Weeknotes 218

Happy Sunday morning.

In 2009 I started my own limited company and spent a few years doing consultancy work through it. Then I got myself a real job in 2016, and the company’s since lain dormant while money drains out of it into the accountants and administrators who keep it on life support. Several times a year I get stressed about some unwanted legal obligation I have as a company director, ignore it for as long as I can, snap at the last possible moment, pay someone else to sort it out for me, heave a sigh of relief, then return to the beginning and repeat indefinitely.

Many years of procrastination and unnecessary admin later, I’ve finally done the paperwork to shut it down so I don’t have to deal with it any more. I feel a twinge of anxiety about ridding myself of a burden I’ve habitually kept around as a kind of career comfort blanket, but in practice there’s no likely situation in which it would be helpful, so it mostly feels good to be shot of it. I should’ve done it eight years ago and saved myself the hassle.

The only wrinkle is that I now have nowhere for my book royalties to go. They’ve always trickled into the company’s bank account rather than my own, partly because that seemed easier to set up initially from a tax treaty perspective, and partly because it meant the money could be taxed alongside the other company income I was already paying accountants to deal with, rather than as a weird (and tiny) additional source of income for me personally.

I don’t think it’s worth jumping through hoops to keep claiming this money for myself. I suppose it has to go somewhere. I’ll email the publisher and ask whether they can donate it to charity or something.

I had coffee with Tara in Kings Cross on Monday. I hadn’t seen her since The Before so that was a real treat.

On Tuesday I went back to Homerton Hospital, like that bloke, for what was supposed to be a final foot X-ray before they discharged me. Unfortunately the X-ray revealed that the broken bone has barely healed at all despite the significant reduction in pain, so I have to go back in another six weeks for them to check my progress.

The doctor wasn’t particularly helpful. He asked whether I wanted to have an operation to fix the bone, “or leave it”. I tried to be polite when I said I didn’t feel qualified to make that decision and was rather hoping that he would. He just shrugged.

Anyway, I’m back in the boot for another four weeks. Sigh.

I’ve taken more journeys on the lower deck of a bus in the last few weeks than in the rest of my life combined. I don’t use buses much anyway, and when I do I always sit upstairs in hope of getting the best bus seat, but it’s too dangerous for me to hobble up there at the moment so I just stand downstairs or treat myself to a priority seat.

It’s grim down there. On Thursday night the man sat next to me was watching EastEnders on his iPad all the way from Aldgate to Old Kent Road. What hath god wrought.

Two months have passed since the rental company told me I’d been fined for a parking violation but, despite me phoning them to ask how to pay, they never actually took any money. After that amount of time I’d begun to assume I’d somehow got away with it, but no, I was eventually charged this week. As I should’ve learned last time, rental car justice always catches up with me.

I saw Poor Things and came away with mixed feelings. I loved Emma Stone’s fearless performance and thought the entire film looked amazing. It reminded me of The City of Lost Children in some way I can’t put my finger on — imagery, colours, innocence, general dark-fantasy vibes — which is always a good thing.

But I couldn’t get past Mark Ruffalo’s strangled cod-British accent and, erm, you know, the story? Its events? Obviously not okay is it? So I suppose my review is: impressive and disturbing, not in a good way.

I’d been waiting to watch Poor Things at home and bought it on iTunes last week as soon as it appeared, then this week it showed up on Disney+ for “free”. Oh well.

Coincidentally I got an email from Disney+ saying they were going to renew my annual subscription — currently priced at £80, up from £50 when I joined in 2020 — for the princely sum of £110.

I’ve seen a handful of good things on Disney+ over the years. I enjoyed Barbarian, Prey and No One Will Save You; The Bear, Andor and the first season of The Mandalorian were all decent. Early on I went through a period of watching Marvel and Star Wars films as a mindless distraction while exercising at home. I probably got my fifty quid’s worth.

But that was years ago, and now I hardly ever open the app, so forget it. I’ve cancelled the subscription and will use that money to buy individual films and shows when I actually want to watch them.

I also watched Saltburn which was boring and naff. Barry Keoghan doesn’t give a good performance — his one-note concussed shtick worked well in The Banshees of Inisherin but here it’s just deadening — and Jacob Elordi spends the whole film doing the same accent as Mark Ruffalo. Nothing happens, everyone’s unlikeable, the funny bits aren’t, the attempts to shock don’t, and it thinks it has a twist but it doesn’t.

4:3? Christ, give me a break.

I had to wake up early this morning to catch a train. I can’t believe that, even after everything, I still allowed myself to believe for a moment that I’d be getting even less sleep because the clocks would be going forward overnight for daylight saving time. No, dum-dum, that’s in America.