angophora

• Absolutely is an album by R&B artist Dijon; I hadn’t heard the album until this week when I found this incredible live performance of the whole album on YouTube. It’s an incredible performance, only 25 minutes long, but filled with a real presence and connection between all of the performers.
• Continuing the theme of Scott Alexander’s article I linked to in Tuesdays’s post is this thought-provoking piece from Nolan Lawson which very nicely captures the nail-biting ambiguity and anxiety I feel around using AI tools for software development.
• In a similar vein is this note from lauded Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, whose algorithm for finding the shortest path in a graph is probably one of the most-used in the world, about how natural language will always fall short of capturing the full complexity and precision of problems in engineering, science and mathematics. It rings very true in our current age of AI slop, and it was written in 1978. It’s number 667 of Dijkstra’s “EWD” series of technical notes, on a huge variety of subjects, that he wrote throughout the course of his life, mostly as correspondence with his friends and colleagues: you can find a lot of them here — he wrote 1318 such manuscripts between 1961 and 2002. EWDs are another great inspiration of mine.
• This site contains a huge amount of free-to-air television stations to stream from all around the world. Could easily lose many hours with this, something I wish I had had access to as a teenager with time to kill.

Photograph: The lake at Crystal Palace park.

London is still full of British-style cafes, bulwarks against gentrification, serving English breakfasts to workers in their high-viz vests and red-top newspapers. A “cafe” means different things to different segments of the population: to some, it’s a squeaky clean, modern, wood-and-concrete affair, with a cradle of pastries on the counter, Australian-style flat whites, oat-milk friendly. To others, it’s places like Ince’s Cafe on Wastdale Rd in East Forest Hill, an established family business trading in bacon, eggs, sausages, toast and tea for decades.

There are no frills and there is no bullshit at Ince’s. The awning counts “salads” amongst its offerings, but I doubt anyone has ever ordered one. You would probably be laughed at if you tried: places like Ince’s often offer “banter”, with the degree of spiciness depending on how well you know the person serving you behind the counter, as a free add-on to your order. You will often be greeted with banter if you offer to pay by card: the machine will be offered to you, but with a look of subtle disappointment, like you haven’t read the secret manual telling you how to behave in places like Ince’s. Cash for breakfast. Mug of tea with milk and sugar. Everything awash in beans (though not in my case, I can’t stand beans so I swap them out for an extra egg).

In England people like to talk about the decline of the pub, and of pub culture. Once the cornerstone of every community, pubs are now closing in record numbers across the country as people turn to different cornerstones, or simply decide to live without any community around them at all. Unsurprisingly, cafes like Ince’s are also on the decline, with more and more people showing preference for breakfasts with fewer than 1000 calories, coffee over tea, card over cash.

It’s not as obvious what the intrinsic cultural value of greasyspoon cafes is, whereas pubs have a long and romantic cultural history (which of course entirely ignores their central role in creating generations of alcoholics and broken homes). I like to think of them as an example of something that is becoming very rare: they do what they say on the packet. Sure, the best fancy cafes are truly great, can be very pleasant places to spend time and money, but the average ones are entirely forgettable and the bad ones are awful. Cafes like Ince’s are unpretentious and simple and the transaction (and the menu) has been the same for decades.

The older you get the more change you are exposed to: this is a tautological statement but it is also profound in its ability to explain why people change as they get older. In a sense, we are changed by all the change we experience, we become weary of it, become desperate for something familiar, something constant, something that isn’t going to change, that will still be there next year. One day Ince’s won’t be on Wastdale Rd anymore: this corner of London is rapidly changing, and soon you won’t be able to find anywhere you can buy your breakfast with those strange metal coins in your pocket.

• The best thing I’ve read in the last couple of weeks is this piece by Sally Rooney in the New York Review of Books about professional snooker, and in particular Ronnie O’Sullivan, the undisputed king of the sport. It has some excellent questions about how exactly professional sportspeople perform their wondrous feats, and how much they understand about how they do what they do. Rooney says there isn’t another sport with the same qualities as snooker, but much of what she writes rings very true for me about Test cricket. Replace snooker savant O’Sullivan with leg spinning savant Shane Warne and much of the article would read the same.
• Twenty years ago, on March 27, 2005, at the Ether Festival at the Royal Festival Hall in London, Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke debuted a new song which they called Arpeggi. I was in my peak Radiohead fanboy phase at this stage, constantly lurking on the now-defunct AtEase fan forum and downloading hundreds of bootlegs, and this sniff of new material, the first since the Amnesiac sessions, was a huge moment. This song kicked off more than a year of new songs being tested out during a tour that ultimately culminated in 2007’s In Rainbows album, which includes a studio version of this song which sounds very different to this skeletal, other-worldly version which will always be the “original” to me.

• A couple of weeks ago I made a proof of concept of a web application called GreenChainer, which creates urban routes through green spaces designed for walking, and inspired by the Green Chain Walk in south east London near where I live. You can read a bit more about how and why I made it on my personal webiste.
• Scott Alexander has a very thought-provoking piece about the “semantic apocalypse” — the death of meaning — that many fear is coming as a result of the onset of generative AI and the commodification of so many things that humans can create. There’s lots of interesting comparisons to similar past events in world history: the invention of synthetic colours, recorded music, the printed word. Something in me just feels a bit different about this though: in all the other examples Alexander provides, people were still involved in the process which replaced its antecedent. With LLMs, we are ceding our semantic sovereignty to a machine which doesn’t actually know what it is creating.

