Author: orbific

Monthnotes: May 2025

May has had some wonderful high points, although work continues to squat toad-like on my life (although I still mostly love my job). I’m better than I was at the start of this year but, despite two bank holidays, I still feel battered and behind with everything. Things are slowly improving, not least because summer has come to the valley. Everything looks green and lush and the days are stretched out long past my waking hours. It feels good to be here.

I spent a week hiding out in Blackpool, and we also got to celebrate Rosy’s birthday, which included a visit from her daughter. Our new household is settling in, with some long neglected jobs finally getting done. I made a flying visit to Brighton for ‘Rosy Carrick’s Poetry Gangbang’, which was on for two nights in the Brighton Fringe. I performed on the second night. I was nervous about reading prose among such an impressive poetry line-up and was delighted that I held my own. I stayed out late on the Friday, and made very few arrangements to see people – so apologies for anyone I did not catch up with. I loved the short visit to Brighton, but it also confirmed that I am happy to have moved to the valley.

I have very little context for the gashapon shop in Brighton, but I love that it exists

I continue struggling with physical activity. The month’s step total was 413,499, an average of 13,338 steps, with the peak being 19,350, wandering around Blackpool and Hebden Bridge. My weight is still drifting, which I think is due to stress. One good thing I’ve noticed – while I still have occasional headaches, the ones I do have are changed. I have fewer long duration ones with weird auras – an improvement that’s come about from paying more attention to hydration.

I’m continuing to try new things with my writing, trying to work out how I can work in longer forms. I experimented with writing a novella – I set it aside, but it was a useful experiment. I made a Wednesday Writers session, determined not to let work keep getting in the way, and loved it. My favourite story on the substack this month was The Cooking Pot, which might become part of a longer thing in time.

I continue to enjoy my job, although I’m still not feeling settled with my current client – and I’ve been with them six months. There is a lot of inertia around my role, and it’s hard to produce changes that would make things more comfortable. Much of my work energy is going into the client side, meaning I have less capacity for the ‘side-of-desk’ work, and those commitments are harder to keep up with. It’s all basic stuff, but hard to fix in the moment. I suspect I’m doing better than I think I am, but how I feel about my work is one of the most important things to keep an eye on.

I made it to the cinema a few times over May. Thunderbolts* was a decent MCU film, and 28 Days Later was intense but felt less innovative than when I first saw it. I watched Sinners twice in the cinema. I’m excited by that film in a way I’ve not been about a film since Star Wars as a kid. Beyond how well crafted it was, it opens up whole areas of history and music I’ve not thought about in depth. The soundtrack is superb. I find myself thinking back to that ending, the last few lines of the film, and how beautiful they were.

I’ve also watched a little TV. Rosy and I had Yellowjackets as a regular show, which meant a third watching of season 1, but it maintained my interest. Returning to From season 3 was hard work, and I might just read the synopsis for this one. The Last of Us was mostly annoying, with the adaptation feeling in conflict with the original. Doctor Who has undergone a spectacular renaissance, feeling like essential TV once more. I’ve not liked all of the episodes this season, but they all attempted to do something interesting. We’re standing on the edge of the series being cancelled once more, and it’s a great way to go out.

My reading this month was mostly trying to get my kindle back under control, abandoning a number of half-read books. I did stomp my way through a Brian Eno biography (music books are relaxing) and a history of the Labour party’s 2024 victory. I also blogged about Exterminate! Regenerate!, John Higgs’ recent book on Doctor Who and about Ultra-Processed People. I’ve also found myself hooked by Saga, the Brian K. Vaughan comic series – it took a while to grow on me. The Facebook memoir Careless People was shocking and needs a post of its own.

I love the circle on the side of this building – it’s interesting and effective

I continued playing the daily runs on The Last of Us 2. It’s compulsive and sort of boring, but a nice way to reset myself after work. Following some recommendations in the work slack, I picked up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, hoping for something a little like Planescape: Torment. It’s pretty good – a fascinating storyline and setting. It has all the grind of a role-playing game, but building up stats to take on a boss feels more fun than the grind loops of most open-world games.

Walking through the town centre this month, I passed an anti-trans protestor with some particularly unpleasant slogans on a sandwich board. I decided that saying ‘shame on you’ in passing wasn’t enough, and walked back to suggest that maybe confronting trans people with such things was not a nice thing to do, given the recent attacks on them. Then I saw they had a camera – so the whole thing was basically someone trying to make Youtube content.

