It’s been a while since I’ve written here but I am trying to get back into the swing of it. I finally wrote down some thoughts about my recent walk in the Pennines, and some more about painting my living room. Here are some of the most memorable things I’ve “consumed” (hate using that word) in the last couple of months.
Strudel is a really cool online music sequencer slash programming language. You can use it to make electronic beats in the browser, because it’s a Javascript port of a well-known live-coding language for music called tidalcycles which is written in the formidable Haskell.
I was lucky enough to visit the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford towards the end of the summer to see the This Is What You Get exhibition of artwork by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, who have collaborated to create the art for all of Radiohead’s album covers and many other things. It was so wild to see all these iconic images on their original full-size canvasses. I could have spent hours poring over everything but we took a baby so had to take a bit of a whirlwind tour. If you live anywhere near Oxford, check it out.
My wife and I have been watching Slow Horses, a really well-made spy thriller with Gary Oldman,
I really enjoyed this poem by British-Nigerian poet Gboyega Odubanjo who grew up in South London and died in 2023 aged only 27. I just bought his book of poetry, called Adam which was published posthumously and includes the poem above, which I actually saw on the tube.
Who Do You Want Checking in on You (AM / S), a track from the new album from Joan Shelley.
Photograph: A collection of Stanley Donwood designed album covers at the This Is What You Get exhibition of his and Thom Yorke’s artworks at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
In September I spent three days hiking about 80 kilometres of the Pennine Way, a famous long-distance hike through the Pennine Mountains in northern England. The whole route is over 400 kilometres, but I just had three days, so I chose a section with a starting point readily accessible by train, booked pubs to stay at each night, and set off by myself.
The first day I walked from Gargrave, a village outside of Skipton near Leeds, to Horton in Ribblesdale. The first day was by far the hardest of the three. I had been anxiously refreshing the weather forecast in the week before setting out on the walk, and was disappointed when it had been painfully accurate: a morning full of cloud and drizzle with patches of heavy rain. Not really wanting to think about walking 35 kilometres in the rain, I just got started and hoped that my new waterproof gear would turn out to actually be waterproof.
Walking in light rain is fine. So long as the drizzle can evaporate a little faster than it can arrive, you don’t really stay wet for long and it even adds a certain ambiance to the walk, and certainly means you will have the path to yourself. Drizzle accompanied me to Malham cove (pictured above), which featured in the very first episode of The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
As I walked north from the limestone pavement however, the drizzle slowly began to get heavier and heavier, until I found myself walking through very exposed terrain, without even a tree in sight, in full on driving rain. It quickly became very unpleasant. There was nowhere to seek refuge, no chance of turning back to somewhere warm, nothing to do but press on and hope it will ease up.
I began to get a little disheartened at the thought of walking a further almost 20 kilometres in driving rain by myself, including several very exposed sections at altitude. I began to feel a little anxious, like maybe I’d taken on a bit more than I could actually accomplish with this walk, the self-doubt kicked in, the “what am I doing here in this freezing field in the rain so far away from my family”.
At the height of these unpleasant feelings I ran into John.
John was in his late sixties, an ultra marathon runner, who had retired last week after a thirty-five year career as an economist in the health sector. He’d spent months preparing for the Pennine Way, which he was walking in its entirety, and looked serene, headphones in, in shorts, almost gliding through the scenery.
I stopped him, an impulse that I surprised myself with, and we began to talk, and I ended up walking alongside him for the rest of the day until we reached our destination for the evening.
I would usually say I prefer to walk by myself, but in this instance John’s company immediately lifted me out of my funk of self-doubt and into a great mood. I immediately recast my situation as astonishingly fortunate, remembered how long I had been waiting to get out for a walk like this, and how beautiful the scenery was, even in the rain.
As John and I came down off the summit of Fountain Fell, a rather forboding mountain covered in bogs and old shale mine shafts and peaty moorland that was shrouded in a very thick mist, just as I was thinking to myself how I would have felt quite frightened to have walked it by myself, the clouds parted, and then disappeared, within seconds. In descending ten metres, my visibility went from 100 metres to 50 kilometres, the sky from grey to blue, and in front of us was Pen-y-Ghent (pictured above), the butter-pat shaped lump that we were about to climb to finish off the day, with some technical scrambling towards the peak that would have been dangerously slippery in the rain.
“The pleasures of walking,” John said, and offered me one of his Eccles cakes.
The village for my second night was Horton-in-Ribblesdale. The village has two pubs. John and I had a couple of pints at the first one before he got the train home, to rest before starting from the same spot the next day. The pub had two rooms: one large one with an open fireplace, which was fitted with a sign saying “No entrance, yes that means you”, and another, smaller, dingier, with black bin bags individually taped to every stool. The owner told us it was to prevent hikers from coming in and getting mud everywhere. She ranted for twenty minutes about hikers and their manners and their mud and their packed lunches. Later on Google I read that the bigger, nicer room was reserved for locals only.
