Weeknotes 217

February overstayed its welcome a bit didn’t it? February. February.

I love this cold, clear, proto-spring weather. The sky’s been very blue.

GET OUT: On Monday I had lunch with Phil at Cook Daily. The setup was less chaotic than last time and I enjoyed the food more because I chose a rice dish instead of noodles, avoiding the usual knot of starch in my stomach afterwards. Then on Friday I met Chris for a notional coffee which turned into an actual beer by a pub hearth. Good times.

Back to the local taproom yesterday for a bit more beer and a bit more book.

I survived all week with a conventional shoe. If I concentrate I can walk almost normally, then I lapse into a cautious limp when I stop paying attention.

I walked to Spitalfields today which is the furthest I’ve been on foot without the boot. I managed the distance okay but it was painful by the time I got home. Getting there slowly.

On the way I passed an unexpected Caroline Polachek popup on Shoreditch High St. The queue stretched almost to little Tesco so I wasn’t doing that.

I began to suspect that the US/UK daylight saving disaster was imminent but realised I’d already forgotten how it works despite writing it down here a few months ago. Fortunately it only took a few seconds to find it: Sunday falls within the first three days of March this year, so there’ll be five Sundays in March and therefore three weeks between the US changing their clocks (Sunday 10 March) and the UK changing ours (Sunday 31 March).

Writing weeknotes is occasionally useful for remembering important stuff. I still regularly refer to my baked potato recipe whenever it’s been a while since I last made one. There’s the daylight saving time thing. Pancakes. Er… that’s it.

Ordinarily I recommend each new ContraPoints video but her latest one about Twilight, sort of, wasn’t as interesting to me. It’s still better than most other things on YouTube, just not unmissable this time.

Aside from being less eye-opening than her previous videos, it rubbed me the wrong way with its overreliance on lengthy quotes from other sources. I understand the concept of an essay but this is a bugbear of mine in general since it creates the impression that an author has given up on communicating their point clearly or convincingly and has chosen to import the weight of someone else’s writing instead. It lets them avoid saying directly what they want to say in the hope that some oblique quotations will generate an atmosphere of persuasive sophistication. Or maybe the problem is that I’m simply not clever enough to understand out-of-context fragments of Shakespeare or Žižek or whatever; either way it’s not for me.

otoh I did laugh out loud at “Edward sweeps in in his battle Volvo” and “you’re just a baby, you had nothing to do with 9/11” so some of it’s on my level.

If you’re busier than me, you can save yourself some time by watching (coincidentally) Welcome To My Island which has the same semantic content but is only four minutes long instead of three hours.

Bear in mind that I’ve neither read nor seen the Twilight saga, although I did watch Gabi’s videos first, which is the same.

That’s it.