Mixed media, Sunday 8 June 2025

Books

  • ⭐ Anthony Horowitz – The Word is Murder, The Sentence is Death, A Line to Kill, The Twist of a Knife, Close To Death || I read these in the wrong order. After thoroughly enjoying his book Moonflower Murders last year, I wanted to read some more Anthony Horowitz. I picked up Close To Death when I was in Scotland in October, not realizing that it was part of a series. Because of the book’s structure – it starts with a lengthy flashback – I was hooked even before the detective comes in, and with him, Anthony Horowitz’s own fictional persona. The idea behind all of these books is that Anthony Horowitz (the writer) was approached by a former police detective (Daniel Hawthorne), who wants him to write about his cases, and these books are his Dr Watson-like fictional account of their fractious relationship and the mysteries they end up solving together. They’re delightful. Twisty plots, rich characters, and a splash of self-deprecating humour as the fictional Horowitz perennially ends up stabbed or in jail as a result of thinking that he can figure things out before Hawthorne does.
  • ⭐ Anthony Horowitz – Moonflower Murders || The second book in the Susan Ryland mystery series is equally enjoyable. After playing around with story-within-a-story crossover in Magpie Murders (which the TV show version takes a step further, to excellent effect) Moonflower Murders literally contains an entire second book inside it, the full text of: Atticus Pünd Takes the Case. The (fictional) author Alan Conway had done his usual trick of turning people and events he found in real life into twisted versions in his books, and this book contains clues to solving a crime that is entangled with it. I’m looking forward to the next one, Marble Hall Murders.
  • Curtis C. Chen – True Blue Kangaroo || I loved the first two books in this series, Waypoint Kangaroo, and Kangaroo Too. They’re wise-cracking science-fiction spy adventure stories, right up my alley. This one continues in the same vein, but it gets a bit too caught up in being a homage to the TV show The Prisoner. In the early books of his Laundry series, Charlie Stross picks a piece of classic spy fiction to riff on in each novel – Bond, Len Deighton, Modesty Blaise, etc – but it’s subtle. If you don’t know it’s there, no matter. In True Blue Kangaroo it’s more than just riffing and references – if you’re unfamiliar with The Prisoner, you may find yourself desperately confused about what’s going on. This is a pity, because it seems so unnecessary: the “escape from a top floating prison on Venus” plot would work perfectly well on its own.
  • Tess Gerritsen – The Spy Coast || This ends up a bit Thursday Murder Club, but higher stakes and more serious and way more stressed-out characters. I liked it.
  • Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, Ryan Ottley et al.Invincible compendiums 1, 2, 3 || I was enjoying the TV series, and I wanted to read the original material. The TV adaptation is really very faithful. There are some character changes, but thematically and structurally, and even right down to the art style, it’s very close. Reading fifteen years of a very dense comic story over the course of about two months is quite an experience. Emotional arcs that at the time of publication played out over years hit differently when you read them over the space of a few hours or days. Some of the themes also appear more clearly when you digest the entire series as a single whole. In particular, although there a lot of women appear as important, powerful, and interesting characters throughout the story, they are always there in opposition to, or as a foil for one of the male characters. It’s not subtle, and it doesn’t get any better over the course of the whole series. I enjoyed reading it nonetheless, but I felt exhausted when I closed the final book.
  • ⭐ Edward Ashton – Mickey 7, Antimatter Blues || The trailer for the movie Mickey 17 looked fun and interesting, and knowing that it was based on a book I picked it up to read before seeing it at the cinema. The book is better. Even though Mickey is only on his 7th body in the book, the book allows us to spend much more time on the specifics of each incarnation, and adds more weight to each death he experiences. Although the novel is funny, it’s quite toned down and dry, while the film is often flippant and over-the-top. The reason for Mickey being on the colony ship is also worked out far better, as is the reason for humans’ mistrust of clones and especially doubles. Antimatter Blues is a good direct sequel, to the book. I can’t see it forming a sequel to the film, though.

Episodic Video (“TV”)

