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Monthnotes: October 2026

October was a busy month, with lots of work and deadlines. Life recently is a competition between good and bad days. The bad days are mostly due to being overtired or not feeling well. The good days are when I get stuck into things, and enjoy working hard. I’ve won more than I’ve lost, and I’ve got a lot done.

I went away for four days to Wales. This was mostly planned as downtime. I broke a personal rule and ended up working while away – the project was not in the right place for me to handover. But I did get a lot of reading done, and felt more relaxed when I came back. I stayed the last night in Portmeirion, where I had an amazing meal.

Walking 10,000 steps a day is proving hard work, and will get worse as the nights draw in over the next two months. But it seems to be working. Gym visits are proving hard to schedule.

October and November are busy with writing, with the advent calendar to finish and the Mycelium Parish News starting. I also had a workshop to prepare and ran a good test session for this. The advent calendar went to print.

Thanks to the holiday, I did a lot of reading. The third King & Straub Talisman novel, Other Worlds Than These was long and felt a little like being stuck doing errands with someone. The dystopian book group chose The Gate to Women’s Country. I had to miss the session so blogged about it here. Books on ‘creativity’ are generally poor, but Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic was a wonderful book, mixing speculation with good, grounded advice. I also read Lucian Randall’s Disgusting Bliss, a 2010 book on Chris Morris. Naomi Booth’s Sealed was read in 24-hours, helped by a bout of insomnia, and was am excellent piece of body horror. Midnight Timetable was the Drawing Blood book club selection, and I’ve blogged about it. I re-read Hearts in Atlantis ready for the Talking Scared discussion. It’s King at his most sentimental and I loved it.

October was another slow month for films. Neither Bad Apples nor Digger worked for me. Rosy and I watched the first season of Time. It was horrifying to see how unsafe and badly run prisons are. The end was frustrating, feeling a bit too much like ‘drama’, with various heavily telegraphed twists playing out. I also watched Japanese time loop drama River which I have yet to write up. Halloween brought a cinema double bill of Donnie Darko and a midnight showing of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’m loving work at the moment – had some fun visits to the office and I’m enjoying working with colleagues. I ran a couple of sessions – a workshop on ‘how to run a meeting’ and a discussion around the recent OpenAI/Huggingface hack. I did have a couple of moments where I think about how a product company would be easier than the plate-spinning of a consultancy. That soon passed.

Details of the PHP2Shell hack emerged while I was on holiday. This meant upgrading several servers at short notice. I’m starting to question whether AI now means that I can no longer support my own servers.

The second Hamonicon event took place in Todmorden. I attended one talk on the Saturday, planning to come back for most of the Sunday. Instead I had one of the worst migraines of my life, spending much of the day being sick. I mostly have fewer headaches lately, so this was disappointing.

I spent a few days playing deck-building game Inscryption. I’d heard there was an interesting twist and persevered with the help of Claude. I made it to the twist, although I’m now struggling to make further progress.

And that was October. One last thing: the new Jamie T record Ghosts (100 Days of Morning) was amazing.

My Own Personal Move 37

I’m doing Nanogenmo this year, which involves using software to produce novels. I started out by seeing whether Claude could produce a book with very little guidance. It’s worked better than expected. The result is better than many of the human-written books I’ve read this year.

Move 37 refers to a particular moment in the Go match between Lee Sedol and Deepmind’s AlphaGo computer program, which was won by AlphaGo. After the match Sedol said “I thought AlphaGo was based on probability calculation and that it was merely a machine. But when I saw this move, I changed my mind. Surely, AlphaGo is creative.”

In 2024 I tried producing a book with OpenAI and the prose was bland, uninteresting. This time, I worked with Claude’s Opus model. It’s long been known that LLMs work best with fiction based on found documents, so I thought I would try that. I also wanted something that would entertain me. So I set out an initial basic prompt.

I want you to come up with a breakdown for a novel about the novel House of Leaves creating an incursion into our universe. The novel should be 50,000 words long, and work a little like World War Z, producing a set of characters and formats to describe a growing catastrophe caused by Danielewski’s novel. You can break it down into chapters as you think fit. Use lost media, information hazards and creepypasta as inspirations.

This is objectively not a very good prompt. I know this because I’ve done my Claude certification. But I was only playing at the start of NaNoGenMo, trying to produce something as a starting point. Claude came up with a plan, which I didn’t read beyond a few paragraphs. I tweaked it from being a little too close to World War Z, then asked the LLM to produce text. I was spectacularly lazy, and requested that Claude generate its own prompts. I sent the text-in-progress to my Kindle and set about reading.

