Category: monthnotes

October was a tough month, for various reasons. for a start, I’ve not been sleeping well. Maybe that’s middle age, or maybe I’m just being sloppy about sleep hygiene. I’ve also felt overwhelmed by the modern world’s deluge of information and I’ve battened down the hatches a little. With everything going on I’ve not had much spare energy, and missed a few events I’d booked tickets for. But, as rough as I feel, I’ve kept moving and it’s not been too bad overall.

It’s felt like I’ve been travelling a lot, to Liverpool, Buxton and London. The second Spirits of Place event was superb, and well worth a tricky trip to the Wirral. I made a quick dash to London for work, where it was lovely to see my colleagues, even if I ended up staying out in Docklands.

Amidst all the chaos, my diet and exercise have been somewhat all over the place. I did however manage a couple of days of the Couch-to-5k – nothing consistent yet, but it’s good to know that my hip can stand more exercise than it used to. I walked 406,606 steps, an average of 13,116 a day, with the highest total being 20,339 for a day in Buxton. Despite a very poor diet, I still managed to lose a pound overall.

I only finished a few books in October. Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Cuckoo was a flawed but impressive horror novel. Uncommon People was a brisk retelling of Britpop which was perfect for a slow Saturday. Movies were also thin on the ground, but I saw The Outrun at my local cinema, featuring a Q&A by Amy Liptrot. It was very strange to watch a biographical movie and then see the film’s subject in person.

Work was hard this month. Despite all my efforts with my current project, it was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. I was a little nervous about having to find a new role, but made some progress.

Last month, I realised that I was a little over-committed with my writing until January. I’ve continued working through these obligations and none of them have felt like a chore. I also did a few new substack pieces that I’m very happy with: The Bleak Stag, When Dad got the Bomb, Copthwaite’s Amusement Park. The short stories continue to flow and surprise me, which I love, but I’m also thinking about how I can do perhaps start doing something more with my writing.

True Clown Stories is at the proofing stage. Reading it once more, I found that most of the stories still work for me. Hopefully this will be published in November. I’m looking forward to seeing what other people make of these pieces.

At one point in October, I found myself waiting somewhere with no phone battery. I had no idea how long I would be there and had nothing to do but sit and think quietly. It’s the first moment of quiet I’ve had in a long time. I let my thoughts wander, tried to remember bits of poetry. I realised there’s a whole state of mind that technology and lifestyle has eliminated for me. It’s something I’d like more of. I think I might be happier in a life without messaging apps, but I can’t see myself getting rid of WhatsApp. But more quiet time would be good.

• Ryan Broderick has started a new podcast called Panic World. I particularly enjoyed the episode where he interviewed Caroline Calloway.
• The new Indelicates album, Avenue QAnon is now on Spotify.
• I had the latest covid and flu jabs, which wiped me out so much I ended up taking a day off work.
• The house has been covered in scaffolding for much of the past month, but the good news is that the roof has been completely redone.
• I found a new writing group in Hebden Bridge and went along to a meeting. Hoping to make some more in the near future.

I like that some of my zines are currently in a university library

September has been an odd month, not standing out as any particular thing. That’s not to say it’s been bad: work was engaging, I caught up with some friends, and I visited London and Alton Towers. But the weather has turned, with the cold waking me at night a few times. I’ve been having incredible, intense dreams. I’m trying to do too much. Life has felt unsettled. Good, but unsettled.

London was fun – I saw the Indelicates perform their new record Avenue QAnon, then went to Borough Market with Emma. Later in the month I visited Alton Towers for my sister’s birthday. At the start of September, Katharine visited for a few days, which was lovely. Rosy has been away much of the month, but our friend Kate has been staying instead.

My walking continues at 10,000 steps a day, which is a little too much for doing the same routes in the valley, but I’m keeping the target high for my training. The total was 362,270 steps, with an average of 12,076 and a peak of 20,302 from walking around Alton Towers. I’m slowly shedding weight from the personal training, with another 3 pounds gone over September. I’m happy with this gradual pace. The training sessions have loosened my shoulders and I’m making progress with fixing my years-long hip injury. I should be running again in October.

Over the past few months, I’ve accumulated too many books, so in September I aimed to read more than I acquired. A highlight was Hit So Hard, the biography of Patty Schemel, drummer from Hole. This was a terrifying portrait of addiction, and it took me a while to realise what made this so stark. I’ve read very few women writing about addiction and I think the difference here was having no trace of boastfulness alongside the regrets. I also read several graphic novels, including some Astro City compilations. Steve Erickson’s Shadowbahn was an impressive but sometimes difficult novel that starts with the Twin Towers re-appearing in the Dakota Badlands.

I’m not sure if it’s the reading, but I only watched three movies this month, and all of them in the cinema. Alien: Romulus was another disappointing sequel and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice seemed surprisingly good in comparison – mainly because it wasn’t obvious what would happen at any particular point. The best thing I saw was Hollywoodgate, a documentary about the Taliban airforce which alternated between hilarity and horror.

I continue to love my job more than any other one I’ve held – it’s challenging, but at just the right level, and I’m working as part of an excellent team. I am a little worried by the rumours of a return-to-office edict. I don’t think I can do more than two days a week commuting, And it would be ridiculous to travel to an office just to spend the day on calls to my distributed team.

