September means indoor spiders.

The start of September makes a good opportunity for a spider post.

This year for me may be different until the ecology of the new place settles down. I'm already aware that the foxes have had to create a new route since the arrival of bricks and mortar on their previous cut-through.

But the spiders here look different too. In London there would be a fair smattering of common house spiders, some of those little jumpy ones and certainly some of the black bodied ones. A kind of de-riguer London attire for spiders.

Around here it's all somewhat more 4-wheel drive. Okay, 8-leg drive. The spiders I've seen seem to be the same colour as the reddish soil, have extra long front legs and look somehow ruggedised.

So far there is limited evidence of webs and I'm guessing the intrepid ones here are the hunter types.

We shall see, this September = Spiders month.

gimme dat package?

The delivery system around here isn't working properly yet.

We've a proper address with a postcode but only about 50% of the people driving delivery vans seem to be able to find us.

On one occasion I walked through the rain to the end of a nearby road to locate the missing van, but then, after my instructions for the last 200 yards, I watched him turn off into the wrong route. Fortunately it was a dead end, so I was able to provide further instructions.

Other occasions have required me to call help desks. I've had to spell out everything, and then hear pieces repeated back to me with mispronunciations of key words. E-zeeta. Dee-von.

I'm sure things will improve, but yesterday's example was another case in point. A package will be delivered between 06:00 and 22:00 by Henry. Will it? I watched the clock flick past 10pm and there was no package, no text message, no email. The delivery web site continued to show it was to be delivered that day, although their helpdesk only had business hours until 20:00.

Then, at about 10:20pm, the message changed. The package was back in a depot. The same place that it had started the previous morning.

Today, I've received a text. Charlie will be delivering it between 16:42 and 17:42.

I wonder what happened to Henry?

orange electric rental bicycles. What's not to like?

I spotted these today.

Rental bikes, with electric assistance. And they are orange.

No time today, but I'll be back to give them a try. But first I must get my own bike functional.

my smart meter is sad because it doesn't know which eon tariff it is on

Part of the house move involves the start of new utilities. We have gas and electricity switched on and smart metered. However, the new smart meter readout only shows electricity and the various tariffs don't work on it at all.

I've tried to contact the supplier, but there's a kind of catch 22. Their web-site says register online, but in order to do so I need an account number, which has not been supplied.

If I try to phone them it says that their are extra long waiting times. Their online chat service is offline.

I decided to try emailing them, but it says there are also long waits for email replies and I would be better off registering on-line.

This structural mayhem is great for the supplier, who is winning all the time this persists.

It means I am on their default tariffs, which are the most expensive. It is like a quiet tax by the supplier, despite all their leaflet claims about providing a superior service. "Great Service as Standard," they claim.

I am not convinced.

and they drive an ice cream van

Just wondering if a Piranha submarine will appear in a couple of days, now that the KLF book 2023 has finally appeared?

The White Room was one of my guilty pleasures. Here's the 27 year old Stadium House VHS tape.

a different kind of voice

It's a stretch to link my recent left bank Paris excursions to this story, but I couldn't help notice that New York's Village Voice has decided to go digital only.

The Voice used to be my immediate acquisition when travelling through New York and was something that survived otherwise ruthless packing when returning to to the UK. That whole process disappears in the world of digital.

Why the Paris link?

Many would say that Greenwich Village (the origin of the Voice) was like an American equivalent of left bank Paris. Add a couple of the Voice's catalysts Mailer and Malaquais/Malakai first meeting at the Sorbonne. Back in the village, Malaquais introduced Mailer to Wolf, the second of the Voice's founders. And Greenwich village's San Remo bar is a kind of NY version of a Café de Flore, so I think my link just about works.

The Village Voice I used to pick up was a kind of pre-blogging blog with its come-all-ye approach to attracting writers, plus its Craigslist quantity of entertaining small ads, It was inevitably competed with by other formats. I expect a few other 'magazines' are looking over their shoulders.

Caught between the twisted stars
The plotted lines the faulty map
That brought Columbus to New York.

As the front cover artist featured this week would have said.

fixing the dead iPhone SE

My iPhone converted itself into a brick yesterday. Everything is backed up, but I had that short all-over queasiness that I'd not be able to function.

