w/e 2024-09-22

I’ve been in Essex all week where the late summer sunny weather lasted all the way through to yesterday. Even today, after rain this morning it’s been pleasant enough this afternoon.

§ I’m not sure what I heard or read that made me add Dreaming by Michael Rother (ex-Kraftwerk and Neu!), released in 2020, to my “To listen” playlist but it’s been lovely to listen to this week, despite lack of headphones. I’ll have to give 2004’s Remember (The Great Adventure) a go – Dreaming is constructed from stuff leftover from that.

It was oddly hard to actually buy this album digitally. Well, it was available on the iTunes Store, but not on Bandcamp, Bleep, 7Digital or the label’s own website.

§ Back home we had an EV charger installed but unfortunately it’s yet to function. Apparently the voltage was higher than the allowed limit of 253 volts, probably because of our and neighbours’ solar panels. But National Grid came out to check and said it was OK. The installer said it wasn’t. So someone will come to look again at some point 🤷🏻‍♂️ Not much we can do about it ourselves.

The good folks at Infrastructure Club explained that the reason voltage goes higher is because a solar power inverter increases the voltage in order to push it out through the meter to the grid. And 253 volts is the cut-off because the limits are 230 volts -6% or +10%. Some “transformer taps” might need to be changed at the substation.

The country is absolutely ready for many, many more electric vehicles, absolutely, no doubt.

§ I had an afternoon in Colchester yesterday, a city that, despite its other more famous historical features, will always, to me, be the place I’d go to as a teenager to buy Citadel Miniatures, D&D modules, etc. at the long-since-gone Games + Puzzles.

I went to a good second-hand/antiquarian bookshop sprawled over three floors of a timber-framed building, found a nice vegetarian cafe, Patch in Colchester Makerspace, (and wished I hadn’t already had lunch), and later had some nice ramen at a tiny place I’d passed earlier on, Hsinking.

I mainly went to Colchester to go to the cinema, the Firstsite arts center showing about the only film I fancied seeing anywhere in this part of Essex during the whole week, and even that I’d never heard of. Thankfully Between the Temples (Nathan Silver, 2024) was good. Funny, tender, and very awkward, Jason Schwartzman falling for Carol Kane, his old school music teacher.

§ This week I watched the second season of Colin From Accounts on iPlayer. I wasn’t wowed at first, but either it picked up or I just wasn’t in the mood, because by the end I was loving it again and really sorry the season ended.

It’s not that swearing makes a programme better, but it is quite nice that they just casually swear like normal people, rather than existing in a weird sanitised sitcom world. Well done Australians.