Word of the day is threnody, stressed with the rhythm of melody, a poem or
song of mourning or lamenting.
let's
We've started using Things 3 to keep track of our To-Do lists. It's fun
using a pretty app. it's really good just having a single place to put things
instead of having decision paralysis every time i think of something.
blood soaked horses
a number of horses were on the loose in central london. there was a white one
and he was drenched in blood. here's how the headline on the live post by the
independent changed over time:
'Number of horses' on the loose in central London - as one appears to be
covered in blood
Blood-soaked runaway cavalry horses charge through London as soldier injured
Blood-soaked Household Cavalry horses loose in central London injuring people
and hitting cars
Three soldiers among those injured as blood-soaked cavalry horses rampage
through city
Runaway horses in serious condition βbut still aliveβ minister says
London horses β live: Runaway horse Quakerβs condition βnot looking goodβ as
Vida returns to stables
now, ignoring the transition to a somewhat accusatory tone directed at the
horses, it is true that that one white horse was called Quaker as in tremble at
the word of god which evokes Revelation "and behold a white horse, clothed with
a robe dipped in blood, and His name is called The Word Of God". the only thing
john the revelator got wrong is that Christ was not upon the horse, Christ was
the horse and he trampled on some soldiers. There were 3 soldiers and one
non-soldier taken to hospital for horse injuries. Their names have not been
released so until we know for sure it's best to operate with the assumption
their names are Conquest, War, Famine, and the non-soldier Death.
brindisa
we went out for a wonderful spanish meal at Brindisa, LB to celebrate the
schengen appointment and eat chorizo. great dinner. the beer hit a little too
hard. i had a small chat with some irish people who were pretending not to be
irish. i noticed my old vape shop has been replaced by an independent french
patisserie which seems like the wrong way round for how these homecomings go and
is quite pleasing. we met luke blaney, one of our
planet's strangest people, for a little empanada at porteΓ±a.
rooftop cinema
went to the rooftop cinema with dani to watch clueless. dani was a little late
so i got our blankets and found some seats. dani is recovering from whooping
cough because dani is a chimney sweep and/or news boy from victorian london
and/or four year old child.
tell you what Peckham is wild these days. i moved out of there a few years ago
and i thought i knew what direction it was going. lot of people who wouldβve
moved to shoreditch if the rent wasnβt high moving in. so i thought oh i know
where this is going, but iβll tell you what i was wrong. that place has the
highest freak density in london, and i mean that in a good way. all kinds of
wild people going around. now thereβs bouncers at every bar because more
students are drinking there, but thereβs also man in the street making barbecue
in an overturned barrel listening to reggae. in need of further analysis.
On the train home was a guy trying to get to βthe next big townβ after
Lewisham. "Woolwich!" When I was reading out the steps when Iβd got out of the
bathroom and I read him the steps βWoolwich! Does this stop there?β And I
checked and it does. He had a djembe and a few other drums and bells and he
stank of piss and had bright clothes and he looked me right in the eyes with his
icy blues and said thankyou and he bumped my fist. That kind of older red-sknned
white man with close white hair covering his whole head but thin and spare and
not dense. Once youβve given someone time who everyone else is trying to ignore
those other people wonβt meet your gaze any more. Did I taint myself or do they
just not know how to act? Iβve never known.
You cast a very interesting silhouette. that's OK fox, I'm not here for you.
trying the crackled path leading out from the cathedral to my home
While i was on the toilet zaina slapped me in the face with Β£500 cash and
knocked my glasses off.
night mare
this night i had one of the strangest and most persistent nightmares of my
life. we were all in a war and we could all cast these magic spells to attack
and harm and maim our opponents and there was a crowd going around who'd figured
out how to make us cast all our known spells on ourselves and they were much
more powerful than us. i kept realizing it was a nightmare and waking up and
being like "phew!" but then i'd fall back to sleep and be back in the same
nightmare as though it was not a dream but just another reality that was running
alongside the one in my waking life.
saturday after payday
a long day but a lot of fun. started out with a grand perigrination across the
island of england from lewisham, south greenwich to a business park in north to
eat an incredible lebanese breakfast at beit el zaytoun. house of olives. a sort
of fairuz theme restaurant on the canal. i'd never been before but when we
stepped down by the canal i realized i'd been right next to it a bunch of times
as it sits on the Grand Union facing the Grand Junction Arms, a place i am by
accident several times a year next to the mcvities biscuit factory. with the
bakerloo line closure and Harlesden closed we may have picked the worst day of
the year to make that journey, but a 2 hour morning constitutional (walk, not
poop) puts you in the right frame of mind for a breakfast for two that could
feed a family of five.
