From Writing.

I was in Essex all week until today; I should have come home yesterday but strong winds stopped the west-bound trains. Today I could get most of the way back, needing to be picked up at Newport by Mary. Very, very good to be home.

That’s two sets of plans spoiled by extreme weather in two weeks – flooded roads last time. It’s only going to get worse isn’t it. Such a shame that nobody could have foreseen decades ago that the climate might get worse! Those with power would definitely have done something about it if only they’d known.

§ I’ve always found the idea of cremation ashes a bit strange. In the way you might read about the funeral rites in a very different culture and think, “huh, weird, not like here in our totally normal culture”. But having a container of the ashes of your loved one in your home, or scattering them somewhere, has always seemed macabre and odd to me. What a weird culture.

This week I picked up Dad’s ashes from the funeral director. I tried not to think about the specifics of it all. I couldn’t decide whether, in my head, to refer to them as “him” (my Dad), or “it” (the box), or “them” (the ashes).

I’m not really superstitious but, rather than walk directly back to the house, I stopped with him/it/them for a coffee at a favourite spot, then toured some other familiar locations on the way home, pausing for the final time with him – “him” – on a habitual bench.

It was very hard. I think it’s only then, and today, returning home and relaxing a little, that the huge loss is finally hitting me.

More admin this week. We’ve now notified nearly 40 places about Dad’s death. Some – clubs, societies, magazines – have only required a brief email. Others, such as utilities, were a phone call (some had an online form but they’re often a bit ambiguous about what the result would be). Sometimes those places needed to speak to my mum to confirm it she approved changing the account to her name. It seems like a very limited kind of security but OK. And then others – some financial institutions – require forms, letters, death certificate, etc.

Mostly the people I’ve spoken to have been helpful, sympathetic, easy to understand, and – BT aside – have hopefully done everything correctly. Having braced myself for the usual awful call centre experience, the bereavement teams and the general call handlers, have been lovely.

§ I had a day in London this week, and walked from Brick Lane to Tate Modern to Covent Garden to Soho and back to Liverpool Street station, with many stops along the way. A good journey.

At Tate Modern I went to see Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet. It was fine. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood. Maybe I was a bit annoyed by them automatically adding a “donation” onto the already steep price and requiring you to have the spur-of-the-moment balls to decline it. Maybe I was a bit grumpy at what used to be a straightforward café with chairs and tables having been transformed into a slightly confusing bar/coffee-shop in which only a lucky few are allowed the luxury of leaning back on a chair, the rest of us having to perch on a high stool, or squat on a hard, too-low stool, or sit on a padded bench that suggests, “don’t relax, please move on”.

There were some interesting things, but after half-an-hour I was already in the gift shop. If I was to rate experiences as pounds-per-hour (lower is better), this was £44/hour, or £50/hour with the “optional” donation.

But, wandering the free galleries, I liked the room of Joel Meyerowitz photographs, especially the ‘A Question of Color’ series (also a book) and the handful of New York street photographs, the descriptive panel really helping explain what he was doing with them. £0/hour

§ Later I saw The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971), which I hadn’t seen before, at the Prince Charles. An almost full cinema – except for the seats either side of me, perfect! – very few trailers etc, well-behaved audience, good screen, good film (despite its lack of ending): top marks all round. £7.76/hour

§ I watched the first season of Everyone Else Burns on Channel 4 this week, out of curiosity. It was OK, had some good moments, and plenty of funny lines that were all the better for being down-played more than another show would have done. £0/hour (but about 8 minutes of adverts per hour)

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20 years of these! An institution. Beloved.

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From Writing.

This week I’ve been listening a lot to Charlotte Cornfield’s 2023 album, Could Have Done Anything. I can’t remember how I came across it, or why it was recently, but it’s been just right the right pace for this week.

In my head I say “Charlotte Cornfield” as Steven Toast would say it.

§ Back in Essex this week for Dad’s funeral. Over the past few weeks it’s been hard to think past this event. I’d been pretty stressed about the organisational and social aspects of it.

