Phil Gyford’s writing

I returned from Essex on Thursday after four days in a darkened dining room scanning 79 notebooks of my dad’s diary from 1955 to 2013. As regular readers will be sadly aware, being back there is always a mix of emotions. Last week I said I felt like a ghost haunting the house (I kept thinking of Ghost Story) but it’s at least as true to say that the house haunts me. It’s rarely been far from my thoughts for the past 2½ years and I have to struggle to think of other things – because I’m so tired…

I’m back in Essex for a few days, having carried the book scanner across the country on annoyingly full trains, in order to scan as many of Dad’s diaries as I can. Maybe I’ll finish them this trip, or it’ll be too slow or drive me mad before I finish. We’ll see. Made good progress so far though. Odd to be back here, as ever. Each time I come I feel more like a ghost haunting this place. So strongly tied to it for so long and yet also wanting to be free. Little else to report. Went to the gym…

Musical highlight of the week was a recent Tim Reaper NTS show: an hour of drum’n’bass/jungle that was just right for drowning out the music at the gym. And I forgot to mention last week that I especially enjoyed the American Twilight edition of James A. Reeves’ Midnight Radio. Good night-time US road-trip vibes: § It’s been seven weeks since I started taking SSRIs and ten days since they increased to “the most common” dose. It’s impossible to know if it’s down to them or not, but I assume so:…

Not much to report this week. Only two trips to the gym but back into yoga: three 45 minute Apple Fitness+ sessions at home. Haven’t persuaded myself to get back on the bike trainer yet. Guitar teacher is on holiday so I’ve had no lesson for a couple of weeks, which has only confirmed how the accountability, progress and variety of a weekly lesson really does make me practice more (pretty much every day). § A bit more fiddling this week with Home Assistant which is a good way to fill the time…

Among our grandad’s papers was his memoir of his childhood in Ipswich, Suffolk. It had been typed up, double-spaced, with a preface and postscript by his son, our dad, John Gyford. I’ve added a few extra paragraph breaks and also included many related period photos. Most of these are from the collection of David Kindred on Flickr with kind permission. The dates of many are unknown but hopefully they aren’t too far from being contemporary with these memories. § Goodbye Victoria:An Edwardian…

Back over to Essex this weekend. We had a holiday flat in Walton-on-the-Naze which we used to spend a lot of time at. Around the time we were moving to the opposite side of the country some friends and neighbours there were looking to downsize and rent. So they’ve been our lovely tenants up until now when they’ve moved away. So we drove over (well, Mary did the driving as usual) on Friday to check the place was fine. It was. hmu if you want a nice two-bed flat with a sea view in a…

Achieved very little this week, as usual, other than allowing Pippa the cat as much time as she needs to snooze on my lap before I get up from the sofa to get on with the day or go to bed. An important skill that I look forward to continuing to work at. But I have, very gradually, started to do some yoga and cardio after too many weeks off, so that’s good. Getting momentum going again is hard. From Tuesday through Friday pur 4G internet connection was very, very slow – mostly less than 1 Mbps –…

I’m on the train home after another weekend in Essex sorting out the parental house and I nearly forgot to write this. We have now just about finished looking through everything and now, thanks to my much-more-diligent-than-me sister, we have dozens of folders of categorised papers of mostly old Labour Party related material, at least some of which we hope to find homes for. We’ll see. I’m pretty over this whole thing now and even though we’ve cleared this huge hurdle it feels like a never…

Home alone all week (plus the cat) and not really in the mood for writing, so in brief: I finally sorted out a big pile of old paperwork I brought back from Essex months and months ago. Sorting, scanning, filing, shredding. Three trips to the gym, the week’s only exercise apart from… …three hours of scything and collecting grass before the rain began. Only a little patch left to do now. Weekly guitar lessons are going well and I’m practising most days so I assume I’m making progress. Two…

I’m tapping this out on the phone on the train back home at Monday lunchtime, after a weekend in Essex with my sister doing more sorting out of the old family home. We had three four-drawer filing cabinets remaining before we’d complete the big initial phase of “look at every single thing and work out roughly what to do with it, discarding, saving, and finding new homes for some of it along the way.” We got through one cabinet on Saturday afternoon and on Sunday started on the big one: four…