The second pub was the one I stayed at for the night. There was a picture of Nigel Farage behind the bar. I had a pie which was just a stew with a slab of puff pastry whacked on top of it. I slept the best sleep I can remember for a long time.
The next day’s walking was sublime. I left early and walked 22km without stopping and made it to my next village for lunch just as it was starting to rain. The walk was flat and scenic and there were some spectacular views of the Ribblesdale viaduct (pictured above). John had left before me, so I walked alone, but I definitely felt his spirit accompany me throughout the day.
The final day was harder. The weather was constantly threatening. I had originally planned for four days, but halfway through the third I had realised the fourth was not going to happen, it would be icy cold, gale force winds, and rain all day, and I realised I didn’t have to flagellate myself in such a way. I would end the third day at the Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in Britain, a fitting end to the walk, and then could spend the fourth day travelling home at a leisurely pace and even make it to see the kids after school, rather than arriving at midnight.
I still had to make it through the day first, a tough slog, a very sore toe, unpleasant winds, and a constant mental battle, looking down at my feet to not step in a bog. Great Shunner Fell (pictured above) was beautiful, covered in colourful heather and peat moss.
But by the time I made it to the pub, just as the wind was picking up even further, beginning to howl, I knew I had made the right decision to stop here. I wondered if John would be walking tomorrow, or whether he’d take the day off too. I’d like to think he would rest, would listen to the body that had given him so many long years of access to the pleasures of walking. I sat in my body next to the fireplace, drank a pint or two of ale, muddled my way through a couple of conversations with folks around the bar, and then went to bed early, feeling very content and ready to go home.
Photographs
The famous limestone “pavement” at the top of Malham Cove.
Looking towards Pen-y-Ghent from the base of Fountain Fell.
I painted the living room of my house this month. It took four days of pretty much nonstop labour to do it. The rough sequence of tasks was: strip back damaged walls and trim, repair damaged walls and trim, sand walls and trim, paint walls and trim with primer twice, tape trim, paint the walls yellow twice, tape walls, paint all the trim twice. There were also a number of “side quests”: remove the wooden cover from the radiator, paint the radiator, prime and paint the built-in cupboards and their shelves, repair some wallpaper lining on the old Victorian wall using some supplies loaned by a neighbour.
As someone who sits at a computer all day for a living, it was interesting to spend four whole days doing physical labour. I found it very difficult on my body. My shoulders and back still ached several days after finishing. My hands were all rough and peeling from touching abrasive things all day. It made me realise it would take my body a long time to get used to a life of manual labour after so many years of relative inactivity.
As well as being difficult, it was also immensely satisfying. Many times throughout the four days I fell into a “flow state” that I remember from programming but which I was a little wistful to realise had become quite unfamiliar. I do a lot more non-programming stuff at work these days, and when I do program it has lately felt a little tainted by AI, like some of the meaning has been taken away. Even personal programming projects, once a source of much joy, kind of have to have an AI focus or they feel like a waste of time, like I am not spending the energy I should be spending to stay relevant (and, crucially, employable). While painting you always feel relevant. There is always a clear next task in the sequence of tasks until the entire thing is done and you can stand back and look at it and see the sharp line form when you pull off the tape and enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of one colour contrasting with another.
We had to wait a few weeks for the paint on the shelves to “cure” before we could put our things back on them — books, records, trinkets, a sound system. Apparently if you don’t wait, which is very tempting, you will pay by stripping off your new coat of paint when you reach for a book. So you have to sit in your freshly painted room and consciously leave it unfinished. Spend weeks living in it unfinished.
This is something I was always really bad at with programming projects, and in life in general. Once I started something, I either felt a manic burning drive to work on it until it’s done, or just quickly abandoned it. Living with the project in an unfinished state was always very difficult for me. While programming too I enjoy the aesthetic pleasure of a clean terminal, the right colour contrasts in my syntax highlighting, a build with no errors or warnings, a nicely finished UI. But getting there is hard, uncharted, unobvious, and involves navigating through states which are full of uncertainty and mess. Nothing like painting a wall, music blasting from a speaker, the next task in the queue blissfully obvious.
Photograph: A freshly painted radiator (“Seashell”) on a freshly painted wall (“Oopsy Daisy”).
Things Become Other Things is a book by Craig Mod which was published by Random House this month. Craig is someone I have been following for many years — I was one of the first subscribers to his Special Projects membership program which has been going for over six years now, and he is a huge inspiration for me.
