Snippets

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A small software change that delights: holding down a key on my iPad keyboard now brings up a menu of accented variations of that letter. This is a massive improvement over having to bring up the on-screen keyboard and doing a similar thing on the screen.

📚 Finished reading Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. A friend suggested I pick this up; I’m glad I did, as it contains snippets of wisdom that I needed to hear. I love the idea of treating my reading pile “like a river, not a bucket” and my to-do list as a menu. The saying that ‘there’s no time like the present’ is literally true — the present is all there is.

Strava seem to have removed their activity map styles of ‘Black Lives Matter’, ‘Pride’ and ‘Support Ukraine’. Presumably this is part of getting ready for their IPO and not wanting to have a potentially damaging narrative about whether they are ‘too woke’. I always wondered when this would happen, given the broad anti-diversity and inclusion narrative that has emerged this year. Old activities with these map styles are unchanged, but you can’t select these maps anymore.

📚 Finished reading The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture (1955–1979). An epic book in five parts, covering the mid-1950s, the early and late 1960s, and the early and late 1970s. This period is transformational for gay rights, moving from a hidden and illegal world to one of openly homosexual, bisexual and transgender artists, and is reflected through the stories of the characters in pop. The book finishes just before the 1980s with a foreshadowing of the AIDS epidemic that was to come. An interesting slice of cultural history.

Last night, thanks to a friend pointing out that there were three members of Britpop-era band Dodgy, the penny dropped and I finally got the triple meaning pun of Dodgy’s 1996 album title Free Peace Sweet. Superb work, guys from Dodgy. Is 29 years to get the joke some kind of record (pun not intended)?

🎶 I was thrilled to discover that Deco Audio have moved from Aylesbury to Tring. Getting there from Berkhamsted is now half the journey it used to be. A friend and I popped in on Saturday for a chat about CD players and to scour their second hand music. I landed a big haul of second hand CDs as well as a lovely 1972 copy of George Harrison’s The Concert For Bangladesh on vinyl.

🎶 It’s Album Club .


Someone bought me a Look In Television Annual for Christmas 1982, around the time I turned six. I spent ages flipping through the pages over the next couple of years, staring at the pictures and reading about pop stars like Adam Ant and Toyah, without knowing anything about their music. Tonight’s the first time I’ve heard this album in full.

📚 Finished reading Fathomless Riches: Or How I Went From Pop to Pulpit by Richard Coles. An interesting cultural memoir, from the perspective of a young gay man who comes to London and falls into a short but explosive pop career. The memoir is honest; he comes across as super self-involved but also very self-aware. I had no idea about the link between the striking miners and the gay community in the early 1980s, and how much of a role it played in progressing LGBT matters in the UK. It was completely shocking to read how Coles lied to his friends about being HIV positive at the height of the AIDS epidemic. It’s difficult to understand, but also difficult for me to judge him too harshly from my perspective in 2025.

“ Another time we were at an event and one of the other clergy asked me about homosexuality in the Church in Britain. I said it did not bother me, nor any of my friends, and we regarded it as something quite normal. They went quiet. One sucked his teeth. They all melted away except one who said, intending to be kind, 'You must understand there is no homosexuality in Africa. And then a drama group came on stage to entertain us and I could see at once that there was homosexuality in Africa, just like everywhere else.” — from Fathomless Riches by Richard Coles

📚 Finished reading Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia. An excellent overview from the Financial Times’s AI Editor of the many emerging ways in which this technology is having an impact on people. Much of it is terrifying in an ‘is this the society we’re creating?’ sort of way, but the author tries to remain hopeful.

📷 Someone has left most of a cookie on a small window ledge outside my office. Not sure if it was a bird or a window cleaner who decided to save it for later.

📚 Finished reading Thatcher Stole My Trousers by Alexei Sayle. This is his second autobiography, covering the period after he left school to the early 1980s, by which time he had become a popular live comedian. Sayle is one of those people whom I have vague fond memories of from my childhood, but I didn’t really know much about. His TV programme Alexei Sayle’s Stuff seemed edgy to me when I was 11 years old. I also remember when people used to burst into singing the title of ’Ullo John! Gotta New Motor? without warning. An enjoyable journey through his years of leaving home and starting a career.

📚 Finished reading Intimacies by Katie Kitamura. A small slice of the life, relationships and feelings of an American working at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s a novel that feels like a novella — we drop into and out of the story in a very short space of time. I enjoyed this.

“ For that reason, the paintings opened up a dimension that you did not normally see in photographs, in these paintings you could feel the weight of time passing. I thought that was why, as I stood before a painting of a young girl in half-light, there was something that was both guarded and vulnerable in her gaze. It was not the contradiction of a single instant, but rather it was as if the painter had caught her in two separate states of emotion, two different moods, and managed to contain them within the single image. There would have been a multitude of such instants captured in the canvas, between the time she first sat down before the painter and the time she rose, neck and upper body stiff, from the final sitting. That layering-in effect a kind of temporal blurring, or simultaneity was perhaps ultimately what distinguished painting from photography. I wondered if that was the reason why contemporary painting seemed to me so much flatter, to lack the mysterious depth of these works, because so many painters now worked from photographs.” — Intimacies by Katie Kitamura

📚 Finished reading Rainbow Diary: A journey in the new South Africa by John Malathronas. I’ve had this in my library for years, since meeting the author by chance at work. His recent passing and my return to Johannesburg prompted me to finally read it. It’s an interesting journal of the author’s trip around South Africa in 2005, with enough historical background to give context without disrupting the narrative. I’ve been to South Africa many times for work, but only once ventured beyond the centre of Johannesburg. This book brought to life just how much I’ve been missing out.