  • Slow Horses (season 4) || Continues to be good.
  • Only Murders in the Building (season 4) || Continues to be goofy and good.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon (season 1) || I don’t think I would have watched this if Alex hadn’t been a massive fan of the game series. We watched it together, with Alex giving me commentary on how it all fits together, and where it deviates from the games. It’s a solid Japanese gangster crime story or family and betrayal and revenge.
  • Echo (season 1) || I enjoyed this as a spin-off from the relatively down-to-earth Marvel Hawkeye series, and the Daredevil-ish universe with Vincent D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. It mostly stays down-to-earth itself, but it brings in supernatural elements towards the end, which I thought were unnecessary – the story would have been perfectly fine without them. But it’s a Marvel show, so there’s got to be some kind of magical/mystical/superpower thing to them.
  • Agatha All Along (season 1) || I do quite like these one-off shows that Marvel spins off. I enjoy ongoing shows as well – but sometimes it’s nice to have something with a solid beginning, middle, and end. There were a couple of episodes in the middle that felt like dramatized Escape Rooms, but overall it was solid.
  • Bad Monkey (season 1) || Vince Vaughn does a good sardonic wisecracking protagonist. He’s not exactly playing against type here. I binged all the episodes over the course of a couple of days. I liked it, but that world-weary wisecracking got a bit grating at times, and overall I felt it the whole story could have been wrapped up in 8 episodes rather than 11.
  • The Tourist (seasons 1 & 2) || There’s still life in the “guy wakes up in a hospital with no memory of how he got there” trope. The first episodes of season 1 are brilliant and completely bananas, with every episode ending on a revelation that throws all the previous events into a completely new light. Season 2 not quite as inspired, but still massively fun, with terrifically engaging performance from the lead actors.
  • ⭐ ⭐ Arcane (seasons 1 & 2) || OMG wow. Watched this with Fiona. The animation is just astonishing, and the voice acting as fabulous. I came to this having no knowledge about the setting of the League of Legends game the show is based on, but that wasn’t a problem. At the end of the show (season 2 brings the story to a close) it had left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to give the game a try, but Fiona and Alex talked me out of it.
  • The Diplomat (season 1) || Did not finish. In the current timeline I couldn’t take the portrayals of well-intentioned US government officials seriously. Maybe as peripheral characters in a different show, but not as protagonists.
  • ⭐⭐ Star Trek: Lower Decks (season 5) || All the world building that has gone into Star Trek over the decades acts as an anchor weighting down new live action series, but when you take it into an animated comedy, it provides a rich spring of ideas to explore from a completely different angle. It’s glorious.
  • What We Do in the Shadows (season 6) || A nice wrap up of the show.
  • 💩 What If…? (season 3) || A pointless wrap up of the show.
  • Silo (season 2) || Having read the books it’s based on, there are elements I was looking forward to see, and I kept wanting the show to just get on with it. It’s good, but like many Apple TV shows, it really does take its time.
  • The Day of the Jackal (season 1) || Ooh, this is fantastic. Globe-trotting assassin/secret agent cat-and mouse game. Runs a little out of steam in the last few episodes, but mostly incredibly tense throughout.
  • Invincible (season 3) || I saved watching this season until after I’d read the books (see above). It’s good, but I think maybe I should have waited a little longer before watching it. I felt a little over-Invincibled.
  • The Penguin (season 1) || I still find it hard to believe that it’s Colin Farrell under a ton of make-up effects doing all this. His performance is incredibly nuanced and physical at the same time. This is not a superhero show – it’s an organized crime thriller that just happens to have characters from the Batman universe. It’s also a detailed portrayal of a sociopath. Not in the shorthand sense, of using the term to lazily wave away a character’s motivations just to keep the plot going. The show carefully builds up the viewer’s sympathy with Oz, and then rips it all away to show the emptiness underneath. It’s quite something.
  • Daredevil: Born Again (season 1) || Given how Trump is acting to destroy all democratic institutions and how easily he seems to be able to install an authoritarian regime in the US, I found this show…quite hard to watch in places. Kingpin is Trump. This season of the show focuses on his rise to power as a populist mayor of New York, and how he immediately uses that power to destroy any constraints on him using it, and to crush his enemies. Spoiler: there’s no come-uppance in this season. It’s pretty bleak. But I’m glad to see Marvel investing in the old shows from the Netflix era. I enjoy the more grounded take on superheroes.
  • ⭐ ⭐ Andor (season 2) || Just as Star Trek: Lower Decks is the best Star Trek property, Andor is easily the best Star Wars show, and I’d rank it higher than everything apart from Empire and A New Hope in the whole Star Wars canon. It’s an unashamedly non-family-friendly, anti-fascist rallying cry. (How the heck did this come out of Disney? Consider this the antidote to Daredevil: Born Again, if you felt depressed after watching that.) The show also does an incredibly good job of joining up the edges with the Rogue One movie. I re-watched it immediately after finishing Andor, which may have been a mistake. The tonal shift is jarring. Andor’s score is dark and moody, while Rogue One has a jaunty, heroic soundtrack. After having followed Andor as a protagonist for so long, seeing him play second fiddle to Jyn Erso, who doesn’t benefit from a similarly intimate backstory, felt like a disappointing end to his arc. Apparently there’s a fan edit of Rogue One circulating, which replaces its score with music from Andor, and re-cuts it to make it more tonally consistent. I might seek it out…
  • The Last of Us (season 2) || After finishing the game The Last of Us, part 2, I remember thinking: “That was amazing. There’s no way I’m never going to replay it.” It was a great game, but it was harrowing. Fiona and I approached season 2 of the TV show with some trepidation, because we knew what was (probably) going to come. It did come. It was intense. And…they cut it in half at the end of seven episodes. The game does this thing part-way where it switches the main character, and you get to revisit the plot from a different angle. There will be a season 3 of the show, and I’m annoyed that we’re going to have to wait for it. (See: Trung Phan’s “The Case Against Streaming TV Shows“)

Games

I haven’t been consistent about tracking games in these Mixed Media posts, so there’s probably stuff I’ve missed. Bear in mind that these all get a ⭐, because I’m pretty selective about what I spend my time playing.

