Still no phone boxes in my life so I’ve been planning phone box tourism instead (to be fair this is not just about phone boxes; it’s going to be nice to stick my nose out of Newcastle every now and again when the pandemic eventually goes away).
Next time I’m in London (which, everything crossed, will be for the marathon in October) I would love to go and see the ‘Out Of Order’ sculpture. I’ve seen a lot of London phone boxes but not these ones!
It is probably not at all surprising that this is just one of many phone box destinations on my list…
This one is classic by name and classic by nature. I’ve been eating it for a long time. When I was really little and first discovered pesto (in the golden age of pesto that was the ’80s), the jar for this pesto looked like this:
I think Dad gave me an old jar to store beads in the very early ’90s and I’ve been hoarding it ever since without using them. Nice to have the old jar though!
Nowadays there are a lot more flavours of Sacla pesto and so they have a numbered system to keep track of them all. Modern jars for the original basil pesto look like this:
Sacla No. 1 Classic Basil Pesto.
The taste of this pesto has changed over time as well as they’ve gradually altered the recipe. It originally tasted more like the pestos that call themselves ‘pesto alla genovese’ nowadays. These days, it’s got quite a strong, rich taste that I find more suited to the ‘chicken pesto’ meal I make with pasta, Quorn chicken style pieces and green vegetables.
That meal is Geth’s favourite, so we eat this pesto at least once a week!
In the world of my current game project, it is November. The town centres have put up their Christmas trees and the shops are full of tinsel and cut-price fireworks. Every day is cold and wet. It is the UK in the run-up to Christmas. It is a few unspecified years in the future, and life has returned to pre-pandemic levels of normality.
In the real world, it is June. The shops are full of summer holiday clothes that nobody is buying, because it’s still too much of a risk to book a summer holiday. The heat arrived a week and a half ago and despite the clouds today it is endlessly muggy. It is the UK in the throes of uncomfortable summer. It is still the very early 2020s, and we are not out of the woods yet.
As such, is it any wonder that I’m preferring to spend most of this month in my game world rather than the real one? 😀
I kid, mostly. I’m spending most of my time coding because I’m working to a tight deadline for ParserComp. I need to be really disciplined with it in order to give myself some breathing room in the last couple of weeks before the deadline, so this week is going to be a really big push. Lots going on in my other life areas as well, but that’s okay. Madness is sometimes enjoyable!
A Christmas tree in a rainy town centre. The opposite end of the year always feels like a different world…
I think I’m going to feel a bit bereft in July! I am going to enjoy playing other people’s games again though…
Two races in two weeks. It almost feels like things are getting back to normal!
This weekend’s race was an actual, real, in-person race – my first since the Inverness Half Marathon in March 2020. This was a huge milestone as the lack of in-person races and parkruns has been one of the most frustrating things about the pandemic for me. I’ve been keeping myself going with virtual races and my daily run streak, but it’s just not been the same.
As such, I felt a type of happiness I had almost forgotten about when I walked into the race HQ and saw the crowd of runners and the tents and start area all set up:
A very welcome sight!
It was so exciting to collect my number and line up on an actual start line again – even though we did have to stay distanced and set off in waves of six people! I did the race with my friend Claire, and it was a really pretty course. It was also a really hilly course – huge steep climbs through the woods! – and I really struggled in the second half, being unused to that kind of terrain. Fifteen miles through trail feels a lot further than fifteen miles on road, and I didn’t have any running left in my legs over the last few miles (mainly because my muscles were burning so hard from all the climbing!). As such, it was a fairly difficult race. If I sign up for anything similar in the future, I will need to do a lot more training on trails in order to get my legs used to it.
It felt like it was never going to end, but it did eventually, and it was amazing to be able to pick up a t-shirt and medal straight away at the finish area. Another great addition to the medal haul!
My brand new medal taking pride of place among my recent virtual ones. Looking forward to finishing the medal display soon.
Next up in the race season (so exciting to be having some semblance of a ‘season’ again!) is a nice flat road 10k in a couple of weeks’ time. I have a chance of getting up some speed (by my standards) on that one and I can’t wait!