Among all the other things I’ve been doing, I found a little time to play with embeddings and vector databases. I also wrote a review of I Am Code, a book that had some interesting ideas around generating literature with LLMs. I wish I had more time to learn about technology. But I guess it’s good that I am discovering so many things through work that I want to spend time on.

I continued writing on the substack, with my favourite new stories being A Shrine to Light Entertainment and How to Write Cosmic Horror. The substack gives me an energy around my writing that I’ve not had since around 2010 (although I am missing the opportunities I had to perform back then). The most exciting thing is how I seem to be getting better at tuning into stories and finishing them; and I like the new pieces I’m writing.

At the start of the month, I tallied up how many projects I have in progress between now and January 23rd, and was shocked to find 10 of them:

• ASAP: Completing the edits on True Clown stories
• Weekly: My regular story email
• October: planning a walk on a Liverpool ley line
• November: a talk for the Invisibles unconvention in London
• November: working on a piece for NaNoGenMo
• November: sending out my Secret Project
• December an undergraduate lecture on the comic book Promethea
• December: sending out the 2024 Mycelium Parish News
• December: a talk and event to launch the Mycelium Parish News
• January: a new walking zine (my Horkos pledge)

Obviously, this a A Lot, but should be fine as long as I’m organised. I’m making sure to do regular small bits of work on each of these.

I received some worrying news recently, that my sister’s dog was going blind. It explained a few things, like why she couldn’t catch. It was very sad but there was apparently nothing to be done, although a last ditch referral to an opthalmologist was suggested. After a brief examination, the canine ophthalmologist said that Rosie is not going blind as the vet had suggested, but rather she is just ‘fucking clumsy’.

At the start of the month, I had some surprise dental work. I calmed myself during this by thinking through routes from Death Stranding. It made me long to revisit the game, but playing it didn’t feel all that fun. It was the same with returning to Days Gone – the memories of these games are great, but spending time on them felt dull. I’d like to enjoy video games more than I do.

I’m continuing to love being on mastodon. It seems to have that early twitter vibe of friendly people having positive conversations. My theory is that it’s because nobody uses algorithmic feeds, reducing the incentives for attention-at-any-cost. I also seem to be get more interaction on mastodon than I do on Bluesky or Twitter, which is surprising given my smaller audience. The other social networks keep me coming back to click aimlessly when I’m tired, but maybe I just need to log out for a while.

The new Indelicates album Avenue QAnon is one of the best records I’ve listened to in years. Part of this was the slow release of information in the run-up, which felt like the growing expectation I had about records in the 90s. The new songs are catchy, bleak and funny, with Live, Laugh, Love in particular sticking in my head. I’m hoping this record gets the attention it deserves – I think this is an important album I recently found myself comparing it to The Holy Bible.

• I used to put the Nine Inch Nails instrumental A Warm Place on repeat as I fell asleep and I love this new orchestral version.
• Kieron Gillen’s The Power Fantasy is one of the best comics launches I’ve read in years, and is worth the outrageous cost of single issues nowadays. Superheroes as nuclear war allegory.
• The NYT’s article on The Prince We Never Knew reminded me how remarkable Prince was, while being open-eyed about his flaws. I hope we do one day get to see this documentary.

• My parents celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary this year. Wow.
• I’m usually scornful of any adaptations that cling to close to earlier versions, but the new The Last of Us trailer has me desperate to see the new season – even if nostalgia is death
• Warren Ellis’s Department of Midnight podcast has finished an excellent first season. I’m not a fan of narrative podcasts, but this was gripping. Good enough to listen to at 1x speed.

• An Atlantic article (archive) introduced me to Tiktok star Savannah Moss and her amazing shortform videos.
• That AI-generated podcast where the hosts learn that they are AIs is genuinely unsettling
• I had a message from Ellen de Vries, reminding me of my first visit to Hebden Bridge, when we came here to run a writing workshop.

August was another month of catching up with myself. Rosy was mostly away, so the house was very quiet – althought I did have Rosie the puppy to stay for a week. It’s been an odd month – I was doing admin on my own life which feels like a waste of time – but I am on a more even keel. August just didn’t feel as exciting as it should have done.

I spent a week at a writing retreat. Spending my leave messing around with old notes rather than adventuring was a waste of time – but I feel better for clearing that clutter. Being looked after for a week and not having to worry about meals freed up a lot of time. It’s become obvious that my writing has bogged down in big ideas when I work better by building things up from sentences, so I deleted a lot of notes. So, I’m glad I did it, but I’d rather not do it again. The danger with having a writing practise is turning your entire life into homework.

But then, reading through some old blog posts, I see this isn’t the first time I’ve done this: in November 2008 I was also struggling with too many accumulated notes. This is why journals like this blog are so valuable – you can see where you’ve failed to change, where you are lying to yourself. So the question I need to ask myself is: how will things be different this time?

Scheduling two gym visits a week continues to be stressful, but the exercise routine is paying off. I’m more flexible after a few months of feeling achy and decrepit. Calorie deduction is helping me lose weight. While the weight loss is slow (5 pounds in August) I’m happy with the gentle but consistent pace. As part of getting fit, I’ve been doing at least 10,000 steps a day, managing 404,323 over the month for an average of 13,040 a day. My highest total was 27,390 on a day where I walked from Todmorden to Hebden Bridge. I’m still feeling unengaged with walking and would be doing less if the steps were not in my training plan.

