"Hillbilly Elegy" is the autobiography of JD Vance, a self-professed hillbilly made good who graduated from Yale Law School. I read it because reviews touted it as illustrating the economic conditions leading to Brexit and the implausible election of Donald Trump. As I wrote in an earlier post, I'm keen to learn about why Brexit happened. However, I think this book fails to provide an explanation. 

J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy

As much as I hate to write about writing, especially when I write so infrequently, I feel I need to reboot this blog. I wrote so few posts in recent months I considered giving up altogether.

Reboot

As a wedding present, Ingrid's Mum Maria kindly took us for a trip along The Great Ocean Road, the longest war memorial in the world.

The Great Ocean Road

On our second full day in Australia we went shopping in central Melbourne, before Ingrid's mum Maria picked us up ahead of our trip along the Great Ocean Road.

More Melbourne

On our first full day in Melbourne we took it easy. It was warm and sunny, so different to the weather we'd left behind!

Taking It Easy In Melbourne

A Day in the Air

Not being much of a drinker, I've never felt the need to do dry January. Also Ingrid and I sat in a restaurant in Barcelona on January 2nd drinking for the third night in row. We hadn't got off to that great a start. Well today marks the completion of a dry month: dry January with a two day lag.

Any sugar?

This year promises to be exciting so this week I tried to buy a diary. One of those day-to-a-page affairs for scribbling down all the things I've seen and learned about. I thought they might be cheap now the calendar is turning to February. No such luck. There were a few week-to-view diaries going for half price in Waterstones but nothing suitable for my needs. I have lots of Field Notes notebooks if my urge to write gets too much to resist.

A Diary?

Ingrid and I renewed our Cineworld passes as it is the season to go to the movies and check out the Oscar contenders. You nod along sagely while dreaming up superlatives to show how much you agree with the taste-makers. Or you can call such-and-such movie a pretentious load of crap.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

For new year Ingrid and I met up with Ingrid's friend Ros at Barcelona airport. We went from there to Cadaqués on the Costa Brava. A winding drive over steep hills leads you down to a cute bay with the typical white houses and terracotta roofs. All the window frames were painted just the right shade of blue.

Spain, New Year 2017/18

Top 10 Albums 2017

Top 10 Songs 2017

Some thoughts about whether to carry on with this blog

The paths in the wood

A summary of an issue I've been having with my external monitor since moving to an M1 MacBook Pro

M1 External Monitor Issues

Rosewater is an exciting science fiction novel set several decades after first contact with an alien called Wormwood, that has established itself as a large biodome in Nigeria. The novel follows Kaaro, a thief whose extra special abilities are forged from an unlikely connection with the alien. The whole thing is part sci-fi adventure and part spy novel.

Tade Thompson, Rosewater

I find it hard to get started on projects. This may have always been the case. I definitely remember instances of complex plans for school projects that I'd barely have time to finish. I once got up at 6AM to finish making a calendar in French—I thought it was going to be this outstanding piece of work that would genuinely replace my teacher's calendar! Reality didn't quite match the idea though.

Doing the thing

The Imaginary Girlfriend is a short autobiography by American author John Irving. In it, he explains the interwoven roles of writing and wrestling in his life.

John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend

Today I had an interesting bug in some Latex code I am writing. Putting a footnote into a caption caused the document to fail compilation. The problem was that this document doesn't use a table of figures at the start, so I hadn't thought to include a short summary caption. Apparently the curly brace in the footnote command does not sit well with that, even if you aren't using a list or table of figures in your document. The solution is simple, as long as the footnote isn't crucial to the list of tables!

TIL: footnotes in Latex captions

'Civilisations' is a counterfactual historical novel that attempts to extrapolate the future course of history after changing one pivotal moment of the timeline. I usually find novels like this are great fun, another entertaining example is 'Making History' by Stephen Fry. The novel, originally written in French, won some big awards in France last year. I read the translation by Sam Taylor. 

Laurent Binet, Civilisations

Today, we transferred our Christmas tree to a new pot. Being root-bound as the tree was, it took ages to get it out of the crappy pot from the store and into the new, bigger pot. And I'm pretty sure it's a bit wonky, which might make the baubles a bit lopsided next Christmas. It looks excellent next to the new bird bath.