Photographs

1. A sandwich bar in Forest Hill, London.
2. A plane flying above a eucalyptus tree in Catford, London.

These last few days I am obsessed with MJ Lenderman’s cover of Dancing in the Club, originally by indie pop band This Is Lorelei (AM / S). The original song is a jangly indie pop tune with a highly auto-tuned vocal that kind of turns me off, but with very heartfelt and heartbreaking lyrics that definitely speak to my general search for beauty and meaning in music. On his recent tour, which my cousin in Sydney was lucky enough to catch at the Opera House, MJ Lenderman, one of my favourite artists of the last couple of years, started performing a cover which he has now released a studio version of. I love this version so much, it brings an entirely new emotional dimension to the lyrics and the song, and it got me thinking about other cover versions which transcend their originals. Of course it means the original was never a bad song, just that someone else was able to get more emotion, something truer to the original vision, than the original performer. So here is a list of some of my favourite cover versions in this vein.

• This Is Lorelei, MJ Lenderman - Dancing in the Club (MJ Lenderman Version)
• Jeff Buckley - Hallelujah
• Rufus Wainwright - Hallelujah
• Waxahatchee - With You
• Johnny Cash - Hurt
• Sinead O’Connor - Nothing Compares 2U
• Harry Nilsson - Without You
• Grizzly Bear - He Hit Me
• Chromatics - Into the Black
• Frente! - Bizarre Love Triangle

Photograph: The old town of Hastings, England.

• Industrial Love Song (AM / S), by These New Puritans, featuring Caroline Polachek. I had somehow missed These New Puritans until a friend introduced them to me a couple of weeks ago, and in a classic case of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon I am now seeing them everywhere. They have an album coming out this year and this is the lead single, featuring the ethereal voice of Caroline Polachek.
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I don’t really read historical fiction, but it’s also not a particularly apt description for this very unique book, actually the first of a trilogy called The Baroque Cycle, which weaves a narrative around a huge cast of historical characters and several fictional ones, in seventeenth century Europe and colonial America.
• Spirit of Eden by Talk Talk (album released in 1988; AM / S). I recently heard a very interesting episode of the Artworks programme on BBC Radio 4 about this highly influential album, which has been a favourite of mine for years now, which apparently was critically panned at the time, but later served as an inspiration for Radiohead’s Kid A. Both the album and the Artworks episode are well worth a listen.

Photograph: An oak tree in Beckenham Place Park.

Spring in London. Blue and white and pink and green. Air thick with pollen and vapour. A rush to learn the names of different birds and ornamental cherries. Spring is a wonderful time to have a newborn baby in the house, a sense of renewal and excitement and joy.

I am different this time around. I think it’s in no small part due to the power of walking, of commitment to a single thing day-in day-out and the way such a process grounds you. I have spent almost three months now walking my route through a few parks near my house, usually in the mornings. I have felt my body shed weight and gain fitness and strength.

The Pool and Ravensbourne rivers, banked by concrete but at least surrounded by a strip of greenery a mile long which is my favourite part of the route, are flowing, awash in birdsong and blossom petals. When I began my walking regime, in the dead of winter and mostly as a startled response to post-Christmas gluttonous weight gain, there was frost on the dormant blackberry bushes most mornings. Today it is going to be 18 degrees and my sleeves are short.

I joined a walking group last year to try to meet some like-minded folks, inflicted with the same insanity as me, obsessed with the transformative and meditative power of the putting of one foot in front of the other tens of thousands of times. I was not particularly surprised to discover most of the folks were highly eccentric and lonely. Of the groups of twenty or thirty people I walked with almost all were single and I did not meet another walker with children.

I can’t stop thinking about two things these last few days: the Red Hand Files and the Maggie Smith poem I linked to yesterday. For myself and many others, personality is split between an outward facing individual who interacts with the world, forms relationships, receives data from stimuli, experiences things, and an inward-facing one who processes it all and searches and synthesises it for meaning and beauty. Cave so eloquently describes the delicate and often tragic balance that must be kept between these two halves of the self when one has a family. Smith’s inward facing self desperately cries out to exist, to be heard, to leave a trace in the physical world.

Everyone I encounter on my walk this morning is alone in their own world, most with headphones in, walking or running, soon to be back in their more complicated realities. There is one older couple, holding hands, showing their children the blossoms on FaceTime.

Photographs

1. A tree blossoming in the River Pool linear park in Catford, London.
2. The River Pool.

• Issue #318 of Nick Cave’s formidable Red Hand Files. If you haven’t encountered it before, it’s Cave’s newsletter where he answers letters from fans. He has become somewhat of a Jesus-like figure in recent years, dishing out hard-earned wisdom like this beautiful explanation of how the creative urge, however overpowering it may be, should never take precedence over a true connection with your family.
• Poem Beginning With a Retweet by Maggie Smith, a wonderful life-affirming poem which was part of my inspiration for starting this new website.
• Shilo (AM / S), a new song from Weyes Blood.

Photograph: Clapham Common on a warm day in early March.

Hello there and welcome to this website. I am already writing in two other places online. I have my main personal website, where I post technical stuff related to my career as a mathematician and software engineer, as well as my technical interests and projects in various long-form posts. I also have Mt Solitary, my “digital garden” where I host a subset of my extensive notes that I keep about all manner of things.

This site though, which I am calling angophora after my favourite tree in the world, the Sydney red gum, will hopefully be a slightly different outlet for me. I intend it to be a collection of small, hopefully meaningful, observations, comments and discussions about things I have thought about, noticed or done in the course of my day-to-day life, and a lot of links to interesting things I have discovered that I hope others can find interest and joy in.

Some context about myself: I am a 36-year old father of three, with the most recent of those three born just this week, in our living room in south east London where I live with my family. As mentioned above, I have a highly technical day job as a programmer, and I trained as a mathematician. I have a huge range of interests but mostly I am interested in beauty, and all the ordinary and sublime places it can be found. Today’s example: my 5-year old son marvelling at a camellia bush which burst into flower this week, precisely on the meterological first day of spring.