Claude’s book, The Quarter Inch, certainly did a better job with this idea than I would have done. The model has also avoided upsetting itself over copyright because, in the world of its book, quoting from the original text is considered dangerous..

The novel is definitely derivative of other works, and intentionally so. “[-] of Leaves” (as the book refers to it) is one of my favourite novels, one I know well and find genuinely terrifying. The Quarter Inch builds on that terror by describing that book escaping into the real world.

The Quarter Inch describes the first few incidents, book groups who measure their flats as a joke. Slowly, the rumours spread and more people encounter the House from the original book – until 29th February 2032, when all the openings close, leaving people trapped on the other side. In the aftermath, the world’s governments do their best to manage an impossible crisis. Meanwhile, Eve Calloway, a records manager at Hereford Council moves into a round building and begins creating an archive about ‘the Interior Event’.

There are some clumsy moments but the prose is generally smooth and unflashy. It’s very readable. I spotted a couple of potential edits, but very few of them. I’m currently reading a professionally published music biography where actual humans left notes to the editor in the text – so the standard of Claude’s book is beyond that of some human ones I’ve paid money for.

It’s possible the scenes that impressed me last night are based on other stories. Although there’s a great section about an AI company who have illegally included “[-] of Leaves” in their training data, and face the consequences. That doesn’t sound like a pre-existing story. There’s a council leaflet about ‘Measuring Week’, where everyone is asked to check their interior spaces which has a Scarfolk vibe.

The bit that blew my mind this morning featured a copy of a printer’s invoice from Lagos, item number QI/2039/017. The letter accompanying the invoice began as follows:

Dear Mrs Calloway,
My father, Tunde Okafor, died in 2033. You asked whether he printed the book. Yes. Everybody in Lagos who had a press printed it in 2027 and 2028, and my father had three. I am sending you one invoice because you asked for one. There were more than four hundred.
You must understand how it was. Someone had said, in a newspaper first and then everywhere, that if you wrote in this book your flat would get bigger. In a city where a family of six lives in one room, people heard that and nothing else. They did not hear the rest. They came with money in their hands. My father was not a wicked man, but he was not a fool either, and he printed what people paid for.

That passage takes an angle on the concept I’ve not considered. I love the phrasing in that last sentence too. Adaeze Okafor’s letter gives me a feeling of her personality. It’s a passage that expands The Quarter Inch‘s world beautifully.

Overall, this book has been very entertaining. Yes, there are errors. Yes, there are issues with LLMs as a technology. None of that takes away from the fact that I asked one to write me a 50,000 word novel and it did a good job. It’s impressed me several times with a good phrase. There are bits I’d change (“She gave me tea in a front room with a piano and a clock that ticked loudly enough to be a third person” – that seems a little overwritten compared to the rest). But, broadly, this works.

I don’t think Claude is going to replace human writers. I asked it to produce a specific style of novel I knew it might be good at. The text is based on a massive sample of human writing. But the fact that it’s done a good job here is significant. No publisher is likely to produce a story about [-] of Leaves – but with a £20 Claude subscription I’ve produced a specific book that I wanted to read.

There are obviously significant ethical issues around whether I should be producing a work based on Danielewski’s book without his permission. The Quarter Inch is certainly not a book that works without House of Leaves, but it is about the reaction to it. And it doesn’t replace that book, but instead points to it as an important work that people enjoy obsessively.

I’m generating the last couple of chapters in the book in the background while I write this, and I’ll add the finished text to this post once I’ve read it myself. I’ve not discussed my views on the significant issues around AI here. I am aware of them, and I have thoughts on that. But, for this post I wanted to focus on this fact: Claude has produced me a bespoke novel that I’m enjoying reading.

Dystopian Book Club: The Gate to Women’s Country

This month’s Dystopian Book Club selection is Sherri Tepper’s 1988 post-apocalyptic novel The Gate to Women’s Country. Set three hundred years after a nuclear war, it describes a society where city-states are run by women, with male warriors living in garrisons outside the towns. I can’t make the session, so I’m sharing my notes here.

The book was a good counterpoint to one of the group’s previous reads, Demonic Males, a study of male violence through primatology. That book made the point that societal structures can improve or worsen violence. Tepper’s book set out, somewhat heavy-handedly, to describe a scheme for reforming society.

