I went to see a podiatrist (they used to be called chiropodists) on Monday to get my toenail sorted out. At some point in the summer, I bashed my big toe, leaving a black mark under the nail that was slowly growing out. However, the trauma also left the nail weakened until it came away from the bed and started to split last week, and I was worried that it might split and delaminate further, or get caught and damaged.

So I paid someone to fix it. It was quick and easy and I was out in ten minutes with no blood and having sustained injury only to my wallet. He cut away the loose section, filed it down smooth, and it should now just grow out normally over time. It looks a bit weird right now, but it’s not uncomfortable.

As a bonus, I was right next to Waitrose so I bought a vegan haggis on the way home for a slightly late Burns Night-inspired supper on Tuesday night.

There were at least a dozen uniformed police on Rye Lane on Wednesday, stopping and checking dodgy e-bikes that don’t conform to regulations. This included quite a lot of food delivery riders. They are often a menace to themselves and others, but I feel sympathy towards them. It’s really the delivery companies that are responsible for the abusive conditions that drive them to take unnecessary risks in order to earn what still isn’t really a liveable amount.

And, of course, I blame the treat enjoyers most of all, the people who use a precarious labour force risking death and injury to provide them with mother-as-a-service, to save them the effort of picking up their own takeaways or – God forbid! – cooking their own dinner. This wasn’t a normal thing a few years ago. There were a few types of food that transported fairly well – stir fries and curries and pizza – and you could even get them delivered, but you couldn’t employ casual labour to bring you a single McDonald’s burger on a regular basis unless you were the kind of rich person who had jeevacation in their address book. Now I see people getting fast food delivered for breakfast! And you don’t even have to talk to the staff! The technofeudalists somehow willed it into existence by selling a dollar for fifty cents, got people hooked, and now they can squeeze the margins at both ends.

And that, via a chain of causation, leads to people riding electric bikes without the legal constraints on speed, to make as many deliveries as they can in the time available. It doesn’t have to be this way, but you’d be paying a lot more for that burger if it were fair and not exploitative.

Confiscated e-bikes and scooters (and one monowheel)

There was also a monowheel – one of those suitcase unicycle things – on the lorry of confiscated vehicles. There may be a place for an electrified circus act, but it’s not the public highway.

My cousin Kara performed Zimmerman’s Oboe Concerto on Thursday evening at the Royal College of Music. She won the RCM Concerto Competition last year while still a student, playing the same piece, and the prize is that you get to do it again as a public concert. She nailed it, the supporting orchestra were excellent, and it was a joy to hear. She’s obviously very good – she has the accolades to prove it objectively – but watching her perform such a virtuosic piece made it absolutely clear.

Here’s a representative few bars of the score to give an idea of what the player is faced with:

Representative bars

I also thought that I should go to more concerts at the Royal College of Music. It’s easy to get to from home or from Peckham (with a train to Victoria), the standard is excellent, and the value is unbeatable.

Freight train passing through at Peckham Rye

My own musical accomplishments this week have been a bit less rarefied. At Saturday’s Sanshinkai rehearsal, I played the jikata accompaniment to the eisa dancing on my own for the first time. It went OK, although, after fifteen minutes of what is more or less a continuous run of quavers with no breaks, my left hand was worn out. Still, it proved that I can in principle do it, even if I need to practise more.

The book of John Dowland lute pieces arranged for ukulele I ordered arrived, and I’ve been practising the first piece, Awake, sweet love, thou art return’d. I can play it, but now I need to put the expression into it.

Here’s a whole load of links from the past week:

• Jmail: Read Jeffrey Epstein’s emails as if you were using his Gmail account.
• The UK is a rich country built on mass poverty. “Record levels of very deep poverty expose the true cost of austerity, inflation and the concentration of power at the top.”
• Golf Must Be Abolished. It’s time to destroy the sport of kings: our humanity is at stake. “Imagine reclaiming a golf course, and with it your self respect. You could plant trees and save the bees, rewild the place if you want.”
• Last turbine on [Ireland’s] first commercial wind farm dismantled. The 21 original turbines are being replaced with 18 new ones, each of which can generate more power than the entire previous farm.
• The British Museum Posted AI Slop… (and quietly deleted it).
• 7 Reasons Why Teens Are Rejecting AI. “Some young people only turn to artificial-intelligence chatbots as a last resort, citing concerns about relationships, creativity, the environment and more”.
• OpenAI exec becomes top Trump donor with $25 million gift. Brockman was CTO when I worked at Stripe. I didn’t have a great opinion of him at the time, but it’s so much worse now.
• Anthropic’s Philosopher Weighs in on Whether AI Can Feel. We don’t know if AI can feel? Yeah, sure, and we don’t know whether the moon is made of green cheese underneath that layer of regolith. Give me a break.
• Why I Have Joined the Greens. “A socially liberal party with left wing positions on a raft of issues that speaks to the class interests and outlooks of immaterial workers, stands up against the scapegoating and racism of the mainstream, and being the only party that really takes climate change, energy challenges, and the green transition seriously, Zack Polanski’s leadership and his adroit interventions have catalysed and coalesced mass support around the Greens.”
• Stanford scientists found a way to regrow cartilage and stop arthritis. I hope this comes to fruition before I need it.
• AI won’t replace us human literary translators just yet. “As a reader, you might care about the loss; you might not. I do – for one thing, I’m writing a book at the moment, so I’m rather hoping for more than ‘basically, yeah, that’s the gist’ from my own translators.”
• Spain plans to give 500,000 undocumented migrants legal status. Moral leadership in a global political environment that’s sorely lacking it.
• Leonardo da Vinci’s Recorders. Designs for recorders with slots instead of holes, so that they can play a continuous variation of pitch. Includes a video featuring a reconstruction.
• worstofbreed.net: “Welcome to the premier destination for Resume-Driven Development, Over-Engineering, and Resume-Padding. Why build simple solutions when you can build a distributed monolith managed by 4 different committees?”
• India’s 60 million street dogs are turning from village scavengers to city territory defenders. The relationship between India’s not-quite-wild dogs, the people who feed them, and the consequences.
• What It’s Like to Get Undressed by Grok. Horrific, and yet no one with power seems willing to stand up to the world’s richest man.