  • Hi-Fi Rush || Fun game, fun plot. I enjoyed the rhythm action elements of it, but I found it really hard to keep the beat. I thought I was pressing the buttons to the beat of the music, but the game disagreed with me. I spent a lot of time tweaking my TV and PS settings to see if there was some kind of synchronization lag. I think I got a bit closer, but I never felt like I really got it. As someone who used to play the drums, this felt incredibly frustrating. It’s also possible that I just suck at games.
  • Stellar Blade || Abi got a free download code for this last year; I had a lot of free time; and I went “sure, why not”. The game’s environments are gorgeous, and the action is good, once I got better at timing my attacks. (Although just as with Hi-Fi Rush, I never felt like I was completely in the groove.) The story is just…bad, and the dialogue and the voice acting are — somehow — even worse.
  • Astrobot || Utterly charming, fun, and with enough challenge to keep some of the tricky levels interesting. Fantastic varied level design. Just a joy to play.
  • Lego Horizon Adventures || Fun and charming. It’s lightweight compared to the main games, but it’s a Lego game – that’s the whole point. I love that they kept the same voice cast as the main games, and let the actors play them in a whole new way.
  • God of War (2017) and God of War Ragnarok || I hadn’t played the original PS2 God of War series. When I started playing this God of War, I initially felt disappointed because it isn’t an open-world game. Coming from games like Horizon, I expected that any game so visually detailed would allow you to wander off through the woods, and climb every boulder you pass by. But no. The explorable area is heavily bounded, and the game leads you through it very linearly at first. I did get the hang of it eventually. There’a s bit of story, you go to a different area, you fight the next iteration of enemy and learn their unique attack patterns, and you solve an environmental puzzle to move on to the next area. The game does open up once you get far enough in, and there’s a satisfying amount of side quests and collectibles. But ultimately what kept me engaged throughout the first game for about 100 hours, and made me go out and get the second game and spend another 100 hours in it as well, was the character development throughout the story. The writing is very good, the voice acting is excellent, and the whole Norse gods family drama is fresh and engrossing. Loved both.
  • The Witcher 3 || Did not finish. After finishing God of War, I thought I’d give this a try, but the game engine felt incredibly primitive and out of date in comparison. I’ve heard many good things about this game (and I enjoyed the TV show), but it didn’t grab me quickly enough, and it wasn’t pretty enough to make me want to persist.

Films

  • Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) || Spends far too much time on the setup, and hardly any time at all on the climax.
  • The Wild Robot (2024) || Gorgeous animation. I didn’t know the original book series, so I didn’t have any nostalgia heart strings to pluck, but the movie was enough. (Also: Matt Berry should provide voices for all the things.)
  • Killer Heat (2024) || Noir-ish mystery with washed-up detective Nick Bali (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) being hired to solve (or not solve) a murder in Crete. Made me want to watch Brick again.
  • 💩 Man of Tai Chi (2013) || Why did I watch this. Only interesting because Keanu Reeves plays a bad guy.
  • 💩 The Killer’s Game (2024) || Hitman diagnosed with terminal illness, takes out a contract on himself, but then discovers he was misdiagnosed and has everything to live for. But he can’t cancel the contract, whoopsie! Fun premise, and I like watching Dave Bautista, but this was straight trash.
  • La Jetée (1962) || Finally got around to watching this seminal film, after seeing the Nerdwriter’s Youtube video essay “The Time Travel Movie That Doesn’t Move”. Both the film and the essay are very good.
  • Anthropoid (2016) || The title sounds like a sci-fi horror film, but it’s actually a WW2 film about Operation Anthropoid, the (true, historical) plot to kill a high-ranking SS officer in Czechoslovakia in 1941. I watched this shortly after watching The Tourist (see above), because it has Jamie Dornan in it. Worthwhile.
  • Force of Nature – The Dry 2 (2024) || There are only so many times you can make a movie about the main character revisiting past trauma while he’s investigating a parallel murder or disappearance in the present day. In this case, that number of times was “one”, and this second movie feels like a pale echo.
