Successful shopping.

The weather yesterday was dire. Heavy, constant, big dropped rain of the sort that pummels your face and manages to find the gap between your neck and your collar. A few brief pauses in the downpour enable us to don Wellington Boots and walk to the heron pond. Even the archaeologists ,who are usually oblivious to the weather, decide that enough is enough. They head off home after half and hour. In mid afternoon a gentleman with a 'specialist' vehicle appears outside the courtyard to service the Portaloo. This is a job that would be unappealing at the best of times and is arguably worse , much worse, in solid, unrelenting rain.

2 weeks today and we head off here : https://vipp.com/en/world-of-vipp/our-guesthouses/the-bolder . Looking at the constant rain sweeping by the windows we are wondering why we opted to head North in winter. If the weather is clear the views will be to die for. If it's bad then we may be staring at a wall of grey fog. On the way we shall visit this bakers for breakfast :https://samson.no/

'The Font' read this Gunnar Gunnarsson ( dourly Scandinavian ) book about a man, a dog and a ram on the journey back from London. It's an old classic but has been newly ( and 'The Font' tells me well ) translated. I started and finished Serhii Plokhy's new book ' The Nuclear Age'. This was very worthy and written in what might pass for a jaunty Harvard style. He thinks the new US administration is pushing countries like Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Brazil and Argentina towards developing their own nuclear weapons. This is what happens when trust disappears and the law of unintended consequences kicks in.

 

The David Mellor coffee maker has finally lost its handle. We buy a new one. I guess more than a quarter of a century of constant use isn't too bad.

A quick detour to Lulu Lemon for some arctic layers.

The train from London to York was packed solid with tourists wondering where to stow their wheelie bags. At York the tourists got off and were replaced by office workers in grey suits heading back to Edinburgh for the weekend. At Edinburgh the office workers decamped and we had the carriage pretty much to ourselves for the remainder of the journey North. There is something ever so slightly Freddie Kruger eerie about an empty railway carriage bathed in light from the green 'seat vacant' lights.

Greying :https://www.newsweek.com/hair-going-gray-hidden-health-benefit-senescence-cancer-tumor-10912239

AI freedom :https://futurefreespeech.org/that-violates-my-policies-ai-laws-chatbots-and-the-future-of-expression/

The accuracy of prediction markets :https://dune.com/alexmccullough/polymarket-brier-score

China v Silicon Valley :https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-china-tech-canon

Opus Dei - not a subject we know much about :https://thecatholicherald.com/article/report-claims-opus-dei-faces-sweeping-reform