All This And Winter Of Discontent 2

I’m relatively sure that my memories are jumbled to the point where the visits didn’t all happen at Christmas, but I remember being small, somewhere between eight and eleven, and some of my parents’ friends visiting. Not exactly exciting in and itself, but these friends had left Britain for far-off lands; Nigeria, South Africa1. And again, my memory is probably faulty and skipping over things, but I remember conversations about how Britain was broken and the only cure was to let the Tories do more. Which my parents would naturally counter and argue back on how they were wrong, at least about the latter part. I always thought it was weird. After all, I would go to the shops every week, CBBC always had great programmes on, Radio 1 was likely playing Fleetwood Mac2.

Our house was (and still is!) in a late 1970s and early 1980s housing estate; before the big Barrett Boom of the mid-80s onwards, meaning that we had big patches of greenery all over the place. A large field capable of supporting a non-regulation football match, a basketball court and a set of swings where all the teenagers would hang out late into the night (augmented by an insane zip line in my absence, though in recent years the council has discovered it doesn’t actually own the field, which is a slight problem…). A patch of land by the side of our street filled with four massive trees which were seemingly custom grown for hideouts and climbing. We imaginatively called “The Trees”. At the other end of the affair, a large, multi-street linear strip of grass and woods separated the far edge of the estate from the main road beyond, a thick tree line forming a barrier. Places to explore on your BMX bikes.

As we came home from the airport this year, twisting through the new roads that simply didn’t exist when I was little, through the new 2010-20 estate of £600,000 houses that are shabbily terraced together and already look like they’re falling apart, we turned across the Middleton Stoney road and I saw something that I had never ever seen before.

Tents. In the tree line. -8ºC outside and tents in the tree line.

It’s a country I obviously recognize. It hasn’t descended into some V For Vendetta otherworld. But it just all seems completely and utterly broken. Ambulances queued ten deep outside A&E for hours with sick patients inside but there’s no room for them inside, cracked shop fronts, and queues at the pharmacy that spill out of the building.

I went to London for the first time since 2019. There were things to see, and I desperately wanted one of those chorizo sandwiches again.

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There’s not much left of Robin Hood Gardens now; just a few pieces remaining, jealously guarded by hi-vis jackets to prevent anybody thinking of using them in the cold winter weather. And, I’m sorry, but you can be as tradarch as you like, but the Station Square buildings above made me so angry that morning, to the point where I was muttering loudly into my mask and flicking Vs at the Blackwall Reach showroom. Say what you will about RHG, but it had a purpose, it had intent, it was made specifically for that area, and its form was unique. And now large sections are gone and replaced with what? Buildings that have not one single spark of wit or imagination in them; “An exclusive collection of 242 spacious and dynamic apartments. A haven for those looking to indulge in the London Lifestyle.” A lifeless cube that impressively manages to be worse than all the traditional arguments against Brutalism. So if you saw a muttering man acting like Alec Guinness at the start of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on the DLR that morning, it was probably me.

I fled to the Barbican. Because where else would you go? Kids having snowball fights in the streets in the sky, the towers looking amazing covered in snow and frost, the Centre bustling with a Christmas staff function and revelling in its community. This is what we could have had. With money, with care, with a will to make it work. A straight run from Beau Brummell to Bauhaus.

But this is what we have. Battersea Power Station. One of the most striking buildings in London, an Art Deco masterpiece that projected power across the city. You could have done so much with this piece of London’s history. But instead, it has been enclosed and turned into a big box for upscale retail. Once it supplied the city, now it has Rolex and Genesis showrooms to extract money from tourists. Alongside the redevelopment, Gehry’s Prospect Place sits uneasily, out of place next to the monument of industrial power, while looking hungrily at the 1950s housing estate and pub across the road. If you saw a masked man leaving the station loudly saying “This is perhaps the worst thing I have seen in years” before angrily stomping to the tube just before Christmas, well, that was probably me too.

