A couple of eyebrow raisers (a working class AI industrial revolution?) and he now needs to deal with the vested interests, but the commitment to electoral reform was really good to see and fuck me but he made me feel a tingle of hope. I’m sure it’ll be tempered and I’ll be fighting back the disappointment, but for now I’ll take it.
  • Dunt gives a thorough summary and is fairly happy.
• How do you solve a problem like the paywall? — A view into what it’s like to write something that is published behind a paywall and then promoted on social media, where everyone responds to the headline and no-one clicks through for the substance they spent weeks working on. Over the last few months I’ve been following a handful political types on BlueSky whose writing I enjoy and it’s been fascinating seeing how they and their followers behave online. The best way I can describe it is ‘angry people shouting at screenshots of headlines they dislike’. From a context-collapse perspective it’s actually quite terrifying.
• Compost and the climate — Nice piece by Cass about how composting can help the climate crisis. It’s somewhat counterintuitive that one of the worst things to go into a municipal landfill is organic matter. Surely it’ll decompose and vanish? Yeah, but in a sealed up landfill it’ll emit a staggering amount of methane which is way worse for the climate. Which is why it’s best to remove all food and garden waste from the stream before processing it. Organic matter should go to a composting site where it can decompose aerobically producing some CO2 and locking the rest in as plant food. (Or you can decompose it anaerobically and capture the methane to burn it as fuel. Just don’t let it leach into the air.)
• Thanks LMG!