The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:02am on Thursday, 29th January, 2026:
Weird
Marks and Spencer have this catchphrase they want us to associate with them. "This isn't just <product>: it's M&S <product>".
They've eased off on it in recent years, largely because people use it when M&S screw up. "This isn't just an Internet security issue: it's an M&S Internet security issue".
That hasn't stopped them from putting up signs like this in their stores:
The white lettering on the black background makes it look like a protest message, telling us the food isn't just.
No Fairtrade designation for your food, then, M&S!
8:34am on Wednesday, 28th January, 2026:
Weird
I don't know why the makers of these baby wipes decided to draw grass on the packaging, but did they have to make it look as if the baby has claws?
8:27am on Tuesday, 27th January, 2026:
Weird
These people in Colchester still have their Christmas lights up. Lots of people leave their external lights up all year round, because they can't be bothered to take them down; these people are different because they leave them switched on.
If they take them down on February 2nd (Candlemas), either they're minority Christians or they're majority Christians born pre-16th Century.
I guess they could also be non-Christians messing with passers-by.
10:18am on Monday, 26th January, 2026:
Anecdote
After three weeks, I've finished replaying Elder Scrolls Online, having last finished playing it in September 2019.
It hasn't really changed a lot. There's new content, although acquisition of experience points and the like has been speeded up so you whisk through and miss a great deal. I started a new character, but experimented on a build that didn't work out so gave up on it after maybe a week. I began another one, for for which it took me two weeks to reach the level cap and garner a slough of champion points.
As usual with Bethesda games, none of this actually matters because of the dynamic difficulty adjustment. Mudcrabs take just as long to kill at level 50 as they did at level 5. By the time you have a decent set of skills slotted, every fight is the same and therefore boring.
The stories associated with the quests are usually good in principle, but in practice they all involve very similar activities. 90% of them are: : go to these nearby places, where you'll need to kill the mobs that are guarding the thing you have to click on, then after you've clicked on all the things, come back here. If you're in a dungeon, the boss will be in the furthest room from the entrance, so either run through the trash along the way or do the sub-quest that you'll come across early on. If the boss isn't an end boss, expect it to tell you "you're too late" to stop the end boss.
There was a lot of activity in the chat logs, most of which was guild-related. Not every guild that was trying to recruit was German or Russian. The first three invites I saw in English were for LGBT guilds. I didn't join a guild, anyway, as I knew I wasn't going to be playing for long. I don't think anyone talked to me directly, but it's hard to tell when the chat box is packed with plaintive five-line requests for gawd-knows-what that no-one reads.
They still haven't fixed the quest-tracking problem, whereby you're in the middle of a quest chain, complete the link and are given the next one, only to find the currently tracked quest is now one in a different zone entirely. Maybe there's a setting that makes it less prevalent or something, but if so that should be the default setting.
Overall, ESO in 2026 is an improvement on ESO 2019, but it has the wrong focus. Its main strength is its stories, but you're zipped through these to reach some tiresome elder game that assumes you want to spend your time in groups repeatedly running limited content.
I confess that I do feel an urge to replay Skyrim after this, though.
9:28am on Sunday, 25th January, 2026:
Comment
In the Hans Christian Anderson story, The Emperor's New Clothes, everyone knows the emperor is wearing no clothes. They go along with the pretence that he is, because they don't want to be thought of as stupid. Only when a child points out that he's wearing no clothes does the façade collapse.
Pretty well every politician knows that the current president of the US has some form of dementia. Our leaders go along with the pretence that he doesn't, because they don't want their country to be in for a pounding. All it would take is for one leader, speaking on a world stage, to say openly what everyone can see and no-one will have to pretend any more.
Someone could have done this at the Davos meeting earlier this week, but they didn't.
My guess is that every politician also knows that the man will die soon, so they just have to wait it out.
8:42am on Saturday, 24th January, 2026:
Weird
My instincts tell me that most vehicles turn right at this junction.
I should have been a detective.
9:01am on Friday, 23rd January, 2026:
Weird
Two sections of wall on this building in our village have numbers on them.
I've no idea why they have numbers on them, they just do.
I always thought that on the whole, bricks were mutually interchangeable. These non-fungible bricks suggest otherwise.
8:56am on Thursday, 22nd January, 2026:
Weird
Here are a couple of signs I saw recently:
The first one is saying "we would prefer you not to ((smoke or eat) in this store)", although it can also be read as "we would prefer you ((not to smoke) or eat) in this store", and only the use of large upper-case letters prevents "we would prefer you (not to smoke) or (eat in this store)".
Because parentheses aren't used this way in regular English, a better way of putting it would be: "in this store, we would prefer you neither to smoke nor to eat".
The second sign is saying "please (do not obstruct entrance) and (keep lane clear)", but again, it can be read a different way:"please do not (obstruct entrance and keep lane clear)".
In the first sign, the "not" applies to the entire clause, but in the second sign it only applies to the first term of the clause. It's only because we know that signs typically tell you not to do things you might other wise do that we can divine their meaning.
Perhaps Boolean logic should be taught more widely in British schools.