  • Sonic 3 (2024) || Not as fresh as 1 & 2, but still fun.
  • Nosferatu (2024) || I haven’t seen the original film, but I understand this this follows it fairly closely. I found it tense, engaging, and well directed. I enjoyed the long lingering takes where the actors really had a lot of room to, you know, act.
  • Alien: Romulus (2024) || Eh, it’s fine. It does a lot better at recapturing the claustrophobic horror of the original movie, and at least it’s not a pointless sprawling retconning exercise. Still not great.
  • 💩 Venom 3: The Last Dance (2024) || Well, that didn’t make any damn sense. Kudos to the editor who was able to salvage even that much.
  • Captain America: Brave New World (2025) || Hmm. I like Sam Wilson as the new Captain America, and I appreciate how they tried to recapture some of the feeling cold war paranoia from The Winter Soldier, but Harrison Ford felt horribly misplaced here. Swing and a miss.
  • Mickey 17 (2025) || See notes on the book, above. Some of the visuals are amazing – the scene where the creepers deploy their whirling mounds of decoys to confuse the colonists wasn’t in the book, and was a fantastic addition. But the colony leader is turned into a larger-than-life caricature, when in the book he is a more measured foe. I understand why they made that change: the film has a certain tone, and the pastiche fits this tone. Film adaptations are their own thing; they don’t have to be a faithful retelling of the original. And that’s fine. This is well-done and amusing sci-fi film in its own right.
  • American Fiction (2023) || I should watch more movies that aren’t action blockbusters or sci-fi spectaculars. This is a tight little drama about a writer who decides to parody a particular style, and finds that the parody is miles more successful than his original work. Jeffrey Wright is always intensely watchable.
  • ⭐⭐ Sinners (2025) || Okay, so I’m back in the blockbusters again, I guess. I saw this in the cinema, and wow, am I glad I did. This is a fabulously inventive vampire flick that is deftly weaves harsh real world themes, wooden stake action, and a soundtrack to die for. The Switched On Pop podcast called it a vampire musical, and they’re not wrong. This really feels like a classic for the ages.
  • 💩💩 Kraven The Hunter (2024) || From the sublime to the ridiculous. Sony’s track record for their Marvel movies is really shockingly bad, and this is right on track. On the other hand, any version of Kraven that isn’t from Ryan North’s run on Squirrel Girl is never going to match up.
  • Freaky Tales (2024) || From a recommendation by jwz, this is fantastic! Punks vs nazis! Rappers vs sexism! Mystical basketball samurai! It’s much weirder than you might think from the trailer, and the trailer looks plenty weird already. I first visited Oakland in 1992, a few years after the 1987 setting of the film, but there were many touches that I recognized and enjoyed. I would love to have a Colonial Donuts T-shirt like the one Tom Hanks was wearing…
  • Thunderbolts* (2025) || After a string of recent Marvel disappointments, this feels like a solid return to form. Despite being filled with a large cast of characters, it doesn’t feel bloated trying to give everyone equal screen time. This is Florence Pugh’s show, and her performance gives a rock solid foundation for the whole thing to build upon. Her sense of loneliness and looking for purpose is in perfect sync with the plot and the foe’s arc. The balance of action and comedy is perfectly judged. Not sure if this it’s enough to build a whole new Avengers arc upon, but I’ll quite happily take this as a standalone.
  • Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning (2025) || The film was long enough that my local cinema decided to splat an intermission right in the middle. (Get stuffed, Pathé Zaandam.) Some of that length comes from the fact that it tries to tie up threads from earlier films in the series (not just Dead Reckoning), and so it spends a lot of time explaining things. It felt like the first twenty or so were solid exposition, and then there were more recaps dotted throughout. The plot is quite complicated, and as the final confrontation approached I lost track of who was doing what to whom, and why. (Personally, I thought the option of destroying all of cyberspace and the internet sounded just fine.) But the stunts and set pieces were, as promised, incredible, tense, and thrilling. The film was preceded by a weird short introduction by Tom Cruise, thanking us for showing up in the cinema in person. He was clearly reading from an autocue, and looking slightly off to the side of the camera…it felt oddly like a hostage video. I hope he’s OK.

