Weeknotes 341

An exhausting week at work, back-to-back with a largely exhausting week of travel, has left me drained. I’ve spent the weekend slowly recharging with no commitments or activities and I’m almost back to normal.

Three gyms, back in the rhythm. No net progress but I’ve shed the holiday weight like it never happened; an adipose no-op.

For whatever reason I couldn’t face the epic space nonsense of Redemption Ark and chose to be alone with my thoughts on the treadmill instead. I am in principle still interested in it so I intend to grit my teeth and dig back in next week.

I finished season three of Succession. Obviously Too Much Birthday is a straightforward classic, nicely kicking off Kendall’s spiral into self-destruction through Chiantishire and the brilliant All the Bells Say to wrap up the season. Although this season as a whole felt a bit more uneven than the previous two, the scenes with the sibs in that last episode are so well-written and well-performed that it feels like they pay off the entire show.

I started catching up on Star City by watching Bite Your Elbow, a properly tense episode with excellent performances. There are only three episodes left after this and I’m already abstractly worried about the possibility of them choosing not to make more, cos it’s turning out to be really good and I’d miss it if it stopped so soon.

I was pretty worn out last week so forgot to mention two things about the Iceland trip.

Firstly: it didn’t get dark, which I’d never experienced before, and that felt very strange, a little like being jet-lagged but somehow without the accompanying time zone confusion.

Technically the sun set shortly before midnight and rose around 3am, but that just meant it dipped briefly below the horizon without really committing to it. Most days it was overcast enough that the transition from daylight to civil twilight and back again was barely noticeable.

I enjoyed the novelty of white nights even though they made it even harder than usual to motivate myself to go to bed at a sensible time. The main downside is that they removed any possibility of seeing the aurora borealis (at this time of year?) so I’ll have to go back in the winter for that.

Secondly: I booked the trip back in March — flights, hotel, rental car, parking, all nonrefundable — and then largely forgot about it as I waited for July to arrive, smug in the knowledge I’d discharged all my responsibilities.

At least a month later I was wasting time on Reddit and clicked on “I am a fuckwit, check the issue date of your passport, as well as the expiry!” purely out of an appetite for schadenfreude, looking for an answer to the same question I ask a hundred times a day: what has this clueless internet wally done?

Issue date needs to be less than 10 years ago for European travel, irrespective of the expiry.

Guess who just lost an expensive holiday.

That sounded a little worrying, but I knew I’d already checked that my passport had loads of validity left on it, so I came very close to not even bothering to look. When the creeping anxiety had matured enough to make me double-check anyway, my heart sank: issued January 2016, expires October 2026. That means (post-Brexit) that it stopped being valid for Schengen entry in January this year, and I’d have been turned away at the airport, my entire backlog of latent potential up in flames. I felt sick when I imagined it.

Fortunately, mercifully, the timing of this revelation meant I had plenty of opportunity to renew my passport, so I did, and it was all fine in the end. I am of course suitably embarrassed that I didn’t already know all about this — apparently it’s been extensively covered in the British media, so if you’re reading this in the UK, it was probably already obvious to you — but, well, since I broke my news habit I just haven’t paid attention to stuff like that, plus I’ve already entered the Schengen Area a couple of times post-Brexit and had become complacent about how straightforward it was, all while this silent timebomb was ticking away in my document drawer.

To be honest, if some bored official at the airport had told me my passport wasn’t valid and the whole trip was ruined, I don’t think I’d have coped very well with the ensuing anger, frustration and guilt. So I’m glad I’m living in the timeline where I randomly stumbled across a Reddit post which saved me from that fate. Thanks, “CandyflossRampage”.

The sun’s shining, the windows are open, it’s only 20 °C outside. Everything’s okay.