Hello. I’m still writing 2025 on my cheques.

Seriously though: almost all the dates I write are in ISO 8601 format, so the muscle memory for immediately typing 2025- is strong. At least with dd/mm/yyyy (or, god forbid, mm/dd/yyyy) your brain gets a fraction of a second to warm up before having to pick a year.

It’s become cold and wet. Snow fell past the high office windows on Tuesday, I got battered by wind and rain as I rode home through Thursday night’s storm, and it was -5 °C for one morning’s hurried 5:30am walk to the gym.

Oh, yes, three times at the gym. It’s much busier than usual despite the weather.

In hindsight I realise the first quarter of Revelation Space felt like hard work as I sweated to recall every character’s space-name, space-location and space-narrative purpose, but I’m getting quite drawn into the story now I know who everyone is and roughly what’s going on. I’m still not quite halfway through — just over twelve hours left.

Admittedly I completely forgot that one character who reappeared after a long absence was another character’s spouse, but fortunately the narration eventually used the word “husband” and that helped.

I considered buying the audiobook of Ice but it’s 57 hours long so that’s not going to happen. Conversely There Is No Antimemetics Division’s far more civilised nine-hour duration is keeping it near the top of my list. I’d like to read Luminous but for some reason Audible doesn’t appear to have the audiobook (yet?).

After work on Tuesday I met James & Murray for dinner at Unity Diner which was both geographically and dietetically convenient (for me, not them). What a treat.

It was Unity’s first day open this year so half the menu was unavailable but the tofish & chips hit the spot. In principle I keep meaning to try their Sunday carvery; in practice I somehow never fancy going out on a Sunday.

Which reminds me: last summer there was a splashy UK launch campaign for Just Egg and I’ve been waiting for it to show up in shops so I can see what it’s like, but it just… hasn’t. Apart from some amateur sleuths on Reddit there’s no information about why not, and they’ve simply not bothered to post anything to their Instagram account since September. Some real Club Mexicana-level marketing work.

I rode to Maltby Street Market yesterday to visit Kegarmo’s stall, partly to pick up a baked treat but mostly because they’ll be opening a coffee shop in Tooting next month and I doubt I’ll be cycling that far with any regularity (if at all), so I wanted to say congratulations and make the most of their last few weekends at the market.

I’m genuinely glad they’re succeeding, it’s just… Tooting is so much further than London Bridge, so I might not be able to stay a customer even though I love their food. So it goes.

Despite a couple of boilerplate “sincere apologies for the delay” emails, I haven’t got my £113 back yet.

Against my better judgement I watched Tron: Ares which is of course basically shit, but also of course has a good soundtrack and some impressive things to gawp at while listening to it, so in some ways succeeds on its own cynical terms. Not recommended but also nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be.

In a similar vein I semi-reluctantly watched the first episode of The Studio and it turned out to be quite a lot better than I’d assumed from its cast & premise. It’s fine so far: well made; accessible to someone who has no interest in listening to The Town; pretty smug but not as far up its own arse as expected; mildly amusing; basically watchable. My appetite for consuming stressful workplace situations as entertainment is low right now but I’ll probably give it a chance and see where it goes next.

Lately I’ve been supplementing my daily Cracking The Cryptic habit with new & old London Eats videos. I don’t consciously grasp what it is about the latter that I find so comforting, but something about seeing both familiar and new parts of London from a novel vantage point, especially at night, makes me feel calm and grounded; it’s that meditative slow TV feeling, except with places I know, and also burgers.