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Recently Watched
Jun. 29th, 2026 03:47 pmI tend not to watch a huge amount of TV if on my own, but as I've been staying with my sister I've been watching a lot of what she watches and enjoying some of it.
Death Valley, Series 2
This was a surprise like for both of us, and that title is a little misleading, because it's set in mid-Wales, nowhere American. Gwyneth Kegworthy is the knitted tank-top and bolero jacket wearing DI Janie Mallowan, while Timothy Spall is over-acting his little heart out as retired actor John Chapel, once the star of legendary cop-show Caesar and now the consultant to Janie's nerdish DI, and for whom every crime is explained by character. Warning, may contain Welsh (mostly Janie complaining about Chapel bonking her mum).
The Sommerdahl Mysteries, S2
Danish whodunnits, set around Helsingor, and complicated by half the cops/cast being the extended family/ex-family of senior detective Dan Sommerdahl. Your wife/CSI leaving you for your partner isn't ideal, but they're trying to make it work. Think Midsummer Murders, but with a lower bodycount. Somewhat shaky on police procedure, such as asking a suspect to collect some evidence for them in this week's episode.
A Taste For Murder
A Met Police DCI loses his Italian wife, so he and his daughter go to stay with her parents on Capri for the summer. Crime ensues, both on Capri and in Naples. May contain cooking (the in-laws run a restaurant).
Sky go boom!
Jun. 26th, 2026 05:12 pmI'm glad I'm at my sister's where it peaked today at 31, friends nearer my house were reporting 35 on Tuesday. (Facebook memories reported yesterday that 15 years ago I was struggling with near 35 temperatures).
It'll be nice to open the curtains again, they've basically been shut all week to keep the incoming heat limited and keep the temperature down in the house for Poppy-dog, who is not a fan of hot weather. My sister's been having to take her out for walks at 6AM in the morning, or 11:30 at night just to find reasonable temperatures (we're currently at sunrise at 4:30AM, sunset at 10PM).
I guess the question now is what are July and August going to be like?
All the Cassandras proved right again
Jun. 23rd, 2026 04:01 pmTempus Fugit
Jun. 15th, 2026 11:12 pmWe'd arranged to go through to Morpeth and meet Les, the one UK resident cousin we see regularly (he'd come through to visit about once a year with his other aunt, my mother's sister-in-law) and head into Blyth for the funeral with him. Which was a nice straightforward trip until about a mile from his new house when we needed to get off the A1 and my sister's car's satnav went berserk and tried to drive us through a cattery. Fortunately we were close enough that I could see which roads we needed to take on the screen. Apparently she had exactly the same problem last time she went to Morpeth - but that was on a course five years ago, and you would have hoped it would be fixed by now!
It should have been a straightforward trip into Blyth, but a traffic jam led to Les treating us to a quick tour of the dodgier back streets of Ashington. We finally came into Blyth from the North, with a five second view of the North Sea through the dunes as we passed over the mouth of the Wansbeck, with my sister and I looking for the sights we recognised - mostly St Cuthbert's, where my paternal grandmother was housekeeper to the parish priest for many years. There's massive changes since we were there regularly, with Bates Pit opposite the cemetery, and where many of our relatives, including both grandfathers, once worked, now replaced by light industry and housing.
Nice short non-religious service, though the chapel in the crematorium is a little bizarrely laid out, with the coffin lying at right angles and almost off to the side of the congregation. OTOH probably not as bizarre as when my sister was there during COVID for my uncle's funeral and there were nine seats equally spaced around the chapel. And then a bunch of hugging cousins and telling them "My god, you look like your dad used to!"
An unexpected bonus was one of the cousins had been working through their family photos and had a gorgeous shot of my mother for us. It's black and white, clearly a studio shot, she's probably aged about 15 (the age she started dating my dad), and she looks beautiful. I've seen it before, but my sister hadn't, and the copy I've seen is only wallet sized. And apparently there are a few others he'll scan and send on to us.
