wherever you go i want to go.

what happened this week? christmas

christmas was very nice. i cooked a chicken, with grandfather’s stuffing; braised red cabbage, with balsamic vinegar; carrots and parnsips, with nutmeg and butter; piggies in their blankets; brussels, with fresh roast chestnuts; yum yum.

cooking started on christmas eve and went until we were eating. we had a lovely time. it was very warm and homely and nice. christmas. christmas time. a year ago today it was christmas time too. happy anniversary, christmas. there were some nice walks and nice meals that weren’t christmas, too.

what else? i did a little work, did a little snooze. it’s Monday tomorrow but i’m not going to take it personally. today i breadboarded a fuzz pedal circuit with 3.5mm sockets.

it was just all very nice, it’s been a year now. i wrote a little code, read a little book, watched a little tv. a little sainsburys has made itself known around the corner, i don’t know how long it’s been hiding out there watching and waiting.

zoggle taught me to do a wavy hair routine and now my hair is very wavy. thanks for my new hair, zimber. next year will be even better.

tidied a couple of corners up. working now from my desk, which is clear of clutter for the first time in a very long time. what are we doing for new years? perhaps a nice walk. the parade? go out on the river. and on the eve? cheese in the bath while listening to This Will Be Our Year by The Zombies?

a good cheese should be cherished.

Merry Christmas, or thereabouts.

Did I mention I’ve been having nightmares? terrible nightmares, every night. waking up sweating cold, exit stage up pursued by a wraith, tense sensations all in my forearms.

Read a couple of books this week. Don’t know if I really get up to much else. I skipped a few engagements. Seemed to spend a lot of time emptying and filling the dishwasher. Not much time using dishes. Where were they all coming from? And preparing to cook Christmas dinner. Heading all over town trying to locate all the little bits. Got most of it now. Can’t find a gluten-free crumb. Maybe I’ll make my own. Can you make crumb?

Yes, you’re right. Wandering around that night was fun. Did I tell you I gave up drinking? Well, there’s that. This time next year expect me to be skinny and rich. That’s not why. Finally read that Bevins book If We Burn. It was very good. And a Jeeves & Wooster book too. Now I’m reading a book about sobriety. Next up is another P.G. Wodehouse and The Jakarta Method.

Wrote a web-based Things 3 clone for me and Zaina to use for shared lists. It works really well. Wrote it with SolidJS, Automerge and my automerge-repo-solid-primitives library. That library might be the most enjoyable way to build software in existence. Specifically the function that creates a deeply reactive projection from an Automerge handle. Everybody should get to experience this. I built this same app before, with Y.js and Preact. It took me about 3 weeks. I built the automerge-repo-solid-primitives version in 3 hours. There are about 1000 lines of code and only about 40 of them have anything to do with collaboration. Because the library is magic. And Automerge is magic. And SolidJS is very good.

There’s an unsettling feeling of queasiness rising in my belly. Feel like I might just throw up. Not sure if there’s enough in there to throw up though. I’d better go and eat some cheese so I have something to throw up. Good night. Have a good winter holidays time.

I remember a time I met an old friend from IRC in person for lunch at a Japanese place in London near the “humble objects made of clay” gallery in the Autumn. After we’d left and we were walking home I was surprised to learn he used a Mac now; Kat and I had started using Macs towards the end of the channel’s life and this man was quite strongly opposed to the whole idea. I asked if he was still using Emacs and he laughed like I’d reminded him of something we did at school, like I’d asked if he still plays hopscotch. “Sick of my config breaking,” he’d said.

Last week I recall I reported to you from my first bed in Tuscany. Some hundred thousand steps ago, all uphill. I neglected to report my experience on the aeroplane. “Is there no end to the indignities I must face?” I’d asked my reflection. “Now I see that I am to contend with nasal hairs. The blotchy red skin around my nose and forehead, and the deep caverns around the eyes that stare back at me from this aeroplane bathroom mirror…” Moments before I’d been scolded by the man in blue and tartan for merely holding a vape.

    “What is that in your hand, sir?”