we walked to north acton, got some documents printed by the guy who owns anakin
skywalker in star wars episode 1, and took a choochoo train to TCR where we
visited the graveyard of the british invasion and got some stationery and saw a
girl being carried around on a ladder ladder by several gay men and 1 straight
man in a kilt and bought some undergarments and ate mexican food at the first
mexican restaurent in the UK and drank beer and ate koshari and drank beer and
ate nuggets and pork buns and drank beer and went to zoozoo's with big dreams of
packing up some little boxes for her move and getting a 2am Bolt (cheaper and
fast) but maybe we'll just lie down for a little bit cozy for a few minutes
before we get started and oh we're waking up and oh it's 7am and i have to rush
off to get a washing machine and none of the packing has happened.
now, this looks delicious:
you know those weird pubs that don't know who they are? house music and pub
grub... pickled eggs and 909 hats shouldn't be in close proximity, it is
unhygienic
sunday machine
and now i'm at home waiting for that washing machine that hasn't been delivered
yet. made a breakfast of humous and a corn tortilla with cheese and za'atar and
now i'm drinking beer and waiting for the new washing machine.
i can't wait to have a washing machine with a countdown clock on it and one that
doesn't leave a strange smell! i am less enthuastic about the bluetooth icon
i've seen on the washing machine in the pictures, but we'll see. maybe it'll be
fun and i'll be able to link it with Shortcuts.app (my favourite programming
language) to have a certain song play when the wash is done and automatically
add a reminder to empty the machine!
i've got a thing now where every time i come home my phone automatically adds a
reminder to type up all my paper notes into my digital notes.
click here to join my secret society The Meeting of the Blood-Soaked Horses.
i forgot to mention it last week, but look at this super cute collage postcard
lb made and sent over
new business
little springs
we have no ruffled grouses nor spring peepers here but there were plenty of
moths. zoozoo was staying the week and we cleaned out the everything. i realized
the masa harina incident never truly ended because around the corner in that
haunted cupboard there was an unseen organic granola full of breeding
henries. we have since destroyed their habitat and defeated them, it would seem,
for good.
schengen area
imagine a visa application system where you had to have tickets for a flight and
hotel before you apply for the appointment to ask for permission to use the
flight and hotel, and where very few of the visa appointments are given out
every month, and where they are snatched up quickly, and then you only get 90
days if you're lucky. eventually we managed to get an appointment and have
accidentally booked a trip to spain in june.
macedonia
in other news, if you have a UK Biometric Residence Permit you can visit
Macedonia for 15 days without a visa this year onlyapparently.
All foreign nationals who are holders of valid USA, UK-British, and
Canadian visas, with multiple entries can enter the Republic of North
Macedonia without requiring a short-stay (visa C) issued from the Republic of
North Macedonia. The length of the stay at one entrance should not exceed 15
(fifteen) days, while the duration and the validity of the USA, British, and
Canadian visa should be 5 (five) days longer than the planned stay in the
Republic of North Macedonia. This decision is of a temporary character and
shall be in force from 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024.
good news for roasted red pepper fans.
other business
i didn't take any notes this week, so it's hard to retrace my steps. i think we
mostly just tidied and tidied and tidied. the apartment looks lovely. and i
cooked lots of nice meals. roasted red pepper and feta dip; and curry; and lemon
and garlic and olive oil and butter codfish; and keto-ejjeh; a beef sausage
tomato and roast pepper casserole; many cheese flatbreads, one very pizza;
labneh. a nice fat omelete this morning with grilled bacon and philadelphia.
i'm reading the john dolan book, enjoying his surprisingly parallel struggles as
he sees the world by accident. it's good company to know you can be 60 years old
and still not have your shit together but survive and eat mcdonalds.
market business
we went for a nice walk today to the market. then to see where the marathon
began, it was noisy. we stopped in at a coffee shop and bought some cute amber
glass cups and saucers and new filters and came home and some nice coffee with
lunch that was leftover dinner. it's funny how all those marathon strangers
peering up at the tops of the buildings on my local high street like it was some
foreign land made it all feel new again. with april threatening to shine a
summer sun and take its clouds in the days feel long and hopeful, like they
could have a joy in them.
zoozoo was over at my rabbit hutch for a few days, and on tuesday we went out to
slade green to collect my . it was fun riding the train and
drinking canned beers. the instrument is great fun! very playful.
she had a friend coming over for Eid so left on Wednesday morning, we had kind
of a strange night but it was just a lot of pressure from feeling like there
isn't much time to make a lot of big decisions.
more silly things on this website
i spent some of my free time this week adding a micropub endpoint so i can write
posts from (for instance) IA Writer.app or Drafts.app on my phone and
computer.
