It's good to know that our weekly local newspaper updates stories as they develop.
The front-page headline, by the way, is "Wildfires spark calls for action". No opportunity for an inappropriate pun goes unmissed by the Essex County Standard.
The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
RSS feeds: v0.91; v1.0 (RDF); v2.0; Atom.
8:40am on Saturday, 8th August, 2026:
Weird
From this week's Essex County Standard. The story on the left is from page 14; the story on the right is from page 18.
It's good to know that our weekly local newspaper updates stories as they develop.
The front-page headline, by the way, is "Wildfires spark calls for action". No opportunity for an inappropriate pun goes unmissed by the Essex County Standard.
8:23am on Friday, 7th August, 2026:
Weird
Yesterday, my puzzle game Plaitword tried to warn me about the problem I had earlier in the week with the drainpipe.
Sadly, its warning came too late.
8:40am on Thursday, 6th August, 2026:
Anecdote
When my friend and fellow designer of virtual worlds, Mike Sellers, died in 2022, I donated some money to Indiana University for a memorial that they were putting together.
Ever since then, Indiana University has been sending me regular letters through the post asking for further donations — not for Mike's memorial, but for the university in general. I must receive three or four a year.
The postage cost for a letter from the USA to the UK is punishing, and there was a danger that it wouldn't be long before Indiana University had spent as much on begging letters to me as I donated for Mike's memorial. However, they've found a solution!
Now, they're getting the letters printed in the Netherlands and posting them from there. It's much less expensive!
They're still wasting their money, but doing so more slowly.
8:40am on Wednesday, 5th August, 2026:
Anecdote
I arrived at the post office nice and early yesterday, to send some playing cards to someone in the USA who wanted to buy them from me (he collects playing cards that show Julius Caesar, and my Goodall Shakespeare cards did exactly that) ( well, his playing cards now, as he's paid me for them).
There were three people in front of me in the queue. The two women between me and the man at the head of the queue, who was being served, were looking impatient. The man himself was taking issue with the woman behind the counter over the amount he had to pay.
The circular conversation went something like this:
Him: But why do I have to pay extra?
Her: Because of the tariffs imposed by the United States.
Him: But why isn't this included in the postage price?
Her: We don't know how much it will be until we tell them what's being sent.
Him: But why not?
Her: Because we don't set the tariffs.
Him: But if I don't know, how can I know how much to charge my customers for postage?
Her: It will be same every time you send the same thing.
Him: But I don't always send the same thing.
Her: Well you could always charge the maximum it could be.
Him: But then people wouldn't buy my work, it would be too expensive.
Her: I'm sorry, but I don't have any other suggestions.
Him: But why do I have to pay, and not my customers?
Her: Because they might decide not to pay, and then it has to be sent back to the UK, which is expensive.
Him: This will ruin me. I'll lose all my American customers.
Her: That can be a side-effect of tariffs.
Him: They don't think of the little companies they'll put out of business.
Her: You still have to pay extra.
It cycled back through this three or four times while I was there, paraphrased in different ways and sometimes missing an exchange, but basically the same. The woman behind the counter was professional about it, not raising her voice or pointing out that there was a queue. Two more people had joined behind me by now, then a third joined who had to sit down because she'd had a knee replacement. Although we all heard this, including the man who was attempting to persuade a British postal counter worker that she had the power to revoke the US tariff system, it didn't speed him up.
Eventually, he paid his extra fee and left grumbling, but defeated.
The next customer only wanted to know how much it would cost her to send her package, so it didn't take long to serve her.
The next customer had a UK parcel to send, and it didn't take her long to be served, either.
I took a little longer, because there was a customs form to fill in. Playing cards don't attract a tariff, but there's a £1.50 administration fee to pay for finding out that they don't attract a tariff. The woman behind the counter was up for explaining to me why I needed to pay, but I just paid it. It wasn't within her discretion as to whether to ask for it or not, and it seemed to me that she'd had that conversation many times already (perhaps not in quite a circular fashion).
I understand that tariff randomness can be very frustrating, but there was no need for the man to occupy fifteen minutes of her time and of those behind him in the queue. He must have known it would all be to no avail.
I'd already told the nice person who bought my cards what the postage was, and he'd paid it in advance. I didn't charge him the extra £1.50.
8:49am on Tuesday, 4th August, 2026:
Anecdote
Buying a somewhat belated birthday present for a relative should be easy if they ask for something you've bought them before: you just go onto Amazon and repeat the previous order.
I did this with a pair of size 4 blue slippers.
