orbific weblog – Strange stories and interesting things

Monthnotes: May 2025

May was challenging. We were supposed to release the work project I’ve worked on since November, but the testing phase won’t end – although the bugs were all false positives from testing issues. The long client-office commute has been wearing, even when it’s only twice a week. My life is good overall, but this has been one of those months with too much to keep track of, and a constant hum of anxiety. The brighter mornings haven’t helped, the early light waking me despite the blackout curtains. As good as everything is, I’ve felt tired and frustrated.

The month started in Stroud, where I visited Mr Spratt and his family. I had a lovely relaxed time, including a decent hike – something I’ve not done enough this year. I always dread making trips involving long drives, but I’m glad I did this. I even enjoyed the three pub visits we made while we were there, which doesn’t often happen since I quit drinking. I should commit to more such expeditions.

Other adventures included a weekend in Blackpool, watching movies with Muffy. I also discovered the excellent Aunty Social shop. I escaped the office in Manchester for an hour to visit the Whitworth’s exhibition of Japanese prints, dragging my new team along with me. In Hebden Bridge, we celebrated Rosy’s birthday with a party (although I didn’t make it to midnight).

This was the month where my weight finally broke containment. I weigh myself daily, tracking it through a moving average, and this average hit the highest number since I started this round of tracking in 2019. It’s finally got me being more careful about my diet, getting a rein on the stress-eating as well as well as upping my daily step target. The spike appears to have been a short-term blip rather than a permanent change, but I’m staying alert.

The writing continues to go well. I’m trying to settle into a regular practise, getting a flow of new work out. I went to both of the month’s writing group sessions, despite them occurring on commute days. I’ve also cleared out the blog post drafts I’ve accumulated. I’m still longing to work on a big project, but my way there is through getting smaller pieces out.

I published seven blog posts in May:

I love the hope implied by this clarification – that there is a possibility of this line-up without tribute acts

I finished twelve books in May, although this was mostly finishing several half-completed ones; reading so many things simultaneously is not the best way to enjoy books. David Marx’s Blank Space was a quick read, an interesting cultural history of the 21st century. While I knew much of the material, this had ended with an provocative and useful manifesto. Marcus Kliewer’s The Caretaker was a great follow up to We Used to Live Here. While I don’t like Kliewer’s prose on a sentence level, he’s definitely at the start of an interesting career. Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling likely falls into the true crime genre, but he tells the tragic story of Zac Brettler very well.

The month’s best meal was probably the sweet potato hash in Stroud, but a similar dish in Leeds ran a close second.

A big theme for May has been reducing digital clutter – clearing out old blog posts and the hundreds of articles I had on my Kindle. I love using the FiveFilters Push to Kindle service to send article from my browser, but it had got out of hand. It feels like there are several areas of my life that have become cluttered and stagnant. This is something I’m being careful with, particularly when I have so little spare time and energy.

I love this view of Manchester in the distance

More time was made available when I abandoned playing Death Stranding 2. The game has some moments of incredible beauty, but the plot is dreary, and the gun-play annoying. It felt like there were better things I could do with my time, so I stopped. I wish I could have finished some of the roads but I was sick of the bosses. It feels like Kojima’s innovations were strangled by the form’s cliches.

It saw a lot of films this month, with seven trips to the cinema. Obsession was an excellent horror movie. Mother Mary was too long but worth it for the imagery. The Mandalorian and Grogu was predictably disappointing. I saw The Backrooms on opening night and found myself the only adult in a cinema packed with teenagers. Nomadland was beautifully made but deeply flawed (I thought this review was an excellent response)

I’m exasperated by politics. Kier Starmer might feel a failure as prime minister but he was elected with a massive majority and he shouldn’t be discarded lightly. It seems obvious why Reform are winning – they are the only party promising an improvement to the grimness of the British economy since the 2008 financial crisis. Reform’s use of immigrants as scapegoats is vile – but they are the only party offering something other than managed decline. I don’t see why Labour are so unable to promise any hope.

A week or two later, someone had demolished the art in the woods.