It was the Blobby Shop’s first birthday

Another local story is the geese. I’ve written before about the two geese who nested on a rocky island below the canal bridge, and how people had taken them food and bedding. Some of their eggs were stolen and the rest didn’t hatch. There was another sad story of a Canada gosling abandoned by its parents. And the two sad stories resolved with the gosling being adopted.

Two more paedophile teachers from my school were arrested. It brought out the usual claims that the school had no idea that such things were happening at the time. This is a lie. Everyone knew which teachers were paedophiles, yet they were tolerated by the establishment. When the bounds were overstepped, certain teachers were allowed to retire without sanction. There’s a danger to pretending that our current moral views were held in the recent past.

I’ve been reading Samantha Harvey’s ‘space pastoral’, Orbital: “She finds she often struggles for things to tell people back home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between” (p17-8)

  • The trailer for The Long Walk looks amazing – it’s out in September
  • I watched and blogged another time loop movie, Until Dawn.
  • While I was in Brighton, I ate my favourite meal at La Choza three times – vegan sweet potato burrito with naga salsa. It was great each time.
  • I spent a day throwing up from food poisoning in Blackpool. I’ve not been that sick since I stopped drinking and did not enjoy it at all.
Walking through Manchester, I found an invader mosaic.

Ultra-Processed People

Reading Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People is a disturbing experience. What starts out as a non-fiction book about diet ends up as a work of cosmic horror – with some impressive touches of body horror.

I had a similar feeling from Jay Owen’s book Dust. In cosmic horror, “the characters become aware of the true scale of the universe, its hidden natures, and wrestle with the meaning of that.” In van Tulleken’s book we see how industrial preparation of food has taken over our diets, leading to horrific outcomes. The system produces massive harms but nobody is able or willing to stop it.

Chris van Tulleken (hereafter CvT) tells the story well, starting with an ice-cream that will not melt. Checking the ingredients, he sees that what he has given to his daughter is not a combination of eggs, cream and sugar; rather it’s something designed in a laboratory to produce particular sensations. Many of the ingredients are things you wouldn’t find in a kitchen cupboard.

He portrays food production as a sort of evolutionary race, with the companies trying to out-compete each other in the marketplace. The drive to reduce costs produces appalling decisions that cost lives. Several times, the comparison is made to smoking, where paid scientists obfuscated the research for their own financial benefit.

One of the most striking discussions is around Pringles – a food that markets itself on addictiveness. CvT writes about the engineering of the shape, how the flavourings work, all designed to be as appealing as possible and to undercut the body’s responses to feeling full.

CvT is an effective writer. He quotes Donald Trump’s 2012 tweet that “I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke.” as he discusses how sweeteners prime the body for sugar that will not come, and may provoke cravings. He’s also clear about the effects of different food preparation – a whole apple turns out to be significantly healthier than a smoothie made of just apples and water.

The book lays down clear evidence that ultra-processed food is harmful. Sometimes CvT overeggs his cake in his desire to press his case, cherry picking the most dramatic research. This is fair enough – he sees a certain type of scientific rigour as a tool used to defend these foods, similar to the scientific defence of smoking.

CvT uses any means he can to provoke revulsion I don’t find the idea of eating bacterial foams disgusting in particular – it’s less disgusting than eating the flesh of another creature – but there’s a fantastic image when CvT talks about how fizzy drinks leach nutrients from the bones: “Drink enough and you may end up peeing out your own skeleton”. It’s a great horror image. The one that made me shudder most was around the acidity of fizzy drinks and how, if you brush your teeth after one, “you are literally brushing away a slurry of tooth enamel”.

Like in a lot of cosmic horror, there are links to the Nazis. CvT shows how they were pioneers with processed food, with one scientist making edible fats from paraffin by-products – it caused damage to the body, but the U-boat sailors who ate it were unlikely to live long enough to see problems from it.

The cosmic horror comes from how these foods have such massive effects but nobody is responsible. Terrible things happen through a diffusion of responsibility. The book talks about Nestle’s decisions around baby formula, and how it’s now working to disrupt established food distribution among remote Amazonian communities. Scientists end up paid to say things that are misleading. It’s a situation that nobody would have chosen, but that cannot be resisted.