The organisational aspects, despite the fact we didn’t have to organise much ourselves. The funeral directors and the humanist celebrant had the funeral itself well in hand. And the nice folk at the local Labour Party hall had sorted out the reception for us. Aside from a handful of other details, ably handled by my sister, there wasn’t much to do.

And then the social aspects, which were the usual fears of being somewhat responsible for an event: How many people would turn up? Who wouldn’t come at the last minute? Would people have a good time? Would I say or do something stupid?

I’m sure that, way back, I didn’t mind organising social events. But at some point my silly stress over the no-shows and the worries about things not going right gradually put me off organising anything at all, which is a shame.

Of course, it was mostly fine. I expected to feel more emotional than I did, perhaps because of all those logistical and social worries. It was a nice ceremony, it was nice to see various people from Dad’s life, and some nice memories were shared. And it’s a relief to get to the other side, into the future, the new normal.

§ Thank you for all of the lovely comments, messages and emails after my big summary of six-months a few weeks back. I really appreciated every one.

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I barely went there but, still, nostalgia for the times.

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From Writing.

One of the big current admin tasks is informing organisations that my Dad has passed away. I started on the utilities this week, calling BT to let them know, and to have the name on the account changed to my Mum’s name. (They do have an online form but it’s ambiguous in places.)

That seemed to go OK. But then it was apparent the broadband at the house had stopped working. I called the phone number: “The number you have dialed has not been recognised.”

Yes, the fuckwit I’d spoken to had, instead of changing the name, closed the account.

I called back and there was no way to re-open the account.

The only option was to open a brand new landline and broadband account, which can take up to 14 days to start working. And there was no guarantee the phone would have the same phone number.

The phone number my parents have had for 58 years.

I can’t remember when I was last that angry. I’m still furious now, although the vibrations have subsided and I don’t want to cause quite so much physical damage.

I have spoken to a couple of genuinely nice and caring people at BT (or EE as they seem to be now) but they can do nothing. It’s very much “the computer says no”. There’s not even anything they can try. How is this even (im)possible.

In theory the new landline and broadband should be up and running in a few days with, hopefully, the old number being put back after that.

If not, I have spent way too much time plotting the various campaigns of annoyance and protest that I would escalate to.

So very very very angry. Also so very impotent.

Never ever use BT. Or EE I guess.

§ On the upside, Nationwide endeared themselves to me, with a field on their online form for the date of the funeral. Why? So that if they need to call, they won’t do it on that day.

§ I finished reading Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard this week and really liked it. I read some of her short stories a while back and they didn’t grab me but, having read quite a few acclaimed short story collections, I think that’s the fault of short stories in general.

There are so many good turns of phrase. I’m not good at analysing why I like how something is written. Her text often often has something ominous about it, which reminds me of Nicholas Mosley and James Salter (who I wrote about here). I wondered if this is something more common to British writers who grew up during and after World War II: a sense of conflict, engagement, the potential of things to get worse before they get better. Here’s part of a description of a well-to-do family dinner (page 17):

The girls’ curved necks were intolerably exposed as they spooned their custard: you could practically feel the axe. Upright Mrs. Thrale could never be felled in the same way, at least not now. The young man and the girls remarked among themselves on the delayed season—“the late summer,” as if it were already dead. They were like travellers managing an unfamiliar tongue, speaking in infinitives. Everything had the threat and promise of meaning. Later on, there would be more and more memories, less and less memorable. It would take a bombshell, later, to clear the mental space for such a scene as this.

Experience was banked up around the room, a huge wave about to break.

As with Mosely, there’s a way with similes (I think, not metaphors?) that I envy. Such as this, too, from page 136:

Caro sat at her office desk remembering Paul Ivory’s play and how, for an instant at the end of the final act, the audience had remained silent after its ordeal. Here and there in the theatre a click or tick, a slight crackle such as one hears at potteries among baked wares cooling from the furnace. And then the fracturing applause.

I’m not familiar with the sound of ceramics cooling but that still works so well. And then the fracturing!

