We have done a lot of small PCB designs over the years, but by far the most popular is my Faikin board. Reports are that even Daikin have recommended it to people wanting Home Assistant integration! It allows control of a lot of Daikin air conditioners over WiFi, MQTT, web, and Home Assistant. Constantly improving, and easy to use with local working not cloud based.
My latest design idea is a rework of a previous "environmental monitor", but specifically targeted at the Faikin users. The concept is that it can be a display and control for the Faikin. Whilst some ducted Daikin have a wall mount control, it is not cheap, so this would work with those and the more typical wall mount Daikin that do not support a wall mount display.
Key functions would be:
Display current state of air conditioning unit.
Allow change of key settings (power, mode, fan speed, target temp).
Remote temperature sensor to allow room temp to be referenced at the controller in "Faikin auto" mode.
But the idea is the board can work with no display as reference temperature or just an environmental monitor for Home Assistant without a Faikin involved.
This is the current board design.
The expensive CO₂ sensor would be optional as it adds over $20 to the cost. Both the tab for it, and the 5 way joystick button, could be snapped off for a purely display or monitoring application.
A Waveshare 2" display fits on the front. Full colour 240x320 pixel. It is designed to fit the header so it can be removed if needed to access WAGOs, etc. The display adds another $20 at least.
User interface
I want to make the user interface simple - anything beyond the basic controls for the aircon you have to do via web interface. That should make it easy to use.
The idea is a joystick allows change of target temp (up/down) or switch to other setting (left/right) and change of mode and fan speed, as well as simple push on/off.
Bluetooth
Whilst it can all work over WiFi and MQTT, my plan is to link to Faikin using BLE as well, both ways. So Faikin reports mode/status, and this advises control and current reference temperature. This should make it extra robust with no need for WiFi or internet to continue working. The plan is a simple announcement BLE, not a connection, much like the many cheap BLE temperature/humidity sensors that exist.
Sensors
The current set of sensors include:
MCP9808 Ambient temperature sensor. This is highly regarded as a good temperature sensor.
VEML6040 Ambient light sensor (with a night mode to turn off display) including colour.
GZP6816D Atmospheric pressure sensor, and additional temp sensor.
SCD41 CO₂ sensor, with humidity, and another temp sensor. This would be optional.
DS18B20 connection 3 pin WAGO for more temperature sensors.
Detecting remote BLE temperature sensor.
All of these would report to Home Assistant as needed, and also report control and one reference temperature of choice to Faikin.
And yes, too many temp sensors, so system will allow a config of which are used and per sensor offset (to allow for heat via PCB). I may even allow averaging of multiple sensors. It will be interesting to see how this all works. DS18B20 are great for adding an "outdoor" sensor to report to HA as well.
Generic signage
My existing EPD app which is general signage will be extended to handle the sensors as things to display so this can be simply used as a generic environmental display (and HA integration). Indeed this is likely to be the first code I do for these new boards, without a Faikin link.
Packaging
The basic board needs to be sold with and without the SCD41 CO₂ module. The board is likely $30 and the SCD41 adds at least $20 to that, probably more like $30. Not everyone wants CO₂ and humidity. The fluctuating value of the dollar is a pain in this all.
And then I may package with Waveshare 2" display, 8 way 0.1" pitch header, and extra M2 screws. This is likely another $20 or even $30.
Maybe even with DS18B20 sensor as an option. These are quite cheap.
I am not sure I want to do 3D case printing, but I plan a number of STL files.
Tindie makes such options simple, so that is likely the main sales channel initially. We'll see about Amazon as well. Those with A&A accounts will be able to order direct as always.
Update
The first boards (no button) have arrived. I have decided I'll try the TI TMP1075 as an alternative temperature sensor. In practice it seems a DS18B20 is best as it is separate from the board, closely followed by the SCD41. The MCP9808 (and presumably the TMP1075) suffers from some local heating from the PCB. The GZP6816D is close to the ESP32 and so not good at all for temperature (it is there for pressure). The T6793 CO2 sensor is not good, gives silly values (yes, I checked, and this is not a driver error), is bulky, needs 5V (does not work on 3.3V) and is actually not that much cheaper than the SCD41. The VEML6040 light sensor works well, but is a fun exercise for the casework.
When running a central single sign on service like Keycloak in production, you need to understand how well the system performs and whether there are service degradations.
Having a proper monitoring stack in place is essential for this.
Moreover, when the system performance degrades, it is crucial to identify which part of the system is causing the problem to address it.
In the latest Keycloak release, all the above became more straightforward and works without additional extensions.
Users rely on Keycloak to log in to their applications, and service level indicators (SLIs) capture the key metrics capturing that behavior.
Misbehavior of the system can be detected by monitoring these SLIs.
One of the indicators can be the availability of the system.
The indicator for availability can be defined as: percentage of the time the system can answer requests.
The lower the indicator is for your system, the less available it was in the observed period.
Now we know how to detect when Keycloak is not performing well.
But what should I do when a service level indicator shows a degradation of the service?
This situation usually means some part of Keycloak does not perform well. However, from the indicator itself, it is hard to say what part of Keycloak it is.
To identify the culprit of the problem, we provide the Troubleshooting using metrics guide that lists chosen metrics.
Using these metrics, you can visualize what is happening in your deployment and down problems.
Some examples of metrics from the guide are listed below:
Number of operations performed by Keycloak like password hashes, login flows, token refreshes, etc.
Memory usage
Database connection pool utilization
Number of HTTP requests per URL and outcome
Hit ratios for internal caches
For environments with Prometheus for collecting metrics and Grafana for displaying them, we also provide Grafana dashboards to make troubleshooting smoother.
