The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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8:55am on Saturday, 1st August, 2026:
Anecdote
My wife is absolutely brutal when herbs fail to perform.
On the left, basil; on the right, coriander.
She's leaving them as a warning to other herbs that might consider not producing the level of leaves she demands.
I shuuder to think what fate will befall me should I ever be unable to remove the lid off a jam jar or kill a wandering spider.
7:57am on Friday, 31st July, 2026:
Anecdote
Our new fibre-optic broadband connection handles our telephone calls as well as our game-playing and whatever else the Internet is used for.
BT helpfully sent us a card to tell us how how set up our new home phone service. In fact, they sent three:
(address redacted for address-redaction reasons).
These were sent separately through Royal Mail, so represent a considerable expenditure, what with the cost of stamps these days.
The instructions on the back basically said "disconnect your old phone from the wall socket and plug it into the back of your router in the socket marked 'phone'.", although it didn't mention you'd have to wait a day for it to work.
We now have our phone live again, and have already received our first silent call checking that we can be added to the list of numbers that hoaxers can try.
8:57am on Thursday, 30th July, 2026:
Anecdote
Well, the Openreach chap came yesterday armed with insulated ladders. He had to wait for a colleague to drive 40 miles to watch him climb up them, but was then able to install our high-speed fibre-optic connection.
It is indeed fast.
It was 40mpbs faster when I checked yesterday, but that's still much faster than it takes to render many web sites once their content has downloaded. For ones such as those of the BBC, that are on sites with a lot of broadband that don't pack their sites with tons of garbage that the browser has to sort out, they appear pretty well instantly.
I had two connections I was using before this. The fast-but-unreliable one that used microwaves or something gave 62mbps (as of a minute ago). The slow-but-reliable BT connection over copper cable gave no more than 1.7mbps. My 900mbps+ fibre connection is therefore definitely something of an upgrade.
I'll see how it goes for a couple of weeks, and if there's nothing amiss about it then I'll cancel my over-the-airwaves contract.
This is going to make downloading new games much easier!
8:12am on Wednesday, 29th July, 2026:
Anecdote
We still don't have our super-fast fibre broadband. Who saw that coming?
The chap came to install it at around 4pm. The chap with the insulated ladders required to do the installation did not.
One might ask why the person sent to do a job that Openreach knew needed insulated ladders or a cherry-picker didn't send round an installer who had insulated ladders or a cherry-picker. Ours did had ladders, but not insulated ladders, so wasn't allowed to go up the relevant telegraph pole (which is used both for comms and power-supply purposes).
We knew that, he knew that, and the Openreach despatcher knew that. He was still sent round to do the installation, though.
He's going to try again today.
This is why in the past, engineers had wooden ladders.
8:24am on Tuesday, 28th July, 2026:
Weird
My step-mother found an astonishing multibuy deal at her local garden centre.
I should go along and save myself £-3.02.
In other news, Openreach are coming round this afternoon to finish off the installation of our fibre broadband connection. We shall see.
8:41am on Monday, 27th July, 2026:
Anecdote
I was getting ready to go to bed last night and I thought, "cor, it feels like a Sunday". Then, I realised it actually was a Sunday.
That doesn't happen very often. Tomorrow, I'll think it feels like a Friday.
9:12am on Sunday, 26th July, 2026:
Weird
It would seem that this bench in the nearby village of Little Horkesley doesn't get much use.
The writing on the back says it's to commemorate the coronation of HM Elizabeth II, so it's over 70 years old. It's in quite good condition, given its age and the fact it's covered in moss. It's in better shape than I am, anyway.
Maybe people don't sit on it because of that missing vertical in the backrest.
Alternatively, the may prefer the cute, roofed, wooden bus shelter four metres away from it.
8:13am on Saturday, 25th July, 2026:
Anecdote
The secret of the feral hollyhock's success is revealed.
Someone waters it.
That's cheating, if you ask me.
8:10am on Friday, 24th July, 2026:
Anecdote
This ad is on a wall in Colchester:
The trouble with taking so many American TV programmes is that people replace some of their cultural heritage with that of the US. I don't know that many people under 30 would know what "berk" meant in English slang.
It's Cockney rhyming slang. Berkshire Hunt rhymes with ... .