9:21am on Wednesday, 21st January, 2026:
Weird
These 1950s schoolmasters had a prophetic grasp of 2020s politics.
9:25am on Tuesday, 20th January, 2026:
Rant
Remember in December when I showed a photograph I found on Ancestry.com of my paternal grandmother? The original had been badly colourised.
Well, now someone has uploaded a new photograph of the badly colourised one that's been desaturated to make it look as if it's a black-and-white original.
You can probably tell which is which.
This is the kind of representation-of-representation-of-representation-of-representation that post-modernists dream about.
9:44am on Monday, 19th January, 2026:
Weird
This happened a lot in the lead-up to Christmas:
How is this "colleague" (who's no colleague of mine) able to check whether I've been overcharged? What they do is rootle around in my bags, scanning random items. They can't detect whether I've been overcharged or not: their scanner uses the same pricing system as the customers' scanners. They could perhaps check that I'd not scanned the same item twice, but they'd have to rescan everything in my bags to do that, not just a random sample.
Just tell it like it is, Sainsbury's: you want to check that I haven't shoplifted anything. We all know that's why you're doing it, and pretending you're doing it for different reasons just makes you look insincere.
9:53am on Sunday, 18th January, 2026:
Outburst
Facebook changed its formatting again, so Facebook Purity stopped working. This meant that I get to see it in its full, as-intended form.
It's horrific!
Here is a summary of the first 60 posts I saw, in order, when I opened Facebook yesterday:
Put another way:
5 posts from friends
7 posts from sponsors
1 post from me
1 bunch of selected "reels", whatever they are
46 suggestions of posters to follow.
What's the point in following people if only one in twelve of the posts you see are from the people you follow?!
Gawd, what a crock of a system....
This morning, I only saw posts from people I actually follow, so FB Purity must be working again. I can see posts about nightmares, rather than experience one.
9:56am on Saturday, 17th January, 2026:
Weird
Properly used, Love Hearts can be quite creepy.
10:59am on Friday, 16th January, 2026:
Anecdote
Yesterday, my younger daughter's car was due a service so she drove it to the service centre. I agreed to pick her up from there and bring her to our house for the few hours the servicing would take.
We started off at the same time, with me following her. I'd normally have taken the A12 to get there, but my daughter turned right when the A12 was left, so I figured she was using the back roads. Unfortunately, I lost her when I had to give way to a skip lorry that was overtaking a line of parked cars (even though I had right of way), but no matter, I knew where I was going (unlike last time, when I went to the wrong service centre).
All went well, taking the usual back-road route, until I had to make a familiar right turn. The road was closed. It was only closed in the direction I wanted to go, but it was nevertheless closed.
OK, well that wasn't good. I drove on a bit, putting the destination into my car's satnav so it could find me a better route. It instructed me to turn right at an up-coming junction, so I did.
There are back roads and there are back-of-beyond roads.
The track it put me on was barely wider than my car. Furthermore, it was sunken, so there was no way I could have pulled to one side if a vehicle came the other way. I could perhaps have got past a pedestrian if they'd stood sideways, but I couldn't have got past a pedestrian pushing a wheelbarow.
Up ahead, I could see the red of a Post Office van. If it was coming the same way as me, I was doomed.
Fortunately, it was going the same direction as me, but I was still doomed. There was a tractor ahead of it with a tree-trimming attachment on the back. It was mincing the tops of the hedges down to an acceptable level. I can walk faster than it was going, although I wouldn't have wanted to, given the volume of wood chippings flying in random directions.
I stopped, texted my daughter to let her know I'd be late, then restarted and moved forwards the eight or ten metres I'd lost by stopping.
Eventually, the tractor pulled over into a field entrance so Postman Pat and I could get past. I followed the satnav, and in a wide circuit it brought me back to the road I'd originally come off. A three-point turn would have been so much quicker than a circular path along muddy lanes full of muddy puddles concealing muddy potholes.
When I got back onto the road, I followed the satnav and it told me to take the (now left) turn I hadn't been able to take the first time and still couldn't take. I had to drive on and find my own way to some location close enough that the satnav's recomputation didn't involve a U-turn.
I got to a set of traffic lights where the satnav was saying I was two minutes away. There were six cars ahead of me in the queue to turn left. The lights changed green. Three cars went through, then the lights went red again. I waited for five minutes before they changed back to green. Two cars went through, but the one immediately ahead of me was being driven by an overly-cautious driver and was slow to start. I was contemplating whether I could have sued him for this, but the lights held out for just long enough that I could get through before they were red again. Note that this doesn't mean they were green when I went through.
I was stuck behind this slow vehicle for the rest of the journey, which made it three minutes instead of two. It was on a very wide road with lots of room for overtaking, none of which was allowed because of a bus lane that's part of Colchester's rapid transit system (or will be, should they ever finish it).
I eventually arrived at the service centre twenty minutes late. My daughter had taken different back roads and so arrived on time.
Time passed, and after stiffing my daughter £104 for a new tyre over the phone, it was time to return her there so she could collect her car.