It's partly brought about by not having another phone at the moment. We still don't have broadband, and the suppliers are all queuing up somewhere else to avoid connecting the fibre cable from the cabinet across the road to the house.

In full blown work mode I'd be utterly dependent on a phone, for email, messaging, conferencing, voicemail and, yes, actual phone calls.

I've gone through the Nokia phase, the two phones phase (work phone and personal phone), the Blackberry phase (years ago, but it did have a proper keyboard) and then into the single phone world of the iPhone.

I've experimented with Android phones too, and even a Chinese Goo-Phone which was a rip off of an iPhone 6, running android but reskinned to look like it was running iOS. These quirky phones were simply side projects, not meant to interfere with my main phone's use.

And my device of choice is still the iPhone, although not (currently) the latest design. I'm still using an iPhone SE. It's around two years old, but has that Apple industrial build quality that was somehow lost with the iPhone 6s.

I can remember writing about the later iPhones that it was becoming a pure marketing battle and the size of screen seemed to be winning. I didn't want to have to put a table tennis bat sized device in my pocket, but that was where it was heading.

So now, what to do? The iPhone 8 is due out in a few weeks, and that could be the point where the iPhone form factor suddenly collapses back to one shape in three sizes. My Steve Jobs phone will surely get axed as a new Tim Cook wireless rechargeable device replaces it?

For my phone, I'd already tried three chargers and a selection of different wires to no avail. Blank screen of brick.

But instead, another plan.

"Blow it!" I say.

Yes, the phone of course. I tried that thing.

The one where you clean out the apparently already clean USB socket on the phone.

Yes, I blew into the phone. A couple of times.

Then I plugged it in again.

A picture of a battery appeared, with a red line at the bottom.

Okay, 0%, but I can wait.

And : Update: before posting this, it's already up to 35%.

nosediving cycling metrics but a village incentive

There's that scene in some movies when the plane is losing height fast and all the dials are going backwards indicating an imminent crash.

My cycling stats are a bit like that at the moment. I don't have proper connections to the various monitoring systems yet (flat batteries and lack of reliable wi-fi), so instead I connected the Garmin to my MacBook by a cable to download the latest sessions.

Oh dear. I won't make my annual targets this time, (except for the most basic ones).

It's the same with the Trainerroad and TrainingPeaks monitoring, where I can see my performance has dwindled away until the point where I've restarted everything again. Tomorrow I'm going to get one of the road bikes roadworthy again (pump tyres etc) and perhaps take a spin into my new cycle friendly village.

take it to the bridge

The local terraforming continues. Where there were three pools of water, there's now one temporary larger one. The other two have been pumped so that they can be more artistically shaped.

The water has been moved into the stream, which currently looks more like a river. Once the culverts are in place, the low end of the stream will be unblocked and we'll see the water levels drop again.

Then there's the small matter of a bridge further upstream.

almost fixed?

I spotted the airline advert on the tube at Kings Cross.

Aeroflot declared as Europe's best airline according Tripadvisor. I suppose it is based upon on-line voting and reviews?

I couldn't help wonder whether there had been any assistance with placement?

Curiously, on Skytrax's 2017 airline review Aeroflot is rated 30th globally, with around half a dozen European airlines ahead of it. But I'm sure it is nothing that can't be fixed.

soft landing

Arriving back in London this time was slightly different.

The house move we started back in May is now complete, so we could properly move back to our new place.

That'll mark the end of the last few months on the road, during which time we've spent time in Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, in Newcastle-upon Tyne, at the Mondrian in Central London, then in an apartment in Canary Wharf, across to Hay on Wye for the book festival, then at a lakeside hotel before moving to the shack in the woods, then the barn by the alpacas before moving onward to the temporary apartment on the pretty jetty by the steam railway, then to the motel before the hotel on the Rive Gauche.

So why not spend another night away? This time at the Renaissance at St Pancras?

star (euro)

This is the London end.

Back from Paris on the Eurostar. Coach L ;-)

Gare du Nord to St Pancras in about 2h30. The train runs at up to around 295kph, and there's some decent stretches alongside the A1, which makes for the effortless overtaking of cars travelling at French speed limits of 130kph.

I'm already thinking about another rail trip.