Photo workflow, mid-2025 edition

This is an update to my photo workflow post from 2023, because I’ve changed a few things since then.

Phone camera (iPhone 15 Pro)

  • Take photo in the normal Camera app
  • I don’t tend to bother with Halide or other camera apps any more.

The photo goes into the photo roll on my phone, and gets synced to iCloud and Photos.

In the field (Fuji X-T20)

  • I now use the MapMyWalk app on my phone instead of GPX Trail Tracker. I use MapMyWalk for tracking my (long) walks anyway, and it can generate a .tcx file with geolocation coordinates along the walk, which I use later in the process. (Note: it’s important to start a new walk in the app before beginning!)
  • Take photos. I’m still shooting in “fine” JPEG + (uncompressed) RAW format, image size Large 3:2. I think I could switch over to compressed RAW files to save some space, because I’m using third-party apps to deal with RAW files now instead of Apple’s Finder, which still doesn’t support them. (Update 1 June 2025: I have indeed switched over to uncompressed RAW files now. XnView and On1 both handle the compressed files just fine, and my RAW files are now about 30MB each instead of 50MB. Nice.)

Back at base

  • Since 2023 I’ve upgraded my desk computer from an old MacBook Pro to an M2 Mac Mini. It doesn’t have an SD-card slot, so I use an adapter to connect up the card from the camera.
  • I use the application XnView MP to view the photos I’ve taken in a session on the SD card itself, and cull them. I’ve got the app set up to treat RAW+JPEG files as a pair, and I hide the JPEGs in the browse view. XnView is great for very quickly going a large number of photos and marking the ones I want to keep. I generally check for focus and composition, and use the keyboard shortcuts to add a star rating to some files. “3” means that it’s acceptably sharp, and a good enough composition, and is the best from a burst of shots. “4” means even better than that, and “5” is something that really leaped out at me as soon as I saw it. I don’t bother marking anything lower than that. When I’ve gone through the whole batch, I delete anything without a number right from the SD card. If I’ve been out on a bird walk, I often come back with 1000+ shots, and with this system I tend to keep only about 5% of those.
  • I still have the same pair of (1TB) drives named “Photos Import” and “Photos Import clone” as in 2023. A nightly task in SuperDuper keeps them in sync. They’re about 85% full right now. On a typical bird walk I’ll add about 5GB of files, and I do that maybe once every two weeks? So I’ll probably be looking at upgrading these disks sometime in the coming year.
  • I’ve changed my folder structure for filing photos slightly. I’ve occasionally rented a different camera body, and this allows me to keep the photos from those occasions separate. Not sure if this is useful in the long term; check again in another 2 years.
    /root
    / Fuji X-T20
    / YYYYMMDD Short event or location description
    I make a new folder, and then copy the “good” photos from the SD card onto the drive.
  • Next, geotagging again. I log in to the MapMyWalk website, select the relevant route, and download the .tcx file for it. This goes into the same folder as the photos.
  • I’m still using HoudahGeo for geotagging the photos, and it’s still great. Version 7 was just released. I load up the photos I want to tag, drag in the .tcx file with coordinates, and then tell the app to attach the coordinates to the files. It embeds the metadata directly in the JPEGs, and creates XML sidecars for the RAW files.
  • Next, processing! Last year I put some (not much) effort into learning how to tweak my RAW files a bit using ON1. I didn’t want to go down the Lightroom subscription route, with all the Adobe helper apps clutter and annoyance. ON1 works well enough. It’s not expensive: there’s always a 40-50% discount offer on, and I paid €58 for the 2024 version last year. (I haven’t upgraded to the 2025 version because the difference doesn’t seem compelling for my case.) The biggest drawback of the app that its checkbox UI components are styled as radio buttons. It’s downright offensive. Yes, it has generative API capabilities, but it’s easy enough to ignore them.
  • One thing I do very much like about ON1 is that it works just fine with the folders on my hard disk. I don’t have to import everything into a catalogue first. It’s just a bunch of files on disk. When I make edits to my RAW files, they’re additive and non-destructive: ON1 puts a .on1 file right next to the RAW file it belongs to. This is just another sidecar file, like the .xmp file I generated with HoudahGeo. If I want to process the original RAW file again with a different app in the future, it’s not a problem.
  • Inside ON1, I open up the folder of images I’ve just made, and look through everything again. I don’t tend to process everything. I’ll select maybe 5-10 that look like they may end up nice, and do some light processing on them. Typically a bit of a crop, a bit of work on the brightness and shadows, sometimes add or remove a little vibrance, and then see if the sharpening algorithms do anything to improve the final image. If there’s an image that looks really special, I may spend more time selectively tweaking different areas, but that’s rare for now. I’m not an expert at this, but I can generally get the image looking “better than it was before”, which is nice.
  • I then export the processed RAW files to a sub-folder called “ExportJPG” because that was the default name in ON1 🤷‍♂️. From there, I import these processed, exported JPEGs into Apple photos, where they sync to the cloud. (For backup I also have a nightly job in SuperDuper to clone my full hard disk; and I’ve got Backblaze for off-site backups of everything.)
  • I don’t have a photo printer at home, but very occasionally I want to get a print of something. I’ll create an export file in a different folder, and then send that off to HEMA, and they’ll have it ready for me in about 5 working days. I don’t think I use this often enough to make it cost-effective to buy a photo printer.
Eurasian Blackcap, I think? (Zwartkop)

Los Campesinos! (and ME REX) at Queen Margaret Union, Glasgow, Saturday 21 September 2024

Last year was weird, but good.

In the end, I was off work from the middle of June until the end of the year. I didn’t know how long that time would be at the start of it, though. I definitely wanted to take at least 3 months off free and clear, but beyond that it would depend on the job market. I have a mild allergy to the term “productivity”, but I wanted to “use my time well.” Almost immediately after coming back from my work trip to Edinburgh I started some big DIY projects around the house (bike shed, garden shed, bathroom…) that lasted into August. At the end of August my parents came to visit for a week, and by September I was kinda itching for another project.

(Aside: after having been laid low by burnout for months, having energy and enthusiasm for DIY work and manual labour came as a surprise to me. It really was like a switch had been flipped on the day I left my old job.)

After seeing them support Lovejoy in 2023, Fiona raved about Canadian band Good Kid, and was fondly hoping that they would come back to the UK and Europe at some point. At the start of 2024 the band did announce some headline dates on this side of the Atlantic in September, and Fiona snagged a ticket for their Glasgow gig immediately. I got myself a ticket for their show in Amsterdam in September…and also one for Glasgow. This was in March 2024, shortly after I’d decided to leave my Masters project, but before I’d decided on the timeline for leaving my job at FD. I figured that either I’d be still working for FD and could plan a work trip to Scotland to coincide with the gig, or I’d be taking some time off, and could treat myself to some time in Scotland without work at all. Either way: it felt like there was a good chance I could go and see them in Glasgow with Fiona.

This doesn’t explain Los Campesinos!, though. For that, I have to come back to the garden shed project. Going by my photos archive, we painted our garden shed at some point in March 2012. It used to be plain wood, but since then it has been glossy white. I don’t remember much about the work, but I do remember listening to two albums while doing the painting: The National Health by Maxïmo Park, and Hello Sadness by Los Campesinos! Out of nostalgia I started listening to Hello Sadness while I was working on the shed in June. Despite loving that album, I hadn’t kept up with the band over the years. My loss. I was blown away when by their more recent albums, and I immediately rolled into their brand-new material from 2024. Turns out they were just about to release their new album All Hell, and also play some gigs to support it – including one in Glasgow in September…the week before Good Kid.

It didn’t take me long to decide that I definitely had to spend some time in Scotland around those dates.

Not only that, but I mentioned to Fiona that they might like the band as well, and I sent some recommendations for tracks to listen to. Fiona loved them. We got tickets for the Glasgow gig as soon as they were available. Not only that, but I got my friend Graham in Glasgow interested in going along as well. And then he found out that his daughter is super into the band, and he got her a ticket as well. So we found scheduled for a double concert dad outing. Nice!