§ We started season two of Shrinking (Apple TV+), the first season of which I apparently enjoyed. I could hardly bear to finish one episode. It was too oddly slick. Every person and object and set was immaculate and lit the same. The pacing seemed relentlessly the same. There were many lines with the cadence of snappy one-liners that weren’t funny. The relationships between this insular group of characters now seem bizarre. An Apple Keynote of a show. So odd in many ways.

On the plus side, I had practically given up two-thirds of the way through season one of Ludwig (BBC) – it was OK, just a bit middle-ground – but by comparison it seemed innovative, interesting and slightly funnier. So we finished that. If you love David Mitchell being David Mitchell, with an added dose (but never enough) of Anna Maxwell Martin, you will love this much David Mitchell being David Mitchell. One very strange, and quite tedious thing though: how teal-and-brown/orange all the sets and costumes are. Can we please move on from this?

§ The keen feed readers among you might have seen this post appear briefly a couple of days ago. For once I wrote most of this a couple of days early, but then forgot to change the publish time to Sunday.

Anyway, it’s now a very wet Sunday after a very wet and windy night and our plans to visit Abergavenny for the night have been scuppered by floods. We spent the morning reloading graphs of local river levels, flood maps (different for England and Wales for little useful reason), searching for webcams of roads, and watching Facebook videos of local villages under surprising amounts of water.

And now, minutes before finally publishing this, we’ve discovered our water’s been turned off due to emergency works at a nearby borehole. What an adventure.

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From Writing.

Back home this week, to my other life, and settling back into those habits and routines.

§ As a distraction from other thoughts I’ve started tinkering with the Kirby CMS. I’ve been wondering how to simplify my personal website and Kirby seems to hit a sweet spot: it’s PHP so could run on good old shared hosting; it stores everything as flat files so doesn’t even need a database; and it has a decent admin front-end (unlike static site generators). At version 4 it seems pretty mature and has a small but helpful community.

So I’ve enjoyed learning something new for the first time in ages, getting very stuck with basic things, learning new shapes and ways of doing stuff. I wrote a script to export my 1800 or so blog posts to files and, running on my laptop, Kirby works well, as far as I’ve got.

I might end up not using it, but that’s fine. Some interesting, personal, low-stakes coding is the best kind.

§ I’m enjoying the sudden influx of collaborators refugees from Twitter/X to Bluesky. My feed there is now busier than my Mastodon feed and, if I mute some of the politics posters, it’s a fun place.

I definitely agree with Cory’s take on Bluesky, that it’s yet another (currently) locked-in, VC-funded social network, and we shouldn’t be jumping into yet another one of those. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?

I would love Mastodon, or similar, to be the most successful network but unless it changes I can’t see it. For one thing, there are too many little hurdles for normal people to jump over. So I’m reluctant to go all in on Bluesky but at least, sigh, I guess it’s an improvement.

Occasionally I pop on to X to see who’s still posting and it baffles me. We all make compromises with this stuff – I use WhatsApp and Instagram and, rarely, Facebook despite the awfulness of Meta, and I occasionally buy something on Amazon when there’s no other option, despite the terribleness of it and Bezos. But it’s surprising to see the otherwise reasonable people who are posting on X still. At this point I guess there’s nothing Musk could do that could wean these people off their dwindling followers. It’s an odd look.

§ We watched season three of Industry this week which was really good. It’s nonsense, and doesn’t withstand comparing most of it to reality, or wondering why the characters explain so much to each other in ways they wouldn’t, or thinking about what the morality and lessons of the whole thing are… but if you just go along for the ride it’s good fun. I’m surprised there’s going to be a fourth season because it felt wrapped-up, and already drifting further away from the financial industry at its heart.

§ I finished reading Adam Greenfield’s Lifehouse: Taking Care of Ourselves in a World on Fire which was good.

I don’t read many contemporary non-fiction books and most of those I have read over the past decade have been quite disappointing, in a “this could have been an article” kind of way. There’s also a tendency to write a lot of first-person stuff which maybe authors and publishers like because it feels personal and gives it “character” or something? But that always feels “light” and non-serious to me, again more like a magazine article than a non-fiction book about a serious subject.