Tepper’s writing feels clumsy and unsophisticated in places, which makes the novel feel didactic. We’re essentially given a tour of Marthatown through the eyes of Stavia, with incidents through her lifetime. The weak plot and characterisation make the book feel more like a debating point than a story, with far too much exposition. There are also some troubling scenes featuring sexual assaults which I suspect would be very different were Tepper writing today.

The most interesting aspect of the book was the play that is excerpted throughout, Iphigenia at Ilium. This is described in places as a ‘comedy’, despite the script itself being grim, which produces an interesting irony. My knowledge of the classics is flawed, so I didn’t appreciate the reference to Euripedes’ The Trojan Women, but this worked well despite that.

There’s an interesting question as to whether Tepper (or, more fairly, the book itself) considers Women’s Country as a good thing or not. The deceptions at the heart of Women’s Country are ultimately the place’s greatest problem. To a contemporary reader, the book’s focus on biological essentialism and eugenics feels vile – including a notorious paragraph explaining how homosexuality has been eradicated in this new world. I didn’t feel the book was ironic enough to be condemning Women’s Country as strongly as it deserved.

For me, the most troubling aspect was the idea that the women would gladly pass their sons into an all-male society that was inherently unsafe and brutalising. Tepper is trying to deal with essential problems – how male-led militaries threaten to lead the world to ruin – but ultimately the book has no answers and misses the chance to ask the right questions.

Monthnotes: September 2026

After a bumpy summer, I started settling things down in September. It didn’t go perfectly, but I made progress. I did more fun things – which, for me, is basically anything that doesn’t require much planning or preparation. I went to the Sutton Bonnington show, did some hiking with Mr Spratt, visited Leeds Zine Fair, and spent a good day bimbling around Todmorden with a friend.

A big highlight of the month was that visit from Mr Spratt to walk a section of the Calderdale Way. The walk felt harder than it should have been, but it was good to do a decent hike (my first of the year!) We went from Ripponden to Heptonstall – familiar territory but I found some new paths.

It was another bad month with my weight – another pound slipped on, meaning I’m about 5 pounds heavier than this time last year. Work and sleep schedules meant very few gym sessions, so I’ve put the daily steps from 6,000 back to 10,000 for October. I also need to be sleeping much better than I am.

The Quack Pack at Sutton Bonnington show

.For various reasons, I’ve been cooking low-FODMAP dishes at home. This involves cutting out various things including onions and garlic – both of which I rely on for my cooking. I’ve struggled with this and decided to ask an LLM what cuisines I could cook without adulteration. It suggested Japanese which turned out to be good advice, and I’ve been getting back into cooking.

Writing was slow in September. I had a few big projects to work on, and neglected the mailing list. The Advent Calendar took a lot of time. Several stories were dropped from this for being too dark, but I finally have a set that I’m happy with. I’ve also been making preparations for a November 1st workshop on microfiction. I attended Bryony Good’s Mycelia writing workshop which generated some interesting ideas – I just need time to finish them.

We had our six-monthly assessment sessions at work, which took a lot of preparation. Now they’re over, I’m focusing on client work for a while. While I have been worn out, I’m still enjoying my job, and actively look forward to seeing colleagues. I spent a lot of my life resenting work, so this has been a positive change.

I only watched four movies in September and didn’t make it to the cinema at all. I read several books including Ian McEwan’s What Can We Know and Emily St John Mandell’s new novel, Exit Party. Will Maclean’s Solace House was a fun read. It was chosen as part of the Drawing Blood book club at In A Land, and I’ve reviewed it here as I couldn’t make the. session. Probably my favourite book of the month was Janine Warren’s indie music oral history The World Was a Mess But His Hair Was Perfect.

Rosy and I watched the first season of The Rehearsal. I’d read about Fielder for a while, but was pushed to actually watch the show by an Adrian Hon essay. Excellent television.

Book Club: Midnight Timetable by Bora Chung

Today is the second Sweating Blood book club at In a Land gallery. I can’t make it, but once again I have read the book.

One of the great things about book clubs is reading things you wouldn’t normally pick up. Sometimes, they don’t work for you and this is a Good Thing. While I didn’t love Midnight Timetable, I don’t think it’s a bad book, just not one for me. I’m glad I tried it.

I’ll be brief about the things I didn’t like. The first couple of stories felt unengaging and a little obvious, particularly given Chung’s slight characterisation. The book identified characters by role rather than name, which I found alienating. Chung writes with telegraphic brevity. An example: “She took her to the most popular shopping mall in the city. Chatting endlessly, they ate snacks together and looked at all the clothes and appliances.” There’s a lack of detail here, a smoothness, that doesn’t work for me.