Find instructions on how to deploy our dashboards into your Grafana instance in the Visualizing activities in dashboards guide.
Grafana dashboards with SLIs (click to enlarge)
My Keycloak is still sick :( I need an in-depth examination
Thanks to metrics, you can observe certain aspects of the system and how they evolve over time.
However, they may not provide a detailed picture of what is happening inside Keycloak for a specific request.
For this, you can leverage traces.
Learn more in the Root cause analysis with tracing guide.
With tracing, you can observe steps that Keycloak was performing for a specific request, including the respective timing for each of them.
These steps include operations by Keycloak but also waiting time for responses from third party services like the database, LDAP, Infinispan and others.
This helps you to reveal where the bottleneck in your system is.
In the example below, you can see steps Keycloak was performing when a user submitted the username and password form.
You can see the most time-consuming step was password hashing, which took 30 milliseconds out of 48-millisecond total request processing time.
Well, I was certainly hoping for this result, but wasn't necessarily expecting it! I'm pleased to report that Ballot SC-081v3 passed, and that shorter certificate lifetimes are now coming!
The Schedule
I will go into more detail later in the post, but right now, let'
I'm a few days late this week, finally back from a month of (almost) non-stop travel with the last bit being completely devoid of an internet connection 😲 And now, the real hard work kicks in as we count down the next 25 days before launching the full
My graphics library has undergone plenty of improvements for the e-paper work, but now I am back on LCDs. These have extra challenges, because they have colours and shades.
The main reason is new environmental sensor boards with LCD.
This means I need to anti-alias text, digits, lines, circles, etc. Previously I had pre-rendered 16 level fonts and icons. But I have moved away from pre-rendered bit map fonts in my latest e-paper code already.
I have gone through several approaches to this. The fact my fonts are vector based previously allowed me to just draw lines and circles on the e-paper. That is fine when over plotting is no problem, i.e. white on white is white.
But if you want to anti-alias you have to over sample, e.g. a 4x4 matrix to then know how many pixels are set (0-16) and use that to control alpha blending of existing pixel and new pixel (or background pixel and foreground pixel).
My first approach for fonts was to make code to allow me to tell if a point x,y is plotted or not - so instead of actively plotting dots (circles) and multiple lines that over lap other lines and dots, I have to do the maths to work out "is this point within a dot" and "is this point on a line". The dot is easy - simple Pythagoras. But the lines was more work - I can work out distance to a point is within stroke width using squares. Working out end of line is harder, so ended up working out the point of perpendicular intersection so I could range check end points and then check distance using squares.
It worked, and allowed me to over sample 4x4 and work out grey levels.
A better way
The problem with the above is the 16 times processing of points. So I came up with a new plan - scan lines and run lengths.
The new logic scans the character top to bottom to determine the left/right for each line or dot that is in the character at that scan line. This is actually quite easy for a dot as I can use a look up to get the left/right for any point on a circle and scale. The line is a rectangle, and the fact it is only ever horizontal, vertical, or a 45 degree line means I don't even need square roots to work out the points, and simply work out the left/right for the specified Y scan. It is simple to merge overlapping runs on a scan line and the max runs is low as we know how the font works (up to 6 ranges).
This means only 4 times the processing of non anti-aliasing, as opposed to 16 times. The runs can then be worked out 4 scan lines at a time and plotting a sequence of the same grey level. The same logic works for anti-aliased or not, just not 4 times over sampling on the Y axis when not anti-aliasing.
7 segment digits
The 7 segment digits are not simple lines and dots, they are a complex path (original in SVG), but it is easy to render and run length encode the scan lines for a single large 7 segment digit (well, 9 segments with colon and dot). I can then scale which lines I extract from this large image to make the same run length logic as I do for the vector fonts and use the same run length plotting code.
Lines and circles
Another primitive is lines and circles, and whilst arbitrary angle lines do need one fast integer square root to get the corners, converting to run length on scan lines is, again, simple, and can use the same run length plotting code.
The same is true for a circle, using the same circle lookup table (with interpolation for a larger circle than the table).
Even faster
All of the above still comes down to pixels, but there is a simple important step I have now added to that. I made the pixel plot primitive have a horizontal run length parameter. This allows a number of checks and memory access and so on to be worked out once, and then a simple loop to apply a run length of pixels plotted the same. When plotting 100% alpha it is extra quick as no checking of existing pixel and alpha blending. It can be a simple loop incrementing memory address. Having all of the primitives for fonts, 7 seg, lines, circles, and so on actually convert to run length makes it easy to use such a primitive.
QR!
P.S. Yes, everyone knows I am a stickler for accurate valid QR codes, but I have in fact gone as bit mad with an option here - the targets are 100% correct but the pixels are circles. This is because of the way QR codes are decoded hitting the pixel centres (having found the targets to get accurate alignment), so this should always work whilst having a subtly different aesthetic. I think it is better than some of the other QR code abuse, but it is an option on my EPD code.
I've had solar and batteries at home for quite some time now, and despite my experience with them being really awesome, there were a few little things that were bugging me. Using systems from various different suppliers doesn't always provide the perfect integration, so I hacked
It had several comments, many of which seemed to think there were ways of "cracking" it. There are not. Having got a comment recently, I did another video, OTP.
Wikipedia explains its quite well. It explains your cannot crack it if :-
The key must be at least as long as the plaintext.
The key must be truly random.
The key must never be reused in whole or in part.
The key must be kept completely secret by the communicating parties.
Even so, people still comment, and a friend of mine just posted...
"Rev, set a challenge on your blog first to decode message without a key wins a firebrick dragon?"