NOTE FOR COMPUTER PEOPLE ONLY: implementing micropub is actually
not as hard i thought AND you don't actually need indieauth.
indieauth is just used to get a oauth token, but then the oauth token is sent as
authentication: Bearer ${token}. so i just made one publish token and then
told IA Writer.app about it.
i'm having a lot of fun making little icons and preparing for interactive and
art posts. hopefully soon i'll actually have some art inside me again to put in
them. but for now it's a lot of fun laying brick.
sneaking through the night
i took a bolt at about 2am on friday morning, intending to stay for only a few
hours or so. but then i stayed until sunday. i met her friend Sam, who is lovely
and interesting. we all made vine leaves together on saturday for workingman's
eid.
they were extremely delicious. we used laila's recipe from The
Gaza Kitchen. that's a really great book that intertwines eloquent
and vivid recipes with eloquent and vivid stories of gaza. the potatoes were
like lemons.
we said our goodbyes on sunday morning. zoozer and i made plans for the next
day, she's coming to visit for a week.
sunday lounging scrounging
the dlr is in fact NOT RUNNING today which means it is not possible to travel
between any two places in London. so we're gonna stay here another night before
we do our little choo-choo + chee + zoo-zoo experiment of living together at my
place for a week or two to see if we'd like to life together at my place for a
month or three while we bank dollar after dollar on Half Price Rent.
i have the tightest abs and the biggest ass in the city of london
oh i'll turn the oven on
i made a delicious tangy curry with freshly stewed tomatos and everything else
in the fridge. and a cucumber yoghurt sauce with all the juice a lemon had and a
little vinegar. it was extremely delicious. freshly stewed tomatos really bare
almost no resemblance to canned chopped tomatos.
other matters
weather forecast says
π ΒΏwhere is picnic? π
why do wifi 7 routers look like that? like they were sent here by an alien race
of spider people?
well, i think it's time that we all had a little hazy jane and watched an
episode of lodge 49 don't you?
i'm just about to get on the DLR, but then i'll write about my
week.
i spent most of the week's spare time porting my blog from wordpress to
eleventy. there's a lot left to do, still . but it
works really well and i have a lot of fun new features that make it easier to
post individual posts that are completely independent pieces of computer art. so
that's exciting. it's easier to exclude stuff from the home page and/or the main
feed now too, so i can reduce the amount of noise for rss feed users while still
providing all the extra info needed for a microsub/micropub user.
if you were signed up by e-mail i'm afraid this means you won't
be receiving updates for a while unless i e-mail you personally.
hehe
i zoomed off in the middle of the night on monday and creeped into
zoozer's room to say hello, and then we spent the week together at her place. it
we're on the move at the moment. just hopped off the DLR in lewisham and now
we're in the LEBANESE EXPRESS 1. a friendly place, great food, open at midnight
on a sunday.
on thursday got something working at work which i didn't expect to get to work
on thursday.
on friday i though of an old friend of mine. country boy. very funny. great
drinker. ended up in a ditch at big al's festival. drew sileage, loved tractors,
"are ye bai?". an all round good lad. we spent a lot of time together for 8
months 14 years ago. i looked him up. to see if he has an on-line presence. a
lot of my favourite people from back then, back there, they don't. not at
all. not even mentioned when you go on google. i thought, i'll look him up and
maybe i'll send him a little message and get in touch if he's on the web. see
what his life is like now. turns out he's dead. washed up on the shore of a
lough two years ago. it's strange mourning someone two years after their
death. he's two years in the ground but he's just now dead for me. anyway, rest
in peace m.m. you absolute mental case. i miss you and wish that you were not
dead.
yum yum that was a good meal. we love LEBANESE EXPRESS 1.
we're in bed now, writing our weekly entries, ready to sleep. i kinda want to
stay up all night and write an api but i won't,
i opened a bottle of wine with a shoe on saturday. i've always wanted to do that
ever since i heard about it but never did. it reminds me of that time me and
marty smashed the top of a wine bottle off with the garden wall in a street in
belfast and drank wine with shards of glass all night. that same night i'd spent
our bottle of bombay sapphire gin, smashed it into pieces in the street before
we had even a sip. not on purpose. i was on the telephone with gloria melafuji
and she called me her little mango and it slipped out of my hand like on
television.
if you know the tonic you can listen for the third.
sorry, thanks!
someone needs to remind april that she's in spring