The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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10:09am on Thursday, 18th September, 2025:
Anecdote
A week ago, I was in a meeting along with 20 or more other people.
Did you know that new glue sticks are able to support their own weight when stuck to cardboard?
The biscuits were gluten-free, making them exceptionally dry and held together by gravity. They were like eating flavoured brick dust.
Some of the topics of the meeting were actually interesting, so I was pleased to be invited to attend.
Sadly, there were so many experienced people there that they all knew to drink the Earl Grey tea rather than the coffee.
8:36am on Wednesday, 17th September, 2025:
Comment
The Guardian has published its UK university rankings for the coming academic year, and out of 123 universities, Essex is 12th.
Last year, it was 23rd.
If the high-ups had known that my departure would have had such an impact, they'd have asked me to retire earlier.
8:29am on Tuesday, 16th September, 2025:
Anecdote
When I'm queueing in the post office behind seven other people, all of whom have parcels to send abroad, it's nice to find other things that also annoy me. This sign is one of them:
It's bad enough that it splits three infinitives with that colon there, but each of the things it's asked of us not to do starts with "not". If you're going to factor out the "to", factor out the "not" as well! That would make the bit up to the colon read "It is asked of you to not:", or, better, "It is asked of you not to:". Don't they teach algebra in schools any more?
Personally, I'd have gone with "It is asked of you not:" and then have "to damage items", "to shoplift" and "to be rude", mainly because it's unimpeachable grammatically but would somehow irritate everyone who reads it.
8:16am on Monday, 15th September, 2025:
Weird
From this week's Essex County Standard:
There are only a certain number of places in the country where a headline like that would make sense, but Colchester is one of them.
10:28am on Sunday, 14th September, 2025:
Weird
You can always trust the BBC.
10:06am on Sunday, 14th September, 2025:
Weird
If it hadn't been raining, I'd have got my car washed here.
They had a cyberman and a silurian, too (plus a TARDIS, but that wasn't very good).
8:16am on Saturday, 13th September, 2025:
Anecdote
The room I was staying in while at York had a nice, bright lamp on the side table next to the bed.
It also had curtains that were rather close to it.
Oh, and some concentrated light came out of the back of the lamp when it was on.
That would explain why there's a bleached-out spot on the curtains.
8:35am on Friday, 12th September, 2025:
Comment
Yesterday, I finished reading The Mote in God's Eye, a science fiction book I've been meaning to read since the 1970s.
I wish I had read it in the 1970s. It hasn't aged well.
7:40am on Thursday, 11th September, 2025:
Anecdote
This slide is from Emily Brown's keynote at the IGGI conference yesterday, which was about the development of Monument Valley 3 (for which she was lead designer):
Glad to see I'm not the only person who partitions game-related concepts into four using two axes.
It was a good first day with several intriguing presentations, some of which prompted me to ask questions in the Q&As at the end. I also got some useful references to follow up. Yes, I may be retired from academic life, but that doesn't mean I'm not still interested.
Today is the industry advisory board, which is the reason I'm officially here. These events are normally dominated by a few people, of whom I am not one, but I do occasionally say something if either asked or incensed. IGGI has stopped recruiting students (it was given enough funding for five intakes, twice) and the ones still on the books are gradually graduating. This is why next year will be the final IGGI conference: the funding ends then. Because of this, the industry advisory board shouldn't take long as it doesn't have as much to discuss.
It will take long, though, because it's a meeting and will therefore expand to fill the time allocated for it.
7:43am on Wednesday, 10th September, 2025:
Anecdote
I'm in York for the next couple of days at the penultimate conference of the IGGI doctoral training centre I've been associated with for over a decade.
I drove here via Great Ouseburn, the village where my mother grew up. I have many happy memories of the place from my childhood, and wanted to take a last look at it. I doubt I'll have the opportunity to visit it again in the future.
I'd have loved to have walked through it, rekindling fond aspects of when I was a boy staying with my grandparents in the summer holidays, or spending the days around New Year's Eve in their snug little house. I didn't have the tine to revisit the village, though, just to drive through and take a look at the seat we put up in memory of my grandfather.
It's been there since 1989 and is getting shabby. It needs to be refurbished. Last time I visited, I emailed the council offering to pay, but got no response. Maybe I'll have to write an actual letter and send it through Royal Mail. I did pay for a refurbishment many years ago, which they undertook, but it needs sprucing up again.
The village is still basically as it was, but much has also changed. Pubs are houses, the old corn warehouse, which before that was a workhouse, is now houses. The old blacksmith's forge is now a house called "The Forge".