With Rosy being away I watched a lot of movies at home – 27 over the month. Some I hated, such as a rewatch of Dead Poets Society where it was obvious John Keating was an utter prick. I did see some excellent movies – 11 at 4½ stars or more, including Lawrence of Arabia, The Vanishing, The Fly (such body horror), The Banshees of Inisherin, The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. The Big Short was remarkable for taking a somewhat dull story and finding a compelling way to tell it. I worried that Amelie would be bad on a rewatch but found I loved it as much as when I first saw it.

I went to the cinema a few times over the month. catching up with a couple of movies I had missed – Longlegs was interesting and creepy (review) and I Saw the TV Glow was one of the best films I’ve seen this year (review). Muffy took the train from Blackpool to Hebden for the evening to watch the latter with me. I ended the month watching Midsommar at the cinema with Rosy and our friend Jay. I was delighted that Rosy liked it as much as I did.

I find it rewarding to write my movie reviews on Letterboxd – the way it builds a record of what I’ve experienced – but I’m also aware of how mundane many of my reviews are. I’m not as interesting as I think I am. Or, rather, these accounts fail as criticism as I don’t have a critical point of view – some movies are dull or fail to work for me, and I have little to respond to on those. But overall, I enjoy keeping that journal.

Work has been dominated by preparations for the annual performance reviews, which involve an incredible amount of paperwork. I’m always convinced that I am doing terrbily – which objectively cannot be true – and I feel a sense of dread about the whole thing. I know it’s not justified, but I will be glad when this is over. That said, I am still loving this job as I come towards the two-year mark, which has not happened before.

I use my kindle for reading articles, which means it’s been clogged up for a while, but I finally cleared everything (more admin!). I abandoned Stephen King’s Fairy Tale halfway through – the mundane plot was incredible, but the fantasy bit bored me to tears. In Esquire’s ranking of all 77 books, this book came 14th, which surprised me. Maybe I’ll try again some time – I’ve read almost all of King’s works, but I’m apparently not a completist.

Otherwise, I’ve been enjoying some comic books. Keiron Gillen’s Power Fantasy is superheroes as nuclear diplomacy, and the first issue was good enough that I’m paying to read it as a monthly. I’ve also been re-reading Nailbiter through the compendium. I finished the first nine volumes of Saga which I’d picked up cheap. It was entertaining but a little too much melodrama and ‘edgy’ language for me to continue.

We had a tech conference in Hebden Bridge. I enjoyed my day at Wuthering Bytes (write-up here) and saw some great talks. My favourite was Libby Miller’s Poking holes in reality with prototypes. It got me thinking about the opportunities for doing more with my writing and being more playful.

I am very lucky to live near a wonderful second-hand bookshop. Jay and I went to Lyall’s in Todmorden, and both came out with a pile of weird and wonderful books. I filled a rucksack with my haul, which included books on Antarctic art, mazes, sock puppets and more. I then had to carry eight kilograms of books on the four-mile hike that followed. But it was worth it.

• News seems to be happening so fast right now. It’s hard to believe that August started with a series of riots.
• Warren Ellis’s new podcast Department of Midnight has launched, and the first two episodes were superb. I find audio drama difficult to get into, but these stories were compelling.
• I finally tidied the garden enought to want to sit out there (just before the weather turned).

That’s August done, which means another summer over. I feel like I’ve been a little complacent with this one. Next year, I think should be more ambitious with my planning. I’ve also promised to provide myself with more space to play, keeping fewer tasks on my todo list app. The days where I float a little, seeing what I’m in the mood for, are days that take me by surprise and where I do interesting things. I want my life to feel less like a job.

July has been an unfocused month with too much clutter, both real and virtual. I prioritised work but, outside of that, I’ve been unreliable. I should know better – the first thing to do when feeling swamped is to clear everything down, making it easy to see what needs doing. By the end of the month, things were better, but July was a little chaotic. All that aside, it has been fun – my first trip to Brighton in over a year, visits from old friends, and the Horkos ceremony. Rosy was in Hebden Bridge most of the time and we had several visitors, including Tom visiting from the US.

Being back in Brighton was strange. So many little things had changed since my last visit. The first thing I did after getting off the train was to visit La Choza which I’ve missed a great deal. The food tasted even better than I remembered. I caught up with a few friends but for once took care not to overstretch myself. It was lovely to celebrate Katharine’s 50th.

It’s been another quiet month for walking – total 375,006 steps, average 12,097, and the biggest day being 20,856. I’m continuing to visit the gym, although it’s hard to adjust to the new routines. I’m also struggling with my ongoing injury, but a new physio seems to have spotted the issue, a weakness in my right leg. I have a new set of exercises which will hopefully fix things.

My writing is going well. I was particularly pleased with a new story, The 4th Film. I produced a complete text for the True Clown Stories kickstarter, as well as an initial text for the secret project, which is now off with a designer. The substack has passed a year old. I considered whether to stop there, but I’ve decided to refocus on short, weird horror stories.

I didn’t watch many movies in July and missed several interesting new releases. Terminator 2 was a fun nostalgia trip, although it’s amazing how small it appears compared to modern CGI. Skywalkers: A Love Story didn’t always work as a documentary, but contained some stunning footage. Muffy and I went to the Blackpool IMAX for Deadpool 3, which was a competent MCU movie.

