July 2018 Diary

You would think these were the easiest posts to write. All I have to do is list everything I did. I should be able to do that the day after the ends of the month. Yet I never get round to doing it until the middle of the month. Is there a reason for the hesitation? I don’t feel as if I’ve done enough in the month and would rather not have to document it so quickly?

At the start if the month I went to Doddle at Liverpool Street collected the Asus Aspire I’d ordered in June. I don’t know about your offices, but ours actively discourages having items delivered. The post room for our floor is a pile of letters and packages: nothing is delivered, and there are no pigeon-holes. Send me something to that address and it will never reach me. So Doddle is a really useful service.

In the middle of the month, I collected the Sonos Beam soundbar. I had it working the next evening. Oh yeah. More oomph, clearer speech, fuller sound. My TV set doesn’t have the HDMI-out for sound, so I have to use the optical digital adapter, and there’s a very slight delay between the screen and the soundbar, but once the brain understands what’s happening, it adapts after about five minutes. If you have a modern TV and don’t have a decent soundbar or a 5.1, you are missing out. And yes, the Sonos is controlled by an app you load onto your iDevice and the app can stream music from your subscription service.

I got a day trip for work up to sunny Solihull via Euston and Birmingham International. Most of the day was spent in trains, taxis and conference rooms, so I had no real sense of the place, but it makes a change from the usual commute. I’ve been to Birmingham town centre before with work, and only really remember the awful road system and the restaurants down by the canal. I collected the soundbar from Sonos’ Covent Garden shop on the way back from Solihull, and by the time got to Richmond was so darn hungry - conference centre food doesn’t count - that I had some “street food” at the Yo! Sushi across from the station.

Sis and I had our annual trip up the Kingsland Road to Tay Do for Vietnamese at the start of the month, taking the long but half-scenic route back via the North London Line rather the usual route on the Overground.

I saw Leave No Trace at the Curzon Soho - excellent - and got through S6 of House. I read Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, Joel Dicker’s The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair, and David Szalay’s All That Man Is. East Lynne was a best-seller in the 19th century, and it’s a fantastic read. I started on Cobbet’s Rural Rides, but that’s bedtime reading, so it will be many months before that gets finished.

I almost finished the great CD ripping project. I’m going to write about that separately.

It was too damn hot. I managed to keep up the exercise for a couple of weeks, and then the heat just wore me down. Sleep is not as good as it needs to be. I don’t like being sweaty and hot. I spent a lot of the heat indoors, with the curtains drawn to keep the heat down.