But let’s finish London on a positive note. The Elizabeth Line really does live up to the hype; it is a breathtaking public works project that you just don’t believe can happen anymore.3 But here it is, and it works. While the modern Jubilee Line stations are a lovely blend of PoMo and High-Tech with their enclosed metal corridors that make you feel like you’re walking through a TARDIS that crashed into the centre of London4, the Elizabeth Line stations are monumental, playful, and brutalist. The sublime is embraced with massive curved concrete ceilings, everything is vast, clean, and accessible. Escalators run at a seemingly impossible gradient, and damn, it’s just amazing. If the Astoria had to go, better that it was torn down to make this possible rather than its likely fate of being turned into Zone 1 luxury flats.

And I know it’s fairly tempting to respond with “yeah, but America sucks too!” But I am not disagreeing with that! It’s not like you’ll find me writing an ode to the US health system any time soon. But you have to understand that Britain is not doing well:

At least the strikes seem to be popular, with BBC interviews of the nurses’ strikes often being drowned out by people beeping their car horns in support of the picket lines. But then you also get people that you don’t expect pushing DeSantis’s Florida and referencing a ivermectin-pushing YouTube crank. Or the suggestion that privatising more of the NHS would help.

Back home again now. It took me a solid day to get used to my house again, and the post office brought me free COVID tests and all my post after the free hold service ended. Just imagine, a post office owned by the state which can do things like replacing large chunks of its fleet with electric vehicles. All done in the country of High Capitalism.


  1. Standard Spitting Image reference goes here. ↩︎

  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6VBE1oboK8 Naturally. ↩︎

  3. It’s probably telling that it was set into motion by the last Labour Government. ↩︎

  4. I highly recommend Southwark and Westminster stations… ↩︎

A Horse. Of Course

Great Big Groovy Horse!

(Happy Christmas!)

Back Home Again

Thoughts on London when I can bring them together.

Stable Diffusion bits when I can get it all working (oh, for a A6000 workstation). Hopefully a few fun things during the Christmas fortnight.

Otherwise, keep enjoying the holiday!

Jeff Astle Sings Back Home

My first and likely only trans-Atlantic trip in business class was basically one of those 60s or 70s dramas where the working class boy goes up to Oxford and is confronted with High Table for the first time. What is all this cutlery? Why are we wearing gowns? How come everybody else knows where everything is in this little pod, yet I’m making loud noises as I pull things and think I’ve broken them in a Bob Mortimer-on-Taskmaster way? And then the flight attendant accidentally spilt half a can of Diet Coke on me…which set up an uncomfortable relationship for the rest of the flight: me not wanting to cause any trouble and being overly thankful and reluctant to ask for anything, and her trying to make up for coating me in fizzy liquid. Reader, my blanket was soaked, but I let it dry rather than ask for a new one.

Honestly, being in the back of the plane going home is going to be less stressful. Will I sleep? No, but it turns out attempting to sleep on your front is business class isn’t actually all that comfortable either. So roll on the tighter fit for the return journey home!

But anyway, I am back home in Bicester again. Everything is frosty, cold, and small.

Two more days of work left for the year, two days upcoming in London, and then…FESTIVENESS!

Hello, Mr. December

It’s been three years, but we finally played Blood On The Clocktower again! But, instead of a convention floor, in our own home and run by Tammy (who has retired from active play after her career-high performance of being hissed at on the SHUX convention floor). A good night was had by all, even if Evil carried the night both times!

Packing continues — this time next week, I’ll be back in the UK for a couple of weeks (mostly Bicester as normal, but with a side-jaunt to London, providing I can use the Oxford Tube to sidestep the rail strikes that week). It’ll be the first Christmas there for three years! Expect a few fun things here in the lead up to Christmas (and yes, you can safely assume that they’ll be Stable Diffusion-related).

Goodbye, Mr. November

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And a very good Thanksgiving was had by all. Next year’s will almost certainly have a smaller focus, but we also made progress on that this weekend too. The back bedroom’s transformation is definitely underway.