The Tories have pushed against food regulation on the basis that it’s an aspect of the nanny state. For a long time, I thought I was at fault for some of the poor food decisions I was making. But, since cutting back on processed food, my appetite is much more manageable. The short-term impulsive decisions around unhealthy food are gone. UPFs hack the body’s responses. Is it right to put the blame on people’s decisions when these decisions are being undercut?

The most remarkable thing about this book is that it does produce behaviour change. CvT makes explicit comparison to Allen Carr’s book on smoking. He’s never dogmatic or hectoring, yet by the end, I’d also lost my desire to eat chemicals and emulsifiers. I’ve changed my diet since reading this book (I’m in a position to do this when a lot of people aren’t). Long term, I’ll have to see if this is a permanent change, but I’m already impressed how effective it was. Cutting down on UPF has removed much of my desire for it.

Iteration 24: Until Dawn

On the 1,889th day of March 2020, I watched Until Dawn in the cinema. It’s been over as year since my last time loop movie. This was a borderline case – but I was persuaded when the script explicitly referred to Groundhog Day to claim it wasn’t the same.

A group of young people are following the trail of a friend who has gone missing. After so many revisionist slasher films, it’s weird to see the genre done so straight. There’s the harbinger in a gas station, like in Cabin in The Woods. There’s an overhead shot of a car driving down a wooded road, like in every horror film ever.

The world-building of Until Dawn makes very little sense. The teens are murdered by a variety of different horror tropes, then find themselves returning to the start of that night. Each time, they are more damaged than before, slowly fading. In some ways, it’s refreshing to see a horror film that cares little about plausibility and focuses on producing interesting moments. The were some well-constructed jump scares. There’s even a found-footage section which is so short that you wish the director had made more use of the format.

Until Dawn is based on a videogame. Apparently they made significant changes, but it still feels like one, particularly with how they characters learn more about the world. At one point there’s a video cassette and a convenient player, so you can almost see the icons on them for the characters to interact through.

As a time loop, this is a very loose one – certain small elements are repeated, but other elements of the night change significantly. Mostly, this is a film that uses the time-loop trope to do its own thing. Time loops are now so established that they can be quickly set up for the audience, which is interesting in itself.

Statistics

  • Length of first iteration (in film): not recorded (I was in the cinema)
  • Length of second iteration: not recorded
  • Reset point: all five main characters die
  • Fidelity of loop: huge changes between iterations and the characters fade with each loop
  • Exit from the loop: someone escapes from the loop or the characters’ life-force is fully drained

airgap.txt: an abandoned/prototype novella

Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve been working on a novella, airgap.txt. I produced 20,000 words of text and I’ve decided to stop. There’s nothing wrong with putting aside a project, as long as there is some reflection.

I’ve been thinking recently about writing longer, deeper work. airgap.txt was a first-person story about a woman running a blog about internet ghosts who investigates an incursion of fairyland into the real world. It was inspired by Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld, egregores and NPC theory.

What I learned from this:

  • The narrative was too linear to maintain my interest. I like reading both conventional and ergodic novels, but writing a linear narrative doesn’t excite me. I’ve used linear forms in a few novels, and the interesting bits were where I pushed and broke the format.
  • One particular problem of writing a linear narrative was that there were no vignettes or sections that stood independently. Chuck Palahniuk has spoken about the fun of breaking off sections to try out, and I didn’t have the opportunity for that. I’m someone who loves the fragment, and anything I do should support that.
  • I intentionally set out to write about an isolated character. This is incredibly difficult to get right, and I had a good try. The text was discursive, bringing in other perspectives; but it’s hard to write about an alienated character without alienating the reader. Some level of character conflict is more engaging to write.
  • I started writing airgap.txt playfully, and built a good structure. But it would have been better to start with a clearer idea of where I might go.
  • It’s easy for a discipline around writing to eradicate the playfulness, which is something that happened here.

What I enjoyed:

  • Most of my writing has been for the weekly substack and the Wednesday Writers group, and I enjoyed trying to work on a larger scale.
  • It was fun to explore the character, even if I’d not given her much space to express herself. I should have allowed more space for play – when I did, I loved it.

