In no other industry would this be considered acceptable. An email, out of the blue, telling me to register a new account with a new service in order to even see the details of a mysterious appointment that’s been apparently set up for me at an unknown date with zero prior warning or information.

I earned big brownie point this morning by making my wife some iced tea. I used one teabag of early grey + one of her favourite lemon tea in a small amount of warm water, then added lots of cold water, sliced lemon, loads of ice. We don’t really do iced tea here so I was making it up on the fly.

A nice way to end a hot day

I still get momentarily confused when people sing “God save the King” instead of Queen

Hannah the birder (Clarkson’s Farm s05e07) is fantastic. Proper clueful geek and a passionate advocate for red-listed birds.

Make racism taboo again

Back from a great 3 days in the Cairngorms with www.adaptivegrandslam.com - 2043m climbed over 46km

I just asked my (it turns out, kiwi) physio where in South Africa he was from. The embarrassment. He’s excellent and now I can obviously never ever see him again.

3 days, 46km, exhausted but very happy.

The view from the hostel in Aviemore. Looking forward to getting into the hills tomorrow.

Next stop: Aviemore

At a very nice cafe in Carlisle which has sadly been infested with a group of startup boys on their laptops (doing their morning standup with someone joining noisily via zoom too). They’re energetically talking about prompts and context and platforms and generally being unbearable.

If YouTube hadn’t introduced their stupid endless-scrolling ‘shorts’ feature, it wouldn’t have been included in the proposed social media ban. (Or there would have been so much public outcry at teens losing access to the world’s video content it would have no chance of passing unamended)

My son, like his father before him, sometimes quietly turns his light back on after bed time so he can read. Perhaps we can avoid making that illegal please.

Our fish pond is doing well

Getting ready to climb the Cairngorms next week without oxygen 🏔️

“Two-tier policing” against white people? As if, after decades of problems with institutional racism, the police force is suddenly biased in favour of minorities? Please. Privileged people do seem to love imaginary victimhood.

Just started series 5 of Stranger Things. I think Hopper must have the same barber as me.

Kit room, planning wall and new rucksack.

A lovely 14km walk via the bakery in Brockenhurst this morning. I’m averaging 40km per week at the moment and training for some big mountain adventures. No real hills around here so have been supplementing walking the dog with some running, gym (stairmaster+weights+circuits) and weighted rucksack.

The first warning arrived on a Tuesday morning, six weeks after consultants advised moving from dependency on six hundred small excel scripts - and nobody at Zenith Ledger Advisory paid much attention. It appeared in the system dashboard between routine audit notifications and a maintenance reminder

Gammon slow-cooked in coke before being roasted. Roast potatoes in goose fat. All the trimmings. Especially yorkshire puddings.

I can’t tell if he’s coming or going

Moving to Argentina? A bit on the nose.

It’s been a good week for family paddling

I remember how excited I was when I first discovered Google. The team that carefully put together the cleanest and fastest search engine in history would not, I can’t help thinking, be very excited about AI Mode being pushed to the top of the results

It’s only 16°C so it’s time to walk the dog

Unusually good weather for a bank holiday weekend!

I love Rob Brydon. He’s a national treasure by this point. But boy does he do a lot of advert voiceovers at the moment.

I know it comes from the latin, but there’s something deeply unsettling about the word “gubernatorial”.

Baby foals all over the place at the moment. (These all a short walk from Burley / the White Buck Inn)

He’s making a kit list. He’s shaking it down twice. He’s going to learn if Nalgene water bottles are nasty or nice.

@cackhanded.net my 12 year old buy just turned to me and, quoting Tom’s videos (or more likely compilations of Tom’s videos) said “I’m here with Norm!” I thought you’d appreciate that.

“You think you’re so great because you have BOATS!” -Ridley Scott’s Napoleon

First key change of the night there?

Go on Sam! This is great 🤖

I will be watching Eurovision tonight because Sam Battle (aka Look Mum No Computer) is representing the UK and he deserves the support

I wrote to the Tivoli theatre in Wimborne urging them to reconsider hosting a Katie Hopkins event. Their reply is polite and mostly strikes a fairly reasonable tone (though clearly I disagree with their decision). Their final paragraph slightly spoils it, and reads as somewhat churlish & patronising

Our friendly village eccentric just shouted across the road at me: “Have a good day! You look like George Harrison!” Which was a treat.

Plausible. He also seems to be confused about the word asylum (with weird non sequitur references to “insane asylums” when talking about people seeking asylum). These are obviously small flaws in the grand scheme of things, but contribute to his unsuitability for, well, inclusion in society really.

There are a few things I’d like to get done this afternoon, but I think I’m going to sit here for a little while longer

If I were ever to resign from the Cabinet, you can be assured the letter would be on one page, not two, and it certainly wouldn’t start with “The results are in” and four whole paragraphs of self congratulatory fluff.

Surely Streeting is pretty much the only option worse than Starmer?

Local horse, presumably rolling for initiative

Our kayaks arrived at the Keyhaven boatyard today, and we took a trip out around the harbour

Gradually getting active again, after 6 weeks of collarbone recovery. I went to a circuits class today. Squats, planks, seated rows etc. Lovely 70-ish year old lady did the whole thing with a smile on her face & barely out of breath. I had to take a breather, and afterwards went outside to honk up.

Circuits at the gym

I was about to remind you to vote today, but then I remembered it’s Bluesky, so not only have most of you already voted by post but many of you are probably running as local councillors.

Devil Wears Prada 2. Great fun. I went to Milan once for a meeting with Miuccia Prada herself. Even though I was wearing my very best suit the feeling of being just grossly and hideously underdressed was visceral.