29 Jun 2025
Another few weeks have passed and some more things have happened in my life. I'll start with the most recent and most interesting: me and my lovely partner took Friday off to stay a night in Margate and go to see HAIM play at Dreamland. Dreamland is a great outdoor venue and the gig itself was fantastic, I remember being blown away at just how loud everybody was singing along to every word. It turned out to be their warm-up gig for Glastonbury but I won't complain at a great live music experience and some time by the sea.
England has seen some very high temperatures throughout this year and this weekend was no different, the two of us melting in the 30 degrees sun (we made full use of the Slushee machines at Dreamland!). We did get to have a dip in a tidal pool, but not before managing to get quite badly sunburnt. All of the heat really makes me very thankful we have air conditioning, something that is quite rare in domestic properties in the UK. I really struggle in the heat so having our home be the temperature of a refridgerator is a huge relief and I think genuinely make a massive difference to my comfort.
Otherwise there's some quite mundane things that happened this week, like after literally months of me trying to figure out what I should do about it I finally gave my old jeans that still fit me to the drycleaners to get repaired, gave a whole bunch of T-shirts that don't fit me to a charity shop and also dropped my old jeans that don't fit me to a fabric recycling bin. It's a little embarassing to admit how long it took me to find the time and effort necessary to get it all sorted, and perhaps more so now that it is so hot again I haven't even worn jeans in weeks. I try not to beat myself up over that sort of thing though, I've got a wonky brain and the world isn't made for me.
Perhaps this is a little too "behind the scenes" but sometimes when I need to remember what has happened since my last blog post I'll take a look through the message conversations between me and my amazing partner. In scrolling through I read a message from her that read "activism is stickers and maps" and there isn't a whole lot of analysis I can add to that because as I get older I realise that simple things like maps and stickers are rebellious. Signage and pictograms can be positively revolutionary.
We visited the roof garden at the Southbank Centre, on another punishingly hot evening. Although we stayed for a drink, a walk around the garden was quite pleasant, and as my multi-talented partner has turned her hand to gardening it gave us all sorts of ideas for things we would like to try in our garden. Don't get me wrong, I also enjoy gardening, and I very much enjoy the fruits of her labour, quite literally in the case of our dwarf mulberry. I do plan to make some more wooden planters at some point, I bought myself some right-angle clamps and even invested in a new drill to prepare for the next one.
This was supposed to be a vaguely tech-related blog but the only thing of interest I can talk about is I had a sort of business idea that I think could probably work. The problem is that I'm not an entrepreneur, have no desire to be one, and I have no experience in anything related to running a business. I'd also need a lot of support, and quite possibly funding, to get it off the ground so it will probably just die on the bonfire of okay-ish ideas.