More context is needed. Fiona had moved to Scotland in 2022, but still had most of their stuff here in Oostzaan. There was still a ton of their art supplies in their room here. They had space for it in their flat in Dundee now, and it made sense to try and move more of it over to Scotland. So Fiona came over here for a few days in September with the goal of packing up as much of their stuff into boxes as would fit in our car, and then I would take the car over to the UK by the IJmuiden-Newcastle ferry, and drive the boxes up to Dundee. I love passenger ferries, and I’d been looking for an opportunity to take the boat over to Scotland again for years. This was going to work out perfectly. I’d have the car with me to drive us to the gigs in Glasgow, and also available in Dundee for going shopping, and picking up odds and ends for the flat in case I did some painting and decorating while I was there*.

With the back seats of the car folded down, we managed to pack it with eight large removal boxes and about five or six smaller ones. Solo almost managed to disrupt my departure by escaping our back garden and getting himself stuck at our neighbours six doors up the street half an hour before I was due to leave for the ferry. But we got him back with only minor injuries, and I had a lovely leisurely ferry crossing. The weather was warm, the Sky Bar on the top deck of the Princess Seaways was open, and I had my camera and a bunch of lenses with me. It was glorious.

The ferry crossing was on Thursday 19th, and the LC! gig was on Saturday 21st. (Was I wearing my Sept 21 shirt? Of course I was.) Fiona and I also enjoy going for walks when I’m visiting. We figured that seeing as we’d be in Glasgow anyway, we could do an overnight stay and then find somewhere nice on the West coast to go walking the next day. We booked rooms at the MyMotel in Paisley. (It was fine, and inexpensive, but they’re going to regret the new tiling work in their bathrooms in a few years’ time.) On the drive over on Saturday afternoon we started listening to ME REX, the band playing in the support slot. Fiona and I both liked them, which was a great sign for the gig in the evening.

We got to Paisley a little later than intended. We dropped our bags at the hotel, and drove into Glasgow. We parked at Kelvinbridge Park & Ride, and walked up to Paesano Pizza on Great Western Road, where we met Graham and his daughter. The restaurant is described as “vibrant”, but in practice this just meant “noisy”. Graham and I enjoyed out pizza, but the artisinal style didn’t quite suit our offspring, and the noise was just too much stimulation. We didn’t linger after finishing our food.

Graham went to Glasgow University, so he knew the area well. It was a short walk to Queen Margaret Union, and it was nice to decompress a bit after the restaurant. The gig was sold out, and the venue was busy when we got there, but we found ourselves a good spot with clear sight lines. (And I was reminded how pleasant it is to see a gig in Scotland, where people are on average shorter than in NL.) ME REX came on and launched into their song “Jupiter Pluvius“, which we’d been listening to in the car. They were great. They played another seven songs, all of which I would recognize now because I’ve continued to listen to them a ton since then. But at the time it all felt fresh and new. They were loud and fun and exciting.

ME REX at QMU

Los Campesinos! don’t release new music very often, and they don’t tour very much. When they do play gigs, they have a policy of only inviting mixed-gender acts to support them, and they will only play in venues with mixed-gender bathrooms. They recently did a write-up covering the cost — to them — of playing a show in Dublin. A banner reading “Safety, dignity, & healthcare for all trans people” was draped over their backline equipment. They’re principled. Their music and lyrics are raw and impassioned. And they’re just terrific live. They played a long set, and it was packed with bangers.

  1. A Psychic Wound
  2. I Broke Up in Amarante
  3. Romance is Boring
  4. Avocado, Baby
  5. Holy Smoke
  6. By Your Hand
  7. What Death Leaves Behind
  8. Feast of Tongues
  9. Long Throes
  10. For Flotsam
  11. Straight In at 101
  12. Moonstruck
  13. kms
  14. Knee Deep at ATP
  15. I Just Sighed. I Just Sighed, Just So You Know
  16. To Hell in a Handjob
  17. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
  18. The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future
  19. 0898 HEARTACHE

Encore:

  1. Clown Blood; or, Orpheus’ Bobbing Head
  2. Hello Sadness
  3. You! Me! Dancing!
  4. Baby I Got the Death Rattle

I had gone to the merch stand to buy some T-shirts in the gap between ME REX and LC!, but after the gig I decided to get a poster as well. After all the queuing, we met outside and said our goodbyes. Graham and his daughter headed off, while Fiona wanted to sit down for a bit. I think it was Freshers Week at the uni, because the streets were full of partying students in all kinds of fancy clothes. We stopped off for Room Snacks at a Co-Op on the way back to the car, and drove back to Paisley for the night.

The following day we got up and set off for Puck’s Glen near Dunoon, a small slice of temperate rainforest. We drove to Gourock and got the ferry across the water, then headed for the forest. There wasn’t much parking nearby, but we found a spot, and had a lovely wee walk. (Not nearly as long as the 17km trek up to the Blackwater Reservoir in 2023…)

After that, we took the scenic route back: north past Loch Esk, round the tip of Loch Fyne to Inveraray, north to Dalmally, and then along the A85 via Tyndrum, Crianlarich, Crieff, and Perth, back to Dundee. We listened to a bunch of ME REX along the way, as well as a lot of other music. Fiona wasn’t car sick, but they did sleep for much of the last stretch. It was a long drive! And it was a very good weekend.