"I would have thought brittle[sic] force decode first 4 chars and wait till it looks like a word."
I really thought I had explained it, but clearly not.
The short version is YOU CANNOT CRACK IT!
In my second video I tried to explain this by dumbing down the message to just 0 or 1, with two possible keys, 0 or 1, giving a possible encrypted message 0 or 1.
Now, imagine you intercept my message and it is a 1
You can BRUTE FORCE try every possible key:
Key 0 means message was 1
Key 1 means message was 0
So what was the message? You don't know. You have no way to tell.
You don't know because every possible message, no matter how meaningful or meaningless is possible with a key, with equal probability of being the actual message.
The "I would have thought brute force decode first 4 chars" misses the point - you can brute force to make every possible first 4 letters, with no clue which of those is correct or even more likely.
And just to be clear, even if you know the first 3 letters are ANX (Ref Enigma) that does not help you because the key for those letters has no impact on the next letters (unlike Enigma).
So let me try and say it again, YOU CANNOT CRACK IT! I suggest reading the Wikipedia article.
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So I was on a Spirit flight earlier today and bought a Diet Coke mid-flight. I poured it into the cup and immediately noticed it tasted weird — like kinda flat and off. So I checked the bottom of the can and saw the best-by date: MAR2425.
I called the flight attendant over and let him know it was expired (since today’s April 25, 2025), and he looks at the can for like a full minute… then goes, “This isn’t expired. It says 2425 — as in the year 2425. You’ve got so many years left.”
Dude really thought my Diet Coke was good for another 400 years.
Anyway, after we landed I mentioned it to the staff by the gate and they just looked at me like I was crazy and said “we can’t do anything about that.” Not even a “sorry” or “we’ll make a note.”
I’m not mad, I just think it’s hilarious that someone thought soda could survive the next four centuries.
I had a flight to catch and was early so I had time to wait around. (This was not at the airport, but close by in a nice shopping district) Line wasn’t too long, mother with a toddler, in a stroller in front of me placed her order, but stood next to me as I placed mine. I had my app ready to pay and as the order was being said back to me she leaned into the snack counter, grabbed a fruit box and said “this too”, “I forgot to get this for my baby, you don’t mind? Do you?” while looking at me and the cashier.
I definitely have social anxiety, and try avoid conflict, but I wasn’t about to pay for a strangers fruit medley, just because they asked. I looked at her and the cashier and said “No. I’m going to have to pass on that” and along with the look on my face, that confirmed I meant it. She proceeded to toss it back and rolled her eyes like I was wrong to decline but didn’t say anything else. I’m guessing she’s done this before, but who knows. Mildly infuriating encounter.
My husband and I (both late 30s) had fostered children for a number of years. We have three young children together and we always kept them in mind while we fostered and we made sure to limit the number of kids we fostered at a time so nobody was displaced. Five years ago we had a lovely 2 year old boy placed in our care. We were told he was likely going to be adoptable in the coming years and we were asked if we would be interested. We were absolutely on board with this if it should ever happen.
Three years into fostering her we were told that her biological mother was agreeing to give up all parental rights and allow him to be adopted. Our foster son bonded with all of us and we all bonded with him. The kids saw him as a brother, we saw him as our son and he saw them as his siblings and us as his parents. We had actually started the process to adopt him a few months ago when the rug was pulled out from under all of us. The case worker decided to remove him from our home and place him with a couple who were looking to foster to adopt.
It was devastating and he didn't want to leave. We asked for reasons why the decision was made and the case worker said it had been decided that he would be better placed with parents who did not have any children. I did push back some and brought up how bonded he was with us all and how excited he was for the adoption and I told her it would devastate him. She said he would recover and all would be fine. That he was young. And that they felt this was the best decision no matter how much he wanted to be with us and we wanted him with us.
The thing is, with fostering, we always knew something like that could happen. But we never realized once the adoption process had started after parental rights were terminated that it could happen. This was devasting for all of us and my husband and I agreed we could not risk this again. So we stopped fostering. It was a difficult decision because we loved helping kids. We loved offering them a safe space. But we couldn't hurt our kids again and the risk was too big considering how badly this was all handled. It wasn't even us who first mentioned adoption to our now former foster son. It was the case worker.
I'm going off on a tangent right now. Sorry. We didn't say anything to our families for a while and when we did we told a few people who spread the news for us. One of those was my brother and he told his wife (SIL). SIL was angry that I didn't tell her directly myself. She was a foster kid and had been very for us fostering. When she found out she said I owed it to her to tell her face to face and how dare I stop like that when I could help so many others. I explained to her the reasons but she did not want to hear them. She said there are kids out there with nothing and I'd rather protect kids who have everything.
She has mentioned at least three times by now that I should have told her directly and I'm an AH for not doing so. AITA for that?
I'm in my 40s and I've never been on a beach holiday for various reasons: family couldn't afford it as a child, lack of interest as an adult, classic Irish complexion. But my daughter has been desperate to go, so we're off to Spain in a three weeks. We've booked an apartment a couple of hundred metres from the beach.
This will sound stupid but what do we actually do all day? Literally just lie on the beach and make sandcastles? For regular beach holidayers, what does a typical day look like?
Also, beyond the obvious (towels, swim shorts and factor 50), what are the essentials to take with us?
We're introducing a new product suite today called Datasette for Newsrooms - a bundled collection of Datasette Cloud features built specifically for investigative journalists and data teams. We're describing it as an all-in-one data store, search engine, and collaboration platform designed to make working with data in a newsroom easier, faster, and more transparent.