The trip back was a lot more straightforward, we knew where we were going this time, but my plan for spending the rest of the afternoon reading turned into sleeping the afternoon away. I know I had a conversation with my sister part way through, but I have no idea what it was about.
But it's a little sobering that it's now my generation dying .....Aargh, Windows!
May. 20th, 2026 09:34 amI left my laptop on last night when I went to cook tea and watch a couple of hours of TV with my sister, when I came back to it later it was dead.
Not just turned off, unwakeable, It's dead, Jim!
So I was more than a little stressed when I went to sleep.
I woke up at 6:30 this morning (hours earlier than usual) and thought, okay, let's have a look at it.
When I pressed the on button, the LED in the caps lock button lit (not convinced it did this last night). So I knew it was getting power, and after a couple of minutes I got the Dell logo - this is looking good!
Then I got a Blue Screen - Please enter your 48 Digit Bitlocker number.
What? What the hell! WTF is Bitlocker!?! (I may have known at one time, I certainly didn't know at 6:30 this morning).
So I grabbed my tablet to find out that Bitlocker is Windows 11's on-by-default disc encryption. Oh, FFS, Microsoft! I don't need on-by-default disc encryption, particularly if my system has half-died and my record of my Microsoft Account password I need to look up the 48 digit key is on the drive you won't let me into.
Fortunately I then noticed a Continue button off to the side on the bluescreen and it let me take it, which started Windows booting up.
As far as I can tell, I must have interrupted a Windows update last night, which threw up the Bitlocker thing out of spite.
After some poking around in settings, Bitlocker is turned off and theoretically busy decrypting my hard-drive - some kind of process bar would be nice - and I'll be updating my USB with key files backups later.
Life has the best action movie plots
May. 13th, 2026 07:43 pmhttps://www.forcesnews.com/services/raf/saving-life-how-raf-and-army-carried-out-medical-para-drop-remote-settlement
Well that was fun*
May. 8th, 2026 02:54 pm* for certain obscure values of fun.
It was lovely and sunny this morning, so my sister said 'Let's take Mam out for a walk today rather than tomorrow.'
So we popped down to the home a bit earlier than usual, got Mam into her wheelchair and headed off down town.
As we'd arrived before coffee time, we stopped in Greggs to get her, and us, a coffee. Just as we went inside there were a few drops of drizzle falling.
So we got our coffees and sat in the window watching the street theatre - a young man had collapsed and various concerned citizens were visibly on the phone to 999 and following instructions, while waiting for the paramedics to arrive. A paramedic rapid response vehicle turned up, got him on oxygen for a few minutes and then walked him wobble-ily over to the ambulance that had arrived - at which point he legged it, apparently being a known local drug user who'd been a bit too enthusiastic with spice (synthetic cannabis).
The paramedics had no sooner disappeared than the heavens opened, coming down like stair-rods as we say around here.
So we decided we were stuck there for a while, as I'd come out in a hoodie, my sister was just in a light top, and my mother was the only one of us wearing anything remotely waterproof, and that just a light anorak.
As time wore on, and the rain persisted down, and we realised we needed to get my mother back for her lunch, my sister decided she'd pop along to the cheap shop a few doors down and buy an umbrella.
While she was gone, it started to hail, and not just a light smattering, pea-sized, and enough of it there were quickly inch-thick drifts falling.
My sister arrived back with her new £3.50 brolly, but the hail showed no intention of stopping. There was clearly no point in trying it just yet, so I got another coffee to justify retaining the table, while Andrea popped back to the cheap shop in pursuit of cheap kagoules - they must have been doing a roaring trade because every other person passing was suddenly wearing them.
I'm not quite sure why she only bought two, not three, possibly because she was already soaked to the skin, but by the time we got myself and my mother into them the hail had at least stopped, so we took our chance.