I’d planned to be travelling on July 4th but after the election announcement, Rosy and I decided to stay up all night for the results. After the chaos and mismanagement of the last few years I was delighted to see the back of the old government. I even made party poppers for the results I was most looking forward to. Staying awake was hard work, but I was determined to see Jacob Rees-Mogg lose his seat. I’m not particularly excited about the new government, who seem to have taken expectation management to a ridiculous level. But it’s good to feel like there are adults in charge.

This post was slowed down by me breaking my webserver with a botched Linux upgrade. I wasn’t able to restore things from Jetpack backups, so I rebuilt everything from a four-year-old OS image. I’m not sure everything is 100% back to normal, and I think I’ve broken all the permalinks. A lot of hassle that I didn’t really need.

A few years back, I helped a friend with rhymewave, an online rhyming dictionary. I was delighted when he showed me a link to Still Number 1, a track by Hindi rapper Emiway that refers to the site.

Weird to see H&M selling T-shirts of NIN’s Downward Spiral as fashion:

June was a packed but tiring month. It started with the EMF Camp festival, included a visit to Blackpool, a holiday in Wales and many visitors. I came to the end of it worn out, not helped by poor sleep and hurting my back.

Going to EMF Camp with Emma was great fun. I was a little shocked on arrival to learn that my talk was in the largest venue. I’m not sure how many people attended, but I had a decent audience in a 1,000-seat venue. I didn’t disgrace myself, and had some lovely conversations afterwards. The festival was a little overwhelming – it was my first since the pandemic started. I enjoyed catching up with a few old friends, including a visit to ‘the Brighton consultate’. EMF Camp 2024 will be remembered for an ‘orphan source’ incident, where some radioactive materials went missing onsite (now listed on wikipedia).

We had a full house to celebrate my birthday, which was lovely. The day itself was spent in Wales at a week-long gathering of about 30 people, with communal meals, estuary swimming and a Midsummer Ceilidh where everyone (including me) made monster masks. I got a carried away when one of the dances was announced as a competition to see who could dance longest, summoning my best inner-Florence-Pugh, but my partner and I came third.

My walking continues to be a maintenance dose, with a total of 372,184 steps, an average of 12,406. My longest day was my birthday, where I managed a total of 22,115 steps. I started a ‘transformation course’ at a local gym, figuring that I needed a short, sharp shock to help me back to fitness. The first cardio session destroyed me, and showed that my body is not as strong as I would like, given that it took over a week to recover.

I’m feeling a little funny about my writing. I’m approaching a full year of running the weekly substack. I’ve enjoyed it, but I also question the amount of energy that I put into my writing. What do I actually want from it? Part of this is wanting to try new forms as I feel I’m at the limit of what interests me about the things I’m currently writing. I tried a few experiments with Mastodon but they didn’t feel right. And an attempt to work on a new zine in Wales frustratingly came to nothing. But, I guess, the answer lies in writing more than thinking about writing. Stop doing the things that I’m not enjoying, focus on the ones that I do.

I do miss performing. I did a very small spoken word set on a staircase in Wales, where Rosy also performed some of her new poetry. I read five stories in three minutes. I can’t see any way to do this more often, other than crashing open mics – or doing the dreaded one man show. Or maybe this is connected to my frustrations with writing, and I need to think about how I can get more direct response for my work.

Work continues to be challenging, mostly in postive ways; I enjoy being a consultant rather than simply a programmer. We had a ‘miniconf’ at work during June, where I did a talk on computer-generated novels (another performance!) which seemed to go well. Our team had an in-person day in Leeds, and it was great to see my colleagues in real life. I ended the month with a trip to the JManc Unconference, which has me resolving to spend more time programming for fun.

The election started out dull and seems to have gone on too long – but the massive failure of Sunak to run a campaign has been amusing. I’ve already decided I won’t vote Labour due to their stance on nuclear weapons. But, given the polling for my constituency, that’s not a difficult decision, since the Tory candidate is unlikely to win. While a Labour victory seems assured, the national mood seems a long way from 1997. Britain feels tired out, and it looks like we’re a long way from anything improving.

Reading continues to be slow. I’ve still not finished Annie Jacobsen’s nuclear war book since I can manage only a small section at a time. RF Kuang’s Yellowface was an entertaining and dark satire. It was very much a book about writing, and contained some interesting reminders of how aiming for ‘success’ can leach away the joy that gets people into writing. Hanna Bervoets’s We Had to Remove this Post was a wonderful and disturbing novella about content moderation.

No new movies have blown me away this month, and the latest season of Dr Who underlined the usual rule that it works better with intimate dramas than the fate of the universe. The best film I saw was a rewatch of Three Kings, which I gave 5 stars.

My best friend’s daughter invited us to come with her and some friends to see Bikini Kill. Watching the band onstage, I realised how much Olympia punk had inspired me and what it has meant to me. After so many years in corporate life I’m hardly punk myself, but I’m still inspired by that passion.

I wrote a little last month about the joys of personal archives, like digital photo albums or these monthnotes. There was a great article in the New Yorker by David Owen, How to Live Forever, which looks at how such things unlock memories. He quotes Marilu Henner “By really exploring your past, or remembering it in some way, you get a piece of your life back. Your life becomes longer and richer, and kind of stretches in the middle.” I’m into the fifth year of these monthnotes, and they are already valuable for that, particularly with the mushiness of pandemic memories.