The horror elements were not as strong as I’d hoped and for much of the book it felt like a diluted SCP Foundation. I love this trope, which echoes the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark – the feeling that countless hidden stories that could be told. The early stories did little to build on these predecessors but then came the last chapter, Sunning Day. It took a new approach to the concept that I hadn’t expected and it was beautifully written. I felt this should have been the first chapter, with the book starting from there.

A few set-pieces work brilliantly and there are some interesting insights into Korean life. Some words are untranslated, which adds to the feeling of immersion – it’s easy to google a word like ‘goshiwon’. I also loved the afterword, where Chung suggests writing ghost stories as a playful way to dodge writer’s block.

I feel like I’ve been harsh on this book. I read a lot of horror, so I’m comparing Midnight Timetable to books like There is No Anti-Memetics Division. I suspect many people will enjoy it more than I did. I’d probably pick up another Bora Chung book in future.

Upcoming microfiction workshop – Hebden Bridge 1st November

I’m hosting a workshop on microfiction at In A Land gallery on November 1st. Tickets are £10 each.

Microfictions-flyer Download

This workshop is in the spirit of the five Brighton Creative Writing Sessions workshops that I ran with Ellen de Vries. I’m amazed to see that these workshops were back in 2010 – but I’ve not seen anyone since doing the sorts of events that we were running.

microfictions will be a relatively straightforward workshop, but I’m very much inspired by my collaborations with Ellen. Yesterday, I ran some field tests for my writing exercises. I tried several things I thought were too far-fetched, but they all went perfectly. I’m now more excited than ever about the workshop. (Thanks to Clara, Peter and Gina for helping out).

It’s important to me that the event is not gimmicky. I have a lot of thoughts about microfiction to share, and I want people to come out of the workshop with stories they can develop. Above all, I want people to have an enjoyable and social experience.

I’m planning to do a lot more workshops in 2027. I’ve one booked in for late November on ‘Lying for Writers’, and I’m speaking to Lou Ice about doing something spectacular in Sweden. If you want me to run an in-person workshop for your writing group, please get in touch.

Solace House by Will Maclean

On Saturday, In a Land are holding the first session of their book club, Sweating Blood. I can’t go because I’m hiking that day, but I read their first choice of book, Solace House, and here are my thoughts.

At the end of the university year, Alex doesn’t move out of his halls of residence. In response, the university offers him a job working with some other students to clear an old hospital. Alex joins a varied cast of characters who are then reassigned to clearing Solace House, a mansion that has been entirely filled with trash. Everyone is aware that there’s something wrong with this place.

In a recent Xanaduum newsletter, Grant Morrison described Solace House as “another of those things I stumble across more often these days where the writer appears to have been reading me and Alan Moore when he was younger”. And there are definitely a lot of tropes that I love from graphic novels – it reminded me in particular of Gideon Falls. The publishers compared it to The Secret History, which was a poor comparison – the only resonance was that both books are set at universities.

Solace House absorbs a lot of influences without being distorted by them – there is cosmic horror, gnosticism, labyrinths and fairyland. Julian Jaynes’ bicameral theory makes an appearance. There are hints at the Mandela effect, as something seems fundamentally misaligned with the book’s universe.

It’s strange reading books set in the 90s, as my memories of the time often clash with the writing. For example, there are phrases that I think were not common at the time (would we really have talked about dopamine then?). And I can’t see Bill Hicks being a cultural touchstone beyond a small group of aficionados – almost nobody had heard of him back then. Quibbles aside (would a student recognise a font as Antiqua Double?), this is a good book.

Solace House finds various ways to build dread, including the use of metafiction to undermine the characters’ grip on reality. The strangeness of their location suggests that they might have entered a story – that lost phone, ringing somewhere in a cluttered house, is almost too perfect. They know that their experiences are like a story – at one point, someone says “‘I believe it was Anton Chekhov who said that if you introduce a shedload of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Act One, you have to do them all by the end of Act Three at the latest.’”

The sense of unreality is used brilliantly when Alex makes a trip to a supermarket. The items he sees are described in the same poetic listings as used for the house: “Earth’s dwindling, irreplaceable rainforests and wild places, one way or another, packed up into cans and packets.”

This was entertaining and genuinely creepy at times – I made my way through it in a couple of days. There was a great running joke about literary orphans and an interesting puzzle. While not all of this worked for me, I was definitely entertained.