Craig is a writer and photographer who grew up in the United States but has been living in Japan for more than twenty years. The book is a sort of memoir about his childhood in a working class post-industrial town in America in the 90s, which he frames through a long walk through the Kii peninsula in Japan during the COVID lockdowns. The peninsula is itself a post-industrial part of Japan, albeit surrounded by a stunningful beautiful natural landscape, so there are plenty of visual parallels that spark Craig’s memory.
I don’t know of another creative person whose work and process and life I am more intimately familiar with than Craig’s. He shares a lot with his Special Projects members, and I have been watching the slow and steady process that resulted in the creation of this book over several years. The Random House publication was actually preceeded by a “fine art edition” that Craig published himself, using a custom printing process, beautiful paper and inks, and a gorgeous screen-printed cover. I own a copy of the first book he produced this way, Kissa by Kissa, but didn’t get around to buying the fine art edition of Things Become Other Things, so waited for the “major label” version: a reworked, more “mass-market” friendly version of the original text, with black and white photos instead of colour (though some of them still “full-bleed”, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen before in a mass-market book, and they look fantastic here), and a lot more text added, but still true to the original vignette-heavy flow of the original book.
Craig wrestled with his memory and his past during this walk and managed to commit to page a poignant description of so many things at the same time: communion with nature and humanity at large, confronting the death of a childhood best friend who you lost touch with, the meaning of being adopted, asceticism and its impact on the body and the mind, addiction. And all the while you slowly feel these things becoming other things: without the pain and scarcity of his formative years, he reckons he would not be who he is today.
I really recognise and relate to the feeling of drive born of scarcity and an urgent desire to leave where you came from for somewhere where you can more fully achieve the vision of who you want to be, which is all over this book. “Becoming another thing” is a uniquely human and humbling experience, that sadly so few people manage to have. Anyone who is interested in walking, in art, in beauty and in becoming the best version of themselves should read this wonderful book.
Photograph: Things Become Other Things resting on the windowsill of my home office.
The biggest news of the last couple of weeks of course was the passing of Pope Francis, an interesting figure whose legacy will presumably be debated for some time. In slightly less significant news, the kerning of the lettering on his tomb was extremely substandard. A sign of the wave of enshittification that has now reached the highest echelons of the world and will live on forever here as a marker of our shitty era. Compare this to something from the 19th century and you’ll see what I mean.
My cousin informed me of a little-known fact about Apple Music: there are thousands of spoken word poetry readings available on the platform. So I have been listening to quite a bit of that recently.
In rare moments of idle time during my paternity leave (now finished: I started back at work last week), I discovered Balatro, an extremely addictive and fun deck-building poker-themed roguelike game which is available on pretty much every platform there is, including iOS. This feels like a much better way to waste time than doomscrolling.
Lana Del Rey performed several new tracks at a festival in Portugal over the weekend including this tongue-in-cheek number called 57.5. The whole set is available on YouTube and is worth checking out. Lana is looking and sounding amazing, very excited for this new album which seems to have a bit of a country vibe (very in-trend at the moment).
Much less cool than Lana, but “Britpop” veterans Pulp also returned with new music lately — in their case their first new tracks in over twenty years — in anticipation of a new album later this year called More. The lead single Spike Island (AM / S) is classic Pulp, and I’ve been really enjoying it this week.
Photograph: A field of wheat near Chichester, England.
I have been keeping a journal pretty religiously for over six years now, and have written one on and off for much of my adult life. It’s a very interesting record to have, but in recent years when I go back over old entries I find a lot of repetition, a lot of focus on the negative: “tough day”, “tough night”, “not feeling great today”, “today was hard/overwhelming”. Et cetera.
So I had the idea the other day to spend more time focussing on cataloguing moments of “joy” in my life, which are certainly as numerous as the moments of frustration and anxiety, but for some reason do not seem to make it into the Hansard of my life as frequently.
This is not a unique idea — “gratitude” journalling is certainly a fad I have heard of, and “joy journalling”, obviously shortenable to “joynalling”, is fairly similar to that. But it felt like a bit of an ephipany to me: a small but extremely meaningful change in focus and state of mind that can have a tremendous impact.
I will finish with a brief list of some small moments of joy from the last few days and encourage anyone who finds value in their journal to dwell a little more frequently on moments that inspire joy.
Posting about my love of reading plaques and signs in various places around the world to Craig Mod’s “The Good Place” social network and getting great responses that made me feel less like a weirdo — in particular I was turned onto this episode of the 99 Percent Invisible podcast called “always read the plaque”.
Wearing shorts for the first time this year and drinking an iced americano.
Rocking up to school dropoff with a takeaway flat white in my Birkenstocks.