Life comes in ebbs and flows and June has been intense. I’ve also been overwhelmed with to-do lists, and worry that they’ve distracted me from what I actually want and enjoy. Something to focus on in the coming month.

• The release for the Indelicates’ new album Avenue QAnon comes closer with the new single, 4CHAN (THERE’S SOMETHING GOING DOWN ON /POL/).
• I’m delighted to see Chapelle Roan blowing up. I’ve been listening to her on Spotify for a while but it’s great to hear people being excited about her in the real world.
• I’m increasingly frustrated with people on trains listening to music without headphones. Someone on Mastodon blamed this on the loss of headphone jacks.
• I tried to get into Tiktok, but the magic algorithm doesn’t seem as wonderfl as promised, showing me mostly rollercoasters and footage of musician Flora Algera.
• I loved listening to musician Buttress appearing on the Women Talking About Their Lives podcast.
• Another good podcast episode was Why Didn’t Chris and Dan get into Berghain? on Search Engine, which went off in some interesting directions.
• In Wales, someone did a close card-magic show and my mind is still blown from that.
• I forgot about the video where Mike Skinner from the Streets talks about Peter Mandelson’s comeback.

Life still feels pretty good at the moment, but it also feels like hard work. Part of this is that I was committed to giving three talks between May 28th and June 12th. I’ve also continued to feel like I was a little behind with everything. May brought two bank holidays and neither felt particularly relaxing. However, it was lovely to have lots of guests in the house during the month, including several visitors for Rosy’s birthday.

Walking continues to be a maintenance dose, with my target at 8000 steps a day. The daily average was a mere 10,489 steps a day for a total of 325,147 over the month. The highest total was 17,150 from my friend Laurence coming to visit, and being given a tour of the town. I’ve actually committed to an exercise programme starting in June which will hopefully get some control over my fitness.

My weekly writing on the substack continues, and I was particularly happy with Skin Fever, a piece I wrote for Wednesday Writers. I also released a zine, Once Upon a Time in Brighton and Hove, which is basically my sixth South Downs Way collection. I’ve not done very much promotion of this – I sent out some free copies, but these haven’t received much response. I’m pleased with how the writing is going, compared to where I was a year ago, but needs a change in approach to build momentum. The substack has been great for getting me to publish stories, but I want to focus on larger works. I’ve an idea about experimenting with novella-sized fictions, which can be shared on the substack as works-in-progress.

The local elections were at the start of May, and felt like an imposition as I’m not feeling particularly engaged with party politics. At the end of the month, the government announced the general election for July 4th. I’ve long expected that this would be closer than the polls are claiming but the shoddy launch suggests this will not be the case. The chaotic Tory campaign has been entertaining so far.

I watched slightly fewer movies than usual in May, and a couple were re-watches. I went to the Blackpool IMAX to watch Furiosa, which was bitterly disappointing. The best thing I saw was And the King Said What a Fantastic Machine, a documentary about the history of film. This was delightfully sprawling and full of provocative footage, a little like an Adam Curtis documentary, but without the overarching narrative.

I also watched most of Castle Rock season 1 before running out of steam. It felt a little too much like a drama, but it was interesting to see Stephen King done as an aesthetic. Dinosaur was a charming BBC comedy series. I tried watching Baby Reindeer. Despite it being a true story, I couldn’t believe that the main character would not immediately spot how odd/dangerous Martha was. The new Doctor Who series is good, but I’m taking time to settle into having a new Doctor.

My reading was a little less disordered than it has been, and I finished six books. Joelle Taylor’s The Night Alphabet was a patchwork novel, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately one I’m glad I read. Kathleen Hanna’s biography Rebel Girl was inspiring, but harrowing in places. I also read part of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario but I’ve been taking it slow as it is so terrifying. Stephen King’s new collection You Like it Darker had some excellent stories. King has reached the stage of his career where everything feels elegaic. While some of the stories were simplistic and unremarkable, there were others that were moving.

Rory Stewart’s account of his time in government, Politics on the Edge was interesting. Stewart was undoubtedly effective as a minister, but the reasonable tone he takes against the idiocy of everyone else makes you wonder if there’s sometimges another side of the story. His portrait of Boris Johnson’s time in the Foreign Office is withering and suggests that the current system isn’t working.

I’m continuing to enjoy music, but I’m missing the music papers and the context that they gave context to upcoming releases. Nowadays music simply appears on streaming and I miss the background that reviews and promotional interviews gave. Among this month’s new releases was a Ghostface Killer album, but a homophobic slur made me drop that pretty fast. I also went out to a live gig when Zheani came to Manchester.

I’ve been mostly logged out of Twitter and Bluesky, having tired of social media’s current form. I’ve been posting regularly to my mastodon account, where I probably have more monthly posts than readers. But its good to return to the original feeling of microblogging. I’m completly ignoring Threads and Facebook. I have an account on the latter as I need to contact some local groups, but I am not adding anyone who’s not based in the valley. Given Facebook continues to allow problematic content, I want to give it as little support as possible.