The Garden

Lifeforms is the 1994 album from the Future Sound of London. A double album (just), it also features the talents of Robert Fripp, Ozric Tentacles, Talvin Singh, Toni Halliday, and Liz Frazer. It reached number 6 on the UK album chart and went silver.  

Understated Classics #39: Lifeforms by Future Sound of London

At the moment I can’t compile this blog locally because my ruby-ffi install is somehow wrong and is preventing Jekyll from running on my recently upgraded Mac system. Fortunately the site still compiles on Netlify, or else you wouldn’t be reading this!

What is FFI anyway?

Hmmm it seems as though the ffi gem as installed by bundler is not compatible with a Mac that has an M1 chip. This limits my ability to preview blog posts locally. I might have to swap to a more modern static site generator (which is probably easier than working out what ffi actually does) - seems like a good February project!

A February Project

Despite my best intentions, I didn’t manage to continue writing posts after the first day of 2022! But perhaps now I can try again as an excuse to test my blogging set up on my new computer.

Checking In

At the new year, thoughts and spare time for writing point me toward writing some new posts for my understated classics series. Expect some new ones soon.

Understated Classics Or Not?

How hard is it to just listen to music these days?

A pox on both their houses

Today I listened to 'Cloudbusting' by Kate Bush for the first time in a while. What a gloriously strange song it is. Best of all, it's one of those songs that obscures what it is really about. It's not a song about a change in the weather, but about [Wilhelm Reich][1], the [orgone][2] accumulator, [fluorescent yo-yos][3], and a son (rather than a sun) coming out.  

If anything, make it weirder

I was due to have my second vaccination today, but like most people I rebooked to have it a bit earlier. No real side effects this time, save for a bit of malaise. Though that may have just been the thought of opening up the country when cases are still increasing quickly. 

Jab 2

Outline is the first of a trilogy of novels by Rachel Cusk. In it, the narrator is travelling to Athens to help teach on a creative writing class. You could describe the rest of what happens in a couple of sentences. I won't be doing so because first, that's spoilers, and I don't do spoilers; second, Outline is one of those novels where what happens doesn't matter quite so much as how it all happens.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

I don't know about you, but lately I've been in need of some music that:

Understated Classics #38: Trance Nation (Various Artists)

I had my first Covid-19 vaccination on Friday. Leading up to it, I was borderline having a panic attack. From about lunchtime I was just all over the shop (the jab was at 7pm). I'm glad that the vaccination centres run with such exactitude, but also with a sense of cheeriness. By the time I'd had the jab, I was feeling much better just from the sheer relief of it. 

Jab 1

Ingrid has joined an online drawing class. She sits there on Teams getting feedback on her drawings, while I sit there attempting to absorb everything. I'm also learning by doing, by making a line on the page. In some ways, it's instructive to observe the difference in what we learn with and without the feedback.

Drawing a line on the page


"I was twenty-one at the time, about to turn twenty-two. No prospect of graduating soon, and yet no reason to quit school. Caught in the most curiously depressing circumstances. For months I’d been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill. In the autumn, everything took a desolate cast, the colors swiftly fading before my eyes. The sunlight, the smell of the grass, the faintest patter of rain, everything got on my nerves. How many times did I dream of catching a train at night?"


I was twenty one at the time…

A non-exhaustive list of ideas for saving time:

Some Tips For Saving Time

Writing this post came about from  frustration with blogging. Specifically the tools I am using. Often it feels like a new language or paradigm comes along that shifts one or two of the pain points of blogging. The biggest are:

The Forever Now

This Is How You Lose the Time War is a short novella about two members of opposing factions (Red and Blue) engaged in a 'time war’: that is they travel in time and attempt to erase each other's existence. Except that one day Red decides to taunt Blue with a letter, and a correspondence emerges.

Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War

Last year I started to write a review of Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller". I read it while we were in Germany for Christmas. We'd visited Bremen and also undergone the bizarreness of Christmas in another language - the same motifs played out in different words and different customs. I'd tried to write the review in a similar structure to the book but, in a testament to Calvino's writing I couldn't pull it off. Here's the opening paragraph:

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller


"The mind may give up its desire to improve on creation and function as a faithful receiver of experience." John Cage


Richard Powers, Orfeo

I’ve listened to music in slightly different ways to normal in the last nine months, but it’s still been a decent year for music. When I checked out my Spotify Unwrapped and my Last.fm reports, I had listened to more 2020 music than I thought.

Album Digest 2020

Recently I've had cause to dig out some old photos. If I'm honest it's made me sad. Sadder than I was expecting. There's a quote from Nan Goldin that once felt like a warning but now just sounds like a sad statement of ongoing affairs:

Old photographs

I decided to create my own deck of creativity cards. I was sick of all the adverts for similar products on Instagram. You know the kind. They're covered in pictures, patterns, and buzzwords. You shuffle the cards and draw them one at a time. As you place each card on the table, the brain’s natural desire to tell stories, create patterns and produce meaning takes over. 

Strategy one

"He keeps biting me on the leg" says Ingrid one day as I mill around her desk during the new water cooler moment that is a comfort break on a Microsoft Teams call. I pat Martok, one of our cats, and he rubs up against me, pretending that he might nibble at me too. 

Am I caring for a naughty cat?

This post explains some of the modifications I made to a minimal Jekyll theme to get this blog as I wanted it. This blog (currently) uses the excellent Sidey theme by Ronalds Vilciņš. His site looks eerily similar to this one, at least at time of writing.

Sprucing up the Blog

While sprucing up this blog a bit during lockdown, I fell into reading my old posts about South America. I enjoyed it, mostly for the memories, but also because the current lockdown is warping my sense of time and space. Hours feel like weeks, but then I blink and a month's gone by. I find myself traipsing similar orbits each day around the house, and then perhaps over to the supermarket or the park. There's a palpable escapism to be had in reminiscing about South America and other places.

Travel Writing After All This

Over the course of a week on holiday, I started reading many interesting articles. In lockdown there isn't much to do but read articles, but I still find myself not that good at finishing them. My phone has lots of tabs open and has become a Rolodex of shame. This post is to confess my sins.

Holiday Tabs

Ingrid bought me a raspberry pi for my birthday. I've set it up to run the Pi-hole software. Pi-hole is a nifty bit of kit that intercepts your web requests and purges any that ask for material on known ad servers. Essentially it's like having an ad blocker on your network rather than just your computer.

Living in the Pi Hole

I read this book on holiday in Belgium last year. Having forgotten to pack a novel I scoured almost every book in the Waterstones at St. Pancras station before settling on this Booker prize winning novel by George Saunders.

George Saunders, Lincoln In The Bardo

Amanitore of Nubia is available in a base game DLC. She also has her own scenario “The Gifts of the Nile”, which like most scenarios has unique tech and civic trees. You need to assert your dominance over the Nile by building seven temples. The scenario combines faith and military tactics in a satisfying way and you can also play it as Cleopatra for a different perspective.

Civ Leaders #3: Amanitore of Nubia

These are some things I jotted down one day last week, I'll refine them a bit more later on. Think of it as an aide-memoire of things that work for me, your milage may vary.

Things to Remember

Doves are a band from Manchester who traded dance music for rock yet never left their former genre behind. Starting out as Sub Sub, they scored a worldwide hit in 1993 with "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)": a timeless dance tune that immediately owns whatever room it plays in. However, subsequent releases by Sub Sub did not catch on and people started to think of the band as a one-hit wonder.

Understated Classics #37: Lost Souls by Doves

Alexander of Macedon is available in a base game DLC pack alongside Darius of Persia. He also has his own scenario “The Conquests of Alexander”, which is both fun to play and instructive in how to use the formidable benefits of his bonuses and unique units.

Civ Leaders #2: Alexander of Macedon

Civ Leaders #1: Hojo Tokimune of Japan

I haven't written one of my monthly album digests for over a year. The reasons mostly boil down to a lack of time and motivation but other factors include the changing way in which I listen to music. I bought more albums on vinyl and only a small proportion of those were recently released music. Meanwhile, the attractions of Spotify's release radar proved too great to resist: it is a very convenient way to consume new music.