There were a lot of summer fields on my long trail race today, so these ones from Shetland in 1985 feel appropriate today. My memory doesn’t quite go back far enough to remember this particular walk, but I am fairly sure being pushed in a buggy is easier than running/walking miles and miles under your own steam.
I have a race tomorrow. An actual real race, not a virtual. There will be COVID-secure measures (we are starting in waves and have to wear face coverings at the start and finish), but it’s an actual race with other people, and I’m really excited. It’s a trail race with lots of hills, and it’s going to be hot, so I will be taking it very slowly and walking a lot. In some ways it should be easier than last week’s virtual half. I hope! I’m also going to be getting on public transport for the first time in fifteen months, which will be interesting.
This last week has been very busy between coding and day job work. It’s going to be like this for the rest of June while I finish my game. I’m doing really well with it on the whole, but I am looking forward to a bit of a break in July!
Summer has hit now, and it just doesn’t seem to get dark at the moment… especially seeing as I’m falling asleep so early. I always feel a bit out of sorts at this time of year as I’m not really built for it. Autumn is my time.
Excited that I’ll have another medal for my collection this time tomorrow. They’re coming thick and fast at the moment!
Geth took this photo of a very muggy and foggy Whitley Bay for me earlier this week.
This week’s earworm playlists (still very Duran-heavy):
Saturday
Duran Duran – ‘American Science’ Duran Duran – ‘Invisible’
Sunday
Harry Belafonte – ‘Jump in the Line (Shake, Señora)’ Pitbull and Christina Aguilera – ‘Feel This Moment’
Monday
Duran Duran – ‘I Take The Dice’ Traditional – ‘Kookaburra Sits In The Old Gum Tree’
Tuesday
Dee Cooke – ‘Outside Building’ Duran Duran – ‘Secret Oktober’ Pointer Sisters – ‘Automatic’
Wednesday
Duran Duran – ‘Secret Oktober’ The Midnight – ‘Endless Summer’ Cornershop – ‘Brimful Of Asha [Norman Cook Mix]’ Stephen Duffy – ‘Kiss Me’ Duran Duran – ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’
Thursday
David Guetta and Sia – ‘Flames’ Duran Duran – ‘Five Years’
Friday
Duran Duran – ‘I Take The Dice’ The Wonder Stuff – ‘Golden Green’
Still no new phone box finds here in 2021 but Dad found me a cracker from the family archives. This is a slide taken in 1965 by Grandad, who used to like taking photos of trams (if you’ve ever wondered where I get all my strange forms of nerdery from, look no further than my immediate Cooke family ancestors). On this happy occasion he happened to capture a phone box as well!
Yes, it’s still there! As are the buildings and even the tram lines, though I’m not sure if they’re still in use. The buildings are no longer shops, but still very recognisable.
1960s shop signs always look very cartoony to me (this is probably caused by my general ‘1960s=cartoon’ vibe that I was talking about last week) and make me think they’re on a film or TV set, as 1960s productions always have signs that look like that. I don’t know why I find it hard to believe they looked like that in real life too!
In recent years, following the chart on and off, I’ve been a bit disappointed that rock music seems to have all but disappeared from the scene. I know it’s still going on in a more underground way (all forms of music are still going on in an underground way, as I know very well having been a goth for so long and more recently a synthwave fan!), but it’d be nice to see it back in more popular consciousness. Maybe there’ll be another big revival in a few years’ time.
Anyway, the earworm part of my brain has been casting back to the early-to-mid-’00s recently, when things were very different and there was a LOT of rock in the charts. A lot of it was rubbish, but I always liked this Strokes hit.
It takes me right back to the rock clubs of Edinburgh and a very different time in my life.
I’ve tried a few Fever Tree drinks over the last couple of years, mainly various forms of ginger beer and ginger ale. This Sicilian Lemonade was something a bit different.
Fever Tree Sicilian Lemonade.
It’s a lovely, sweet drink and very refreshing! I need to start looking out for it again now that I’m gradually poking my nose back into pubs.
