One Man's Notes

This was a very long time ago in the Cairngorms.

Pandemic pleasures: being at home enough to keep your Hotbin composter at a steady temperature of nearly 60C. 🌱

I’m currently reading and enjoying The Mystery Of Three Quarters: The New Hercule Poirot Mystery by Sophie Hannah 📚. While I was sceptical about the idea of Poirot novels not authored by Agatha Christie, they work because they aren’t Christie pastiche.

They’re books featuring a completely recognisable Poirot, and set in the same sort of era, but are very much told in the author’s own voice.

Good, escapist, murderous fun.

Here’s one reason every journalist should write a newsletter for a while: nothing teaches you more directly the relationship between what you write and subscriber churn.

I am embarrassed it has taken me until my late 40s to understand the difference between a good quality, long-lasting t-shirt, and a cheapo one.

The pandemic lockdowns seem to have kicked the tablet market back into growth.

Apple has 38% of the market with the iPad, Samsung is next with 18.7%.

Well, this makes sense: Social media is addictive if you like embarrassing people

A rather busy key worker at Nymans yesterday.

Schools, Covid-19 and the risk of unintentional misunderstandings.

Sometimes they way we write something can do more harm than good.

Lots of people using the slipway behind our house today.

This is an adorable version of something that every parent who has been working from home the last few months has experienced. Except, the parent is Alanis Morissette.

This sums up pretty nicely why I, as a teenager in the 1980s, completely fell in love with this series: Moonlighting: How Pre-Dramedy Era Dramedy Made Words Cool Again

This sunflower has self-seeded from below our bird feeder. What a lovely surprise.

Typo of the day: “toe-hugging”.

Less green than tree-hugging, and just possibly a bit more kinky.

Um. Get your GoPro merch?

Trump just used a massive dead cat to distract from appalling US economic news.

A devastating consequence of the pandemic and lockdown: the National Trust are making over 1000 people redundant.

The current wave of newsletters are often compared to the early blogs - but most of them miss one critical element.

Sign on the equipment in the local playpark. One day, it’ll be an historical oddity blithely ignored by children for whom it’s an irrelevance.

Roll on that day.

Beach detail.

The Isles of Scilly, a decade ago.

An additional mask, now they’re compulsory in shops.

We get some surprisingly big ships on this stretch of the river.

Buoyant bird.

Beach life.