This time, I took the A12, which was fine. However, there were terrible queues of traffic to get back onto it. It was a solid line of cars over a mile long, all on the opposite side of the road, so there was little chance I'd be let in. The side I was on was clear, though. I therefore decided to go back home the way I'd come in the morning. After all, the problematic junction was only closed in one direction.
It all went swimmingly at first. There were some traffic lights on a bridge, but there usuallly are because the bridge has been periodically broken for three decades and any fix they make lasts at most six months before breaking again. Cars were coming the other way, so I figured that the junction was fully open now.
We got to the junction. It was fully closed. The drivers of the cars I'd seen coming the other direction had thought, like me, that the road was open. They'd turned around to try a different route. I was obliged to do the same.
My wife was with me this time, so she put our home address into the satnav and off we went.
Hmm, perhaps it would me more accurate to say way-off we went.. It took us through a village, which was fine, but then had us turn down a narrow country lane that was full of muck and scree from water washed off fields, a lot of which was still pooled there. The surface was uneven, missing edges where tractors had crumbled pieces off, and barely wide enough for two Fiat 500s to pass. We were the third car behind a delivery van that filled the whole road. So did the delivery van that was coming in the opposite direction. Eventually, the other one reversed into some kind of impact crater and we were able to get past. In time, we reached a road I recognised. It was the one I would have been on if the junction hadn't been closed.
The satnav didn't advise me to take this road, though. It advised me to take a different one.
The different one was a nightmare. By now, the sun was beneath the horizon and it was getting dark. Also, I was conscious that I really needed the toilet. An undulating, weaving, slip-slidy wet road at dusk is not the most ideal combination of driving conditions, but when you need the toilet it's somehow worse.
My wife was getting cross with our car's satnav by now, so found her phone (which is perpetually on low charge) and used that to find out where to go. It seemed we were stuck on this lane for the next few miles.
We were behind two other vehicles, but they turned off to go to a different forlorn villlage, so we were on our own for the next stretch. Other cars did appear, but they were obviously as wary of the road as we were so we were able to pass each other at only low panic levels.
Finally, the medieval lane we were on met a proper road, with white lines and everything. I knew this road. It was the main one through the village next to ours. Our satnav wanted us to go across it, though, continuing along the lane. I've been down that part of the lane on my bike. It's not a lane you want to go down on a bike, in case there's a car coming the other way: it's so narrow, you'd not be able to get past it. I don't go down it on my bike any more. I wasn't going to go down it in my car, either, especially with the growing urgency caused by my ever-filling bladder.
My wife's phone was saying to turn onto the proper road, too, so I did. The satnav offered repeated suggestions of where I could turn around to get back onto the dirt track, but reluctantly conceded defeat and recalculated a different route along a different narrow country lane I wasn't going to take because the last time I did I got a tree branch wedged under the car and had to lie in black slush to get it out. We ignored the satnav and I took the road I'd taken two hundred and fifty or more times before.
Toilet-wise, I was getting desperate now. The traffic was light, but it was being co-ordinated by the unseen hand of fate to slow me down. I had to turn right at a T-junction, onto a road that was empty but for one car, to which I had to give way. If it had apeared a second or two later I'd have been fine, but it didn't. It appeared at precisely the right moment to cause maximum delay. You have to admire the precision timing, but augh! That cost me twenty seconds!
I turned onto the road, followed my usual route in defiance of what the satnav was saying, until I reached the street before the one I live on. It's, quiet with hardly any traffic, and is easily wide enough for cars to pass with ease — unless someone has parked badly and is jutting out. Someone had indeed parked badly and was jutting out. I had to give way to the ONE CAR that chose to come the opposite direction at the EXACT TIME I needed it not to be there.
My now, my sphincter muscles were being stressed almost beyond endurance. It didn't help that my wife was laughing all the time at my predicament — and these weren't just chuckles, these were tears-down-the-cheeks howls. Augh! Augh!
I got to the house, pressed the remote for the garage, abandoned the car on thje drive, and raced for the downstairs lavatory.
Ah, sweet bledded relief! Another twenty seconds and I'd have needed to get the car seat replaced.
I've had fraughter car journeys, but not two fraughter ones for a local 15-minute drive in the same day.
>
Oh, and the in-car satnav was convinced we lived on a different street, too.
[Edit]
I forgot! On the stretch when we were alone, it was raining heavily. My headlights picked out something reflective ahead. What could it be? As I got closer, I realised it was a jogger. I was wrong, though: it was four joggers, jogging 20 metres apart in the pouring rain. The fiost three one only noticed there was a car behind them when the reflector on the back of the jogger in front of them lit up. The one at the front had to be shouted at by the one behind him to get out of the way. To be fair, they did all move out of the way, jogging on a raised bank next to a field as we went past.
Gawd knows why they were out jogging at 4:30 in the rain, though. Maybe it's some new penance for a confessed sin, devised by the Catholic church to bring it into modern times.
9:42am on Thursday, 15th January, 2026:
Weird
It's sad that what seemed perfectly normal as a child doesn't seem so normal as an adult.
I'm pretty sure Rupert the Bear could still have opened his mouth with that gag on.
I do rather like the "Who left this bear here?" attitude of the man, though. That's definitely realistic.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).