I loved Caity Weaver’s essay: I Found It: The Best Free Restaurant Bread in America. Entertaining and informative.
“When you publish physical editions of your work it graduates from the pejorative classification of ‘content’ to, at worst, an object, if not a product, and hopefully, eventually, a successfully circulating artwork.” – Bobby Campbell
I gave up on Tom’s Crossing. It’s a great book, but I don’t have the bandwidth for it right now. Maybe in a few month’s time.
I’ve found a fourth birthday twin in Midge the dog, who has his first birthday next month.

It’s weird to see AI-generated images for sale as physical objects, particularly at such a high price

Next month is a big one – and landmark birthday that’s likely to provoke a little soul-searching.

A Great Work

When I was young, I wanted nothing more than to one day publish a novel. Over time, I realised that being published will not solve my problems, or make me feel better. I’ve seen people I know achieve the sort of success I longed for and end up unhappy. And, besides that, the novel is a less important form than it was thirty years ago.

I did try for a long time. I have four finished novels, two of them that I think are good. I made a few attempts to sell them, and eventually settled down to other things. The submission of my work is the bit I hate about it most – the rejection cuts too deep and it makes me enjoy writing less. If someone reached out and asked to publish a book of mine, I’d be eager; but I’m not interested in begging for it. It’s the same with self-promotion. My enjoyment of my work is a fragile thing, and taking up strangers’ time by demanding they read it proves too much for me. There are risks to not submitting my work, of not having anything to calibrate against, but I’m happy to take that chance.

At the moment, I write a weekly story on a newsletter. I enjoy that, but I want to work on something larger. I have this idea of a great work in my head, something huge but composed of fragments. It’s not a book, not in its first iteration – I think fiction is more interesting online, where it is able to move in new ways; streams, not texts. There are huge opportunities offered by all these different platforms.

The South Downs Way is a start towards this. But I always run into trouble with big concepts – the structure takes over. Instead I want a process more like making a jigsaw – to generate fragments and see how they fit together. Maybe a new tiny story/fragment a day, if I can get up to that pace.

It’s a different way of working, but one that I have to have faith in. If I work with all these tiny fragments then the structure will emerge.

A Tale of Two Beds

On Thursday 5th March, I went to the Tate and saw Tracey Emin’s bed, a piece of art I last saw in the 90s.

A couple of days later, I visited the Bronte Parsonage, where I saw the reconstruction of Branwell Bronte’s bed. This representation of Branwell’s room “as it might have looked in the late 1830s” was made for a 2017 exhibition.

Emin’s bed is the original, but the artwork reproduces her room at a particular time in the past. This bed was once owned by Charles Saatchi, who apparently installed it in a dedicated room in his own house.

The South Downs Way: What Next?

Since 2019, I’ve been working on a series of stories set along the South Downs Way. At almost 40,000 words, this is the largest thing I’ve published, and it’s still expanding. The work consists of six print zines and a few dozen stories shared on my mailing list. I’ve now created a website to gather these stories together and help me to trace the work’s structure.

The obvious inspiration for this project is Geoff Ryman’s 253 – but my story is so complicated I’ve got lost in it myself. If I can’t find the paths through, what hope do any readers have? Hopefully, working through the site will help me make this clearer for everyone, including me.

The original plan for The South Downs Way was to do 150 stories, then 200, and it somehow grew to releasing 20 zines throughout the decade, but I’m fine with falling behind on that. I don’t mind if it takes thirty years before this is ‘finished’ (whatever that means).

There are several elements of this book that never happened. I started in 2019, when I expected to be in Brighton for many years, but I left in 2021. If I was still based near the trail then walking/performance would be a larger part of the narrative. It is possible to read the stories as a hike, from west to east, and maybe I’ll do that eventually.

For now, the website provides a simple way to approach this story. Sometimes, my work feels like a lot of different strands that don’t add up to anything. This is true not just of the South Downs Way but everything as a whole – the horror advent calendar, mailing list etc. I want to make my work easier for readers to understand – but more than anything for myself.

Professional Decline

Whole sections of bookstores are dedicated to becoming successful. The shelves are packed with titles like The Science of Getting Rich and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. There is no section marked “Managing Your Professional Decline.”

