• I loved this post from Robin Sloan — the idea of utopian fiction being harder than distopian is interesting. I immediately ordered the Player of Games, I’m half way through now and loving it.
• Work on our loft started on Friday, so most of the week was getting ready for that.
• Because they’re lowering our 1st floor ceilings by 10cm, to give a better height in the loft, we had to move everything downstairs. So now the living room is basically in accessible as is half the kitchen/dining room.
• The most stressful bit was on Tuesday the scaffold went up and in the evening our neighbour, two doors down, came over very upset because his satellite TV wasn’t working because the scaffold was blocking the signal. He was asking if we could move the scaffold a bit, which we couldn’t, obviously.
• I told him the scaffolders were coming back in the morning to carry on and I’d talk to them.
• He came over again an hour later asking for an update!? Then was out as soon as they arrived in the morning. The scaffolders were having none of it obviously telling me not to worry and that it wasn’t my problem. But it felt like my problem because he came over 4 more times that morning to tell me it still wasn’t working.
• When I realised the scaffolders and builders weren’t gonna help called up an aerial guy and he said he could sort that afternoon by moving the dish onto the scaffold for 300 quid. And then for 200 quid he could move it back in a month.
• At that point I thought I’m gonna have to sort this myself and went to Toolstation and bought a 100m reel of cable for £20
• I climbed out our bathroom window and walked across our kitchen roof, next doors and then onto his. Took the aerial down. Whilst I was doing this he came to talk to me and changed from very aggro to friendly. His English wasn’t very good but he went on to tell me how much he loved football and not having TV was not an option. I talked to him about the three way title race. He wanted Arsenal to win.
• I moved his aerial to our scaffold and then threw huge lengths of cable over the roof down to his living room AND bedroom on the other side.
• It felt highly stressful at the time because he was so aggro about it but it’s sort of funny already now. Although I don’t think I’d ever deal with a neighbour like that myself
• Anyway rest of the week pales in comparison to this drama but we had a nice weekend.
• We went to Brighton to see my cousin who was back with his family from Australia. I haven’t seen him for 7 years. It was really nice.
• On Sunday night we watched Poor Things which was great I really enjoyed it. I loved the costume, sets, colour. All of it. Emma Stone was brill.

NB: This should have published on Monday - but Planetscale quite abruptly stopped their free plan which killed my website. I’ve just commented out all the /stream stuff until I can sort it out. Unfortunately $39/month is too much for me to pay for my personal site.