I can normally manage to push my mother's chair at a slightly slow walk, it makes a nice substitute for crutches, but as it was still pouring I had to push my speed up, to the point my sister says she couldn't keep up with me. Pushing a wheelchair while wading through drifts of hail is interesting, it almost feels like you're skating. It was at least more pleasant than pushing through ankle-high streams of freezing water rushing past at every side road, especially as I was wearing trainers with the upper in a mesh-y fabric that had precisely zero water resistance.
And of course back to the home is uphill. *le sigh*
Let's not do that again.
Recent Reading ...
Apr. 22nd, 2026 10:39 pm... has been dominated by buying the Humble Bundle with all 90 books from Shadowrun 4th Edition (Shadowrun is the RPG premised on cyberpunk meets the rebirth of magic - William Gibson wasn't impressed). A lot of them are in the 20-30 page range, but the larger background and adventure books run 140-220 pages of A4, and some of them have really been impressing me with the depth of background development (I suppose it helps that Shadowrun had had about 20 years of development at the point they were written).
Ghost Cartels is a campaign sourcebook involving a South American cartel managing to release a new drug worldwide while obfuscating the source of the drug from law enforcement. The first 50-odd pages are a sort of found-footage assemblage of leaks and intercepts and official documents telling the story as assembled by a group of interested Shadowrunners - thieves, hackers, assassins, mercenaries and spies - who are the game's common framing mechanism for this kind of thing as they watch from the sidelines and watch for jobs that might come their way. But 50+ pages of sustained found-footage storytelling is by far the longest I've seen them do and they really levelled up. The rest of the book lays out the adventure scenarios behind that story, as a group of shadowrunners are hired for black-ops and executive protection, starting with them working for a street level gang, but then being passed up the chain until they're working for the heads of the cartel as they stage a world tour to bring local distributors on board. Death on the Reik for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying is sometimes claimed as the greatest roleplaying campaign ever. I own Death on the Reik, and I'm not sure this isn't better.
War! This one is a campaign guide to insurgency, counterinsurgency and asymmetric warfare in a Siege of Sarajevo type situation, and someone really, really knows their subject. (I loved the bit about a crate of socks potentially being the most valuable thing you can hijack in a jungle warfare scenario).
I'm actually going to have to go back and re-read the first stuff I read, because I've clearly been missing half the story arcs that are buried within them.
Non-Shadowrun reading:
Tribals, Battles and Darings: The Genesis of the Modern Destroyer, Alexander Clarke.
I've had my eye on this for a while, and jumped on it when I realised that the Kindle edition was on offer at £1.29, not the £12.99 I thought I'd read. But, aargh, what a frustrating read. It's got a good first half dealing with the Tribal Class destroyers and their individual histories in WWII (though I kind of want to dive in with an editorial knife and completely re-order it), but then goes completely to pot dealing with the Battle and Daring Class destroyers that followed them, and a couple of pages on the Weapons class are outright wrong, their reduced length isn't inexplicable, it's because they were deliberately designed to be built in shipyards that didn't have the physical space to build a Battle.
Moonlight's Ambassador
Dawn's Envoy, T A White
Aka the Aileen Travers series, books 3 and 4. I started the series assuming from the titles that reluctant vampire Aileen would end up doing some sort of ambassadorial role between the different races in fantasy Columbus, but Aileen is temperamentally much better suited to punching someone in the face for annoying her. Especially if it's hulking vampire enforcer Liam, or at least she would be if he wasn't too fast for her to land a punch. Moonlight has a nicely non-obvious mystery as Aileen's bestie, and newest werewolf on the block, Caroline is implicated in a series of attacks on werewolves and vampires, while Dawn is rather more straightforward as the High Fey arrive in town intent on a wild hunt, and guess who's front of the queue for being hunted.
e
When Life is Too Surreal
Apr. 14th, 2026 06:07 pmI walked into the lounge at my mother's care home this afternoon to find two alpacas holding court.