Another couple of very hot days this week, made bearable by knowing it wasn’t going to last long this time. I did have to walk the 4km to the next village in 30ºC heat because Mary was away in one car and the other, the Panda 4x4, was in for its MOT. I had hoped to be driving home in the Panda but it’s going to need work doing so I walked back again, this time more uphill and in 33ºC. Still, not as bad as the time I had to do similar on a cold, wet, and muddy day. I was taking my glum brain to…

Sorting through our dad’s (John Gyford) papers we found a few bits of paperwork from his father which seem like a nice collection of things about him and, to a lesser extent, his wife, Ethel Gyford (née Roper), our grandmother. In the interests of populating the internet with facts, here they are. § First, his letterhead: C. Barrington Gyford B. Sc., F.R.G.S. Author, Journalist and Lecturer 70, Waverley Avenue, Twickenham, Middlesex. Telephone: FELTHAM 2212. He lists himself as a contributor…

Excellent temperatures all week, low-mid 20s, lovely but not too hot, so it was ideal for… spending more time sat at the computer than I have for weeks. I did write some new code, which is a rare occurrence. Unfortunately I can’t use it on my site yet because it’s in a separate package and, because I use dependency cooldowns, I can’t use that code for a week. (I could probably get round this but I cannot be bothered.) The rest of the computer time was doing things like improving the GitHub…

I came across this ten-year-old mix by Time Is Away on NTS this week, half of whose similar tracks I’d heard before, and I’d wanted to hear them together somehow: If I’m in London before it ends I’d like to have a look at their Department of Euterpe exhibition at the Warburg Institute. § This week was focused on yesterday’s 80th birthday party for Mary’s step-mother, 70 guests for lunch, with catering, a marquee, and a bouncy castle for Generation Alpha. We had to retrieve a bunch of things –…

I recently re-read Douglas Coupland’s Generation X and had a few thoughts on reading it in 2026. § My copy of Generation X This is at least the fifth time I’ve read it. It came out in 1991 and was first published in the UK in 1992. I felt like I’d discovered it late when I bought it in, I think, 1993. Reading Generation X in 2026 is like someone in the year of its release reading a book about young people published in 1956. The twentysomething characters are often comparing people and styles to…

As a follow up to my previous post about the not-yet-ready Flickr iOS app, as of version 5.0.3 they have reverted the app to the previous code. There’s more info on their help page for the app “refresh”: We know the new app hasn’t met the bar you expect from Flickr. Since launch, we’ve heard your feedback about bugs, missing features, and rough edges, and we want to acknowledge that directly. Here is where we currently stand: iOS: We’re in the process of rolling back the iOS app to the previous…

I got back to smashing up the concrete on the old broken pond this week, something I’d put on hold, what with needing to get scything done and my toe not supporting much weight recently. I did two brief stints with the sledgehammer, the second swiftly aborted after the hammer rebounded at an odd angle and its handle hit me on the side of my already-achy left knee. Twice. I was concerned I’d done some serious damage given how, despite ice and ibuprofen, it felt pretty bad by the end of the day.…

Last time Electromagnetic Field was on, two years ago, I felt a bit bad that I didn’t go given that I would love there to be more events near here that interest me, and this was fairly close. But I don’t like camping and also don’t like driving far (the site is about an hour away from us), so I didn’t go then and, again, this year I didn’t try to get tickets. But at the beginning of this week I saw a post saying there were some people who couldn’t make it selling spare tickets and, this…

I started the summer’s scything this week. It’s the fifth consecutive year we’ve let the lawn grow into a meadow and then I’ve scythed some/all of it over July and August. This year I have a deadline of the end of July to have enough mown to put up a marquee for a birthday party. Jeopardy! These days I’m free of the tyranny of the alarm clock but I tend to wake up early in the summer anyway so I’ve been able to get some scything in before it gets too hot (we’ve had afternoon temperatures up to…

Flickr recently updated their iOS/iPadOS app to version 5 (App Store link) and, while it’s not radically different, for a service whose changes have been incremental over recent years it contains a lot of differences. However I’ve yet to find any official changelog or update information. In the App Store the release notes for last week’s version 5.0.0 are: Flickr is back and better than ever — rebuilt from the ground up with a fresh new look and feel. And for today’s version 5.0.1: Bug fixes…