Anyway, Adam’s book doesn’t suffer that – the only brief bit of first-person experience supports his discussion of how people can get together to help their communities in a time of crisis, and be ready to do so.

I’m not sure I’ll actually do anything as a result of reading it though. Obviously, collective action requires working together with people in your community and… I’m not much of a joiner or a talking-to-strangers-er. Especially recently. My Dad, involved in local politics for decades, said of it, “you have to enjoy meetings,” which he did. I organised my working life around as few meetings and as little in-person interaction as possible, so.

But despite that the book was good, and got me thinking and wanting to read more in a similar vein.

§ I know there were one or two other things I was going to write, but I didn’t make a note of them – “Of course I’ll remember!” – so that’s all.

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From Writing.

Still in Essex all this week. Waiting punctuated with bursts of admin.

The government’s Tell Us Once service is a nice thing – a single place to tell various government departments and the local council that someone has died. I’ve yet to see any results, but I assume it does actually work. Although I did have to report a bug with the validation of its address input fields.

§ While in Essex I’ve continued to go swimming three times a week, enjoying being only 20 minutes walk from a nice public pool. I’ve been increasing how far I swim and now manage 2,000 metres in under an hour, with a quick breather every few lengths. I think I’ve improved my technique too, picking up tips from various TikToks, like Effortless Swimming (also on YouTube). I’d love to be able to get my average speed down to under two minutes per 100m, just because it’s a nice round number of a target, but my speed is persistently a bit over.

§ I had an afternoon in London during the week. Last time I went I spent far too long west of Regent Street but managed to balance it out this trip, spending more time in East London. I met DW for lunch and, overall, walked 19km / 12 miles.

I was hoping to buy a new smart white shirt, with arms the correct length, which is not an easy task for gangly me. This did mean heading to posh West London briefly. I skipped the most expensive ready-to-wear options like Budd (£225 upwards) and Turnbull & Asser (£295 upwards), and so started at Drake’s (£195) where the nice but slightly-too-casual shirt was obviously way too short.

Then on to Hilditch & Key (£195) where the chap said they wouldn’t have any with sleeves long enough, measuring my arms to confirm. Then Harvie & Hudson (£110), whose man commiserated with me – he was tall and thin himself – because he could instantly tell they’d have nothing to fit. He suggested Charles Tyrwhitt (£70) which is a big enough chain that they can make a wider variety of sizes and so had a shirt that fit OK.

I have mixed feelings about buying posh smart clothes. I’m not posh and smart, and the shops, their products and window displays do not in themselves make me feel at home. No matter how much you might appreciate nice clothes which – if you can afford that price level – might be handmade in the UK, it all reeks of rich Tory men.

The service is always interesting though. Hilditch & Key and Harvie & Hudson were impeccably polite, although I still felt out of place in the surroundings.

Drake’s, a bit more casual and so a bit more “me”, was friendly and made me feel welcome and at home (although he should have been able to tell in advance that their shirt would be way too short).

Even better, in my experience, is the Anderson & Sheppard Haberdashery where I once bought some lovely, and correspondingly expensive, Italian flannel trousers. Some of the clothes are, again, too Tory but the staff were just the right balance of friendly and polite that I didn’t feel out of place.

Despite the variations all these fancy places remind me what service in shops can be like when the staff are, I assume, not minimum wage employees only there for as long as they need to be. Charles Tyrwhitt, which was busy and the staff rushed, was heading more in that direction. But then you could pick up four shirts for £150 there (if you needed that many).

§ I finished watching the fourth and final season of Atlanta this week, which continued to be interesting and mostly good.

And I’ve now finished re-watching the third and fourth seasons of Parks & Recreation, still fun, although I’ve also remembered what an absolute nightmare of a co-worker Leslie is. Is she the baddy?

§ On Sunday I left Essex and headed to London where I met Mary off a late-night plane at Heathrow, back from her three week trip to Nepal. Heading home.

"Issue 009/November: Interlude. In which I tell you about Karl, a good little guy" Lovely, sad writing.

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