Monthnotes: August 2026

August started in the ruins of July and never really recovered from that. Still, the house has been busy and that’s been lovely. Several people stayed while working on an exhibition at In a Land. We also had Rosy’s friend and her 15-month old daughter staying for the month along with a visit from Dan Sumption.

The biggest change this month was moving to a new client at work. I’m travelling to Leeds twice a week, but that’s a much easier journey than previously. It’s amazing how different things felt when I finished that last role – all my cravings for bad food turned down straight away.

This lack of cravings has not helped with my weight though. Over the course of August, I put on an incredible 2½ pounds. My diet has been better (helped by cooking real food for our guests), so I’m not sure what’s been going wrong. The warnings are there though: I am getting fat. I am slowly working through belt notches. My clothes are shrinking.

I read ten books in August. I’ve been re-reading the Dark Tower series alongside the Talking Scared podcast. The most recent installment, Wolves of the Calla, was a slow epic. Annie Jacobsen’s Biological War: A Scenario was even more terrifying than her previous book on nuclear war (see my blog post). The new Jon Ronson was entertaining but didn’t really go anywhere. Dystopian book club choice Demonic Males was a depressing look at male violence through primatology. Algospeak was a great book about how the online world affects language. Matt Wixey’s Basilisk was an entertaining pulp novel. While it’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to the writer (and don’t much plan to), Ghosts of the Medicine Show was an excellent and inspiring book, and deserves a post of its own. I also read the alpha draft of Cat Vincent’s forthcoming book.

For a moment, it looked to me as if someone had skinned Mr Blobby.

I missed a couple of blockbusters at the cinema due to having guests, which is OK. We rewatched a few things at home including both 28 Years Later films and Fury Road. Ben Wheatley’s Bulk was frustrating at times, but ultimately inspiring. The cinema highlight was a double bill of I Saw the TV Glow with Jane Schoenbrun’s new film Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The latter was a great film which I’m desperate to see again while it’s on.

I’m not convinced by eclipses – give me a good sunset, anytime. But there’s something magical about people gathering for an event, and knowing the last time that it will happen in the UK will be 2090. I’d been planning to ignore the eclipse, but my friend Jen encouraged me to head out onto the moors and I’m glad I did.

Writing has been slower this month, somewhat ineffective. I did a great practical book-binding session where I practised my stitching skills on some booklets I’d generated – each an edition of one.

I passed my Claude Certified Architect exam at the end of the month. This involved a lot of cramming. I also switched from a paid OpenAI account to a paid Anthropic one, and I’m loving the change in models. Claude turns out to be great for personal stuff. While using an AI for coaching carries some risk, it’s effective. And it does make sense to use a machine for these sorts of reflections rather than inflicting it on people.

An incredible review of the Odyssey: “an autobiographical film about Nolan regretting wasting a decade of his life making Batman films and his attempt to use those films as a Trojan horse for prestige cinema was mistake he and the film industry are still paying for.”
I met someone who was twice crowned world stinging nettle eating champion
The Mycelium Parish News 2025 edition is now sold out.
My biggest achievement of the month: getting a crying baby to sleep.

Biological War: A Scenario

I used to be scared about climate change; but then I read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Now I think that the world will be lucky to reach four degrees.

Annie Jacobsen’s nuclear war book described what might happen after a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ nuclear attack (the same scenario as in Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite). It’s an interesting mix of non-fiction and fiction. People can quibble about the exact scenario, but the facts are clear: any nuclear attack will be an atrocity.

I’d thought Jacobsen’s latest book would be less horrific. I didn’t expect something easy, but plague seemed less of an existential threat than nuclear annihilation. I was wrong. I had no idea about some of the biological agents that have been produced in laboratories around the world.

There are four bio-safety levels used to classify laboratories. BSL-3 is the sort of lab that works with covid-style pathogens (Jacobsen does not endorse the covid lab-leak theory, but certainly draws attention to it). There are hundreds of BSL-3 labs around the world, some of them engaging in gain-of-function research. Then there are BSL-4 labs, which deal with the worst pathogens, some of them synthetic. Dozens of these exist around the world.

Jacobsen is a great story-teller, and saves an awful twist for the afterword. There are worse scenarios possible than the one she chose for her book. Biological weapons require much less infrastructure than nuclear ones, and technology is bringing them within the reach of individuals.

Monthnotes: July 2026

After a lovely June, July felt like pissing into the wind and I’m glad it’s done. The wheels fell off at the start of the month from a combination of stress, bad food and sickness – and never really got running again. Work commitments also meant cancelling some plans made back in September. There were some lovely high points, but overall it was a drag.