Understanding some of the profound corollaries of Hilbert’s Nullstellensatz which had eluded me when I studied algebraic geometry at university.
Making a proper penne carbonara with a really well emulsified sauce.
Realising that any damage I do to myself can stop right now forever and it only depends on me.
I recently read this piece from February’s New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus about plummeting fertility rates worldwide and what that might mean about humanity’s collective future.
I thought it was overall a fairly good sketch of our impending collective childlessness which was ultimately unwilling to take a side in that particular battle of the culture wars. Rather than harp on about the statistics that everyone has surely heard by now (South Korea’s total fertility rate is 0.7; every single Western country is below replacement; fertility is falling even in developing countries; world population will probably peak in the next fifty years or so), the article paints a picture of life in South Korea, where childlessness is the norm, mixes it with a few parallels to the dystopian film Children of Men, and then tries to wrap up the whole thing without passing a judgement either way, other to seemingly say that both groups of people (those who decide to have children and those who don’t) seem to enjoy frowning on the others’ choices more than just living with the consequences of their own.
I have three children so clearly I have fallen on the “having children is a good thing” side of the argument, but I often have trouble articulating why when thinking on the humanity-wide scale of thinkpieces like this. The thing that closest approximates my feeling, I suppose, is a sort of natural skepticism towards a sort of end of history fallacy. I am scared of the times we live in, desperately afraid of the future, but I don’t think I’ve seen enough evidence to conclude that this is in any way exceptional on an evolutionary timescale. The future has always been scary. Unprecendented things have always been happening. But the one thing that has always, unfailingly continued, by definition since the first cell rose from the primordial sludge, is reproduction. So it feels a little disingenuous to me to use “the state of the modern world” as a reason not to have children. In the same sense, are our modern psyches so much more advanced and fragile and important than they have been for the rest of our collective history, that their caprices should trump our biological raison d’être? Could it be that having children is a highly disruptive event for the individual’s ego, which is given more and more prominence in our culture?
My kids seem pretty good at adapting to whatever we have thrown at them so far. I’m pretty confident that they and their generation will be as adequate keepers of the human torch as we have been: indeed, it’s a pretty low bar we’ve set really, isn’t it.
Photograph: Deer on the hills near Brasted, England.
Henry, come on (AM / S) is the new track by Lana Del Rey, released this week, from her upcoming tenth studio album which will presumably be released later this year. It’s a quiet acoustic ballad with country elements: country is really big at the moment with everyone from Lana to Beyonce trying to squeeze its influence into their pop music. What a time to be alive.
Author Robin Sloan’s newsletter was particularly great this month, packed full of links to interesting things. Sloan has a huge variety of interests and can seemingly write about absolutely anything. Will need to pick up one of his books.
This week I learnt about the Indie Web carnival, which is an effort across the independent web to choose a writing prompt each month to give independent writers inspiration around a common theme. This year April’s theme is renewal, which I also read about on Sacha Chua’s wonderful blog, and which I feel like I have also written about a bunch on this site since I started it a month ago. Anyway, a very welcome intitiative. Considering putting my name down to “host” a future month.
Because of new web searching capabilities, ChatGPT is now capable of answering the questions “Who is Clinton Boys?” and “Write a small post in the style of Clinton Boys” for the first time. I can only imagine the directions this kind of “SEO” for LLMs is going to go in the coming years. I desperately wish there was a way to ensure AI scrapers can’t touch a site and make it only accessible to human beings.
Photograph: Close up of a butterfly on a leaf at the Horniman Museum, Forest Hill, London, 2023.
I have been living in London for almost two years and there are still huge parts of the city I have never even been to, let alone explored. But I have been keeping a list of the bits of the city I really like: some are touristy, some are just boring residential places, but all are full of “soul” in the architectural and human sense. I also of course keep an orthogonal list of soulless places that I really don’t enjoy being in.
I am really enjoying the new album Patience, Moonbeam by indie pop band Great Grandpa this week (AM / S). It feels like a throwback to the melodic, ambitiously arranged sort of indie pop music that I loved as a teenager. Thoroughly recommended.
I started reading Proofs and Refutations by Imre Latakos (a PDF is available here). It’s a great look at how mathematicians think and in particular how mathematical arguments, known as proofs, are devised. It’s interesting to read this book in the age of artificial intelligence where the current trend in mathematics is “formal verification”: using formal languages to allow computers to verify mathematical statements. The philosophy in this book makes me a little sad that we may be losing something when we do this.
This poem by Charles Bukowski was new to me and really resonated.
I enjoyed reading about this town in Japan where Pokemon-like trading cards based on old men in the local community have gone viral among young people.
Photograph: Cats in the grass in spring at my old apartment in Tel Aviv, 2018.
