w/e 2022-06-26

This week I have listened to World Full of Worry, the recent album by Peaness which is nice tuneful indie pop and sounded particularly good while driving along country roads with the window down on a sunny morning:

§ I’m in Essex for a few days, visiting my parents, which involved another walk across London. I’m looking forward to getting the Elizabeth Line at some point – ideal for the Paddington to Liverpool Street journey – but a walk is more appealing when I have plenty of time and good weather.

I’m still in the mode of catching up with London after moving away pre-COVID, so enjoyed lunch outside Koya in Soho, watching the world go by, then tea and cake upstairs at Maison Bertaux, followed by seeing the new buildings at Tottenham Court Road tube.

A photo of a room filled with tables and chairs, with red, white and blue bunting strung across the ceiling. The tables are wood-effect laminate and the chairs a mixture of white-painted wood, or black metal frames with black vinyl cushioned seats, or black metal with wooden seats and backs. The walls are covered in paintings of strange faces staring out at the empty room. The table in the foreground holds a white plate with a large slice of chery and almond tart, and a white teapot, cup and two jugs. — Upstairs at Maison Bertaux, the best place

At some point I’ll feel like I’ve done and seen all the things I’ve missed over the past 2½ years and settle into whatever my new relationship with London is, as a visitor.

I had one of those moments of sudden objective clarity while walking along Holborn, noticing afresh the amount of physical and auditory space taken up by the relatively small number of people driving cars, vans, etc., everyone else having to work around them and endure their noise. Crazy. Now I’m a driver I can say this it’s crazy with all of the authority that drivers have about the importance of cars in cities.

§ Before I came away I spent an afternoon helping a local farmer gather in the hay bales from his field across the road, like last year. This time our neighbour and a couple of his grandchildren made up the rest of the team which, given the grandchildrens’ height, left me as the one who had to get most of the bales up on to the increasingly-high stacks on the trailers. Which thankfully went fine. Cool story, Phil.

A photo of an old blue tractor, a Ford 4100, pulling an old two-wheeled trailer across a field in the sunshine. The trailer holds four layers of hay bales and a man in a red cap is sat on top of them. The field stretches back to a green hedge, behind which are some trees and a red brick house beneath a blue sky streaked with thin white clouds.

§ As mentioned last month we were due to get a free directional 4G aerial installed thanks to Gigaclear suddenly realising, after bidding for and winning a contract, and years of installing fibre-to-the-premises, that actually it would be too expensive to install fibre to some premises, like ours.

This week a couple of guys came round with a directional aerial on a telescopic pole, a router, a phone, and an envelope of SIM cards. They determined that with the aerial pointed in a specific direction we could get 55Mbps on Three. We’re already on Three, where our speed ranges from maybe that fast down to a useless 500Kbps, or often around 8-12Mbps. Entirely unpredictable. Anyway, hopefully before too long we’ll be eating all the HD TV we can while downloading all of the internet and whatever else people do with reliable speeds like that.

§ We finished the second season of The Morning Show this week. It was still good but seemed to take a little while to get going, and then the ending was rather flat. But it had some good and surprising middle. It was set in early 2020 so there was some, er, humour in watching the media and population acting as if there wasn’t a virus at loose, which seems crazy now that we’re all so much wiser!

👀