May 2017

C17: Day 131 – The comfort of information

May 11, 2017

When I first moved to London, in the mid-90s, I hated taking buses. I didn’t know the city well, and it was far too easy to get on the wrong bus, or miss your stop. I would end up sitting by the window, looking out for street names so that I could check where I was […]

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C17: Day 130 – How do we combat mass manipulation?

May 10, 2017

I started trying to read The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked by Carole Cadwalladr on the plane yesterday, but had to give up because it was too depressing. Political campaigns, says Cadwalladr, are paying vast sums of money to a company called Cambridge Analytica to do psychological profiling of voters in the UK and […]

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C17: Day 129 – Where has all the magic gone?

May 9, 2017

One upon a time, a long long time ago, I used to work for BAA, the British Airports Authority. At the time, they operated most of the big airports in the UK, and I worked in the Retail Finance department, out by Heathrow. I was only there, as a temp, for I think about nine […]

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C17: Day 128 – The bucket

May 8, 2017

Sometimes, you’re just too tired to actually write a blog post, so you just embed a YouTube video. (I suspect the small birds at the beginning are house finches. We have them here, and the male has that lovely raspberry chest.)

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C17: Day 127 – The problem with DIY gel nails

May 7, 2017

As I’ve already confessed mentioned, I recently started using the Gelish “soak-off” gel nail polish system, and overall I’m happy with it. There is just one massive downside though: It’s a bastard to get the polish off. Although I’ve only been doing this a few months, and I’m only changing colour about every 1-2 weeks, I’ve already spotted a […]

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C17: Days 125 & 126 – Consultative democracy

May 6, 2017

So, yes, I slightly forgot to blog yesterday, but I did talk about writing this blog post, so I’m counting that as, well, “pre-blogging”.  There are, I think, several commonalities between the election of Trump last November and the vote to Brexit the European Union nearly a year ago. But the one commonality that I have been […]

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C17: Day 124 – Inspirational Ouroboros

May 4, 2017

I started blogging in 2002, tentatively at first, and then with increasing enthusiasm. There was something very liberating about writing a blog, one that people read and commented on. A group of us bloggers met up, and became friends, and I still know almost all of them to this day. But somewhere in the melee of work […]

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C17: Day 123 – Sorry, Grabbity

May 3, 2017

Last summer, we noticed that Grabbity was having a problem with her waterworks. She was peeing blood, peeing outside the box, washing herself a lot and had little to no control over the bladder. We whipped her off to the vet, who did a urine analysis and discovered she had a slight infection and crystals […]

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C17: Day 122 – What Teen Vogue taught me

May 2, 2017

If Teen Vogue has taught me anything, it’s that girls and women can care about politics and having nice nails. Enjoying dying your hair or fashion or having nice nails is not a sign of intellectual poverty, it’s a sign of being a normal human being. Now, last year, for Ada Lovelace Day, I wanted […]

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C17: Day 121 – How disc-binding made me want to write again

May 1, 2017

April was a quiet month on the blog, because my creative task for the month was to work on my novel and thus was not for daily blogging. And what a productive month it was: I reorganised my notes completely, using a disc binder system which allows me to remove and add pages, and my ideas just […]

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