time to check it

Along to the Phoenix for Thursday evening. A chance to test a few factors. How long to get to the central city in the evening? How difficult to park? Were there charges? How far to cross the centre?

All easy peasy. The main consideration was that the car park closed unnervingly early at 11pm. No charges after 6pm.

Then to meet up in the bar before the show. Chatting enough that we had to be herded into the show.

A sort of extended front room set. Arts lab, Beckenham was the look. Probably 1970s, judging by the lampshades. Then it was Bowie tunes. A mixture of styles from the players known as Bowie Lounge.

The lyrics were unmistakeable, although some of the interpretations were quite different. It looped through Bowie eras, and didn't try too hard to tell a specific Bowie tale. Bowie used to use William S Burroughs influenced cut-ups to render some of his lyrics and there was a similar fractured approach to any story telling in this performance.

We also witnessed a stage edge scratchy analogue video installation and a Billy Name-esque photographer wandering throughout the performance, like an enigmatic reference to The Factory.

And did the audience like it? By the end they were dancing in the aisles and would probably have been on the stage as well.

I'll classify this first skirmish into my new area's local night life as successful, even with the eleven o'clock car park curfew. But, as someone else pointed out, it was a school night.

theme for an imaginary western

Part of our relocation involves picking up threads with new people and so I'll be starting these new adventures over the next few days.

So as I walked through this recent late summer London scene of the Fever Tree winnebago closed up, a Jack Bruce lyric drifted into my head. The one about the imaginary western.

When the wagons leave the city
For the forest and further on
Painted wagons of the morning
Dusty roads where they have gone

I'm thinking how our own wagon has rolled to the new place. Despite the current almost desert-like scene opposite (which I describe as a mini Grand Canyon), we'll soon have an entire new landscape.

Oh the sun was in their eyes
And the desert was dry
In the country town
Where the laughter sounds

Maybe not Slartibartfast, and go easy on the crinkly edges.

Here's Jack Bruce.

cut grass - done

The recent turf-laying has now created the need for grass-mowing. The turf has knitted together and the individual strands of grass become some 20-30cm tall.

The heavy old petrol mower with its Briggs & Stratton engine from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin didn't make the move from the last place, so we're starting again.

Petrol was the past choice because of the shape of the garden, with a couple of areas well outside the reach of cables.

This time I'm going electric again, but cordless. That's where the different battery tech pops up. There's a selection from between 18 volt to 80 volt, with commensurate pricing. Plus the decision on the number of amperes - broadly speaking I'll go for the largest possible amps, but only take the voltage needed for a smaller bladed device.

Hence this small Ryobi. So light I can carry by its handle with one hand. And, after that first choppy cut, it looks as if subsequent ones will be fine.

However, something important to watch is the way that the coverage per charge gets represented. We all know about misleading car miles per gallon, there is a lawnmower equivalent. I'm guessing that a reduction by a third to a half compared with the advertised coverage will be needed, at least for the first cuts.

I suppose the theory could be to get the grass down to a billiard table smoothness, at which point the full potential may be achieved with an expert groundsman in charge of the mower.

But for me it makes sense to buy extra batteries and use a fast charger.

Topsham Turf Ferry and Otter ale

A weekend trip on the Topsham Turf Ferry, across to the Turf Hotel, a popular pub by the Exeter canal and the River Exe.

The 15 minute ferry ride is a pretty one and gives a good view of Topsham, the one-time port for Exeter.

There's no direct road to the pub and most people will walk, cycle or come along the river.

I enjoyed a casual burger and a pint of Otter served outdoors, although there was plenty on offer from the kitchen like the tasty sea bass, scallops and trimmings, on this occasion washed down with a late summer Pimms.

The pub is on National Cycle Route 2, which is very well signposted from the pub leading towards Dawlish in one direction and Exeter in the other. It will eventually run all the way from St Austell to Dover, some 361 miles.

Another section of the same cycle route runs along by the end of our new road as it weaves its way along both sides of the River Exe, and there's plenty of cyclists of all kinds using it.

But we were boat passengers this time, although soon to be back by cycle.

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.