* I did a lot of painting and decorating while I was there. I had originally planned to be there for ten days, but I extended the trip by a week when it became clear that I had been ridiculously ambitious about what we could achieve in that time.

Marathon walk from Oostzaan to Noordwijk, Saturday 19 April 2025

Actual walking time 7h 25m, total elapsed time 8h 29m (last year: 6h 44m and 7h 44m respectively). Various reasons for being slower this year. For one, I haven’t been taking a regular daily/lunchtime walk for the last month or two, so I’m not in practice. (The lack of a daily walk is a habit I want to address.) The second (big) factor is because I was listening to podcasts rather than music for this walk. (I had saved up some episodes of 99% Invisible and Imaginary Worlds.) Walking to the beat is very good for maintaining pace. Walking to podcasts isn’t.

These two things are connected. I”m not under a lot of external stress at work, but I’m still new in the job and I want to do well. I’ve been doing silly things like skipping lunchtime walks and not maintaining good sleep hygiene. This last week was particularly bad, as I was trying to round off a piece of work that was taking me longer than I felt it should. I was feeling fatigued, and I wasn’t looking forward to doing a marathon walk. I’ve started treating it as an annual tradition, but I’m always wary of traditions turning into obligations. I mentioned to Abi that this year it was feeling much more like Type 2 fun rather than Type 1 fun. As a result, I decided to walk with some podcasts for enjoyment myself while I was doing something else less fun (walking).

As it turned out, the walk started off pleasant, and turned very nice. The weather was cool (6-14°C) but sunny. I left the house at 06:49 as the sky was still waking up. I walked through Poelenburg and over the Den Uylbrug towards the Noordzeekanaal. Google Maps’ walking directions were not helpful after that point. There is temporary floating housing for asylum seekers on the Gerrit Bolkade just before it curves round to the Noordzeekanaal, and the path next to the road is closed to cyclists and pedestrians, so I had to take a detour. Further along the canal, the directions had me walking along the grassy verge of the Westzanerweg, crossing the Nauernasebrug (not suitable for pedestrians), and then choosing between the grassy verge or the grassy dyke along the Nauernaseweg. I should know better. I’ve walked to that ferry before, and on bike or on foot it’s much better to take the slightly longer detour north up to Nauerna. By the time I got to the ferry, my feet were wet from walking in the dewy vegetation, and I was feeling a bit grumpy as a result.

I terms of shoes, in previous years I’ve tended to buy a new pair of walking shoes and to break them in before a long walk. This year I stuck with the Asics Gel-Pulse 15 I bought last year. These shoes have lasted a lot better than my previous Asics shoes. I like them because they’re lightweight and breathable, but the mesh upper seems to have a particular failure mode near the little toe. My last several pairs have all started to develop a tear before they were a year old. Maybe Asics have changed the material or design a bit, but this year: no tear. (I don’t think it’s that I’ve used them less. I did a lot of walking while I was off work last summer and autumn.)

Failure mode on a pair of Asics Gel-Pulse 13: through in the upper near the little toe

After crossing the Noordzeekanaal I continued on somewhat moist feet through Sparndam towards Haarlem. I stopped just after 11:00 to get some breakfast and ate it on the Leidsevaart, just opposite Patronaat where Alex & I had seen Delta Sleep just the other week. Just as the last few years, I was walking without a backpack – just a bank card, a phone, earbuds, and a few other pocket items. Long distance walks in the Netherlands pretty much always take you past a supermarket, a petrol station, a café or a rest stop where you can get a snack. A super friendly coot swam up to the edge of the water and kept me company.

Breakfast on the Leidsevaart in Haarlem.
My coot friend

Taking a rest in Haarlem gave me a chance to dry out my socks and shoes a little bit, and to tape up my feet where I was developing some blister hot spots. (Medical tape is one of my essential pocket items on a long walk.) Then I carried on south along the Leidsevaart (Haarlem is lovely) and entered the dunes for the last third of the walk.

We had gone to the dunes with Patrick and Teresa for a short walk last year, but it’s not an area I’ve spent a lot of time. It’s beautiful! I stopped for something to drink at café ‘t Panneland, which looks like a great jumping-off point for day trips and little expeditions. Then I walked a stretch along the banks of the Oosterkanaal, which is quiet because it’s a little off the main walking tracks. A pair of swans were nesting at one of the crossings. Swans are big. Lots of other birds to see here as well. I definitely need to come back.

Nesting swans

I hit the marathon distance at 15:18, still in the dunes. My end goal was the lighthouse at Noordwijk, so I still had a few kilometers left to go. I took the rest of the way at a leisurely pace, and treated myself to a large strawberry milkshake from the snackbar near the lighthouse. Abi arrived to meet me shortly after I got there. We wandered over to Strandpaviljoen De Zeemeeuw for a piece of apple pie, then walked along the beach for a bit before heading back to the car and driving home. This is a nice little routine we’re developing: I do a long walk with somewhere pretty as the destination, Abi drives to pick me up at the end, and we have a piece of appeltaart or a light afternoon meal while we’re there, and we discover a new place.

