2020-03-28
Boris has the virus, as has the Secretary of State for Health, and the Chief Medical Officer*. They’ve built a hospital with 4000 beds inside a big conference centre in London. They’ve built another at the NEC in Birmingham. The one in London has been dubbed the NHS Nightingale. I don’t know if the Birmingham one has a name. A hangar at Birmingham Airport is being repurposed a temporary morgue.
2020-03-21
Emma’s gone up to the Midlands to collect the car so that we might have some means of getting away from London without breaking social distancing. I was anxious when she left, I don’t want her to be stuck outside of London if the government suddenly announce stricter travel measures. They’ve already started shutting down the trains bit by bit.
Yesterday they shut the pubs and restaurants, and the gyms too. This morning I tried to do a workout at home and I’m still going to go for a run. Cycling around deserted streets appeals too. I feel like my body will get soft and weak in quarantine if I’m not careful.
2020-03-19
We got back from seeing Tom in India on Monday, and ever since then the world has gotten increasingly strange. Though it isn’t completely enforced, we’re all supposed to stay home and work from home to limit the spread of the virus. All the bars and restaurants are empty, people aren’t going to them and so instead they’re all online chatting away in the evenings. It’s like getting back home from school and everybody jumping straight onto MSN. Apart from today, every day this week the Prime Minister has come on TV and announced some restriction measure. Yesterday they announced they’re closing the school except to babysit the children of key workers like nurses and doctors.
2020-01-28
At my day job at BuzzFeed I’m a software engineer, building stuff for the web.
I use my company-issued MacBook Pro “16, 2020 (2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). It’s on a Griffin laptop stand, which isn’t quite tall enough to bring the screen up to my eye line, so the stand is piled on top of a couple of thick hardbacks that were lying around. I have an Apple Magic Mouse and the standard wireless Apple Keyboard.
2020-01-13
I just finished Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I really enjoyed it without really knowing what to make of it. It’s structured in a stream-of-consciousness way, with distinct sections (which aren’t quite chapters) that sometimes relate to what’s come before with a dream logic. Here are some of my favourite sections, or at least a couple that got me thinking.
There are countries where people speak English. But not like us — we have our own languages hidden in our carry-on luggage, in our cosmetics bags, only ever using English when we travel, and then only in foreign countries, to foreign people. It’s hard to imagine, but English is their real language! Oftentimes their only language. They don’t have anything to fall back on or to turn to in moments of doubt.
2019-12-31
When I was at university, me and some friends founded a music magazine and ran it for a few years before handing it off to the next generation of students when we graduated. It ran on for a few years after we left and then closed.
I noticed recently that the hosting was about to expire, so I exported the magazine’s content and turned it into a basic static site so it wasn’t lost forever. It’s the PearShaped Magazine Archive.
2019-12-30
These are the books I most enjoyed reading in 2019, compiled from my Goodreads Reading Challenge.
2019-12-30
This guy has been collecting all the “Best x of the 2010s” lists that have been appearing in the past few weeks into an impressive collection.
Here are some of my highlights:
2019-10-17
This excerpt from 24/6 by Tiffany Shlain makes the case for setting aside a day to go tech free: ditching phones and laptops and screens for the day. It’s come along just at the right time for me, as I’m generally shrinking away from tech outside of my work life more and more.
I like the way the article describes what you might need a tech-free day: a basic watch, a pen, and a little notebook containing some emergency phone numbers. Slightly idealistically it argues that the day then becomes about the basics: seeing friends, hanging out and chatting, playing games, cooking meals.
2019-10-01
I read the Penguin Classics translation of Wasps by Aristophanes the other day. It’s a satirical play about how an older generation of Athenians who fought in the Peloponnesian War were taken in by a pandering demagogue called Cleon. To grasp what’s happening and get the jokes, you have to know a little bit about the context of Athenian politics at the time and how the jury system worked. But all of that is explained in a very quick note at the beginning of the edition.