Monthnotes: April 2025

With April, I felt myself emerge from winter. There’s been a little baling out of the chaos that had arisen in my life, such as emails and to-read piles. I now feel caught up and have even done some spring cleaning. I had visits too, from Rosie the puppy and my friend Naomi. Ayng and Rob dropped by, friends I’d not seen since before the pandemic. Then, at the end of the month, Rosy moved in officially. It’s going to take a while to get everything settled, but life feels pretty good right now.

I did a a decent amount of exercise in May. My step total was 400,816, with a daily average of 13,361. The peak was 24,869 on Saturday 12th April, wandering about with the dog. I did some long weekly sessions on the cross-trainer, getting up to 10km on that. Trying to add treadmill into these sessions has been hard, so there is a long way to go, but I see this as building up towards running.

I finished reading Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. It’s an excellent book that has changed my approach to food. I’ve cut out a lot of unhealthy, unnatural things and my body has reacted positively. It’s also brought my impulsive cravings under control. My appetite has felt normal for maybe the first time in my adult life. I don’t know if this will be permanent, but it’s been amazing to feel this change. The book says that removing UPF from the diet often results in losing weight, but that hasn’t happened with me. I put on another 1.4 pounds over the month, bringing my post-November rise to about 6 pounds. I can feel my clothes fitting less well, so I need to bring that under control in May.

I’ve continued to simplify my digital life. My Instagram and Bluesky accounts are gone, and I’ve removed more things from my phone, including my main email. This seems to have reduced my impulse to use the phone as a boredom buster. With Rosy moving in, I’ve also been decluttering my physical life. My bedroom now feels like a calm oasis. These changes seem positive, although I still feel like I am somewhat behind with everything – mostly due to work.

Being able to concentrate means reading more books. I enjoyed Character Limit, a book on Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase (which I’ve written about on the blog). Roisin Lanigan’s I want to Go Home But I’m Already There was an excellent ghost story about the housing crisis (check out this Guardian interview). There was also a new John Higgs book about Doctor Who, Exterminate! Regenerate!, also discussed on my blog.

Reading more has come at the cost of movie-watching – I didn’t see a single film in April! But I did watch several TV shows. The new season of The Last of Us is an entertaining cover version of the game, although Ellie’s actions seem even more troubling. Black Mirror‘s new season didn’t grab me after two-and-a-bit episodes. Rosy and I have embarked on a watch of Yellowjackets, which is a great 90s nostalgia trip. Also, thanks to Rosy, we watched the end of season of Gladiators. That’s a fun show, but the presenters are insufferable. The new season of Doctor Who has been excellent, with Lux being a particularly great episode.

I’ve continued posting on the substack, although I’m considering whether that is taking too much energy that should be spent on longer things. This was prompted by an online debate on light mode vs heavy work. Ultimately, I decided to continue, but I do want a higher-level structure to what I’m doing. As part of this, I’ve been working on some experiments, one of which was inspired by thinking about Pulp Press (who I blogged about in 2009). It will be a while before something emerges, but then that’s the thing about longer work. Meanwhile, I liked the substack pieces I produced, particularly Once I had a Golden Ticket and I’m Sorry Mr Giggles.

Discovery on Spotify seems to have become good again after a year or two of being ropy. At the end of April, they recommended a playlist of alt-sounds from Copenhagen. This was not something I’d considered before but I enjoyed the exploration. The new Wu-Tang album, Black Samson, The Bastard Swordsman, is a return to form. But the occasional clumsy sexism makes me want to remind them that they are adult men in the 50s with families and should be better than that.

Work continues to take a huge amount of energy. I caught myself comparing it to when I used to drink – I’m enjoying it, but it’s not sustainable. I spent the easter weekend trying to catch up and was still behind. I love the job, but I need to strike a better balance.

A beautiful dawn walk above home

I keep a scrappy journal, making a few notes on each day before bed. It’s great for spotting trends that might get lost day to day. During April I was complaining about poor sleep, headaches, wandering concentration, weight and a general sense of overwhelm. I’m happy on the scale of weeks, but some individual days feel staticky. The above are all things I need to work on. And it would be easy to get some of them under control.

Not being on Facebook, I only heard about the Hungry Years reunion just before ticket applications closed and decided not to apply. The Hungry Years was a rock club that, for a time, was the centre of my life. I had some great times there, but it was also a period of my life when I was often unhappy. I’d love to catch up with the individuals but going back to the old location for a reunion feels like trying to recapture something that’s gone. Nostalgia is a dangerous thing.