On Rosy’s birthday, sat on the sofa with her and Olive, we went though the years of photos on my phone. It was a great way to to review memories – nights out, festivals, walks, hangover selfies – seeing us grow over the space of minutes. I think it’s good to have these sorts of archives. These monthnotes are another example.

The first of my three talks was for work, about Java on Serverless. I put a lot of work into it but, when it was delivered, it felt light and inconsequential. It could probably have had more technical details. Otherwise, work has been going a little better and I feel more on top of things. Consultancy means being busy on many simultaneous, unrelated projects, and I’m finding that doing tasks promptly is helping me to feel less swamped.

• Since Christmas, I’ve been wearing a beard, but decided to remove it this month.
• I picked up a free sunflower from the station cafe at the start of the month, but it stubbornly refused to grow, despite me taking very great care of it.
• Rosy and I discovered the Merlin app, and have been using it to identify local birds.
• I made my first drive since January and discovered that I’d wrecked the car battery through driving so rarely.
• On a drive later in the month, I had more car trouble. I am tiring of driving and wondering if train/taxi might be a cheaper combination for my rare journeys.

Lists of advice on the internet can be trite, but I found this suggestion from Kevin Kelly incredibly moving: “When you think of someone easy to despise—a tyrant, a murderer, a torturer—don’t wish them harm. Wish that they welcome orphans into their home, and share their food with the hungry. Wish them goodness, and by this compassion you will increase your own happiness.” I love the idea of wishing for redemption rather than harm.

April was a weird month. I felt unsettled in work, and a little overwhelmed in the rest of my life. But I’ve also been happy to have a housemate for a large part of the time, with Rosy coming to stay. We also had a visit from Naomi Foyle, as well as a big group outing with my friends Dan and Jill to see Joelle Taylor reading from her new book. I also made a flying trip to London with work.

The Kickstarter for True Clown Stories hit its target, which is great news, meaning that the book will finally emerge after 14 years. Running a kickstarter was odd – after the initial launch it was hard to figure out what to do next, given how little reach social media now has. I’ve also continued writing the substack, which is going well. At times this month focus has been a struggle, but when I have settled down to actually write, it’s felt good. Sending the weekly emails is helping me to take writing more seriously.

After completing the 10-week step challenge, I dialled my daily target down to 10,000, which has felt a little tricky. Walking so much was easy in a sprawling city like Brighton, but it’s a little harder to find enough routes here to keep me interested. My daily average was 12,746, with a peak of merely 19,335. I’ve dropped my target to 8,000 steps for May.

It was another month where I struggled with reading, and only finished a couple of books. One of these was Scarlett Thomas’s excellent new novel The Sleepwalkers, which I read alongside my friend Jane. I started reading the Nadine Dorres book about the ‘plot’ against Boris Johnson. It wasn’t quite bad enough to be entertaining, but there’s an unsettling narrative here, with a dangerous conspiratorial view of politics. I can’t work out if this Dorres believes her own work, and she’s not quite a good enough writer to be able to tell if the spy novel flourishes are ironic.

I continue to struggle with backlogs, and it feels a little like trying to push down an air-bubble. For example, I catch up my email, but that sends more newsletters to the Kindle. Emails, text messages, RSS feeds, all constantly filling up. A few quiet weekends have helped me catch up properly, but I’m not sure how sustainable this is.

It’s the second month on my new project and work has been hard. Things are less structured than I am used to and I’ve not been enjoying the lack of clear goals. I have been enjoying working with typescript after almost 25 years of Java. Typescript feels less fussy and more responsive. I made a trip down to London to spend time with everyone on the project, which was lovely.

Another month where I watched a lot of movies. Ginger Snaps and Badlands were highlights, along with a rewatch of Bottoms. Monkey Man featured some impressive action sequences but relied on lazy, misogynistic tropes. I watched all of True Detective IV in about 24 hours, loving the acting and production values. The plot felt a little inconsequential but was redeemed by the last twenty minutes. I also watched the classic Dr Who story Pyramids of Mars, which was more entertaining than I expected.

I’ve had some quiet weekends, and one day, running errands in town on a Sunday, I realised that this is basically my personal paradise. I love living in the valley.

• I left Facebook several years back, disgusted by their behaviour around Myanmar. But I’ve been forced to open an account there, as a lot of local tradespeople and events only appear there. I’m only adding people I know from up here.
• My theory about my 25+ years of headaches being down to dehydration was proved correct as I forgot to drink one Friday afternoon and was knocked out with a massive headache the following day.

• The Quietus published a great article on unjustly forgotten 90s band Silverfish, which had some interesting observations on pre-Britpop Indie.
• I bought Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War: A Scenario, but it’s hard work. The prologue alone was terrifying. One effect it’s had is changing my political leanings – I will not vote for a Labour party that endorses nuclear weapons.

The start of March found me glitchy and disorganised, a little overstimulated. I wasn’t burned out, but I was definitely singed from the Sweden trip and juggling two projects at work. On top of that, my sleeping patterns have been terrible, so that I was sometimes waking up at 4am, unable to get back to sleep. The month was basically a slog towards easter and the relief of a four-day break.

Dan and I launched the kickstarter for True Clown Stories. I should have published this back in 2011, but never got it off the launchpad. I looked into running a kickstarter back in June 2022, but it only got moving once Dan was involved. Running a crowd-funding campaign is a fun experiment, but it’s hard to make a continued impact. We’re currently at 60% with 18 days to go. I’m not sure if we will make the target or not, but let’s see. If you’ve not checked it out then please have a look.