An article I’ve been thinking about a lot is a 2019 piece by Arthur C. Brooks, originally shared by Russell Davies. Your Work Peak is Earlier Than You Think looks at the inevitable, how we decline as we grow older. Up till now, I’ve been able to work with the assumption that I will remain capable at my current pace and workload until the day I retire. Brooks says this is not true:

The data are shockingly clear that for most people, in most fields, decline starts earlier than almost anyone thinks.” Quoting an expert in the field of career trajectories, Brooks has bad news for me: “if you start a career in earnest at 30, expect to do your best work around 50 and go into decline soon after that

Brooks finds an interesting angle for his article – not just looking at how decline happens, but how one can manage this decline happily. The waning of ability can be tough on people.

Brooks writes about Raymond Cattell’s concept of ‘crystallised intelligence’. Fluid intelligence is “the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems”, and this is something that declines, whereas crystallised intelligence is the use of knowledge. Brooks suggests that, as we grow older, we should aim our careers toward “the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life”.

One example given is that of teaching – “No matter what our profession, as we age we can dedicate ourselves to sharing knowledge in some meaningful way”.

How to make the most of the future?

New ways of story-telling

The Doc Web is a now-lost piece that survives in the Internet Archive, written by Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, about how any tool can be transformed into something to write with.

Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines.

The article focuses specifically on Google docs, with examples of some of the things that have been produced (including ‘a poetry mixtape’ from the pandemic). The piece describes the ephemerality of these docs: “Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it has changed. Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it is gone.” But, in the end, that is the fate of all writing, including Elan Kiderman Ullendorff’s original piece.

I’ve written about interesting new formats in the past. Where to publish your stories? is a summary of a talk by Chris Parkinson in 2014.

At the end of his talk, Chris urged the audience, “Leave your stories lying around in unorthodox, unethical locations,” pointing out that his quick hoaxes had gained larger audiences than his self-published collections.

A similar article is Spencer Chang’s We’re All (Folk) Programmers Now, which seeks to remind people of the radical opportunities offered by the web. These days, Geocities feels like a miracle. But, even so, we can repurpose software. “The crowdsourced nature of Google Maps can be hijacked to write a love letter under the guise of a new restaurant”.

[Comments under a Youtube video are] but one example of people repurposing comment sections into their own particular social networks. Amazon reviews of a Tuscan Milk product are now a space for inventive fiction, a Billie Eilish remix video was repurposed into someone’s journal for a year, and music videos become sites to share memories… From using Discord as a journaling app to weaving in Word and painting in Excel to selling homecooked goods on Facebook Marketplace, we always find ways to make software work for us,

Chang compares these reuses as “‘desire lines in digital space”. And innovative formats are not limited to the Internet. I recently read about Lululux by Gustavo Piqueira:

The fictional narrative is subdivided into 34 parts. There are not, however, 34 chapters. Actually, it’s rather difficult to classify Lululux as a book. Unbound by any fixed structure, its content is spread across a ‘narrative dining set’, which includes 20 napkins, six placemats and eight coasters.

There are so many potential new forms for fiction waiting to be discovered.

Mycelium Parish News Update

I’m continuing to send out copies of the Mycelium Parish News, mine and Dan Sumption’s annual catalogue of counter-culture. Thanks to everyone who has supported us and helped to get the word out. We’re slowly working on the 2026 edition, which will be out in January 2027.

The Mycelium Parish News at the Skiff, my old co-working space

I particularly liked what Kate Shields wrote about the zine in a recent newsletter:

I was excited to receive in the post the latest edition of the Mycelium Parish News: its a great project that features listings of underground, subversive projects by artists, writers, musicians and other weirdos operating in the mycelial counter-culture. You can get a copy through here. The fact that its a physical, self-published magazine sent through the post that only appears once a year makes it a quietly radical project in a world of overwhelm. It is comforting to know there is so much going on than we think, deep in the soil below us.

“A quietly radical project” – I love that description.

Rich Brain

An excellent article by Arnand Giriharasas, Rich Brain, looks at the Epstein files and considers what they tell us about the ultra-rich. His observation is interesting – that being rich basically becomes a life devoted to maintaining that lifestyle – that you end up ensnared in it rather than being freed from the concerns of regular people.

