THIS MORNING, accidentally overwrote an entire website that had been working on for days, completely wiping out all of the content. I was distracted and had no business clicking around and hitting “okay” to big decisions while not fully focussed on what I was doing.
YES, IT’S STILL the weekend here, so to speak, as today is a holiday, but we thought we’d still bring you the Weekend Links as usual, since you might be around and looking for something to read while you’re home or at a café or pub somewhere.
WE HAVE been eating mango and coconut mochi ice cream lately (the coconut is my favourite), something to celebrate these spring days, especially since we've given up our favourite sourdough bread which we used to pick up from the local larder every Friday or Saturday morning. P has been on a health kick since last August, with no alcohol, and well, no bread.
EARLY SUNDAY morning, we quietly lost an hour to British Summer Time. We would not know about it until much later in the day, when we suddenly remembered about the clocks changing, and it all made sense why we felt so tired. Last Friday we drove up to Scotland, armed with a Victoria Sponge cake to celebrate a 95th birthday. The drive was sunny and scenic and as always, we had a lot to talk about. We stopped by the new café in the market square for two flat whites (mine, oat; his, regular) before setting off.
ON SATURDAY, near the end of a three-and-a-half hour salon appointment, my stylist’s next client arrived, an half an hour early. An elderly blond English woman, after sharing hellos and niceties with us, she was content to busy herself with her phone, that is, until through the mirror, I caught her curiously appraising me. “Where are you going tonight?” she asked.
IT’S BEEN HAILED as a cultural phenomenon and at the moment, it’s all anyone can talk about. It’s ChatGPT, the language model created by OpenAI, a San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence company. We touched on the subject briefly before, but will take a more in-depth look today at the fastest-growing internet service ever (it reached 100 million users in January, just two months after its launch at the end of November 2022).
A NEW CAFE opened in town last week, and one of the owners is an old Tuesday night football acquaintance of P's, who has opened the place with his partner, who moved up from London. It's in the centre of the village, in the place another café used to be, and they're planning on serving "typical café fare", including speciality coffee and tea, and using locally sourced produce.
P AND I WERE caught up in a long conversation about AI this weekend, and it's something that has also been mentioned here at TIG quite a bit lately. He is an early adopter for most things, while I can be a nostalgist⏤not because I don't love technology (I do), but because I can be a bit sentimental sometimes.
JUST FOUND OUT about Joanna Goddard (A Cup of Jo)'s divorce today and was completely shocked. She has been running her site for nearly as long as TIG and Alex has been a part of the narrative for as long as can remember. Thirteen and a half years and two children later, and it's all over. Began making a tally of all the bloggers I knew of who were now divorced and it's a lot. Occupational hazard? Perhaps.
TIME AGAIN for another Life Lately, and these past few days and weeks have felt rather busy, especially following the enforced hibernation of the lockdown years, which are beginning to feel like a million lifetimes ago now. There was an early morning train ride to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month and another to Glasgow the following day; and then all the way to the south, nearly as far as Wales just last week...
ON SUNDAY morning, I ate the worst breakfast of my life. We'd left the house just after 8:30 in the morning for a burdensome road trip that would take us five hours south for business. It was an unpleasant obligation, a necessary evil, even, but the drive up was fun, just the two of us. That is, until we pulled over at a Services along the way, somewhere near Sheffield, and stopped for what would be the worst breakfast ever.
IF YOU'RE ever in Edinburgh, remind me to tell you about a new little natural wine bar that just opened in the old hi-fi shop on Haddington. We stopped in late Tuesday night of last week, after P told me at the hotel that he'd made reservations. We ate some delicious snacks and a glass of Lamoresca Rosato for me, and P ordered a homemade soft drink.
ON SATURDAY we were out celebrating something special and about 10 to 15 minutes into searching for new vinyl at the record shop, I reached into my coat pocket to reply to my sister’s text and realised that my brand new phone wasn’t there. I had left it on an outside table the tapas bar where we’d just had patatas bravas and we were a ways off by now. I found P happily browsing in the electronic section and told him what had happened. His first words were, It’s gone.
THIS WEEKEND we watched Aftersun, the 2022 drama written and directed by Charlotte Wells, starring Paul Mescal, Frankie Corio and Celia Rowlson-Hall. We talked about it for quite a while after it was over, analysing what it could mean, discussing our own interpretations, processing the feeling of sadness it left in us afterward. It's about memory⏤more specifically, our memories of those we love after they are gone, the people we remember them as, sometimes as opposed to how they really were.
THERE IS an axiom that states something to the effect of: Be careful with your words when you're with others, and with your thoughts when you're alone. It's not on my list of resolutions this year, but it might as well be, as these words are something have been thinking about quite a bit lately. In fact, one of the resolutions that didn't make the list this year was to go easier on myself, which is very nearly the same thing.