About the Album Digest

I managed to read all of the foundation novels since I wrote about the first one. In this post, I’ll write about the next two, which covers the original trilogy of ‘novels’ created from the original short stories. I’ve tried to avoid spoilers.

Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire, Second Foundation

Ingrid and I love playing Civ VI. It's a fine game that improves on previous versions, adding many layers and mechanics that mean you can vary your playing style. In fact, with the recent Gathering Storm expansion there's now an incredible variety of ways to play. The 39 leaders to play with both reflect and provide the game's increased complexity. Each leader has a slightly different mechanic that influences how you play the game, and of course the leaders you are up against also affect your game play. You can pick leaders to go up against that will make your game easier or harder. Some leaders can even be an existential threat if you spawn near to them and, as I've learned the hard way, it's not always the leaders you expect that cause these problems. 

All the Civs

Back in 2012 I wrote a post listing my ambitions for the future. Well it's the future now isn't it? Almost. After all, I’m a whole new person now. Anyway it's probably time to take stock. Have I achieved any of them? Have any of my ambitions changed? What's replaced the things that I've decided not to worry about? What has come after the things I managed to do?

Ambitions Revisited

Four Recipe Book Recommendations

Five years ago I set out at 3am for Heathrow airport to catch the early morning flight to Madrid. There I connected with a flight to Quito in Ecuador. The previous days and weeks had been fraught with worry about whether I was doing the right thing. Did I get the right vaccinations? Would I have enough money? Would I cope with all that travel? Was I coming back? What was I going to do with all my stuff?

Five years after

"The Overstory" by Richard Powers piqued my interest among the novels shortlisted for the Booker Prize. And once again the book that interested me most did not win. One year I will succeed in my prediction!

Richard Powers, The Overstory

For our first anniversary we decided to exhange books. What better way to celebrate a paper anniversary? Ingrid bought me the entire Foundation saga, most of which were reissued in fancy new paperback designs by Mike Topping in 2016. All save for 1993's Forward The Foundation that is, but Ingrid got me a copy anyway. Hence, here is a new series of blog posts!

Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Album Digest, December 2017

Here's a recipe to use up your turkey leftovers after Christmas.

Turkey and Sweet Potato Stew

We left Gulfoss and drove through the countryside to Fluðir where our next hotel stay would be. The hotel had cute little cabins arranged around a central square and the room itself was comfy and warm. Our dinner was nice enough, although we had a bit of a Fawlty Towers moment with Ingrid’s chicken salad. First it went back because they didn’t leave the BBQ sauce off. Then it came back with tomatoes. And then back again with more BBQ sauce. Fourth time lucky.

A trip to Iceland. Part 3: Flu∂ir to Vík.

Album Digest, November 2017

In a perfect confluence of last month's album digest, here's an excellent Four Tet remix of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's "I Will Make Room For You" from her album "The Kid". I've put it into a playlist with "Lush" from Four Tet's "New Energy" album and the original version of "I Will Make Room For You."  

I Will Make Room For You - Four Tet Remix

After I read "Hello America" and "Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun" to Ingrid, it was her turn to read something to me. We settled on Matt Haig's memoir of anxiety and depression "Reasons to Stay Alive", which is as uplifting and life-affirming as its title suggests.

Matt Haig, Reasons to Stay Alive

We cook this version of bolognaise with beetroot due to Ingrid's tomato allergy. This recipe is an attempt to capture what we do on the fly. The key to it is using the wine, the Worcestershire sauce and the herbs to even out the sweetness of the beetroot. If you can manage that, it's super tasty. The sauce usually ends up being an unusual but pleasing pink/purple colour, as you will see from the pictures.

Beetroot Bolognaise

I had to compute an indicator this week. It had confidence intervals that relied on taking 100,000 samples from the indicator's approximate distribution. I had to repeat this over multiple GP practices and for twelve different demographic groups.

A Little Lesson in R

In recent weeks I have worn a suit to work. I bought a new furry woolly suit a few weeks ago and have alternated between it and my old one. I also bought new shoes that gave me blisters and made me cry. Enough time has passed that by now it feels natural rather than silly and those shoes don't eat my feet as much as they used to. 