Now I knew they were going to be there as an 'enrichment activity', I was in fact there to be sure my mother got to see them if she wanted to, there was even a van outside the door advertising them (plus glamping and various other farming related money spinning projects). But I just wasn't ready for the sheer ludicrousness of alpacas in the lounge.
It turns out alpacas in the flesh look like someone crossed a deer with an Old English Sheepdog and turned the floof dial up to 11. At which point my reality sensor threw a divide by cucumber error.
(The alpacas couldn't have cared less about the lounge, the residents, or the various toddlers and older kids that had been brought in by staff members - school holidays this week - the only thing they were interested in was the dish of alpaca feed being held under their noses)
Suppose they gave a war and nobody came
Mar. 17th, 2026 01:18 amGiven President Bonespurs is whinging about the European nations, and the UK in particular, not queueing up to join the war he started without consulting them*, I thought I'd look up the precise wording of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.
"Article 5
The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognised by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked"
Mutual defence against an armed attack on a NATO power in Europe or North America, does not give Trump the right to drag NATO into an offensive war he started in the Gulf, without consulting them, no matter what he might think.
This is why NATO never got involved in Vietnam, and why Kennedy and Nixon didn't throw a tantrum over it.
Meanwhile there's a pretty good argument Pete Hegseth committed a war crime at his press conference on Friday, which takes a truly special level of stupidity.
Hegseth: "no mercy, no quarter!"*.
Hague Convention of 1907, Regulations: Art. 23: "In addition to the prohibitions provided by special Conventions, it is especially forbidden
....
(d) To declare that no quarter will be given;"
As a former officer Hegseth should know that, and if he doesn't, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, standing next to him, definitely should.
* He may have forgotten accusing all the Coalition powers of staying away from the front lines of Afghanistan just a couple of months ago, but the other NATO nations haven't. As you sow, etc
** At least Hegseth stopped short of yelling "Deus Vult!", but it's still some Crusader-level shit and you can bet the Gulf powers noticed.
The Most Ridiculous Dream Ever ...
Feb. 27th, 2026 11:44 pm... had me competing in the Olympics.
Dream-brain seemed somewhat hazy on whether this was summer or winter games, and normie or paras.
I'm not sure of the event either, possibly the Biathlon? Though skis seemed an afterthought and I don't recall any rifle showing up.
However in a firm nod to real life I was late for my race by way of being unable to negotiate athlete registration.
Recent Reading
Feb. 19th, 2026 11:46 pmBeast Business, Ilona Andrews
The Amazon description says this a novella, but it's actually a shortish novella, a related short story, a short vignette, together with several short stories that were previously on their website. Everything's from their Hidden Legacy world, and if it fits into the existing pattern will be the primer for a trilogy focusing on the third Baylor daughter, Arabella, finding a partner. OTOH, Arabella really only makes a guest appearance in the novella and it instead revolves around a couple of secondary characters from the preceding two trilogies.
Diana Harrison, Prime of House Harrison, needs illusionist prime Augustus Montgomery, Prime of House Montgomery, and owner of massive PI company MII, for an urgent recovery operation. House Harrison's thing is animal magic, and someone has stolen a unique tiger cub from them. They have 24 hours to recover it because it needs its mother's milk, which means Diana needs Augustus personally, and she's coming along whether he likes it or not. But they both have their secrets, including the true nature of their magics, and they're going to have to cooperate closer than Augustus prefers. Shenanigans ensue.
The Masquerades of Spring, Ben Aaronovitch
It's the Roaring Twenties and Augustus Berrycloth-Young is enjoying the high life in New York, ably aided by his American valet Beauregard, and his friend Lucy, who can be trusted to know where all the best Jazz in Harlem can be found. Into Gussie's pleasant idyll comes a reminder that he is a keeper of the sacred flame of the Society of the Wise, in the form of the Folly's top magical troubleshooter, Thomas Nightingale. Nightingale is on a mission, pursuing the origin of an enchanted, possibly cursed, trumpet, and he's absolutely sure Gussie is the man to help him track it down.
