Cold bright morning with just a hint of fog. Lovely start to the day.
ON DECK: Want to finish section 3 of consult job by end of the afternoon. Need to mark up the boards and start prep for Friday phone conference. Am now across AUTHORITY book reprint plans.
INBOX: 74
LISTENING:
READING: cracked and bought the new Krasznahorkai. It radiates Beckett, Borges, Calvino and Kafka.
Mark Power’s Shipping Forecast photographs:
Though the shipping forecast is still broadcast daily on BBC Radio 4, the strange resonance of what Seamus Heaney called “that strong gale-warning voice” may not, in an age of digital information overload, cast quite the same spell it once did on the collective imagination. It nevertheless remains a constant for many listeners, reassuring in its steadiness even as it gives notice of unruly swells and approaching storms in those faraway-sounding hinterlands of Dogger, Viking and German Bight.
“It occupies a deeply rooted place in our culture,” says Mark Power, whose book The Shipping Forecast comprises photographs from the 31 sea areas that are enumerated in the daily radio litany. “For many of us there is an essential mystery to the shipping forecast that perhaps comes from hearing it in the background as a child, but not really understanding it. And, even as we grow older, it’s difficult for most of us to understand it, because we’re not depending on it the way sailors or trawler crews depend on it.”
A superb piece by Richard Foster on the Echo and the Bunnymen album PORCUPINE, which produced what were for me two seminal singles, “The Back Of Love” and “The Cutter:
Shankar had previously added strings to ‘The Back Of Love’, also produced by Broudie, then going under the name of Kingbird, a moniker given to him by a depressed Liverpool mate who saw the musician as a magical figure. This guise allowed him to adopt a more shamanistic, interventionist role than merely being credited “producer” of a Bunymen record. In true Liverpool style Broudie saw the role behind the mixing desk as mythopoeic, an almost physical adjunct to the soul, akin to summoning up a creative unguent akin to the Cthulhu tales
The little person ran off back down the garden before I could get a close shot, but we now have two increasingly brave squirrels visiting the garden daily.
ON DECK: pre-conference notes document to finish, then the next section of the consult job, then WRITTLE 2 105
INBOX: 72. Email tonight, probably.
LISTENING:
READING: TLS
LAST WATCHED: (most of) TOP GUN: MAVERICK.
SHIPPING FORECAST: No idea. Depends on whether this slight eyestrain clears or not! Happy Monday.
In which writer Paul Ford tries a new drug for Type 2 diabetes management and discovers it completely switches off his previously hyperactive hunger signal and basically goes crazy-wall for a while:
“Something’s happened,” I told my wife. She is a veteran of watching me try to fix my body. I told her: Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume—there was sudden silence. It was confusing. Would it last?
I went alone that night to a Chinese restaurant, the old-school kind with tables, and ordered General Tso’s. I ate the broccoli, a few pieces of chicken, and thought: too gloopy. I left it unfinished, went home in confusion, a different kind of sleepwalker. I passed bodegas and shrugged. At an office I observed the stack of candies and treats with no particular interest.
Decades of struggle—poof. Apparently the Mounjaro molecule targets the same hormone as Ozempic, plus a second one, so it doesn’t just stimulate insulin production but also boosts energy output.
“I urgently need,” I thought, “an analog synthesizer.” Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos about. I needed something to fail at every night to feel normal. And I was also manic, dysregulated, and wide-eyed, sleeping five hours a night, run-walking, with pressured speech; my friends, happy for me but confused, called me “cocaine Paul.” I bought more synthesizers off a guy from Craigslist, meeting him in Bushwick, Brooklyn, with a grand in cash. A body is not designed to lose 25 pounds in eight weeks, starting during the holidays. Beep. Boop.
The largest bronze mirror and largest dakō iron sword in Japan were discovered at a late-fourth century tomb mound in the city of Nara, its board of education and an archeological institute that supported the excavation said Wednesday.
Mirror and shields are considered to be tools to protect the dead from evil spirits. The sword is thought to have been enlarged to increase its power…
Status update: so I ordered ten bare-root raspberry canes for twenty quid the other day. They turned up today, a day early. So I’ve had to spend ninety minutes soaking them and containerising them. I repotted the six bare root blueberry bushes I bought for a tenner before Xmas and had to shelter in the plastic mini-greenhouse for a month because of the long freeze, too. So I’m a little behind. But raspberries are my partner’s favourite berry, so we’re going to see if I can’t give her fresh ones from the garden in the future. And, since I’ve been at the desk or hunched over a notebook continuously for some while now, the exercise and air was good for me. Sticking my finger in random cat shit laid behind a weed I needed to pull out to situate this pot, not so much.
We tend to get a false spring out here on the Thames Delta. It’s come a little earlier than usual this year, and will last for another few days before the temperature drops again. Everything in the garden is very confused, and I will have to wait another week before I do the late winter pruning.
ON DECK: All the things. Need to mark up the boards with a bunch of changes and new things. As soon as I can see properly, I’m going into two different scripts, to clear the weekend for a pitch document I need to write following yestetday’s phone conference. And also buying herself’s large and expensive birthday present. Argh.
INBOX: 61. Processing email now.
LISTENING:
A new Fatima Al Qadiri EP.
Gallery: Joseph Yaeger.
Here’s some unusual criteria to consider when deciding what to wear: if you’re scanned by facial-recognition software, do you prefer being detected as a zebra, giraffe, or a dog? Cap_able, an Italian fashion-meets-tech startup, prompts consumers to consider individual rights to privacy when making decisions about self-expression. The studio’s inaugural project, the Manifesto Collection, combines knitwear with an algorithm into a kind of 21st-century camouflage that protects the wearer’s biometric data without the need to conceal the face.
Being an author really means running a small business and there can be a lot to keep track of. I have, in the past, used one notebook to track all my writerly business, but they fill up fast when you’re keeping busy. Enter a big set of seven lovely notebooks…
Most of my notebooks are pocket size journals and sketchbooks. I tend to go through them fairly fast, and I’m not that hard on them. They get broken-in but they stay in pretty good shape. I’ve had a few notebooks where the spine tore apart– my first Moleskine softcover, and a Markings/CR Gibson notebook come to mind (photo in this post). But nothing has gotten as abused as this Picadilly notebook that I’ve been using for cooking notes!
Bare-root apple trees have arrived. They do look dead, but they are (or should be!) just dormant. I’m soaking the roots in a tub of rainwater for an hour before planting them in containers. One’s a Bloody Ploughman, from Scotland, the other a Christmas Pearmain. I have two other, more local apple trees coming in to bridge the pollination groups.