Monday 3rd October 2022, 10.55am (day 4,057)

I’ve had my eye on Joe’s room for 15 years or more….. and now he’s moved out, it’s mine. Let’s start the necessary conversion work with this nice shade of blue, shall we?

It’s increasingly easy to find excuses not to go out on a Saturday night, or indeed a Friday or any other night, at least if ‘going out’ means ‘being expected to move energetically in response to the promptings of rhythmic music’, i.e. dancing. But I just about managed it at the Trades club this evening. And it was welcome enough.

This is nothing whatsoever to do with today’s global media event, which I could not have spared the time to watch even if the desire had been there: declaring a national holiday at short notice is all well and good but it didn’t mean the jobs went away. Not least the new Mac, that is still in the process of being shaped to look as much like the old one as possible. Though no thanks to Apple, for taking away most of the useful ports on anything they shipped after about 2017. That’s another £64 to the Cupertino coffers for the umbilicus one now needs even to look at all that data sitting on the backup drive.

Of all the days over the two weeks since I effectively lost my access to photos, this was the dullest and least eventful. Getting a shot of C’s coat, left as she went to buy a drink, and somehow imagining that it looks like her shade or phantom, was about as exciting as it got. Sometimes Thursdays are like that. One cannot always get the hang of Thursdays.

I was just passing, honest. The crowd who were in the foyer of University Place next door were doubtless heading here shortly after I did so, ready to spoil the pristine purpleness of the carpet, at least. But I’m sure the posters were interesting.

The drive home. The convenience of Abington service station on the M74, two and a half hours from Dundee, and usually three hours from home: unless the bastards close the M6, like they did this weekend. But that’s a different and undepicted story. I hope, at least, that this couple, also heading south, still felt affectionate once they got home.

Back to Dundee then, and back to the storage facility, in which, a few weeks ago, the contents of Joe’s room in halls were deposited. This place reminds me of nothing so much as that scene in Matrix: Reloaded where there are all these ‘back doors’. I expected a hundred Agent Smiths to leap out at us.

The absence of recent posts and the aforementioned ‘computer problems’ are here represented by a crap photo, but that just epitomises it all. Still, I’m back up and running again now, 11 days later. Kind of.

This was the view looking up from the dentist’s chair in which I spent a not-entirely-enjoyable 40 minutes this morning. Could have been worse I suppose — and would have been, before convenient local anaesthetics were invented.

In my mind’s eye there is a perfectly symmetrical version of this shot. But in the absence of its reality, this one will do.
This was the third of eight railway stations passed through today (nine if you count Wageningen bus station) as I travelled from a small provincial town somewhere near the centre of the Netherlands to a small provincial town somewhere near the centre of Great Britain (Hebden Bridge). And so ends my 11th complete year of doing this blog.