Top of the news this week: Storm Darragh blew down our fence overnight. (The fence was old when we moved in 12 years ago and we’re lucky it’s survived this long but it’s a shock seeing it flattened into our garden.) It didn’t help that the the landlord of house next door – which is multiple-occupancy rented accommodation – has neglected the garden which has overgrown so much that the trees and shrubs assisted in the demolition of the fence. We’re responsible for the fence which means either our house insurance covers the damage or it’ll be down to us to make a (terrible) job of repair!
It was a week to sort out Christmassy tasks – through gritted teeth (have I mentioned that I REALLY have little time for this part of the year which seems to me to be little more than a consumer capitalist psy-op to encourage the slaves to spend! spend! spend!?). Making sure that the children had presents. Getting cards for the children to send to their classmates. Even assisting my youngest’s school by helping out taking Year One to the local church to hear the Christmas Story told with the help of pass-the-parcel and some nativity figures. Bah – bloomin’ – humbug! is all I can say.
It’s been a better week for me in terms of getting things done. I’ve returned to some personal projects and moved them on a little. Made what I think is a significant step forward with my writing. Nothing amazing, but certainly left me with a minor sense of accomplishment – something I’ve lacked for a while. What’s certainly helped has been weekly and daily planning so there’s a structure to what I’m doing.
I managed to complete a whole year streak of Duolingo. The reward? A new app icon. As much as I enjoy playing Duolingo each day, I don’t believe that it’s improved my knowledge of French very much. A few words and phrases here and there. Maybe if I spent more time using it each day… Not convinced. I keep thinking that I should immerse myself in French language movies and tv for a month to see if that helps.
After understanding how to manage Syncthing, I spent time UNSUCCESSFULLY working out how I could automatically upload assets from my Obsidian vaults so they are stored online. None of the existing Obsidian plugins appear to work (I tried them all) and attempts to write a plugin for Obsidian FAILED as, though I could upload an image to online storage, I just couldn’t work out how to write back the link and insert it in a note. Really, I guess I need to sort out how to set up a reverse proxy on my NAS that I can access without using Tailscale and properly host things myself. In the end I’ve ended up managing and uploading assets manually.
Music this week has been listening to the latest delightful monthly mixtape by Loula Yorke and more Autechre: I found this massive playlist of their live performances on YouTube
which has a number of great-quality shows (and links to downloadable audio versions of the videos).
FINALLY finished The Keys of Marinus, the First Doctor adventure from 1964 (although the Doctor is missing for half the episodes). It’s been a chore – especially after the chore of watching Marco Polo. I’m 6 months behind in watching the first season but next up is The Aztecs which I’ve not seen before and is, by many accounts, the best of the first season’s stories.
My reading is STILL unsettled and I haven’t managed to focus on anything in particular. I continue to jump around reading parts of books and short stories (Ursula Le Guin and M. John Harrison). I must be more self-disciplined about this. My tsundoku grows!
I’ve continued studying Herbert Read. He’s a quixotic writer. Broadly he’s a Romantic in the nineteenth century sense drawn to anarchism and improvement through education. Closer to someone like William Godwin than 20th century anarchists. I found Read’s The Philosophy of Anarchism (which I read this week) perplexing, especially his insistence that a future anarchist society would require a new religion (of anarchism, I think, what he calls a “mystical ethos”) – which, I supposed draws on the spiritual, idealist aspects of Romanticism. Read also seems to emphasise anarchism more as a political philosophy of individual liberation than collective action. Still, I have a great deal more of Read’s political writings to read before I get to his work on art and education. I’m also eager to find out his perspective on the Spanish Civil War.
