August 2015 Review

There’s a Flanders and Swann song about the weather in England. “In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it’s not!” July is usually hot but quite sunny. August is now terminally grey and overcast. And depressing. It’s also the month when, for some reason, I start to take stock of what I’m doing and make some changes.

I changed up my work shirts to blue, single cuff, non-iron, slim cut, 17.5x35 from T M Lewin's. Of whom I’ve long been a fan, but until I looked at their website I had no idea just how many combinations were available. The one I ordered was exactly what I wanted. I lost two pairs of trousers on the train earlier this year (it feels like last year) and punished myself by buying replacements from M&S. Those got dumped as well, for two proper pairs, again from T M Lewin's.

Finding out from my Fitbit that pretty much no matter what I did, I got around 6:15 - 6:45 hours’ sleep (unless I really do climb into bed at 21:30 or so), I decided that watching an early evening film and getting back at 21:30 wouldn’t kill me, as long as I didn’t then spend an hour looking at nothing much on the internet. So I’m trying to make that a new habit.

I read The FUSE: Gridlock; DMZ: On The Ground; Hadley Freeman's Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies; Mai Jai's, Decoded; Philippe Georget's, Summertime All The Cats Are Bored; Fuck Yeah, Menswear; a monograph on Basquiat’s paintings; The Architecture of Modern Mathematics; and No Highway by Neville Shute.

I saw Straight Outta Compton at Cineworld; Salt of the Earth, Eden, Diary of a Teenage Girl, and Precinct 75 at the Soho Curzon, The Killers at the Prince Charles Cinema. Also S1 of Miami Vice. (Will Nikita look as dated in thirty years?)

I’d registered for the Windows 10 upgrade on my old Samsung, and a couple of weekends after the launch date, it told me it was ready to install the new OS. Which it did in about ninety minutes, from the internet, without losing any data or programs, or requiring me to fill in forms about the software I use. Corporate IT departments please note.

My new gym routine is fairly settled. Tuesday is weights day. Sunday and Thursday are body-weight flexibility exercises: jumping onto or over boxes; Vipr movements; … ; and pull-ups, pull-downs and rows. I need to work on my back. Following my trainer’s advice, pull-ups get done first, and following some bro-science, I don’t do a set to failure. I feel a lot less ache-y and more energetic as a result. Three weights sessions were not doing it for me.

And I had a signing ceremony with Sis and Nephew at my solicitors. They are now my attorneys for Finance and Care. This is a slightly more emotional exercise than you might think. It involves thinking, if only for a while, about what you want to happen to you when you start going gaga or get some unpleasant cancer. Which was probably why I felt it was a much more emotionally-messy month than I’ve made it sound.