w/e 2024-10-06

I’m back in Essex, a few days earlier than planned, due to another family medical event. I would really like to write more about this stuff to be honest, but over the years I’ve become increasingly wary of writing about other people online without their consent. So forgive my vagueness. I would like to say a reassuring, “everyone’s OK,” but with every emergency visit to hospital – this is the fourth in six months – that’s decreasingly true.

By this point I’m more used to it all, or blocking out all the emotions, or knowing that there’s little I can do to make things better, or all that. So it doesn’t feel too jarring to me to carry on with this week’s weeknotes as normal.

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§ I got round to buying the NTS Early Bird and Breakfast shows’ favourite Out of the Blue by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, a 2019 reissue of a 1970s four-track album, mainly for the first and last tracks.

A Letter From Home is a wonderful, trippy 26 minute piece with a woman reading a letter about “the development of consciousness over three ‘sizes’ of time”. And Next Time Might Be Your Time is the catchier number:

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At the start of the week, back home, National Grid came out to install some monitoring equipment to track the voltages, so they can decide what they need to do in order to get our new EV charger working. The equipment stays in place for a week. The guy says it’s such a common problem now that he spends much of his time doing this.

We assume that the National Grid flying one of their yellow “ELECTRICITY” helicopters low over the garden following the power lines a few days later was unrelated.

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§ One little thing that gives me a lot of joy is people getting off buses and, one after the other, thanking the driver. I can’t remember if this happens much in London, where everyone must hold their feelings inside lest they escape and weaken their host, but out here all the “thanks” one after the other, for someone doing their job, is so otherwise unusual and lovely.

(A special shout-out to the “Cheers, Drive” alternative wording in Bristol.)

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§ I finished reading Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents this week which I enjoyed less than Parable of the Sower. Maybe enjoyment isn’t the point anyway because they both, especially this one, contain many very grim parts.

But there’s also the feeling of being preached at that I get from Ursula K. Le Guin’s books. I agree with what they’re saying, and everyone else loves both authors’ books, but… having a message hammered home to me in the form of a story, when I already have the message, isn’t what I’m after in a novel.

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§ It’s been over ten months since I finished season one of The Bear and it’s taken me until now to finish the second. I’m not sure I’d have made it if I wasn’t swept very, very slowly along by everyone else’s love of it.

I can see that it’s well done – it’s so good at orchestrating complicated scenes of restaurant kitchens, fraught dinners, etc. But, mainly, I was not at all interested in the selfish, damaged, white men – who make up the bulk of the show – compared to the other characters. The times when it focused on the others I liked it much more. I also did not at all, at all, buy Richie’s entire transformation of character in a matter of days.

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§ That’s all. I hope you have excellent, healthful, calm weeks.