The “sir” always unexpected, cutting like a knife. I looked so pretty in a patterned jumpsuit and my makeup was perfect by aeroplane standards. And only minutes had passed since I’d valiantly stepped into an occupied aisle so that this gentleman could pass to the front of the plane and he had said “thank you so much” and i’d thought that we were on good terms.

“Oh! I’m just holding it.”
    “You can’t use that on the plane, sir”

So many “sir”s. Rapid fire from some people. South Asian men in cafes are the most fond of it, a sort of machine-gunning tactic they take with a “sir,” at the start of every sentence and a “sir?” at the end, wrapping every question or statement in a kind of sir-shaped parenthesis. Why this is the case has its own unnatural weight that seems to compound the stress of it.

Sometimes the best moment of my day is a rotund Turkish man in a grocery shop risking a “ma’am” following a long moment of hesitation between the greeting and the honorific. Yet I’m always “sir” when I’m in trouble. And these tired red eyes are locked on themselves, with the peripheral focus on this black hair protuding from the olfactorial. Do I need a tool for this now? I tried pinching at it with my fingernails but I can’t seem to get it pinced. I’ll have to conduct the act with tweezers when we land.

At least they have Worcestershire Sauce for spicy tomato juice on board. That really puts the “British” in “British Airways”.

The week in Italy was wonderful, though steppy. So sad when we fight, everything would be okay if we could talk to each other but we can’t reach each other. At those times having holes in your personality the shape of the prongs in the other’s is not the usual comfort, in fact it is deeply sickly. But it seems to get easier over time, as we learn that we’re still there afterwards. As in all things, over time, the depths are not so deep and the time there not so long.

Shisha, taglietelle, creamy sauce, coffee, bad beds, good walks, some of the coldest days and warmest memories of my life. We went to see pulp fiction at a beautiful cinema with a stained glass ceiling and a bookshop in the middle of it. We scared ourselves silly in Lucca. Please put curtains on the windows, otherwise they become the kind that faces look in and haunt poor little animals like me. i read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message during the trip, and recommend it fervently to any readers or writers reading. We’re sober now. I’d been looking forward to enjoying a nice Tuscan red but instead we decided to give up drinking alcohol for the rest of our lives.

I remember that time I was minding my own business working in my mother’s shop, and then the boy beside me said “look at this” and showed me a video on his phone of someone chainsawing a live pig in half. I think it was a Sony Ericsson W910i.

She had a return flight to Florence, but was going over to the coast during the trip. Her flight ended up dropping her in Pisa and BA gave her a taxi to Fiorenze. I had two one ways. I drop in Florence, but I fly home from Pisa. It turned out in such a way that I brought her to LCY with all my bags in tow, then went off to Stanstead for my own flight. She dropped in Pisa, me in Florence, then we met on the Arno near the hotel. Then in Pisa she brought me to the airport, all her bags in tow and rushed back off to Fiorenze. I landed in Heathrow, then zipped off down to Gatwick to meet her as she landed.

In Pisa we stopped on the river and “it’s so nice to see Arno again. haven’t seen him since Fiorenze. he spent the morning with us, when i first got in from the plane station” and off we walked to a restaurant that turned out to be closed.

Everything in Tuscany is closed most of the time. If something appears to be open, you’d best check Apple Maps and Google Maps. If they both say “open now” then there is a 75% chance it really will be, unless it’s a Wednesday or Monday in which case the chances go down to around 10%.

It’s hard to find a restaurant that isn’t selling tagliatelle ragu but when you do and you’re confronted with powdered speck and pig’s blood and cow’s guts and chicken gizzards and do you know what carbonara is just delicious actually isn’t it or let’s go to a tratoria.

My feet. My legs. No wonder these people have never won a war. But I had a wonderful time in Italy and I’d love to go again.

The rest of my life is fine. We had dinner at Imad’s tonight. It’s bed time now, and it’s Christmas time too. Almost time to head to the butcher to pick up some sausage meat and the grocer will have parsley and rice crumb, enough for grandfather’s stuffing.