At one point, Giriharasas refers to a New Yorker article about Julian Robertson, worth billions of dollars, who organised his life around avoiding taxation for spending more than 183 nights a year in New York. The tax rate being avoided – on income only – was 3.6%.

Robertson’s driver had to be on alert: as long as they crossed the Queens border en route to Locust Valley by midnight, Robertson didn’t have to “waste” a Saturday as a New York day. Even one minute of a day spent in the city counts as a day of residence.

This sounds like a lot of work to protect a fraction of your fortune. The article also quotes a tweet from NYT editor Michael Roston:

Was it @choire who wrote that while you’re worrying about the future of journalism, the people who control the money are trying to make sure the right car goes to the right house?

We are told that billionaires are wealth-generators whose ideals and innovation help us all to prosper. But, in fact, much of their discussions are about defending and managing their fortunes: “The price of being rich, it sometimes seems from these emails, is that you have to think all day about being and staying rich.” As Giriharadas writes:

We all have a kind of equity stake in what they spend their waking moments thinking about, because, at the margin, you are working longer hours, eating less food, and buying fewer clothes for your kids to spare billionaires from having to pay more in taxes. So — are you getting your money’s worth?

Evan Dando’s Rumours of My Demise

I didn’t listen to the Lemonheads much in the 90s. I thought they were lightweight because I first learned of them through their cover of Mrs Robinson. But Evan Dando was always in the background, appearing in magazines and TV, as well as in ‘scandalous’ photos with Courtney Love.

Dando comes across as charmingly foolish in his book, just like he seemed to in interviews. But there’s a section where he talks about vandalising a house he rented. It suggested a carelessness, something unpleasant. And, having read Patti Schemel’s Hit So Hard, I suspect that the casual discussions of taking crack obscure some darker stories.

There were two moments of Dando’s life I was most curious about. The first was his relationship with Courtney Love. Dando never met Kurt Cobain but would hang out and take drugs with Courtney. Rumours spread after Cobain’s death that Love and Dando were having an affair. A set of photographs that seemed to show Love and Dando making out fuelled these rumours. Dando says that Love wanted to take the photos as a ‘prank’, and implies it was her that leaked them to the press. Dando writes:

“Unfortunately, I’ll always be a part of the sad, strange story of Kurt and Courtney. “That photo implicated me in all kinds of conspiracy theories about Kurt’s death, which persist to this day… Even though I’ve told the story many times, people still think I had something to do with the circumstances that led to Kurt’s death.”

The conspiracy theories around Cobain’s death are flimsy and sexist, but Dando also includes a few lines that seem out of place from someone who dislikes conspiracy theories.

One thing Courtney said to me on that tour has stuck with me.
“Evan, we’re rich! We can take out hits on people!”
“Hooray,” I answered confusedly.

The other bit I was most curious about what Dando’s account of Glastonbury 1995. In short, he wandered off to a hotel room with two women and missed his band’s slot. Somehow he ended up rescheduled to appear in the acoustic tent, just before a performance from Portishead.

I was crammed into that tent at the time – it felt like the whole world wanted to see Portishead. We weren’t a long way from the stage but couldn’t see a thing. The tent was crowded and we’d been there for ages when it was announced that there would be a set by Evan Dando. This would delay the band that everyone came to see. I can’t imagine that many Lemonheads fans had made it to the performance.

“People were there to see an acoustic set from Portishead, not an American plunking away on a guitar like some wanker at the pub. People actually started throwing bottles at me, which I didn’t appreciate. I picked one up and threw it back, and that put a stop to that. I’d actually scared them somehow, but it was a chaotic situation. As the bottles were replaced by boos, I was quickly hustled off the stage for my own safety. Amazingly, there isn’t any footage of my very brief performance.”

I never saw Portishead that night – I decided to wander off elsewhere. But I’ve never forgotten Dando’s intensity. He faced a hostile crowd, doing his best to calm them. He got some respite with Big Gay Heart, but it wasn’t enough. His playing became angrier and the PA was eventually cut off. He left the stage shouting “Fuck you and your hippy-shit festival”. I’d rather have seen Portishead, but it was a great performance.

Dando points out that no recordings exist of that show. I was in that tent with someone who had a tape recorder with them, recording the festival for a friend of ours who’d ended up in prison. That tape is likely lost now. It would be unthinkable that you’d not have any documentation of a set like that nowadays. There is a watershed, before which we have little trace of cultural events.