I was emailed by a student who’d read one of my blog posts about Brighton bookshops. They interviewed me for about an hour on how the experience of buying books had changed. That was definitely nostalgia, but with a critical view on things. I’m not sure how useful my responses were, but it was interesting to think about.

A few weeks back, a couple of geese nested on the stony islands on the river. I shared a photo last month of someone delivering bedding to them, as Mrs Goose had picked a barren place to lay. For the past few weeks she’s been comfortably looking after her eggs. One of them has vanished, but the remaining two were still there last time I looked.

  • My niece has bought her first set of lambs, which has meant a constant flow of cute photos. I do feel bad that they don’t know what’s coming for them.
  • I blogged about my favourite easters.
  • Byrony Good has continued to put on some excellent workshops, and I loved her recent ‘botanicals’ session.
  • New content dropped for The Last of Us 2 rogue-like. I’m still not bored of that. I tried to play Atomfall but couldn’t get into it. I seem to have very specific requirements for video games.
  • A photo I took of Lou Ice was used when she was interviewed by a Welsh news service.
  • I’ve spoken a lot about Mastodon but Rob Shearer’s Mastodon Exit Interview is scathing about the platform’s limitations. I think he’s right. I wonder if the indie web is maybe a better starting point than Mastodon for federated social media.
  • I love comic book annotations, and was pleased to add something to The Divining Comics wicdiv annotations.
  • I had a dream during April that I was dying. I spent most of it making a to-do list in preparation.
  • I read an amazing article about Tehching Hsieh’s durational performances.

Exterminate! Regenerate!

The arrival of a new John Higgs book is an exciting event. I held off opening Exterminate! Regenerate! until finishing work, then read the first section out loud to my housemate. It’s a gripping scene: Verity Lambert is working on a live TV broadcast when the main actor drops down dead. It’s noted that Verity is 23 years old, the book’s first appearance of the number.

There are superficial similarities between this book and the previous one, Love and Let Die, where Higgs looked at Bond. Both Bond and the Doctor emerged in the early sixties, both have been played by multiple actors and both have changed to fit the times. Higgs tells the Doctor’s story well, producing a brisk, fascinating account. But this is a stranger book than simply a history of a TV show.

During the course of the book, Higgs builds a case that the Doctor is alive: an incredibly successful memetic lifeform. He queries the difference between “something that is a living thing, and something that just acts like one”, and talks about how this creature functions, and the ways it attempts niche construction.

I didn’t recall the word egregore in the text, but that is what we’re talking about here. Doctor Who, more than almost any other 20th century fictional character has begun functioning independently. The only character that has come close to this is the somewhat more obscure John Constantine, who keeps slipping into reality. Other science fiction characters and superheroes seem different to the Doctor – there’s something grounded about him that allows him to interact with our world with some level of autonomy. The TARDIS allows him to function in many types of stories, whereas superheroes often rely on a static, unrealistic background setting.

Higgs talks about the Doctor as “the most perfectly evolved story-creating entity that there has ever been”, keeping itself alive by generating new narratives. I’d not realised how many stories have been released by Big Finish Audio alone – hundreds of them, filling in different eras. “Doctor Who had been a living progression of adventures, but now every moment along that timeline was fizzing with potential and capable of generating new stories. Doctor Who had become fractal.”

Along with the discussion of the doctor, there is an interesting observation about the time lords, and how they represent the show’s editors. There’s an interesting parallel here with the function of the crisis in DC comics, and how these keep occurring to fix editorial issues (many of them created by the first DC crisis).

I loved reading this. It’s full of interesting asides and diversions, as well as a very provocative theme. And, if you accept the book’s conclusion that Doctor Who is alive, what else can you do with that idea?

My two favourite easters

20 years ago, I was working on the legendary Flirtomatic project with Tom Hume and Devi at Future Platforms. We were fighting against a tight deadline, which left us working on easter Sunday.

Mid-morning, our colleagues Antony and Michael turned up at the office. They said we had to take a break and get coffee. They were quite insistent, so we headed out. And, when we came back, they told us that they’d hidden easter eggs in the office and we had to look for them.

I might have been working, but I think that was my favourite easter.