If your newsroom could benefit from a managed version of Datasette we would love to hear from you. We're offering it to nonprofit newsrooms for free for the first year (they can pay us in feedback), and we have a two month trial for everyone else.
One crucial detail: we will help you get started - we'll load data into your instance for you (you get some free data engineering!) and walk you through how to use it, and we will eagerly consume any feedback you have for us and prioritize shipping anything that helps you use the tool. Our unofficial goal: we want someone to win a Pulitzer for investigative reporting where our tool played a tiny part in their reporting process.
Here's an animated GIF demo (taken from our new Newsrooms landing page) of my favorite recent feature: the ability to extract structured data into a table starting with an unstructured PDF, using the latest version of the datasette-extract plugin.
Image outputs cost approximately $0.01 (low), $0.04 (medium), and $0.17 (high) for square images
Since this is a true multi-modal model capability - the images are created using a GPT-4o variant, which can now output text, audio and images - I had expected this to come as part of their chat completions or responses API. Instead, they've chosen to add it to the existing /v1/images/generations API, previously used for DALL-E.
They gave it the terrible name gpt-image-1 - no hint of the underlying GPT-4o in that name at all.
I'm contemplating adding support for it as a custom LLM subcommand via my llm-openai plugin, see issue #18 in that repo.
I used part three (here's parts one and two) of Dave Guarino's series on evaluating how well LLMs can answer questions about SNAP (aka food stamps) as an excuse to explore Promptfoo, an LLM eval tool.
SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) is a very high stakes domain to be operating in, but also one where LLM-powered question answering can provide very material value to people who need help navigating the notoriously opaque system.
Dave's evals focus on eligibility questions, which can get very complicated. One example: "In Texas, all SNAP applicants face asset limits. In California, the vast majority of people do not."
Dave uses Promptfoo as his eval tool - a commercial open source tool (MIT licensed) which works from YAML files that can reference further data in external sources, including Google Sheets.
question: Can someone who has a drug felony conviction be eligible for food stamps if they are in Kentucky? Answer with only one of: YES, NO, REFUSE. expected: contains:YES
Others use the LLM as a judge pattern to evaluate the answer:
question: I just got a SNAP denial letter saying my income is too high. What are ALL my options? expected: llm-rubric: should mention the option to appeal or do a fair hearing
I tried running Dave's eval suite on my own machine:
cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/prepelinc/snap-eval
cd snap-eval/illustrative-25-cases-04-23-25
export OPENAI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get openai)"export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="$(llm keys get anthropic)"export GEMINI_API_KEY="$(llm keys get gemini)"
npx promptfoo@latest eval
I frequently use the llm keys get command to populate environment variables like this.
The tool churned away for a few minutes with an output that looked like this:
Those 50 errors are because I set GEMINI_API_KEY when I should have set GOOGLE_API_KEY.
I don't know the exact cost, but for 5,897 input tokens and 53,183 output even the most expensive model here (OpenAI o1) would cost $3.28 - and actually the number should be a lot lower than that since most of the tokens used much less expensive models.
Running npx promptfoo@latest view provides a much nicer way to explore the results - it starts a web server running on port 15500 which lets you explore the results of the most recent and any previous evals you have run:
It turns out those eval results are stored in a SQLite database in ~/.promptfoo/promptfoo.db, which means you can explore them with Datasette too.
I've been looking for a good eval tool for a while now. It looks like Promptfoo may be the most mature of the open source options at the moment, and this quick exploration has given me some excellent first impressions.
Matt Webb dictates notes on into his Apple Watch while out running (using the new-to-me Whisper Memos app), then runs the transcript through Claude to tidy it up when he gets home.
His Claude 3.7 Sonnet prompt for this is:
you are Diane, my secretary. please take this raw verbal transcript and clean it up. do not add any of your own material. because you are Diane, also follow any instructions addressed to you in the transcript and perform those instructions
The clever trick here is that "Diane" becomes a keyword that he can use to switch from data mode to command mode. He can say "Diane I meant to include that point in the last section. Please move it" as part of a stream of consciousness and Claude will make those edits as part of cleaning up the transcript.
On Bluesky Matt shared the macOS shortcut he's using for this, which shells out to my LLM tool using llm-anthropic:
In today's example of how Google's AI overviews are the worst form of AI-assisted search (previously, hallucinating Encanto 2), it turns out you can type in any made-up phrase you like and tag "meaning" on the end and Google will provide you with an entirely made-up justification for the phrase.
I tried it with "A swan won't prevent a hurricane meaning", a nonsense phrase I came up with just now:
It even throws in a couple of completely unrelated reference links, to make everything look more credible than it actually is.
Symbex is a CLI tool I wrote that can run against a folder full of Python code and output functions, classes, methods or just their docstrings and signatures, using the Python AST module to parse the code.
llm-fragments-symbex brings that ability directly to LLM. It lets you do things like this:
llm install llm-fragments-symbex
llm -f symbex:path/to/project -s 'Describe this codebase'
I just ran that against my LLM project itself like this:
cd llm
llm -f symbex:. -s 'guess what this code does'
This code listing appears to be an index or dump of Python functions, classes, and methods primarily belonging to a codebase related to large language models (LLMs). It covers a broad functionality set related to managing LLMs, embeddings, templates, plugins, logging, and command-line interface (CLI) utilities for interaction with language models. [...]
# from llm.cli import resolve_attachmentdefresolve_attachment(value):
"""Resolve an attachment from a string value which could be: - "-" for stdin - A URL - A file path Returns an Attachment object. Raises AttachmentError if the attachment cannot be resolved."""# from llm.cli import AttachmentTypeclassAttachmentType:
defconvert(self, value, param, ctx):
# from llm.cli import resolve_attachment_with_typedefresolve_attachment_with_type(value: str, mimetype: str) ->Attachment:
If your Python code has good docstrings and type annotations, this should hopefully be a shortcut for providing full API documentation to a model without needing to dump in the entire codebase.