Monthnotes: April 2026

April has been another month balancing work with everything else. Despite project deadlines, I’ve mostly kept on top of things – although a lack of sleep towards the end of the month got the better of me. Mostly, things have settled into a rhythm and a lot of things seem to be on the right track.

Having said that, the Easter Bank Holiday was hard work. I’m always excited about the potential of four days off; and then I spend the time shattered and exhausted. Maybe part of this is emerging from the winter. But I think 2027 James should just book a holiday for Easter and go away.

I’ve restarted my weekly story email list, and I’m enjoying the rhythm. It’s tricky to get a new thing ready each week, but I prefer this to not doing it. I’m still frustrated by a desire to write a novel, but setting out on a large project has never worked for me in the past. But I like the idea of growing a structure for something from tiny fragments.

In a fit of procrastination, I returned to my South Downs Way project, setting up a new website. This project started just before the pandemic, and is made up of connected short stories – about 170 at current count. The connections and characters had got so out of hand that I found it hard to follow. Putting it on a website makes the structure visible and I’m excited by how compelling and strange it is. I’ve started writing stories for this project once more, and I will slowly begin drawing it together.

I found it a challenge to eat properly in April, which made my weight go haywire – but I’m still not making time for exercise. I wrote above about the challenge with balancing my life – and it’s sensible eating that always fails first when things get tough. As something-better-than-nothing, I’ve overcome my dislike of Google’s Fitbit takeover to start counting steps again.

It looks like Himalayan Balsalm plucking season has begun

Much of my reading time went this month went into clearing a few hundred articles that I’d sent to my Kindle in recent months. Clutter seems to be a problem everywhere in my life. I enjoyed an early preview of Ben Graham’s forthcoming novel Savage Jubilee. I re-read Riddley Walker, my choice for the Dystopian Book Club, but I was not able to make the actual event to discuss it.

April’s Fright Night Selection was *The Omen*

I saw six movies over the month, none of them particularly great. Fight Club was entertaining for the first hour, but seemed to go on too long. I hated Project Hail Mary, and that’s fine. It wasn’t really a film aimed at me, and I spent a lot of time picking out holes in the plot (so, my physics degree is not a complete waste of time). Rosy and I watched How to Get to Heaven From Belfast which was fun, but I did sleep through a few bits due to absolute exhaustion. Two of April’s films at the Picture House were interrupted by people checking their phones, which is just annoying.

I’ve decided to stop playing The Last of Us Part 2 in favour of returning to Death Stranding 2. Kojima’s sequel is pretty good, but he doesn’t seem to understand what made the last game so great. I love the difficult hikes, the music, and building connections; I find the guns and violence trite. There are lots of games with boss fights, and most of those do that better. Maybe, possibly, there could be no guns at all in DS3.

Taking good pictures of the moon is hard

I had more bad dreams about nuclear war, brought on by the Iran war. I find it hard to understand why the world is so reticent to condemn Trump’s violence and bullying. I can’t see how we will avoid a nuclear war in the next few years which makes everything feel pointless.

Some random highlights of the month – visiting Blackpool tower; a terrifying drive back through Storm Dave; a visit from Sooxanne that included a collage session at In a Land; Rosy doing an amazing poetry set as support for Joelle Taylor; a visit from Bev and her puppy Otis; looking after our new dog-friend Midge; Calder Valley Pride doing Stars in Their Eyes; Banh Mi with my new team at work.

Paul Stapleton’s new game *Twittens* is fun

My dentist identified some problems with my teeth that will cost thousands to fix and involve major work. Maybe teeth are one of those things like enjoying Star Wars that I’ve aged out of.
God is in the Algorithm is one of the best pieces of hip-hop journalism/criticism I’ve read.
The Guardian published a lovely article on the Brighton 00’s music scene. This mostly happened in a different part of town to where I was, but it did spark a few memories.
I had a comment on a 2018 post on DEAN, the graffiti artist. Blog comments are rare these days, and this was a particularly great one.
From Jenny Offil’s Department of Speculation: “What T. S. Eliot said: When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing.”