Next weekend, Blood On The Clocktower, and the last update on here from the US until 2023!

A Very Special Set of Thanksgiving Anniversaries

(that’s @carsondial@mastodon.social, btw)

This upcoming week will be a double anniversary! Not only is it five years since buying this house in Cincinnati (but not actually living in it - that’s next year), but it is also twenty years since my first-ever Thanksgiving in America! Which was vaguely documented on the blog at the time.

What my somewhat annoyingly terse entries of the time lack, mind you, is just how horrible that weekend was. It was probably the final straw that saw me wanting to throw in the towel on the course just a week later. Because my dorm was shut for the holiday, those of us that had nowhere to go were transferred to another dorm, where we were sleeping six to a room. I don’t have a complete recollection of that time, but what I remember is that I slept there on Wednesday night, and then spent the rest of the weekend sleeping in my TA office at Sitterson Hall, watching My So-Called Life on DVD and struggling to get a handle on some assignments that were due the week after. God knows what I actually ate, and thankfully the building had showers so I wasn’t a disgusting mess by Sunday, but it was such a wretched few days, and perhaps the loneliest part of my time at UNC.

On the bright side, every Thanksgiving since has been a lot better! And hopefully that continues next week - seven of us, enough roast potatoes to sink a battleship, and a healthy-just-over-double-figures number of desserts. Totally sane.

Finally for the week, the art for my third comic story (of four!) has come in and it looks fantastic. Now if I could just come up with a good title for it, that would be grand…

And you said it was like Christmas

It has been, in the main, a rather rotten week, as the two embeds above attest. Slightly offset by the midterms being not quite as terrible as I thought they were going to be when I went to bed on Tuesday night, and the ongoing spectacle of a billionaire stepping on every rake in the car park while setting money on fire at a rate that would astound the KLF. But mostly, I’d rather just forget the last seven days altogether.

Hopefully, something more fun next week!

Make It The Worst $44bn Ever Spent

This is my current position on staying with Twitter for the moment:

(I have reactivated @carsondial@mastodon.social from a four-year slumber in case it’s needed, but in the meantime, I’m going down with the ship with the band playing on as the water rushes on-board)

We have solar panels! 18 of them! Which means, for the next week, I am going to be that unbearable person that messages to say “oh, the panels have generated 50% of my power needs today!” as I keep logging into the metrics panel to see how the stats are going. I promise the novelty should subside by around Wednesday or thereabouts. At least until I figure out the API access to generate all sorts of graphs from the raw data!

It really feels like the year has already run out of steam. Two weeks until Thanksgiving, after which I have two more weeks and then I’m back home in the UK for most of December. There’s not a lot of time to do all the things we need to do…

October Roundup

A few things for the week.

  • I would really like to have more than four hours of sleep a night again. Maybe this week…
  • Sebastian Bakehouse is not messing around and was totally worth the 25 minute trip across town first thing on Sunday morning. CUBIC CROISSANTS!!
  • Watching all of The Blackstuff, The Muscle Market, and Boys From The Blackstuff in one go is…a rather intensely bleak way to spend your time.
  • The Next Stop Is Lewknor Turn is probably delayed until January or February, but I have finally got the last two scripts to the artist, so work will be progressing there in the next couple of months!
  • Apparently, when British and Swedish people have to find a Hallowe’en costume at the last minute, we fall back hard on stereotypes.
  • On a completely unrelated note, after 15 years or so, it seems like the batteries have died in my 10th Doctor sonic screwdriver…
  • This Blu-Ray looks like it’s going to Restoration Team levels of completeness. Rushes! Commentaries! Workprint edits! Now, if only this could convince people to release a set for NTNOCN1.
  • How is it November?

  1. Never ever going to happen. Can you imagine trying to even clear just the library footage? We will just have to scavenge from YouTube. ↩︎