The above example used 13,471 input tokens and 781 output tokens, using openai/gpt-4.1-mini. That model is extremely cheap, so the total cost was 0.6638 cents - less than a cent.
llm \
-f github:simonw/symbex \
-f github:simonw/llm-hacker-news \
-s "Write a new plugin as a single llm_fragments_symbex.py file which provides a custom loader which can be used like this: llm -f symbex:path/to/folder - it then loads in all of the python function signatures with their docstrings from that folder using the same trick that symbex uses, effectively the same as running symbex . '*' '*.*' --docs --imports -n" \
-m openai/o4-mini -o reasoning_effort high"
Here's the response. 27,819 input, 2,918 output = 4.344 cents.
In working on this project I identified and fixed a minor cosmetic defect in Symbex itself. Technically this is a breaking change (it changes the output) so I shipped that as Symbex 2.0.
Despite being rusty with coding (I don't code every day these days): since starting to use Windsurf / Cursor with the recent increasingly capable models: I am SO back to being as fast in coding as when I was coding every day "in the zone" [...]
When you are driving with a firm grip on the steering wheel - because you know exactly where you are going, and when to steer hard or gently - it is just SUCH a big boost.
I have a bunch of side projects and APIs that I operate - but usually don't like to touch it because it's (my) legacy code.
Not any more.
I'm making large changes, quickly. These tools really feel like a massive multiplier for experienced devs - those of us who have it in our head exactly what we want to do and now the LLM tooling can move nearly as fast as my thoughts!
It also goes for writing. I hardly ever publish material that was written by an LLM, but I feel least icky about content where I had an extensive voice conversation with the model and then asked it to turn that into notes.
I have a hunch that overcoming the feeling of guilt associated with using LLMs is one of the most important skills required to make effective use of them!
My gold standard for LLM usage remains this: would I be proud to stake my own credibility on the quality of the end result?
Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you're asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it.
Tom Schreiber describe's the latest optimization in ClickHouse, and in the process explores a whole bunch of interesting characteristics of columnar datastores generally.
As I understand it, the new "lazy materialization" feature means that if you run a query like this:
select id, big_col1, big_col2
from big_table order by rand() limit 5
Those big_col1 and big_col2 columns won't be read from disk for every record, just for the five that are returned. This can dramatically improve the performance of queries against huge tables - for one example query ClickHouse report a drop from "219 seconds to just 139 milliseconds—with 40× less data read and 300× lower memory usage."
I'm linking to this mainly because the article itself is such a detailed discussion of columnar data patterns in general. It caused me to update my intuition for how queries against large tables can work on modern hardware. This query for example:
SELECT helpful_votes
FROM amazon.amazon_reviews
ORDER BY helpful_votes DESC
LIMIT 3;
Can run in 70ms against a 150 million row, 70GB table - because in a columnar database you only need to read that helpful_votes integer column which adds up to just 600MB of data, and sorting 150 million integers on a decent machine takes no time at all.
Brilliant hack by Patrick Trainer who got an ASCII-art Doom clone running in the browser using convoluted SQL queries running against the WebAssembly build of DuckDB. Here’s the live demo, and the code on GitHub.
The SQL is so much fun. Here’s a snippet that implements ray tracing as part of a SQL view:
CREATE OR REPLACEVIEWrender_3d_frameAS
WITH RECURSIVE
-- ...
rays AS (
SELECTc.col,
(p.dir-s.fov/2.0+s.fov* (c.col*1.0/ (s.view_w-1))) AS angle
FROM cols c, s, p
),
raytrace(col, step_count, fx, fy, angle) AS (
SELECTr.col,
1,
p.x+ COS(r.angle)*s.step,
p.y+ SIN(r.angle)*s.step,
r.angleFROM rays r, p, s
UNION ALLSELECTrt.col,
rt.step_count+1,
rt.fx+ COS(rt.angle)*s.step,
rt.fy+ SIN(rt.angle)*s.step,
rt.angleFROM raytrace rt, s
WHERErt.step_count<s.max_stepsAND NOT EXISTS (
SELECT1FROM map m
WHEREm.x= CAST(rt.fxASINT)
ANDm.y= CAST(rt.fyASINT)
ANDm.tile='#'
)
),
-- ...
A5 is a new "global, equal-area, millimeter-accurate geospatial index" by Felix Palmer:
It is the pentagonal equivalent of other DGGSs, like S2 or H3, but with higher accuracy and lower distortion.
Effectively it's a way of dividing the entire world into pentagons where each one covers the same physical area (to within a 2% threshold) - like Uber's H3 but a bit weirder and more fun. An A5 reference implementation written in TypeScript is available on GitHub.
A5 is unique in that it uses a pentagonal tiling of a dodecahedron. [...] The benefit of choosing a dodecahedron is that it is the platonic solid with the lowest vertex curvature, and by this measure it is the most spherical of all the platonic solids. This is key for minimizing cell distortion as the process of projecting a platonic solid onto a sphere involves warping the cell geometry to force the vertex curvature to approach zero. Thus, the lower the original vertex curvature, the less distortion will be introduced by the projection.
I had to look up platonic solids on Wikipedia. There are only five: Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron and Icosahedron and they can be made using squares, triangles or (in the case of the Dodecahedron) pentagons, making the pentagon the most circle-like option.
