w/e 2021-10-03

I’ve been home alone this week and have spent much of the time decorating our open-plan lounge/hall area. It was the ideal time to make a mess and play loud music without bothering anyone.

This weekend I’ve mostly been playing Dry Cleaning’s New Long Leg which I’ve just got round to buying and which is great, like the Gang of Four led by a woman who’s so very tired of everyone’s shit:

(Their Magic of Meghan video remains one of my favourite artworks for years.)

Whenever I do some decorating, no matter how many times I say to myself in a blokey voice, “Well, a’ course, it’s all in the preparation innit,” I’m still surprised how much time all the filling, sanding, cleaning, dusting, taping, etc. takes. “I was right,” I think, “that takes so much time compared to the actual painting!”

And then I do the painting and am, again, surprised at how long that takes. I was only painting white over a light beige sort of colour on the walls but it required three coats to cover. The instructions and their “one or two coats” guide are always a lie. And then there’s the woodwork with its two coats of undercoat and primer and then the horrid sticky top coat.

Still, all done now, ready for the installation of some new flooring tomorrow (by professionals). I was helped in all this by some handy tips from the internet, including Charlie DIYte’s guide to caulking skirting boards and @joannehaydecorating’s guide to repairing cracks in paintwork on TikTok.

Unfortunately, after all these several hours of manual labour my iPhone and iPad no longer recognise my thumbs. “Sorry,” they say, “these aren’t the digits of my owner, a soft white collar worker! These are the rough and calloused thumbs of a Real Working Man! So, no, you can’t come in to check Twitter, it is not for the likes of you.”

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§ I watched several films this week which was a pleasant change of pace from TV series:

• Things to Come (2016), Mia Hansen-Løve.
  French, Isabelle Huppert, Paris, brief but earnest philosophical discussions, pretty countryside, idealistic young people… that’s all I need really.

• Les Misérables (2019), Ladj Ly.
  Nice to see a movie of the other side of Paris rather than the usual romantic and picturesque view. A bit like a film version of Spiral which is definitely fine by me.

• It’s Only the End of the World (2016), Xavier Dolan.
  Very good. Lots of close-ups of faces talking, and faces being talked to. Everyone was excellent. Music a bit OTT at times.

• Da 5 Blooods (2020), Spike Lee.
  Alright, but just felt like it was trying to do too much.

• Results (2015), Andrew Bujalski.
  Like a romcom with very little rom and not a lot of com, which isn’t a criticism. I enjoyed it, but I wanted it to go a bit deeper in the characters’ troubles.

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§ I’m thinking of moving all my photos over from Adobe Lightroom – the powers of which I don’t use to anything like their fullest – to Apple’s Photos app. It seems silly to pay £10/month for Lightroom for the rest of my life, given I might not even open it some months. But I fear it’s a process that will take a lot of patient manual work to move the 15,000 photos over without losing anything important. This is how they trap you isn’t it.

On the off-chance you’ve done this and have any tips, or even random thoughts, do let me know. Almost everything I’ve found online is about going the other way, people outgrowing Photos and moving to Lightroom because they’re oh such good pro-am photographers now. Rather than people wanting a simpler and cheaper life and relaxing into Photos.

I thought about switching to Capture One, which you can buy rather than subscribe to, but (a) it still feels too much for my needs, realistically, and (b) it doesn’t have the ability to add GPS info to photos, or to view them on a map, which both Lightroom and Photos do.

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§ I received two guesses about what car we’ll be picking up tomorrow: Kia Niro and Renault Zoe. Both good guesses but both wrong. Another week of suspense for you. How can you bear it?