the centres cannot hold
I was interested to read a news story the other day warning that town centres could become ghost towns because experts have been warning that this was going to happen since the mid 1980s.…
spaced out on synths
Any of my friends who have spent much time in either my dwelling or my car, have probably noticed that a lot of the music I like is low on singing and drums, and high in synthesizers, particularly those fuzzy old analogue synths.…
fantasy world
in my fantasy world, I would have enough time to read all the books I want to…
open source? Microsoft?!
Microsoft announced recently that it has developed *its own* distribution of Linux. Having followed the IT industry since around the time MS-DOS came out, this is hard to digest and gives rise to some complicated feelings.…
eulogy for LiveJournal
For 15 years near the start of this century, I had a kind of blog called a LiveJournal. It was like public blogs crossed with Facebook...…
memoir
I find the sound of a heavily-laden freight train comforting: as an infant, waking in the night, I would often hear the diesel locos labouring along the line across the fields, hauling thirty heaped wagons of coal from colliery to power station…
mirrors should reflect
Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage.…
a lake
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature…
more of the same
To mark this blog's fourth anniversary, I gave it a bit of a refresh, both visual and technical.…
the map of Whorlton
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a work in progress, and always will be. All maps that try to keep up with the world as it changes are.…
nightbirds
The Night Bird: cross-border train tracking through the darkened Alps, stars defining the mountain peaks, a chain of moonlit cameos coasting back along the line…
patriotism and habitus
After a decade of living in the midlands, I realised that I didn't like it there and missed living in the North, the part of England that I come from. After a second decade, I was starting to feel desperate…