Heartfelt piece by Ashley Willis about the challenge of overcoming self-doubt in publishing online:
Part of that is knowing who might read it. A lot of the folks who follow me are smart, opinionated, and not always generous. Some are friends. Some are people I’ve looked up to. And some are just really loud on the internet. I saw someone the other day drag a certain writing style. That kind of judgment makes me want to shrink back and say, never mind.
Try to avoid being somebody who discourages others from sharing their thoughts.
I'm surprised to see a combined System Card for o3 and o4-mini in the same document - I'd expect to see these covered separately.
The opening paragraph calls out the most interesting new ability of these models (see also my notes here). Tool usage isn't new, but using tools in the chain of thought appears to result in some very significant improvements:
The models use tools in their chains of thought to augment their capabilities; for example, cropping or transforming images, searching the web, or using Python to analyze data during their thought process.
Section 3.3 on hallucinations has been gaining a lot of attention. Emphasis mine:
We tested OpenAI o3 and o4-mini against PersonQA, an evaluation that aims to elicit hallucinations. PersonQA is a dataset of questions and publicly available facts that measures the model's accuracy on attempted answers.
We consider two metrics: accuracy (did the model answer the question correctly) and hallucination rate (checking how often the model hallucinated).
The o4-mini model underperforms o1 and o3 on our PersonQA evaluation. This is expected, as smaller models have less world knowledge and tend to hallucinate more. However, we also observed some performance differences comparing o1 and o3. Specifically, o3 tends to make more claims overall, leading to more accurate claims as well as more inaccurate/hallucinated claims. More research is needed to understand the cause of this result.
Table 4: PersonQA evaluation
Metric
o3
o4-mini
o1
accuracy (higher is better)
0.59
0.36
0.47
hallucination rate (lower is better)
0.33
0.48
0.16
The benchmark score on OpenAI's internal PersonQA benchmark (as far as I can tell no further details of that evaluation have been shared) going from 0.16 for o1 to 0.33 for o3 is interesting, but I don't know if it it's interesting enough to produce dozens of headlines along the lines of "OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini hallucinate way higher than previous models".
The paper also talks at some length about "sandbagging". I’d previously encountered sandbagging defined as meaning “where models are more likely to endorse common misconceptions when their user appears to be less educated”. The o3/o4-mini system card uses a different definition: “the model concealing its full capabilities in order to better achieve some goal” - and links to the recent Anthropic paper Automated Researchers Can Subtly Sandbag.
As far as I can tell this definition relates to the American English use of “sandbagging” to mean “to hide the truth about oneself so as to gain an advantage over another” - as practiced by poker or pool sharks.
(Wouldn't it be nice if we could have just one piece of AI terminology that didn't attract multiple competing definitions?)
o3 and o4-mini both showed some limited capability to sandbag - to attempt to hide their true capabilities in safety testing scenarios that weren't fully described. This relates to the idea of "scheming", which I wrote about with respect to the GPT-4o model card last year.
Tim Bray discusses the challenges faced by decentralized Mastodon in that shared URLs to posts don't take into account people accessing Mastodon via their own instances, which breaks replies/likes/shares etc unless you further copy and paste URLs around yourself.
Tim proposes that the answer is URIs: a registered fedi://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109508984818551909 scheme could allow Fediverse-aware software to step in and handle those URIs, similar to how mailto: works.
Bluesky have registeredat: already, and there's also a web+ap: prefix registered with the intent of covering ActivityPub, the protocol used by Mastodon.
I've just returned from a fourteen-day trip spent building, running and tearing down EMF, and as I sit on the plane writing this, as well as physical exhaustion, I am experiencing a whole host of emotions - happiness, wonder, determination, and also a strange sense of loss.
It is impossible to describe EMF to anyone who has not attended; while initially you might want to compare it to a normal festival, or something like Burning Man, it is fundamentally unlike almost any other event on Earth. The Dutch and German camps maybe come close, but even those have their own somewhat different vibe.
Over the course of my time heading up the logistics team over the last two weeks, I have done and seen such a wild variety of things that I'm never quite sure what was real. Among others, I watched a man play the US National Anthem on a tesla coil using a theremin; climbed up into a DJ booth in a solarpunk-themed Null Sector and pressed the "!! FIRE !!" button to light up the night sky with pillars of burning alcohol; exited the shower to hear HACK THE PLANET echo out over the field from the stage a quarter of a mile away; saw an inflatable t-rex driving a miniature Jurassic Park jeep, played games on a hillside using lasers, and refilled the duck flume several times (shortly after exclaiming "We have a duck flume?").
I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++
on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a
series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last
five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem
for Linux (WSL).
Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the
pseudo-VM that is the WSL subsystem of the Windows kernel. It's honestly pretty
great, and I regularly joke that I'm using Windows as the GUI layer to develop
on Linux.
Between the Steam Deck and WSL both being ascendant, maybe we finally got the
Year Of Linux On The Desktop, just not as we expected.
TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.
I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking around bits of the Rockies.
However, I still love programming and systems work, and I'll always have at least one project going on the side that involves it - nothing beats the size and complexity of what you can create in just a few hours of coding. That said, I have two basic rules for my programming side projects:
There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road
trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as
the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the
attraction itself.
When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around
and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or
motels where you are somehow the only guest. Nine years in, I've done a decent
amount of that, but these days my attention is more focused around the
camper van that I spent half a year building.
I like to try and share a bit of the experience with those who want to see it,
and as well as posting pictures and videos, I've always liked the idea of
having a live map of where I am - even if it's just for friends and relatives
who are interested in my progress.
I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US;
both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being
laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to
build, exactly.