Another easter memory: Rosy decided to do an easter egg hunt for Olive in St Anne’s Well garden. She hid a few eggs around the trees, which Olive looked for. One of them was found by a squirrel before Olive could get to it. The prize was taken up to a tree branch and unwrapped, little twists of foil falling as Olive held back tears.

Happy easter bank holiday!

Elon Musk and Character Limit

Over the past few years, I’ve begun to prefer learning about current affairs from books rather than newspapers. I think this idea originally came from reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb; but it’s more useful than ever. The news media currently optimises for short-term attention-grabbing rather than explaining the narratives underlying our world. Books are now better for understanding.

Rather than following the day-to-day gossip about Elon Musk, I read Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. It’s very much an anti-Musk book, telling the story of Musk’s ill-fated Twitter purchase.

Musk is a fascinating person – both as the richest man in the world, and for the Tony Stark super-genius persona he cultivated. There’s a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in seeing this supposed genius doing baffling and incompetent things. We are told that the super-rich have earned their rewards through reaching the top of meritocratic capitalism – but how does that explain Musk’s peculiar mix of genius and stupidity?

There’s one view of Musk as someone with lofty, amazing goals: “Elon just wants to do what benefits humanity.” And pushing the uptake of electric cars can only be a good thing; as can bringing internet to remote communities. But set against this are the moments of blundering fuckwittery. Musk’s involvement in the Thai cave drama was ridiculous, offering assistance that would not work – “Never mind that Musk’s submarine had not arrived in Thailand until the rescue was well underway, and eight of the twelve boys had already been freed.” There were his vocal claims in March 2020 that “the coronavirus panic is dumb,” and that the USA would have “close to zero new cases” by May. The book is filled with examples of idiocy.

The restrooms became a particular problem, as Musk’s piling of people onto fewer floors caused the toilets to constantly be in use. In New York, the stench of the bathrooms overwhelmed some parts of the office, while some employees complained about cockroaches flitting in and out of drains.

“That is why I bought Twitter,” he once wrote. “I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love. And I do so with humility, recognizing failure in pursuing this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very real possibility.”

How did this idealist end up as someone who thought it would be funny to make a Nazi-style salute from a public platform? Who rowed with prominent Jewish groups? Character Limit suggests that the pandemic was what changed Musk.

This was an interesting book, and one that paints a shocking picture of Musk. Various scenes in Character Limit feature Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson, and I now want to read his book to see what positive case can be made. I’d love to know how the world’s richest man can be somebody so petty and vain that he cheats at video games.

PS – One of the highlights of the book is when Musk is turned away from Berlin nightclub the Berghain, after being forced to queue with other visitors. Some things money cannot buy.

Light mode vs heavy things

Warren Ellis recently posted The Internet Favours Light Mode. He summarises a debate about ‘light mode vs heavy mode’, pointing to the original post by Anu about how the Internet prefers ‘light mode’:

It thrives on spikes, scrolls, and screenshots. It resists weight and avoids friction. It does not care for patience, deliberation, or anything but production… It doesn’t care what you create, only that you keep creating. Make more. Make faster. Make lighter… Make something that can be consumed in a breath and discarded just as quickly. Heavy things take time. And here, time is a tax.

Increasingly, the Internet dictates the rhythms for creators. Algorithms reward regular posting above well-crafted irregular work. In the post, Anu talks about the desire to produce things in heavy mode. They also suggest that Substack is a sort of mid-point, avoiding the full ephemerality of light mode, but still missing some heft. This is something I’ve been feeling a lot lately.

Ellis points out that it is possible to work in light mode, and gather something more substantial from that:

fragmentary writing can in fact assemble into something weightier. I’ve written about several objects like that in the recent past – Kathleen Jamie’s CAIRN comes immediately to mind. It’s about intent.

For almost 20 years I’ve been fascinated by the way ephemerality can build into greater things – how fragments can make something wonderful. The Pillow Book can be seen as an ancient blog. The work of the beats played with this – Howl is a series of sentences that build on each other.

I enjoy writing for the substack, but I am find myself straining against it. I want to build things with more heft, that escape the Internet. It’s one of the reasons for the zines – to say that I thought a set of words was worth printing. And I still want to create something heavy. Something that captures what the world has felt like to me.