I had a couple of trips this month. I visited Muffy in Blackpool and also went to Sheffield to see Rosy Carrick’s show Musclebound. It’s an incredible performance and I loved seeing it again. The show also brought together a few old friends, which was lovely. A great night out.

It’s been the last few weeks of the work steps competition. I walked 511,243 steps in March, for an average of 16,492 a day, with my highest total being 34,538 when I walked to Todmorden and back. Among all the other chaos of March, my diet has been a little unfocussed, and my weight increasing by 1/5 pound. Now that I feel a little less burned out, I can hopefully sort my eating out a little.

Work has been interesting, as I’ve been transitioning between projects. I left my previous project with some excellent feedback, which I feel very happy about. I’ve taken a little time to find my rhythm with the new one, although I’m enjoying working with a typescript stack. I’ve also been doing some interesting investigations into lambda cold starts.

At Rosy’s show I saw some people I’d not seen in years and, when they asked me about work, I found myself saying how much I love my job. And I truly do. I’m 16 months in, but I still feel excitement at the start of most days. I’m rarely bored, I’m challenged, and I am learning lots of new things. I’d never thought I would find so much meaning and satisfaction in a job.

I made some effort to focus more on reading books in March. The highlight was Booker prize winner Prophet Song, recommended by Jude. It took me a few attempts to get going with this, but once I did, I read it in a matter of days. Richard Norris’s biography Strange things are Happening was a great easter read. I’ve also been enjoying the graphic novel series Something is Killing the Children, rationing out an issue a night.

I watched 20 movies over the month – too many maybe? Highlights included the The Third Men, which seemed wonderful, despite being almost 80 years old. The remake of Road House was entertaining AF, and Tom Cruise was impressive in Michael Mann’s Collateral. I went to the IMAX to watch Dune 2 which was looked incredible but was somehow empty. Under the Silver Lake was flawed but thought-provoking. About 20 years after seeing it at the cinema, I rewatched But I’m a Cheerleader and was, this time, blown away. I also wrote a blog post ranking the ten Best Picture Oscar nominees.

Before the Kickstarter launched, I was seriously thinking about quitting writing. I’ve sold very few copies of Memetic Infection Hazards and, after months of writing the substack, my subscriptions had been flat. It struck me that the time I spent writing might be more effectively spent on my job. Then came a mention in John Higgs’ newsletter which lifted my spirits, as well as boosting my substack readership. And while the kickstarter has been slow, these are real people who have signed up.

Thinking about it, eight months of sending out a weekly story is far from nothing, and would have been unthinkable at most points in my past. Having an audience on the Substack also forces me to think more carefully about what stories are worth working on. I’ve deleted a lot of old notes, and what remains is very exciting.

I spent Easter clearing the decks a little. Throughout March, I felt overwhelmed by too much media, too many emails, and too much that I needed to do. It would have been good to do more with the break, but I feel better for having got things under control.

• I realised recently that it’s a year since my last visit to Brighton, which seems odd. While I miss people there, I’ve not missed the place much. Although I am longing for a La Choza burrito, and Rosy has promised to bring one up when she next visits.
• I had a couple of minor headaches in March, but nothing bad enough to force me into bed. So, it looks like increasing the amount of water I drink is working.
• I blogged about the depressing state of Britain.

Look who I have visiting at the moment:

After an awkward January, I had my mojo back for February. Work and writing flowed well, and I got to catch up with some people. I had a trip to Sheffield with Katharine, as well as a gathering in Hebden Bridge to see double-drummer dance band AK/DK. That was a highlight – a load of people meeting for food at my house before going out dancing. I’ve not done that since pre-pandemic. I ended the month with a business trip to Gothenburg.

The big news is, I think I’ve got to the bottom of what is causing my headaches. It seems to be dehydration, although the underlying problem is that, apparently, some people are not very good at knowing when they’re thirsty, and I’m one of them. It’s a little like when I destroyed my first car because the oil light didn’t work. I did have a couple of headaches last month, but they’ve not been severe, so drinking more water does seem to be the answer. What’s weird is that the headaches seem to come on Tuesdays.

A steps competition at work has encouraged me to do more walking, and my total for the month was 483,139 steps, the most since May last year (when I walked part of the Coast-to-Coast). That’s an average of 16,660 steps daily, with my largest total being 26,616 from the day I saw AK/DK. I am getting a little fitter from this, as measured against my climbs of the hill behind my house. My weight is still high, but it’s trending downwards, with 2½ pounds coming off this month.

My new approach to writing continues to go well. I’m deleting lots of old notes (18,000 words on the Souths Downs way in one day) and it feels like I’m making space for new ideas. I wrote two new stories for the Wednesday Writers (Shivers and Wabi Sabi), and another story came to me almost complete before work one morning (Don’t Just Bury Your Trauma). In the past I spent too much time writing notes rather than actually working on stories. Warren Ellis linked to a good piece discussing this: On notes, outlines, and somehow cobbling a script together… I’m more excited about my writing than ever before.

