This must be the place

The past few weeks haven’t really given me time for blog­ging. I’ve been help­ing with house-clear­ances, writ­ing a propos­al for some freel­ance work I really wanted but didn’t get, and under­go­ing major dent­al work. I now have the next 10 weeks house-sitting in a small town at least an hour’s travel from anyone I know.

i’ve also been glued to the news far more than I’d like lately. The depress­ing news that police in the US are still able to shoot as many inno­cent black people as they like, with little consequence, and that plenty of people who think of them­selves as Good People will do as many mental gymnastics as it takes to excuse them with stuff like “well that guy had three speed­ing tick­ets, so it was essen­tially fine really” makes you lose faith in human­ity.

Domest­ic­ally as well, UK polit­ics has turned into a ridicu­lous soap opera where the writers insert as many bizarre plot turns as possible. You feel you can’t look away because you’ll suddenly miss some­thing import­ant, and that you suddenly find out you’re not a citizen any more or that the whole health service has been sold off or some­thing else drastic. It’s exhaust­ing to keep up with, and keeps throw­ing up ridicu­lous scen­ari­os like Boris John­son being Foreign Secret­ary (!!!) and the way that the cent­ral commit­tee of the Labour Party is desper­ate to exclude the party members from being able to vote in anything. Buzzfeed of all places (!!) has two good summar­ies here: 1 and 2.

I was hoping for a quiet summer where not much happens. I suppose I have that in that the local train company has also gone into melt­down, so I can’t actu­ally go anywhere or have friends who don’t have a car (ie all of those in London) visit right now.

Here’s some links to inter­est­ing things to distract your­self with:

• Sooth­ing pixel art of water­falls and forests
• Wint, MP. Text from joke twit­ter account Dril with pictures of Brit­ish politi­cians. Makes as much sense as anything they say them­selves at the moment
• 24 recipes for veget­ari­an and vegan comfort food
• The Lost Victori­an Mansions of LA
• An inter­est­ing article on how declut­ter­ing has a differ­ent mean­ing for the adult chil­dren of refugees
• For French speak­ers- Monoprix’s new own brand food pack­aging with terrible dad jokes on – giving Cara­m­bar a run for their money (try read­ing them out loud if you don’t get them)
• 1930s guide to churn­ing out a pulp novel
• Paul Strand’s photo­graphs of people in the Hebrides in the 1950s
• Things Lucy Maud Mont­gomery Lied to Me About (RIP The Toast)
• The Motorist’s Green Book and Black America’s Perpetu­al Search for a Home (RIP The Toast round 2)