Weeknotes 101

Thanks to a hyperlocal tip-off from a reader, I managed to get a walk-in booster vaccination at St Leonard’s on Tuesday instead of waiting until the end of the month for an appointment. I’m relieved to have got this out of the way before Christmas.

I’ve been making quite a lot of baked potatoes recently because it’s cold and dark outside and I’m lazy. For over a decade I’ve been fiddling about with my baked potato recipe and getting feedback online, so here’s the current procedure for your consideration:

1. Scrub the potato under running water and prick it all over with a fork

2. Microwave it for 5 minutes at 800 W while heating the oven to 200 °C

3. Wet the potato and coat it with sea salt flakes

4. Put it in the oven and bake it at 200 °C for 90 minutes

5. After 90 minutes, turn the oven up to its maximum temperature and continue baking until Nat says “smells amazing!” (usually 10–15 minutes)

6. Eat the potato 🥔

This produces a baked potato that’s dark & crispy on the outside and light & fluffy inside, just how I like it. The overall result varies depending on the quality and provenance of the potato (local grocer usually good, local supermarket usually bad) and sometimes it gets a tiny bit too crispy or charred, but it’s always pretty great.

Is there anything I should change, or shall I just stick with this baked potato recipe forever? I don’t think I want to involve olive oil.

Alice has dropped me in it so I feel obliged to say a few words about the first episode of And Just Like That…, the Sex and the City revival. Spoilers ahead.

I promise I’m not exaggerating when I say I found it so excruciating that it made me feel physically unwell. It was so much worse than I was expecting. I was braced for it to be bad in a specific way — everyone would look older, the material would feel tired and dated, it’d all be a bit undignified — but instead it was bad in a way I hadn’t anticipated at all and it really caught me off guard.

What bothered me most was the way they tried to artificially modernise the show by spackling it with hamfisted pseudo-topical content about gender, ethnicity and sexuality. In general I enjoy shows that explore those themes (e.g. Sex Education does a great job) but seeing these actors awkwardly mugging their way through it was so painful that I found it unbearable.

Reviving Sex and the City was never going to be good but I think a gentle revisit of the characters’ lives could’ve been cosy: update the fashions, put them in some mildly amusing age-appropriate situations, give them some dignity. I was hoping for a warm nostalgia bath of feeling slightly sorry for them becoming a bit old and irrelevant (thus feeding my nostalgia about heading that way myself) but instead I ended up soaking in something tepid and unpleasant.

I’m fine with them killing off Big because it’s a good way to give the new show some momentum, and I had no idea it was coming so it was a good surprise. But playing that card would’ve had way more emotional impact if they’d set it up with even a tiny amount of Carrie-and-Big-love-each-other content first.

Give us one scene of them sitting in bed together: he’s reading his newspaper, she’s reading her book; she takes off her glasses and smiles at him; ah, remember Carrie and Big? But no, just some sassy bullshit in the kitchen and an incredibly awkward bedroom conversation and then he died. It was a total waste of what could otherwise have been a real gut punch.

I also found Carrie and Miranda’s conversation about “Samantha” difficult to watch. It seemed completely unnecessary to paint her as having ghosted them all for no reason; she could easily have been elsewhere but still on good terms with everyone. Carrie’s shtick of “I tried getting in touch (because I am the better person) but she coldly ignored me” was too real for comfort and felt shameless.

Before seeing the new show I entertained myself by imagining a version of it where they worked around the Samantha problem by clumsily editing in footage from the original as if she were actually there and saying those lines for the first time, hoping that no viewers would remember or notice.

Open on the three of them silently eating breakfast, then cut to grainy footage of Kim Cattrall saying “I’m dating a guy with the funkiest tasting spunk”, then back to 2021 Charlotte looking disgusted. Brilliant.

Thanks for sitting through the Sex and the City content. Alice accurately described my usual weeknote media reviews as “nerd, nerd, man yelling at cloud, nerd, text too small, nerd” so at least I’ve mixed it up a bit.

I read this 2017 article on writing and found it interesting and full of good advice. Aside from prose it has obvious parallels to writing code, which is unsurprising because writing code is writing.

Conversely Weeknotes 101 would be a terrible introductory course. The syllabus would have to say:

1. Ideally keep notes throughout the week so you’ve got something to flesh out, but sometimes you’ll end up with nothing and you’ll have to busk it with embarrassing consequences

2. It’s crucial that expectations are kept low; managing to write something every single week is achievement enough

3. Showing up reliably has intrinsic value regardless of quality

4. Seriously, just write anything

Class dismissed.