I watched 10 movies through the month, including 6 Best Picture nominations, three of them at the cinema. Zone of Interest was by far the best of the nominees. I also saw Wild Water at the Hebden Bridge cinema, a lovely documentary about Gaddings Dam. My favourite movie was All of Us Strangers, which might have been the best-looking film I’ve ever seen – all those gorgeous sunsets and dawns. I’m impressed I made it out to the cinema for 5 movies in a month.

I only read two books this month, one of them a re-read of Ben Graham’s excellent Electric Tibet. I also read Jess Richard’s memoir Birds and Ghosts which was beautiful and heartbreaking. Something to focus on in March is ensuring my reading is less chaotic. I’m trying to absorb more media than I have the capacity for, and I need to get a grip.

Work has been fun. My current client project hit a big milestone, with its first production transaction. Travelling to Sweden was fun, although my experience of Gothenburg was airport-hotel-office-dinners, although I did snatch 30 minutes to see Lou Ice. I gave a talk on Spring AI, which went well. I’ve been trying to write up more about the things I’ve looked which is proving helpful. There are a few new posts on my programming blog:

• First Steps with Langchain4J
• LangChain4J and local models
• Retreival Augmented Generation Using SpringAI
• Image Generation on SpringAI

With all the walking, I’ve been listening to many more podcasts than usual. I worked my way through ODB: A Son Unique in a couple of days, and loved it. Also excellent was the Subterraneans podcast (which I’m almost up to date with) and Joseph Matheny’s appearance on The Long Seventies podcast.

Is it possible to change from being a cat person to a dog person? I still love cats, but I really want a dog. But I can’t see a way to fit one into my current lifestyle.

2024 started with headaches and ice. We had a big snowfall, which turned the streets icy and treacherous for a few days. Otherwise, January was mostly quiet, trying to get the year started, although I did have a visit from a friend of Rosy’s looking for somewhere quiet to write an essay. I also went down to the Midlands for my Dad’s 80th birthday.

The headaches were not much fun. For some reason, I had migraines on four consecutive Tuesdays, with one being so bad that I had a day off work. In response, I set up some alarms to remind me to take water, and that seems to be easing things.

After several months of reduced targets, I increased my step count because of a work competition. I walked 308,759 steps in total, an average of 9,960, with my highest being 29,000 on a hike with work. I looked back, and this current daily streak has been running since the first day of 2020. My weight continues to be high and at one point I hit what I think is my highest ever. Despite mostly cutting out sweets and crisps this month, things are stable and I only lost half a pound during January.

I finished watching Monarch: Legacy of Monsters on AppleTV. I thought there were only eight episodes, with an irritating cliffhanger, but there were actually two more, which failed to salvage things. I tried getting back into Oz but after a couple of week’s break I could not remember which episodes I’d seen and not, which seemed a bad sign. I rewatched the first episode of Mr Robot and loved it. I think I’ll continue watching that slowly.

Reading continues to be chaotic, but without any space to sort it out. I enjoyed David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine and Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet. I also re-read Rules of Attraction, and liked how different it was from my memories. Otherwise, distraction is overwhelming and I’m just not able to settle into the enchantment of a good book.

It’s been a good month for movies, having watched 19, including 3 at the cinema. My love of films is being propelled by sharing responses with friends on Letterboxd. I watched three 3-hour epics: Killers of the Flower Moon was long but excellent; Oppenheimer was not quite the physics movie I wanted; and Malcolm X was stunning. Days of Heaven was beautiful but hard to engage with at home. I saw Poor Things in the cinema and loathed it, finding the film’s concept incredibly problematic. I watched A Few Good Men for the first time and loved the cast. And Bottoms turned out to be a superb high school movie.

Writing continues to be challenging. I find myself wondering if it’s worth the time I give it, since putting that effort into work would pay significant dividends. Sending out a weekly story email has got me thinking about how I do my best work, and I do think I can become more consistent. The main lesson so far is that my best work is written fast. I finished three stories for my fortnightly group this month: How Paul Sampson was kicked out of the Band, The Thing in the Churchyard and The Works. I’m still deciding if they are worth doing further work on.

I’ve mostly avoided social media, although I find myself flicking through it when I’m tired. I had considered rejoining Facebook for local information but then I caught up with Erin Kissane’s series on Facebook, which is truly shocking. The company made commercial decisions knowing they would cost lives. I’m increasingly excited by the blogging revival and wrote a number of posts last month:

• Nick Cave and Cynicism
• Why the World is Doomed
• Don’t Save the Best
• The Secret World of Crisps
• Lessons from the 2023 Mycelium Parish News
• Folk Horror and Brexit
• Writer’s Notebook: A New Type of Novel?
• Writer’s Notebook: Live vs Dead Work
• Writer’s Notebook: Finish or Delete

Work feels like it’s going well. I gave a small talk on cucumber, and also started playing with GenAI. I’m hearing some people claim that this is another empty hype-cycle like blockchain. But, in this case, there is something solid behind the hype.

• I read at a spoken word open mic in Todmorden. I’ve not read in a while and was rusty, but I did enjoy it.
• The Indelicates released Cold War Bop the first single from their forthcoming album Avenue QAnon.
• I learned that Small Batch Coffee in Brighton have closed most of their branches, which makes me feel a little sad. It’s been almost a year since I went to Brighton, and the town I knew is disappearing.
• I finally put new curtains up in the lounge and the room feels totally different.