Suits Me

Album Digest, October 2017

Three years ago today I moved in to my little flat in Chichester, soon to start a new job. I had no money left but at least, after a character building stint of six months sleeping on the floor, I had a bed. In the intervening three years, my job role has expanded, I've done another degree, the flat has become a home, and I've met and married Ingrid. Add to that the fact that it's almost four years since I left for South America and I start to realise that I've done a crazy amount of things in that time. I don't intend to stop.

Three Years

"Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun" is a novella by Sarah Ladipo Manyika. Of all the books nominated for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize, this looked like the most interesting to my eyes. I've enjoyed previous Goldsmiths nominated novels including Acts of the Assassins and Satin Island. 

Sarah Ladipo Manyika, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun

Perhaps in today's modern age of streaming and such, The Coral would be a bigger band and may have survived their eventual burnout. Their work ethic was evident from the start, as rumours swirled in the NME about a fantastic new band from Liverpool who were going to blow everybody's socks off. I went to see them live in Bristol after they'd released three EPs and they were incredible. Their sound, a bit like the movie "Holy Mountain" set to pop music, imagined a Merseybeat channelled from an alternative universe in which Lennon and McCartney took their acid in the Mojave desert rather than in the English suburbs. Yes, it was derivative but somehow it also managed to be utterly new and compelling.

Understated Classics #36: The Coral by The Coral

After a day on foot in Reykjavík, and with some trepidation, we returned to the car for our drive through Iceland's countryside. We started by heading out on route 1, which is like Iceland's M25 except that it encircles an entire country and about thirty times fewer people. We went to house of Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, only to be turned away because it was being renovated and wouldn't open for another month. Undeterred, we pressed on toward Þingvellir, stopping off on the way to take pictures at a viewpoint. It was just crazy, a flat expanse of undisturbed snow. Just as with the drive from the airport, the territory should have been relentlessly bleak but instead we got a winter wonderland.

A trip to Iceland. Part 2: Reykjavík to Flu∂ir.

We went to see the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern last year. At the time, I didn't know much about her, other than the fact she was famous for painting flowers. And that people get a bit hot under the collar about what those paintings might represent. Was the art world of the 1920s and 1930s so repressed that it managed to get into a lather about some paintings of flowers? And more importantly, are they any good?

Georgia O'Keeffe at Tate Modern

Alistair Reynolds' 2000 novel "Revelation Space" has long been in orbit of my science fiction "to read" list, but it wasn't until one sleepless night (post "Command and Control") that I came across it in Ingrid's audiobooks. I was instantly drawn in as I listened to the opening scene about an archaeological dig facing evacuation ahead of an imminent 'razor storm'. 

Alistair Reynolds, Revelation Space

I love making plots in R with ggplot. However, there are always a few niggles that I forget about between plots. I wrote this post so that I have somewhere to look the next time I need to tweak a few things in my plots. I intend to come back and add updates in the future as I learn more things. If I keep coming back, I might also remember a few of these too.

Personal ggplot tips and tweaks

We arrived in Reykjavík a few days after a monumental snowstorm. As such the city was still under at least six inches of snow. We collected the hire car from the airport and drove out of Keflavik. The scenery normally looks like a moonscape, but for us it was a frosty white wonderland.

A trip to Iceland. Part 1: Reykjavík.

I had low expectations for "Hello America", the next in the series of Ballard novels that I started reading over seven years ago. However, it turned out to be a hoot. A couple of years ago, this novel would have been a wig-out bit of standard Ballard weirdness (a bit like "The Drowned World" or "The Crystal World") but given recent events "Hello America" is starting to take on an eerie prescience.

J. G. Ballard, Hello America

Ingrid and I got married a month ago. It was a lovely day. We had a simple ceremony with two witnesses, our friends Sue and Andrew. We kept it quiet and small, as we just wanted to be married without too much fuss. A month on, we're happy to report that we are glad we did it.

The same, but different

Note: Recent months have been very busy, so this album digest combines a review of the new album by The National with a couple of reviews left over from earlier in the year.

