Weeknotes 232

I’m loving how cool it is at the moment even though everyone else in Britain is complaining about it. This time last year was a sweaty nightmare and I’m relieved to not be experiencing it again. Yet.

Paul avariciously incepted me into treating myself to a Raspberry Pi 5 as a replacement for my trusty-yet-ageing Pi 400. It’s very nice. I immediately messed up by installing the cooling fan the wrong way around (the instructions could be clearer on this point) but otherwise it was easy to set up and I’m pleased with how small and comparatively powerful it is.

While configuring the Pi I had a moment of clarity and decided to abandon the folly of making myself press the Esc key. Ctrl-[ is better and it’s here to stay.

I managed a more sustainable Monday, Wednesday, Friday & Sunday at the gym, which made me feel much less like I was about to die of exercise poisoning.

As if to counterbalance this attempt at a sensible routine, Monday was extremely busy and I ended up working late into the evening, so I was pretty tired again for most of the week.

On Tuesday an unhappy man came round to install a smart meter at the behest of my energy supplier.

First he said there was no point installing a smart gas meter because it was too far from my electricity meter. Then he said he couldn’t install a smart electricity meter because he wasn’t able to locate the fabled “main fuse“, and I could tell that the poor guy expected his questions to me about this to be something other than utterly fruitless. Finally, pointlessly, he installed a smart gas meter anyway, presumably just to feel something.

So I’ve ended up no smarter than before but with a slightly different gas meter display to manually read every month. That’s progress.

On Wednesday I met Alice for a nostalgic Luardos burrito and a sit on a bench in the cool peace of Bunhill Fields, the combination serving as a double memento mori.

Then I took Friday off and — other than the hour at the gym — did nothing except sit on my bum and watch telly, which was exactly what I needed.

I started with a documentary about Bottom, one of the formative comedies of my childhood. It was funny and poignant and mainly brought back happy memories of watching TV in the 1990s, when everything was better.

Then I saw Society of the Snow, a harrowing Spanish film about the 1972 plane crash in the Andes. It was emotional, visually very beautiful, and about an hour too long. It’s obviously unpleasant to watch people eating meat but I respect their life choices.

For dessert I watched the first couple of episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which I’d ignored when it initially aired because I’d given up on Discovery. It’s surprisingly good so far — episodic, adventurous and inventive, with the right balance of seriousness and fun — and certainly a big improvement over the borderline unwatchable show it spun off from. I’m keen to watch the rest of the first season at least.

Yesterday I spent the day with my parents for Father’s Day, only to discover upon arrival that my dad had suffered a household accident the night before and hurt himself badly enough that he was stuck immobile in bed. While I expect it’s minor and he’ll recover soon, I can’t deny it has a sort of mythic resonance to see your dad injured and helpless. And so back on the train, then, past the sea and through the fields, home to my stupid life.