Places I'd have walked to if I had time: the metre-wide Tom Lane, next to the church wall that we were told 60 years ago was on the brink of collapsing (but never did); 8, Carr Side, where I lived for the first year of my life and have never seen since then as it's off the main road; the spring where the River Ouse starts, which is in a marshy area called the Seggins; the places where two shops used to be near the school, that aren't shops any more.
It was good to get a glimpse of the village, anyway. It's sad that I'll probably never return to it.
Sigh.
8:14am on Tuesday, 9th September, 2025:
Anecdote
When I was a fresh undergraduate, I went for an explore of Colchester.
In the department store, Williams & Griffin, I saw a sign indicating that toys were downstairs. Naturally, I went for a look. There, among toys, games and child-related clothing, I saw a stuffed-toy monkey rotating from a bar in the ceiling.
Williams & Griffin was bought out by Fenwick's, who initially removed the monkey. The public outcry was such that they soon replaced it.
It's still there.
It's probably been refurbished, but that's basically a 50-year-old plushie monkey still performing its trick for the benefit of Colcestrian children.
Well, Colcestrian children whose parents can afford to shop in Fenwick's, anyway.
8:37am on Monday, 8th September, 2025:
Anecdote
These signs have been popping up all over recently:
On Saturday, I rode past seven of them on my bike. None of the roads were closed. Well, they may have been closed some distance further along, but I followed one road for five miles (accounting for three of the signs) and it wasn't closed.
This happens a lot. The worst signs are the ones they put at the roundabout outside Colchester North train station, which often refer to road closures ten or more miles away. They don't say that though. Once, the road closure was about a hundred yards up the street. There's no way of telling whether a sign affects you or not without ignoring it.
Locals therefore routinely disregard these signs, on the grounds that whoever puts them there has called wolf too often. Non-locals turn around, even though they could be fine if their journey ends before wherever the road closure is. It could be in Cardiff or Exeter for all anyone knows.
Ignoring signs that might, on very rare occasions, conceivably be right annoys people, though, especially once they find out where the road closure is and it's in the next county. Many have therefore taken to sabotaging the signs when this is the case.
Sometimes, the signs are just pushed over:
Other times, they're rotated ninety degrees then turned around so they don't face oncoming traffic:
There are other combinations too. When the sign is in two parts, with the top saying "road ahead closed" and the bottom showing to do a U-turn, the top is flipped down to cover the bottom. Sometimes, the sandbag that's used to hold the frame in place is removed and hung over the sign to cover its message.
I'm sure the people who put the signs up know they're going to be sabotaged, but do it because they'll be sued by the relevant agency if they don't. Ordinary citizens, though, while generally law-abiding, are apt to rebel when faced with something that's plainly stupid. The fact that they're unlikely to be caught makes it only slightly more probable.
8:41am on Sunday, 7th September, 2025:
Weird
8:35am on Saturday, 6th September, 2025:
Comment
Yesterday, Angela Rayner resigned as Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Deputy Prime Minister and Housing Minister. The reason seems to be that she took two pieces of advice that both said "we don't think you need to pay extra tax but speak to a tax specialist" as being good enough evidence that she didn't need to pay extra tax or to speak to a tax specialist.
It's a shame she didn't ask ChatGPT for its opinion.
Me:
This is a question about UK stamp duty laws. Suppose a person owns a 25% share in a house, but sells that share to a trust. The beneficiary of the trust is a child of the person who sold their share to the trust. The person uses some of the money from this sale to buy a different house. Should the person pay standard stamp duty on the different house or a higher rate?
ChatGPT:
Great question — this touches on the UK's Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) rules and in particular the "higher rates for additional dwellings" (commonly the 3% surcharge).
Let's walk through it carefully:
...
[A bunch of step-by-step explanations]
...
In short:
If the transfer to the trust genuinely removes the person's beneficial interest in the first property, then their purchase of a new home should only attract standard SDLT. If they retain any beneficial interest (directly or through a settlor-interested trust), the higher rate would apply.
I think that would have been enough for me to ask a professional (or to ask ChatGPT a follow-up question) to see if I did retain any beneficial interest or not, regardless of whether I was Housing Minister at the time.
Your experience with ChatGPT may say differently, of course.
Still, at least our politicians do have the integrity to resign when they make errors, even when those are of a technical nature.
3:38pm on Friday, 5th September, 2025:
Weird
I saw this registration number on a plumber's van when I was in London on Wednesday.
W12 is the London postcode for Shepherd's Bush and White City, so I guess that's where they were based.
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Copyright © 2025 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).