Album Digest, September 2017

"Command and Control" by Eric Schlosser is about the history of nuclear weapons and their safety. This might not seem like a thrilling subject, but it's absorbing from start to finish. I started it three years ago but only finished it more recently as the subject of nuclear weapons has become more pertinent to current affairs[^1]. There are many people who would stand to gain a great deal from reading this book[^2].

Eric Schlosser, Command and Control

We bought a cheap package holiday in the British Airways Black Friday sale. The weekend spanned Ingrid's birthday, so it was ideal. £99 each for flights and a hotel, and we bagged a hire car quite cheaply too.

A little trip to Italy

I came late to Orbital's work. I knew of them through a few remixes and because as a mad Orb fan, they could not have avoided my notice could they? Apart from that, one of my college friends tried to get me into "In Sides" just after its release in 1996. The same friend got me into "Second Toughest In The Infants" by Underworld. I cannot now understand the reason, but "In Sides" just left me cold.

Understated Classics #35: Snivilisation by Orbital

In my last post, I wrote about hills. I tried to use them as a metaphor to explain nagging sense of incompletion when you single out one activity over another. The feeling that there's always a more exciting hill off in the distance to go climb, instead of the one you're on.

Valleys

I'm a big fan of books. The way they transport you away to other places and so on. As repositories of knowledge and adventure they can't be beat. I can think of no better way out of an existential fix than reading.

Hills

I enjoyed Wonder Woman, which came as a surprise to me given my growing distaste for superhero movies. I can remember seeing the Superman reboot Man of Steel with its phallic rockets and its boring boring fight sequences. But almost everything about Wonder Woman exceeded my expectations. It's a well-made superhero movie and better still, it gets to the heart of why these kinds of movies matter. 

Wonder Woman: A Short Review

It can be a struggle to keep writing. I've found this happened a lot since I moved the blog. First, there was  the business of moving things over. That meant a lot of thought about old posts and which ones I should keep. A lot of the time I thought "how on earth did I have time to write this?!"

Create

Moving the blog to Jekyll (again, sort of)

Changes

Album Digest, March 2017

Album Digest, February 2017

Album Digest, January 2017

The next instalment in my understated classics series is "Stray" by Aztec Camera. Released in 1990, it features two hit singles and the cover is my favourite colour: green.

Understated Classics #34: Stray by Aztec Camera

Heavyweight is a podcast about “heavyweight” issues, in the sense of burdens on the soul, rather than the burning issues of the day. It’s presented by Jonathan Goldstein, who was the host of the WireTap podcast. Each week he helps someone resolve an issue from their past. These include resolving family feuds and understanding mid-life depression.

Heavyweight Podcast

Mira Schendel was a Brazilian artist who was active throughout the middle to late twentieth century. She is considered to be one of South America's best artists. Known mostly for her abstract paintings, she also experimented with sculptures and installations. Many of her works use text and semiotics to explore and define possible meanings for more abstract works.

Mira Schendel at Tate Modern

This month's album digest features albums by Wilco, M.I.A., Local Natives, and a collaboration between Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Suzanne Ciani.

Album Digest, September 2016

A few weeks ago, Ingrid and I went to see The Threepenny Opera at the National Theatre.

The Threepenny Opera

Witness the pressure of a new notebook. You sit at your desk, trying to get it started with an amazing piece of writing. Something worthy of that crisp new page. You want it to tumble out of you, fully formed and coherent. Something that justifies you abandoning the previous one. As though first drafts don't exist. You cast yourself into the role of shaman, of seer - of someone gifted a prophetic vision. But it's a role that you cannot and will not fulfil.

A New Notebook

A little man wearing a bow tie, and possibly a fez, scurries into the middle of the frame clutching a clapboard. Breathing heavily he hoists the clapboard up to chest height. He holds the clapper up then brings down while slurring "This is a blog post about not having a clue, take 43". He exits to the right of the frame.

I Don't Have a Clue, part 43

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I allowed Spotify to pick some new albums for me this month. It chose some noodly ambient techno, a captivating slice of World Jazz, a moody gothic hallucination, and a concept album about humans being rescued by aliens. All in all a pretty good job! Here is the list:

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