I'd say this was meant to be a Jeeves and Wooster homage, Nightingale even introduces Gussie as 'Bertram Wilberforce' at one point, but Beauregard really doesn't get much to do. Instead it's Nightingale, Gussie, Lucy and the mysterious Cocoa against an escalating array of music agents, bent cops, and political operators, all complicated by Gussie trying not to let Nightingale know that he and Lucy - Lucien Biggs - are a couple. But never let it be said that a Berrycloth-Young failed to rise to the occasion!
IOW it's a very atypical Rivers of London novella, but Gussie makes for a thoroughly entertaining narrator.
The Vampire and the Case of the Wayward Werewolf
The Vampire and the Case of the Secretive Siren
The Vampire and the Case of the Baleful Banshee, Heather G Harris and Jilleen Dolbeare
Think Due South meets Northern Exposure, with the out-of-place protagonist role played by a London partygirl, rather than a Mountie or a doctor.
A fortnight ago Elizabeth Barrington - Bunny to her friends - was a partygirl about town, then she woke up dead and decided a century of servitude to the king of the vampires just wasn't going to happen. Now she's the newest recruit to the police force of the small Alaskan magical town of Portlock, bringing the total strength of the force up to three - Bunny, Gunnar the Nomo (chief of police), and Sidnee, a friendly siren. Bunny was theoretically hired as an admin assistant, but Sidnee mostly mans the office, and one man, even a man-mountain and alleged demi-god like Gunnar, can't manage 24 hour coverage on his own, so pretty soon Bunny, and Fluffy the rather too intelligent Alsatian, are neck deep in a complicated murder case, variously aided and hindered by the town's political movers and shakers, including smooth vampire Connor Mackenzie, rough-and-ready polar bear shifter Stan Ahmaogak, and human hunter Thomas Patkotak.
Book 2 has Bunny being formally sworn in as Officer Bunny, but she's barely had time to get used to that when an encounter with a new drug almost takes out Gunnar, turning Officer Bunny into acting-Nomo Bunny, and leaving her with a drug crisis to take care of, with the competing help of Connor and Stan. Gunnar's back for book 3, but Sidnee's definitely out of sorts, there's an arsonist about town, and there's an escalating series of thefts which threatens to bring down Portlock's protective shield, and there's definitely something dangerous out there in the wilds, waiting for its chance to feed.
3 down, 9 to go.
My sister and I went out with family friends last week* to catch a band at one of the local pubs, the slightly unusual element being that it was at the local biker bar (Satan's Slaves, County Durham Chapter). I did wonder if the band ('One-oh-One, I think) would be any good, but they opened with All The Small Things, then segued into London Calling, followed by No More Heroes, and I'd basically found my ideal playlist - I did think at one point 'All this needs to be perfect is Swords of a Thousand Men', and it cropped up shortly afterwards.
There's something slightly incongruous about having a bunch of bikers in denim and leathers warning you as you leave to "Be careful on these steps now, they're really slippy. Hope you had a good time, this rainy weather's horrible, isn't it?'
My sister was also out the day before at a Lourdes fundraiser at a church-hall over in Darlington - pie, peas, and 'Bongo-Bingo'. Proper Bongo-Bingo is apparently a raucous franchise version of bingo with lots of party games, silly prizes and dancing on tables, but this was the Catholic version, so they missed out the dancing on tables. The compere/bingo caller, sitting next to a life-sized cut-out of Pope Leo, was moonlighting from his day-job as Head of RE at the local Catholic comprehensive, and pointed out any complaints should go to the Dean (senior priest, sitting on my sister's table).
Sample bingo call: 'Thirty-Three - Nailed to a Tree' (OMG, you can't say that!)