The month started with a trip to the Lytham Festival to see Skunk Anansie and Alanis Morisette. I’ve not been to a lot of gigs since the pandemic, and I was surprised how much I enjoyed it. There was also a fun zine session at In a Land with Caitlin, a hike with some work friends, the office summer gathering, Gina and Lou’s wedding, an engineering summit, and Cleria and Mark’s visit.

Work has, however, squatted toad-like over everything, with a delayed release causing a lot of stress. I also failed to book the holiday to EMF Camp that I’d planned since September. This was a stupid mistake, one I’d not expect from a junior, and it cost me the holiday. Our team have been doing a fantastic job with a complicated release process, but it’s been a slog. I do have a rotation date now – I am going to dearly miss working with our team, but I am excited about a change.

The big problem at the moment is that I’m not having enough fun. I’m not very good at type-1 fun (enjoyable in the moment), and end up aiming for type-2 fun (preparation or stress that’s fun to look back on). All my hobbies have deadlines, and I often commit myself to projects I later regret. While I wasn’t very good at drinking, I miss the silliness and spontaneity of those nights out. While fixing this feels a little harder than just ‘have some fun’, I definitely know some things I should stop doing.

One of the things that needs to be more fun is the writing. I have started a larger project that I’m enjoying. I’m not sure what anyone else might make of it, but that’s part of why it’s fun. I’ve also been thinking a lot about a John Higgs essay I read about being a writer and, you know, maybe I should lean into that a little more.

We’ve looked after 4 different dogs this month – Shuggie (pictured), Midge, Bernie and Fern

The month included a lot of cinema trips. The Odyssey was an interesting take on the myth, although I regretted seeing it in an Everyman Cinema. I found the last ten minutes of Undertone so terrifying that for a few minutes I regretted watching it. Evil Dead Burn was unrepentantly nihilistic, and made me question why I was watching something so unpleasant. Rosy and I tried watching Election, but it was so vile that we gave up after 30 minutes. War Dogs was geopolitics as teen comedy, and it left me shocked. I’ve also started a new letterboxd list for Films I’ve Given Up Watching. Entry one: The Amateur.

I read some good books this month. John Higgs’ The Bees are our Friends was a lovely miscellany, which has set me off thinking about a few things. The dystopian book group selected 1956’s savage The Death of Grass. While it displayed some dated attitudes, these were mostly used to attack British post-imperial exceptionalism. Babylon, South Dakota was a recommendation from Talking Scared podcast and very different to what I’d normally read. John Langan’s The Fisherman was a great piece of cosmic horror, despite a nested structure that I didn’t love. Having abandoned Mick Herron’s Clown Town on a first read back in January, I gave it a second try after Warren Ellis described it as having a more interesting resolution. I also finished a couple of dull books from June that I should have abandoned – see what I mean about having fun?

Carlo Rovelli’s slim book on nuclear war, 85 Seconds to Midnight was filled with nightmares. I find it incredible that we could kill most of humanity in a matter of hours and our politicians don’t want to face this. I spend a lot of time thinking about nuclear war, and can’t understand how everyone else doesn’t.

I only started following Charli XCX after the remix album Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat, and subsequently liked the Wuthering Heights soundtrack. I’ve fallen in love with the new record Music, Fashion Film. The vocals remind me of George Pringle, and final track No-one Lasts Forever, featuring David Cronenburg, is a masterpiece. I wasn’t expecting a record about making art in the face of our mortality.

A positive note to end on – I signed up for a gym this month. It took a while to get the induction session sorted, but it’s a significant move. I’m also going to increase my daily steps total to 6000. I don’t have the heart for a full 10,000 right now, but maybe once I move to my new work client.

Another downer from July – I have some expensive dental work coming up. I’m questioning whether I can afford to maintain teeth.
On top of everything else, I had food poisoning from some vegan rice at the Alanis Morisette gig. I drove home before it hit but then I was out of action all that next day. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so ill.
This month brought another new prime minister. I’m not expecting much from this one – I don’t think he has big enough ideas and the lack of mandate will bring him down.
Spotify search is terrible – I ended up downloading all my data to find a single earworm.
We have swifts nesting in the eaves. It’s great to see them flying near the house.
This blog is currently a wikipedia citation for the release of Buck 65’s album King of Drums.
We’ve had the chimney fixed, so we’re all set for winter.