We see the same thing with youngsters sticking up a middle finger, when the traditional UK version uses two fingers. You can't snarl "up yours!" with a middle finger; all I've ever heard accompanying it is "sit on this!", but then I don't watch much TV.
Mind you, I'm not a Cockney, either.
8:39am on Thursday, 23rd July, 2026:
Anecdote
This hollyhock is growing out of a crack next to some steps alongside the main road in our village.
So hollyhocks are willing to grow between a couple of slabs of concrete where they're regularly fed on exhaust fumes, but they won't grow in our garden? What kind of masochistic plant are they?
I think it's a hollyhock, anyway. It's hard to tell when you've never grown one because they don't like your garden.
12:32pm on Wednesday, 22nd July, 2026:
Weird
This photograph of Prince George was released today:
So, how long has he been a vampire?
8:13am on Wednesday, 22nd July, 2026:
Weird
My wife's been at the crochet again.
8:44am on Tuesday, 21st July, 2026:
Weird
I have a plastic mat on the floor beneath my home-office chair, to stop it from damaging the carpet.
There are two consequences of this:
1) The chair damages the mat, so occasionally I have to replace it.
2) The mat damages the carpet, because it has spikes underneath it to stop it from slipping.
Following 1), I recently ordered a new mat from Amazon. Leaving aside the vast amount of packaging it came in, this is what it looked like:
On top of it are some blue gloves. The instructions told me that the gloves should be worn to unroll the mat, because of the spikes.
That's thoughtful. What was less thoughtful was the fact that the gloves were stuffed inside the mat, so I had to unroll it to get them. It would also have been handy if the instructions telling me to wear the gloves weren't themselves with the gloves.
Now, I merely have to flatten it by weighing down the corners and leaving it in direct sunlight for three hours.
We're sure to be getting another heatwave soon, I'll do it then.
9:05am on Monday, 20th July, 2026:
Comment
I was rooting for Spain in the World Cup final, so was glad they won. They're not great in attack, and the only match they impressed me in was the semi-final against France, but they weren't Argentina and that's all I required of them.
Argentina finally fell afoul of their fouling when they had a player sent off. It still took Spain extra time to beat them, but none of that would have been necessary had the referee dished out a yellow card earlier to stop Argentina's tacting of playing dirty before it took hold.
I didn't like the way FIFA handled the tournament:
- 48 teams was too many. The players had to play more games, and long-standing records fell because of this. Is Olise better than Pelé because he provided more assists? Pelé provided his six in a tournament that only had 16 teams, across six games; Olise's seven came from a 48-team tournament across eight games.
- Hydration breaks are a bad idea. They interrupt the flow of play and leave spectators with nothing to do except boo them. They're an excuse for giving US TV channels time to show advertisements. If the weather in a country is such that players will need hydration breaks, the tournament shouldn't be held in that country.
- Overriding red cards without due process is corrupt. Either allow all players who are red-carded to appeal their ban, or don't allow any of them to do so. Don't pluck out an obscure rule and apply it to one player, whose dismissal just happens to have been questioned by the host country's president.
- Extending half time beyond 15 minutes is against the laws of the game. If you want to put on a lacklustre show, fine, you have fifteen minutes for it. The World Cup final is the most-watched sporting event in the world, with maybe a fifth of the global population following it live: it doesn't need to be pepped up by extending the interval with a set of musical performances.
Oh well, we can have another shot at it in 2030.
Meanwhile, perhaps TV pundits can research an alternative to the word "quality". I was sick of hearing it by the end of the tournament.
9:28am on Sunday, 19th July, 2026:
Comment
I wasn't intending to watch the World Cup third-place play-off yesterday, because I thought we'd get stuffed. However, my wife kept calling me through to see the goals, so I gave up and watched the second half.
Hmm, well it looked as if France took their semi-final loss worse than England did theirs. It also showed that England's squad has more depth than France's, and that Bellingham is amazing.
England scored four in the first half and two in the second; France scored four in the second. Four two four: that was the formation England used when it won the World Cup in 1966. Is that mere coincidence, or is it a portent?
It's mere coincidence. The universe isn't scripted.
Oh well, England won the match and Mbappé is set to win the golden boot, so both sides have something to be pleased about. The score made it look like a testimonial match for Didier Dechamps.
It just shows what football can be like if teams are allowed to play instead of being fouled whenever an attack is developing <glares at Argentina>.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).