Amazon didn't have a pair of size 4 blue slippers in stock, so presented me with an alternative. I didn't notice this fact. I saw the same picture of a pair of blue slippers and made my order.
You might have thought that an alternative to a pair of size 4 blue slippers would be a pair of size 4 slippers in some other colour, but no! Amazon decided that the colour was more important than the size, so I wound up buying a pair of size 8 blue slippers. I only spotted my error when checking when they were due to be delivered; I tried to cancel, but it was too late.
I ordered a pair of size 4 purple slippers, which arrived the next day.
If this is how AI thinks, humanity is safe for a while yet.
8:39am on Monday, 3rd August, 2026:
Anecdote
Colchester has a 40-metre tall derelict Victorian water tower called Jumbo that's something of a local landmark.
When the council first announced that they were doing tours of it, so you could go up to the top, they had to sell tickets by lottery, such was the demand. However, on Saturday, my younger daughter noticed a sign outside the tower saying that tours were available. I checked online and indeed they were: I bought us two tickets for Sunday at 2:30pm (my wife didn't want to go because at's 147 steps to the top, including a very rickety set to the cupola).
If my daughter hadn't seen the sign, we wouldn't have known that tours were still available. There's been hardly any publicity. This perhaps explains why only six people were on the tour when the maximum allowed was twenty-three.
The climb wasn't all that bad, and apart from vertical cracks in the brickwork, a lot of lead paint and some arsenic in the grouting of the water tank, it was fairly safe. The views from the top are spectacular.
This is the one down Colchester High Street:
The university towers are on the horizon in the top-right corner. If I'd have brought my binoculars, I could apparently have seen the cranes at Felixtowe docks, twenty miles away.
If you don't mind a climb up a spiral staircase (here are some landings, so you can catch your breath) and aren't put off by a potted history of Victorian architecture and local politics, it's well worth it just for the views. This may be the last chance you get before the North Essex Heritage begins an £8m refurbishment courtesy of a National Lottery grant.
Of course, once they've finished the refurbishment you'll be able to go up in a lift and look out of broad windows at the tank level, so avoiding the rickety staircase, so you might want to hold off instead.
The cupola at the top of the tower is called the "smoking room". Nobody knows why.
8:42am on Sunday, 2nd August, 2026:
Anecdote
When the chap came to install our fibe-optic connection earlier this week, he asked if we wanted the cable to be placed behind our drainpipe where it would be less visible. We said no, because when there's heavy rain the water runs down the outside of said drainpipe. It's not connected properly at the top. He offered to have a look while he was up his insulated ladder, but if he did, he didn't mention it.
Yesterday, I thought I'd take a look myself. It seemed to me that the drainpipe had slipped, and if I could move it up a centimetre or two, that would fix it. I could do that without getting out my non-insulated ladder.
I undid the screw that held the drainpipe onto a bracket, and a trickle of water came out. I could see that there was a 2cm thickness of crud at the bottom of the pipe, so I thought that if I could clear a hole in that, any water in the drainpipe could dribble out.
I got to work with the jemmy I'd brought to lever up the drainpipe, and was clearing the blockage when suddenly BAM!
Not only did it clear, but a whole column of water and stinking slimy black stuff EXPLODED out and SPLATTED everywhere, but mainly on me.
You can see where I was kneeling in this photo I took. The black line in the foreground with a clear patch either side of it was between my legs. Far, far worse was on my legs. My trousers have now been put in the "to go to the tip" pile. I don't know what the stuff was that coated me, but it wouldn't surprise me if I needed a course of antibiotics next week. There were entire peanut husks in there, partly dissolved by the sludge.
I could have cleared the resulting unhygienic mess a lot more easily with a hosepipe, but there's a hosepipe ban so I had to use a bucket. I probably wasted far more water this way than I would have done with a hosepipe, sloshing it on the filth to get it away, but it worked.
Only ... see that metal grid flush with the ground that leads up to the drain? That wasn't collecting any of the backwash from my sloshing. I took off the grille (handy tools, jemmies) and found it was choked up with crud of its own. I bailed it out, and discovered why: there was a blockage where the half-pipe under the grille reaches the drain outlet. The reason there was a blockage was that it didn't have a proper hole into the drain housing. It looked as if someone had hit the plastic of the drain cover a couple of times with a hammer and screwdriver, leaving two inadequate holes with a tooth between them for everything to catch on.
I managed to chisel out the tooth, but the hole is still quite small, I expect it won't be long before it blocks up again. Maybe it's meant to be small so effluent from the half-pipe doesn't block the drain itself, although nothing big gets in anyway because of the grille.