I completed a thing this week which, these days, feels like a major event. I spent two more days working on the lawn edging which I began a month ago (and continued). Behold, the before and after photos: There’s about 14 metres around the conservatory and down one side of the house and the process was – of course! – harder work and more time-consuming that anticipated. The day after I’d spent one morning sledge-hammering in the remaining half of the 45cm pegs, including a couple of very…

Welcome back. Toe update: two weeks after stubbing my toe it’s still a little painful but gradually less so each day. It was definitely more than a standard stubbing. I’ve been trying not to put too much weight on it, and avoiding any cardio exercises, and skipping things like lunges at the gym that would require bending and weight-bearing. A bit bored of it now. § Early in the week I changed my three main web projects from using pre-commit to prek, a drop-in Rust-based replacement. The only…

The first four days of the week whizzed by, with the gym, parents, and a bit of website admin. I also went for my first ever guitar lesson. I found a guy who teaches about 25 minutes drive from us, crucially on this side of Hereford. So no queues, traffic lights, congestion, etc. to contend with. Only narrow roads, oncoming tractors and, in winter, floods. This was only a quick half-hour getting-to-know-each-other session but he seemed very nice and he presumably approved of me because my first…

My heart predictably sank at the predictable announcement by Kier Starmer that the UK government will ban social media for under-16s. The ban sounds ineffective, imposes restrictions on everyone (providing ID to use social media), and largely lets the big social media companies off the hook for what happens on their services. I a post by Iain Mansfield that lists objections to the ban and sets out his arguments against them. I wanted to clarify some of my thoughts so I’ve taken his structure…

Some progress made this week. § For months, at least, I’ve been putting off updating my three Django websites to use uv to manage their versions of Python and third-party packages. I’ve been using uv for development for ages, and like it a lot, but have never liked doing things on web servers because I don’t understand a lot of it and have no desire to learn more. Every time I thought, “OK, I’ll finally do this!” it was near the end of the day, or the end of the week, and I’d put it off in case…

A cooler, damper, but mostly better week. § We had three men come and replace three radiators with larger ones (the men were also different sizes). This (the radiators) should mean the future heat pump can heat all the rooms despite its lower water temperature. § It seems we’ve reached peak birds-hitting-the-windows season. I assume it’s young birds who haven’t yet learned to look out for conservatory windows. Every day a few will hit the windows. Most either bounce and fly away, or else hit…

I’ve just added a couple of new charts to the self-absorbed Stats section of the site. Both are on the money page, and those will be updated at the end of each year. § First I’ve got one showing how much I’ve spent each year on music over the past 30 years: CDs, downloads, and streaming. Here’s an image of the current state of it: Amount spent on music listening per year This doesn’t include spending in cash, which I didn’t track, and was more common in the early years when buying CDs. I mainly…

We went on a group walk yesterday, not usually my kind of thing – the walking or the grouping – but it wasn’t far and it was a nice day and nice people. But I still tried to avoid talking to anyone; I have nothing to say. I did end up alongside one woman and, after the usual weather chat: Her: What sort of things do you like doing round here? Me: Erm… … Her: Walking? Cycling? … Fishing? Any hobbies? Me: Er… I don’t know. I don’t get out much. In the past I might have tried to justify “making…

The past few days I’ve been listening to Charlotte Cornfield’s recent album, Hurts Like Hell: It hasn’t (yet) grabbed me as much as some earlier ones but I like her tunes and simple stories. § For the first half of the week I was still in Essex making some slow progress on sorting through the old family home. Ahead of time I’d thought that, by the time we left, we might reach the point we’d looked through everything, but I reckoned without the slow process of paperwork. We want to check every…

I arrived in Essex on Friday evening for a few more days of sorting through the old family/parents’ home. We’ve made loads of progress over past months but there is still a daunting amount to do. On Saturday morning Royal Mail collected five boxes – 80kg – of old copies of Renewal, Dissent and The Problems of Communism on their way to the Internet Archive for scanning and storage at some point in the future. Having given several other piles of journals to various archives and libraries, these,…