One final note: this year’s main innovation was wearing a cap. I have a bad tendency to forget to wear sun cream, and I lots my nice pair of sunglasses a couple of years ago. I knew I was going to be walking south-ish a lot, with the sun in my face. I could have ordered a cap from just about anywhere, but Alex and I went to a couple gigs in the last few weeks, and I picked up a cap from the merch stand at ASIWYFA in Tilburg. It was a great €25 investment! It’s soft, and has a subtle logo design based on their album Gangs. I did put on sunscreen before I left the house in the morning, but the cap kept the sun out of my eyes and off much of my face. I spent less time squinting and feeling uncomfortably exposed. Definitely recommended.

ASIWYFA cap merch

My legs and knees stiffened up by the end of the evening, but after a good night’s sleep I’m feeling fine this morning. A little stiff and sore, but that’s expected. Minimal blisters. Annual self-check: passed ✅.

Del Amitri at the Big Top on the Lodge Grounds, North Berwick Fringe By The Sea Festival, Saturday 3 August 2024

I think that Del Amitri’s 1989 album Waking Hours was the first CD I bought after moving to Scotland after secondary school. (It’s a long time ago.) It’s definitely an album I listened to a lot. I definitely remember listening to a tape of it on a portable cassette player on a long overnight bus ride between St. Andrews and London.

I never saw the band live until recently. My parents moved to North Berwick a few years ago, and North Berwick hosts a little offshoot of the Edinburgh Fringe festival every year: Fringe By The Sea. They’ve hosted some big (Scottish) names in the Big Top venue: Texas, Travis, and in 2024 Del Amitri. I had hoped that my parents could come along to see them as well, but the disabled access is limited and there were no suitable tickets left. My dad got me a ticket, and I went along on my own.

It was a pleasant evening in early August. I got to the Lodge Grounds way early. I was pretty much first in line when the stewards gathered people for the queue, and I got a great spot right in front of the stage. When my mental health is in a good state (i.e. not 2023/24), I like getting to a gig early and spending the time to enjoy the opening act(s), because they’re a great way to find new music I’m likely to enjoy. I’m thinking Bleu (opening for Toad the Wet Sprocket in Boston in 2003), Zoë Keating (opening for Imogen Heap in 2006), Thumpers (opening for Chvrches in 2013), etc. I can add Mandrake Handshake to that list. I don’t think they’re destined to be huge, but I loved them. They played a lush, groovy, modern psychedelic set that had me swaying along to their rich orchestration and easy rhythms. Honestly, the evening could have ended after them and I would have walked away happy.

Mandrake Handshake in the Big Top at Fringe By The Sea

Del Amitri came on later, and played a long, wide-ranging set full of favourites and crowd-pleasers. Lead singer Justin Currie has Parkinson’s, and from close up to the stage I could see a tremble in his hands when they weren’t actually playing his bass or holding the microphone. His voice is not as strong as it once was, but when you’ve got 2500 people in the crowd singing along to the familiar choruses, you can afford to hold back a little and roll with the room.

Set list:

  1. Musicians and Beer
  2. All Hail Blind Love
  3. Always the Last to Know
  4. Opposite View
  5. Kiss this Thing Goodbye
  6. Not Where It’s At
  7. Mockingbird, Copy Me Now
  8. Driving with the Brakes On
  9. Move Away Jimmy Blue
  10. You Can’t Go Back
  11. Roll to Me
  12. Here and Now
  13. Tell Her This
  14. Lonely
  15. The Ones that You Love Lead You Nowhere
  16. Spit in the Rain

Big encore:

  1. Missing Person
  2. Be My Downfall
  3. Nothing Ever Happens
  4. Gone in a Second
  5. Stone Cold Sober

Being close to the stage I got some nice photos of the bands. (I had rented a Fujifilm X-H2 for this week I was over in Scotland, because I was taking a boat trip out to the Isle of May to see the puffins and other sea birds. I didn’t have a press pass, so I didn’t bring that to the gig with me.) My favourite photo of the evening, however, turned out to be a sideways shot of a steward, lit by the setting sun falling through the open flaps of the big top tent.

The cost of touring, for bands

As a frequent concert-goer (mostly for bands that don’t sell out huge arenas) and as a notorious over-thinker (of everything), I often stand in the crowd at a gig and wonder how the finances work out for a band on tour. A couple of years ago Adam Neely made a video breaking down the costs of touring for his band Sungazer. Last month, Los Campesinos! shared a post giving details of the cost of playing a gig in Dublin.

Like Adam Neely, they clearly get people encouraging them to cut costs by forcing themselves to work under worse conditions:

Often when this conversation is had in the public domain, people will make statements like, “you can save money by sleeping in the van, or crashing on someone’s sofa” attempting to turn things into the dril candles meme. To those people, I say “grow up”.

I love music, and I love seeing artists play live. I kinda hate that the economics of this work out so poorly for them. The best I can do for them most of the time is to buy their music on a platform like Bandcamp (instead of, or as well as streaming it, because streaming is pretty convenient), showing up for them when they’re on tour, and buying their merch at the gig. (I’m very good at buying the merch.) But I wish that the music business was healthier, and could provide a more stable living for more people.

Related: the new album “Bicker” by Orchards is very good.