Watching Channel 4’s Unreported World segment on cocaine smuggling into Spain by mini submarines from South America. And I can’t help thinking, just fucking legalise it. Regulate it, tax it. Take control out of the hands of gangsters. Everyone would be safer.

And not just cocaine, obviously.

Oh, America, what have you done? How has this happened?

Watched the Channel 4 documentary about Hope Not Hate’s undercover investigation: Undercover: Exposing the Far Right. Very good, compelling viewing, and important.

Just booked to see Fucked Up on Saturday. I saw them back in 2011. I haven’t paid that much attention since. But since they’re playing at Oslo, Hackney, just down the road, it would be rude not to go.

The local parakeets basically live in our garden now.

📚 Books 2024, 20: Julia by Sandra Newman

As I said about Nineteen Eighty-Four itself, a bigger post is coming.

📚 Books 2024, 19: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

I’m going to write a bigger post about all the Nineteen Eighty-Four -related things I’ve read, listened to, or attended recently, and I’ll link to it here when I do.

And here it is.

I love that today’s Xkcd (probably strictly yesterday’s) celebrates the closure of the UK’s last coal-fired powerstation in such a British way: do all the sums in metric, then convert at the last to inches.

Let my phone update to iOS 18 overnight, and this morning… it’s hard to see the difference.

There wasn’t even a message saying, ‘Your phone was updated…’

Currently reading: Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell 📚

So many editions, and none of them with quite the cover I have: a self-portrait by Francis Bacon.

It must be 40, 45 years since I last read this and there are currently a lot of sequels and connected works I want to read, so I thought I’d go back to the source.