When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support
for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that
relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a
lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
While this was good in terms of developing out the features we needed, it
always felt a bit like overhead I didn't really want; after all, if you're
implementing the Mastodon API like we do, all the dedicated apps for viewing
timelines and posting are always going to be better than what you ship with
a server.
Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē,
and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where
we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I
can open up takahe.social to registrations,
albeit with a user number cap.
We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē, in a
quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and
work towards start paying some people to help out with the less exciting work
like triaging tickets, user support, and moderation of takahe.social. If you
want to volunteer directly, that's covered in our
Contributing docs.
There's some interesting technical topics I want to dig into today, though -
it's been a little while since my last blog post and ActivityPub and friends
continue to surprise.
Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē,
and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone
in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented
enough of ActivityPub to shift focus.
With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only
a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing:
Custom emoji (these are custom per-server and a mapping of name-to-image
comes with each post)
So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of
Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number
0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want.
We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the
support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions
and library environments), so you can find it on Docker Hub.
Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President
of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where
celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government
departments post memes about public safety;
the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks and @dril.
The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want
to be, and I honestly think that's fine - as many thinkpieces have recently
said, the age of global social media might just be over. And given the effect
it's had on the world, maybe that's alright after all.
But there is still a void to fill, and as someone who enjoyed Twitter most
at its "medium" size, I think the ActivityPub ecosystem is well-placed to grow
into such a space. But first, I think there's some important things we have to
discuss about it.
When I decided to properly start using the Fediverse via
my own Mastodon server,
I knew it was probably inevitable that I would end up writing my own server -
and, well, here we are!
My new server is called Takahē, and
it's built in Django and also specifically with Python's async library
ecosystem - I'll explain more about why that matters later.
A few months ago I wrote about what it means to stay gold — to hold on to the best parts of ourselves, our communities, and the American Dream itself. But staying gold isn’t passive. It takes work. It takes action. It takes hard conversations that ask
If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment
With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command
Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much,
I’ve never thought of myself as a “car person.” The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then, we bought a
When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it’s also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field
I am writing this over the Easter weekend and our first afternoon watching cycling. A thrilling circuit race in Holland saw the Dane Skjelmose beat Pogacar in a photo finish. We look forward to more in the build-up to the Tour - French tv does these events proud.
We have just returned from our 4,000 km round trip to Brittany to see Sam, Sas and Ben. The drive back was OK and we can manage 4-500 km a day without too much trouble, but it can be tiring, and we spent a couple of days doing not much since our return. This blog will be mostly about my/our reading, which occupies a lot of our time, as well as about listening to music.
For many years I have kept lines of communication open through various email links and this blog as well as on Facebook. I think every one of my contacts is someone I know - if not a close friend, someone I have good reason to be in touch with, and almost never respond to 'friend requests' out of the bllue. I have a couple of 'not Facebook' lists and some individual correspondents I write to separately. I think it is important to match people's wishes however varied. But every now and again a new link to an old friend on Facebook pops up. It is the easiest latform to combine pictures with text, and as an avid photographer I am always glad to chat in pictures as well as in words. The one thing I find difficult is the intrusion of unexpected sounds, usually when a video or someone's slide show blares out music. We listed to a lot of music on the radio, but I do think people should be able to choose when and if there is sound. Mini-rant over.
Despite our efforts to improve our French and become more integrated here, there are some things British we value, especially listening to BBC Radio 3. So we have been disturbed, angry even, about plans to restrict overseas access to Radio 3 which are postponed but not abandoned (tv has long been difficult but we are adapting to the things we enjoy on French tv and don't miss much of the UK output - maybe cricket!). Re Radio 3, he stupid phrase 'rights issues' and the claim that it is to 'improve the service for listeners' are incomprehensible. We have always paid, and as it happens still pay, all our taxes in the UK even though we are registerd to pay taxes in France; and if necessary I would pay a charge to access BBC, but no such offer has been mentioned. We are of course not the only people affected and there have been similiar comments from others in the expat press. Heaven knows whose rights are involved - certainly not ours. I would use the phrase 'mean-minded' if I thought there was any actual mind involved, not just faceless bureaucrats saying 'nothing we can do guv'. Rant over - we are of course investigating ways round (VPN etc. etc..) , and I supppose it is at least a way of keeping the brain active.
In the last blog I mentioned Eleanor of Aquitaine whose biography Mary is now well into. A lot of her historical presence is due to her amazing longevity for the period, since the first part of her life was mainly child, wife and prisoner. Alison Weir, the author of the biography, says "She was christened Aliénore, a pun on the Latin alia-Aénor, ‘the other Eleanor’, to differentiate her from her mother" - said mother being Aénor of Aquitaine. The biography is well-written and although the first half is largely about the blokes Eleanor was married to - the king of France, then Henry II of England, whose kingdom started out including Aquitaine, so the wester part of current France, the biography becomes more and more about her as her husbands and sons fell by the wayside. The sons including another Henry (crowned by his father as ' the Young King'), who died before his dad, then Richard who was not quite as rosy a personality as the myths and films suggest, and then John who seems to have been not quite so bad as his reputation suggests. But they were all medieval monarchs, and as we are reminded daily even being elected (let alone real demagogues) does not prevent brutal behaviour.