Monthnotes: March 2025

With March, I started getting back my missing mojo. Which is not to say that the month was easy, but things are getting better. It was also good to have a flow of visitors to the valley: Tom, Graham, Katharine, Muffy, and Laurence. I did some good hikes too, which got the blood flowing. Work was tough but always interesting.

My diet and exercise were mostly slack, not helped by my trainer being away. I put on an extra 2.0 pounds, which means a total of 4.3 since the end of November. I walked 435,256 steps, an average of 14,073, and the most since the 16,000 or so average in March 2024, when I was in a step competition. The longest day’s walking was going back home from Howarth with Tom and Graham. I’m still not running yet, but my gym recently added an elliptical machine. I went in for the first time outside of my sessions and ‘ran’ 5k. It’s good to see I can manage this, and it might help me build up to actual running.

Most of the films that I saw this month were in the cinema, apart from the dire Electric State. I’d loved the trailer for this so much that I read the book before seeing the film, ignoring my rule about picking one medium for adaptations – it’s a good thing I did. The Bridget Jones film was not for me (I don’t think I’ve actually seen the previous ones), and I am Martin Parr was interesting – very odd to watch a film that included footage of the cinema I was in. The Last Showgirl brought out very different opinions from me and Rosy, but I loved it. For the second year running, I watched all 10 Best Picture Oscar nominees (link to blog post). Anora‘s win was well-deserved, but there were some other very strong contenders. Like everyone else, I watched Adolescence, but found myself underwhelmed. The acting was superb, but the one-shot gimmick seemed to constrain most of the episodes. It’s also shit that it takes a drama to set the national agenda.

My reading was disordered at points in March, demonstrated by the fact that I woke up one night because I’d knocked over my bedside pile of books. The only one that stood out in March was The Amplified Come as You Are, Michael Azzerad’s extensive commentary on his 1993 Nirvana biography, which I’ve written about on a separate post. The online story The Ideal Candidate Will be Punched in the Stomach was a great read – and even better for the writer making it grimly plausible.

I’m enjoying No Return mode on The Last of Us: Part 2. This is a roguelike, with a daily challenge. It seems weird to be so in love with one particular game and not taking to any others. I tried a little of Atomfall, but stopped when it made me feel pukey. I need to give it another chance.

Writing has been slow, but I’m continuing to work hard at it. I’m enjoying the weekly stories on substack but I also want to do something substantial. However, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on something I can’t find an audience for (I very much struggle with promotion). I’m thinking a lot about my approach to writing but it also feels like I am getting somewhere with this. I sent out a prototype of a fun thing (picture below), which Justin pointed out was a feelie.

A little writing experiment that I sent to a couple of people

Work was busy, with a run of all-day meetings at the end of the month. My client role continues to feel ambiguous, but one of the challenges of consultancy is introducing structure where it’s missing. I’ve started setting my goals at the start of the week, aiming to set out what I want to have achieved. It seems to be working, but there’s still a way to go.

I was chatting with Dave recently and he suggested that I sometimes talk too much about my frustrations in the monthnotes. My life right now is close to perfect – I share a house with my best friend in a place I love, and my job is both challenging and engaging. I talk a lot about the frustrations (sleep being a big one) but it’s the grit that makes the pearl. So, when you read me complaining here, bear in mind that there’s very little I would change.

My biggest struggle right now is with energy – days in the office are proving particularly exhausting. I ringfence much of my spare time and energy for writing and my daily steps, which leaves little left for a social life. My attendance at my regular in-person writing groups has been sporadic. I’m not sure how to re-prioritise things, but I am benefitting from less time on social media and cutting down task switching. I’ve also turned off all the metrics on my kindle so I can focus on reading better. It feels like things are improving but I still need to get back to something approaching pre-pandemic levels of sociability

Important Hebden Bridge bird news! The geese here always seem to lay their eggs in odd places. One silly goose chose to nest on some bare stones by the river. Rosy and I were delighted to see a kind person delivering bedding to the birds, which has now been used for a proper nest.

  • I’ve booked my midsummer holidays. They’re a long way off, but I’m excited to have something to look forward to.
  • March brought the 5th anniversary of the first covid lockdowns. I’m still haunted by that experience.
  • The Pack Horse Inn has closed once more, which is a tragedy.
  • I started to clear the back garden. It’s still a disgrace, but there’s something satisfying about improving it.