"We have bingo dabbers for sale if you need them - a pound to Catholics, four pounds to Protestants"!
"Hands up if you're a teacher?", followed by disappointed look + <*Teacherly voice /*> "It's your own time you're wasting".
Trying to jolly everyone up "This is about as lively as the Lourdes fund-raiser at St Johns!"**
First prize dished out was a Virgin Mary fancy dress costume, other prizes included the life-sized cut-out of Pope Leo.
* I wrote this the next day, but accidentally lost the complete post just short of posting and didn't have the energy to re-write it, but it restored itself when I accidentally went into message creation just now.
** The next Catholic comprehensive over, the one I went to.Hive-mindless
Jan. 24th, 2026 08:23 pmSo she popped out (post Traitors final) to get replacements and then we set about trying to get the thing to reboot.
Cue an hour in her freezing garage arguing about how to interpret Hive's guidance on how to get the thermostat and the boiler to talk to each other again if they aren't speaking. (And it's not just that we were mis-interpreting them, they were seriously crap, for instance a how to reconnect video that showed you there were three different models of thermostat, but then only went through the process for one model, that didn't work in remotely the same way as the model we had).
At midnight, after an hour's trying, I announced I was freezing and I was going back into the warm to read up on the system. 10 minutes later I walked into the hall, held down the reset button on the 'Hive Hub', which is sort of a mini-router, for 10 seconds and the system promptly reconnected itself.
*headdesk*
He can have that one
Jan. 19th, 2026 08:07 pmMy sister and I were telling my mother (who is in hospital again) that we had been meeting with her doctor, but he had to dash off because he's adopting and had a meeting with the social worker.
My mother instantly looked across at me and said "He can have that one".
My sister and I sat down together to watch the 1st episode of the second season of Patience - autistic criminal records clerk helps the murder team in York catch criminals. Neither of us had watched the first season.
Not bad, the autism seems mostly well handled - the self-help group seemed designed for humour though. The plot had perhaps a little too much reliance on weird science - revolving around someone with Rh-Null blood caught up in fringe medical stuff, though the vampirism red-herring was nicely handled. The second episode has infrasound as a murder weapon, and probably overplayed hyperacusis as a superpower, though it did also spend a lot of time showing how much of a problem it is for Patience.
But immediately the first episode finished, my sister turned to me and exclaimed: "She's exactly like you!"
I didn't answer that until the next day, because I was completely freaked out by how exactly like me she is.
Storm Goretti has finally brought us some snow. Not much, just a light covering, but it really was getting ridiculous, it seemed like everywhere else in the country had snow, while we were surrounded by it, but resolutely dry.
Not any more. Let's see what the morning brings.
DoT Consultation on "Mobility Devices"
Jan. 7th, 2026 05:26 pmIt's mostly sensible, but I do get a shudder when I come across phrases like "someone who is permitted to use a wheelchair". Permitted? Really?
I'm not entirely certain about "Mobility Device" as the replacement for "Invalid Carriage", god knows it needs replacing, but I don't get the warm fuzzies over "Mobility Device", though I can't actually think of a better alternative right now.
I can see spats with the cyclists coming over whether we're allowed to use cycle lanes (apparently we're not, not even manual chairs - who knew?!)
The intentions seem good, but there really is the potential for this to go horribly wrong, such as options where you can say any power-assisted chair shouldn't be allowed on the pavement. I'm not convinced this was written by someone who actually understood the full range of power assistance types and how different the capabilities are. I need to think about it, but I think we may need more than three classes of "mobility device".
The consultation's open now, and closes end of March.
Not a compliment I was looking for!
Jan. 1st, 2026 01:38 pmShouted across the lobby and lounge of my mother's care home, as I sat in one of their armchairs talking to her:
"Eeee, David you look just like one of the residents!"
That was from the senior carer, cheeky so-and-so!
(She was at school with my sister, I blame the company she grew up with).