I hoisted up the drainpipe a little so it's probably better-connected at the top. I made a new hole to screw it to the bracket. The original screw was maybe 4cm long, and I hold it partly responsible for causing the vertical blockage. I replaced it with the shortest black screw I could find that would do the same job, although it was still 25mm so I don't expect it will be fault-free itself.
I then spent some time sloshing down more water, because I'm more afraid of my wife's complaints that I left a mess than I am of being accused by my neighbours of water wastage during a drought. As far as I'm concerned, it was a health-and-safety issue.
I'll see if the drainpipe is working properly again next time we have rain, which if this summer so far is anything to go by will probably be mid-September.
Referenced by Too Late a Warning.
8:55am on Saturday, 1st August, 2026:
Anecdote
My wife is absolutely brutal when herbs fail to perform.
On the left, basil; on the right, coriander.
She's leaving them as a warning to other herbs that might consider not producing the level of leaves she demands.
I shuuder to think what fate will befall me should I ever be unable to remove the lid off a jam jar or kill a wandering spider.
7:57am on Friday, 31st July, 2026:
Anecdote
Our new fibre-optic broadband connection handles our telephone calls as well as our game-playing and whatever else the Internet is used for.
BT helpfully sent us a card to tell us how how set up our new home phone service. In fact, they sent three:
(address redacted for address-redaction reasons).
These were sent separately through Royal Mail, so represent a considerable expenditure, what with the cost of stamps these days.
The instructions on the back basically said "disconnect your old phone from the wall socket and plug it into the back of your router in the socket marked 'phone'.", although it didn't mention you'd have to wait a day for it to work.
We now have our phone live again, and have already received our first silent call checking that we can be added to the list of numbers that hoaxers can try.
8:57am on Thursday, 30th July, 2026:
Anecdote
Well, the Openreach chap came yesterday armed with insulated ladders. He had to wait for a colleague to drive 40 miles to watch him climb up them, but was then able to install our high-speed fibre-optic connection.
It is indeed fast.
It was 40mpbs faster when I checked yesterday, but that's still much faster than it takes to render many web sites once their content has downloaded. For ones such as those of the BBC, that are on sites with a lot of broadband that don't pack their sites with tons of garbage that the browser has to sort out, they appear pretty well instantly.
I had two connections I was using before this. The fast-but-unreliable one that used microwaves or something gave 62mbps (as of a minute ago). The slow-but-reliable BT connection over copper cable gave no more than 1.7mbps. My 900mbps+ fibre connection is therefore definitely something of an upgrade.
I'll see how it goes for a couple of weeks, and if there's nothing amiss about it then I'll cancel my over-the-airwaves contract.
This is going to make downloading new games much easier!
8:12am on Wednesday, 29th July, 2026:
Anecdote
We still don't have our super-fast fibre broadband. Who saw that coming?
The chap came to install it at around 4pm. The chap with the insulated ladders required to do the installation did not.
One might ask why the person sent to do a job that Openreach knew needed insulated ladders or a cherry-picker didn't send round an installer who had insulated ladders or a cherry-picker. Ours did had ladders, but not insulated ladders, so wasn't allowed to go up the relevant telegraph pole (which is used both for comms and power-supply purposes).
We knew that, he knew that, and the Openreach despatcher knew that. He was still sent round to do the installation, though.
He's going to try again today.
This is why in the past, engineers had wooden ladders.
8:24am on Tuesday, 28th July, 2026:
Weird
My step-mother found an astonishing multibuy deal at her local garden centre.
I should go along and save myself £-3.02.
In other news, Openreach are coming round this afternoon to finish off the installation of our fibre broadband connection. We shall see.
8:41am on Monday, 27th July, 2026:
Anecdote
I was getting ready to go to bed last night and I thought, "cor, it feels like a Sunday". Then, I realised it actually was a Sunday.
That doesn't happen very often. Tomorrow, I'll think it feels like a Friday.
9:12am on Sunday, 26th July, 2026:
Weird
It would seem that this bench in the nearby village of Little Horkesley doesn't get much use.
The writing on the back says it's to commemorate the coronation of HM Elizabeth II, so it's over 70 years old. It's in quite good condition, given its age and the fact it's covered in moss. It's in better shape than I am, anyway.
Maybe people don't sit on it because of that missing vertical in the backrest.
Alternatively, the may prefer the cute, roofed, wooden bus shelter four metres away from it.
8:13am on Saturday, 25th July, 2026:
Anecdote
The secret of the feral hollyhock's success is revealed.
Someone waters it.
That's cheating, if you ask me.
Latest entries.
Archived entries.
About this blog.
Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).