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June. Jubilee. Weather/times like this always make me think of these lines from Forty Years On:
MOGGIE: Then in 1914 it begins to rain and all through the war and after it never stops.
HEADMASTER: The war and everything that comes after grey and wet and misty and nasty.
HUGH: Never a fine day in the trenches was there.
NURSE: Rain on Armistice Day.
MOGGIE: Rain on the queues that wait for the Dole.
HUGH: Rain on the wet tarmac as they search the empty sky waiting for an old man with a piece of paper.
Here are 5 things:
Anne Shewring has compiled her pandemic microfiction into a lovely physical thing you can buy. And she's promoting it with whatIthinkwe'regoingtohavetocall content, produced by Arthur Davies and Company, featuring @jaxysays
Crossrail opening has reminded many of us of the best management concept ever described on a transport blog: the thermocline of truth. Even if you don't run a metropolitan mobility solution this will be familiar to you:
"It is the principle that bad news tends to accrue at a lower management level, because no one wants to be the person who moves a project risk marker from ‘yellow’ to ‘red’ on a RAG chart. As a result, pessimism and a belief that the project will overrun ‘bubbles up’ to a certain decision-making level but never beyond, as if hitting the thermal layer that exists in the ocean. Eventually, the issues reach critical mass and force their way through, leaving senior management wonder why everything ‘suddenly’ went wrong, when in fact the signs that the project was troubled existed at a lower level for some time."
All novels ever. Simple as. I've read a lot of "what if phones but too much", "a weird guy just goes around being weird" and "damn you, margaret thatcher!!"
This tweet thread became a blog post. The theme: "women’s sport exists as a category because the dominance of men was threatened by women competing". Current examples: ultra-endurance racing, big wave surfing and shooting.
The sounds of a small boat on the tidal Thames and the calls on its two-way radio.
BONUS UPDATES from previous episodes. A correspondent points to another example of explicitly portable food: The Bedfordshire Clanger, more on Liberation Skirts, Arooj Aftab compiles an Ambient Focus mix.
Promotional news
Many of you lovely people have bought tickets for Interesting despite knowing nothing about what's going to happen. We've sold more than 100 so far. If you need more certainty before committing I can tell you that I'm 99% sure that we're going to have - at minimum - talks about crispy onions, the trains of Eastern Europe and nightwatchmen.
I'm doing my semi-annual DJing next week. My friend Ben has asked me to play jazz records in Hastings. (Sounds very jubilee, doesn't it?) To avoid too many editorial decisions I'm performing a simple chronological history of the vibraphone called, inevitably, vibeshift. You can hear a practise set on mixcloud. Or, if you like to watch awkward dad dancing to polyrhythmic jazz you can see a tribute to My Analog Journal on YouTube. (Or, because demonitisation, on Vimeo)
And that's it. The real royal family are the friends we made along the way.
BYE!
(There are 837 of you. 837 is the 36th generalized heptagonal number. Obvs.)