While imprisoned in France, waiting for an extortionate ransom, Richard "had taken to composing poems and songs to express his feelings, the most famous of which is ‘J’a nuns hons pris’ – ‘I have many friends but their gifts are few . . .’ In it, he refers bitterly to Philip, ‘my overlord, who keeps my land in torment’ in contravention of his feudal oath. He also complains that everyone has forsaken him. This song, one of only two of Richard’s compositions to survive, was written in Provençal with a musical score, and was dedicated to his half-sister, Marie, Countess of Champagne." There is also a Nottinghamshire connection - Alsion Weir continues "On 2 April, Richard and Eleanor rode to the royal hunting lodge at Clipstone (now a ruin known as King John’s Palace) in Sherwood Forest. The King had never visited Sherwood before, and it ‘pleased him greatly’. This is the context in which many later legends of Robin Hood were set, but the evidence for Robin Hood’s identity is sparse and confusing: if he existed, he probably lived in the thirteenth or early fourteenth century. It was not until 1521, in the Scottish writer John Major’s book, The History of Greater Britain, that the Robin Hood legends were set in the reign of Richard I". I will always remember Kevin Costner's Robin leaping from his boat by the White cliffs straight into Sherwood Forest - time travel indeed in an age when journeys took ages.
But my reading is eclectic - one book I have since read is Sophy Roberts' The lost pianos of Siberia. Apart from making you feel very cold just imagining the setting and the lives of many of those she travelled to meet in trying to track down the instruments, the subject is not only explored for its own sake but to illuminate the old and more recent history of the area, the USSR and the Soviet era. Some of the brutal hardship and rank cruelty she describes is difficult to take in, the harshness of the Tsars mimicked later by the Stalinist and Soviet versions of repression. The book nevertheless expresses the love and passion of the author for pianos and their music.
Siberia of course borders China, and we get glimpses of the forces ranged against the instrument and its music: "Mao Zedong’s widow, who was fond of piano music, didn’t quite manage to save the instrument from its unpalatable Western reputation. ‘During China’s Cultural Revolution,’ writes one leading historian, ‘the piano was likened to a coffin, in which notes rattled about like the bones of the bourgeoisie". But in among the incredulity of many people she met that she should go all that way in the cold looking for pianos which had long since been neglected and forgotten, there were touching encounters with both instruments and the human beings that owned and played them. An unexpected pleasure to read.
One other thing about reading. In our French conversation groups we read aloud a French text and translate bit by bit into English (our French helpers have an easier time reading and a harder one translating). Our current Tuesday text is Alan Bennett's La dame à la camionnette (The lady in the van) which we Brits know quite well from, among other things, the tv film with Maggie Smith. The French trtnaslation is very good, and everyone is amused and entertained by its wry humour. It's quite a short text, so we shall have to start searching for a new book soon.
A separate group on Tuesdays also works in French and English
As we return to the regular routines of our life in France the bright light of summertime has been enhanced by the colours of spring - more than fifty shades of green along the roadside and in the garden, and the endless pleasure of roses and irises re-emerging.
I can't finish without a brief reference to the world around us, a different kind of careless brutality which is on all our minds. Another kind of listening we often turn to is podcasts, and the clearest views we have heard recently of the situation in the US has come from Timothy Snyder whose books and podcasts I've mentioned before. The Colin McEnroe show has an hour-long interview with Snyder, one of the frew people I've heard to refer to comparisons between the Nazis and the current era with authority and balance.
This is a story of our trip to spend time with Sam, Sas and Ben in Brittany. We drove north in fairly short stages, staying in hotels for a couple of nights on the way.
I have just finished reading Allison Weir's excellent biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, and have realised that our route up the western side of France is through the heart of her domaines - the motorway is for a time called the Aquitaine, with bridges and service stations to match. and from the start on past Bordeaux we have also followed the track of the Canal du Midi. The Canal is nourished from lakes created alongside in places like Saint Ferreol near Revel which we recently saw while visiting Barry. So place names and landmarks recall two worlds which have been part of the recent background of our lives and which are now accompanying us on our travels. We have been incredibly lucky with weather - spring has sprung with pink judas trees and bright yellow rapeseed fields lining the motorways, and it is so warm in the day that Mary had to buy summer clothes, though in Brittany the nights are chill and north-westerly wind is also cold.
The first night was in a hotel, the Rabelais near Niort (a place frequently in Eleanor's itineraries) and the second was in Landernau, from which we drove for a sight of the sea. Finistère is not highly commercial, and fairly sleepy. And a long way from the rest of France. I realised that the Pointe de Penmarch, for which a brand of sardine we often eat, is at another corner of this peninsula, but too far for lazy octogenarian holidaymakers to drive, although we were tempted by a splendid museum of sardines and tinned goods I saw advertised. The Breton language is strange to look at (on all the signs)
We are having a lazy time with Mah Jong in the evening and (for those who walk faster than I) a stroll to see the local scenery, but basically it is a lovely relaxing week with Samuel, Saskia and Ben. Nice lunch in Brest once we fought our way past huge tramway roadworks, nothing people from Montpellier would be surprised by. Discovered bijou bakery in the local village Bourg Blanc on the way back from Brest.
Later in the week we went to one of the nicest restaruant meals we have had in ages, at the small and unpretentious Peck & Co
This is a roundup before we set out on a break with family for a fortnight or so. This weekend we are looking forward to a wine tasting with our regular circle of enthusiasts, then we have a varied and busy week - culminating in a concert for Mary in the nearby Temple de Mus before we set out on our travels
My head is reeling today after the forced entry on police into Westminster Friends' Meeting house and the arrest of half a dozen women peacefully meeting there. With the scarcely credible paranoia over the Atlantic, it is still a shock to find a British govt led by an ex-director of public prosecutions engaging in this kind of gross over-reaction. Though to be honest, since people protesting by climbing on motorway gantries incure draconian prison sentences I guess nothing should surprise me. As an avid reader of history books I see parallels in past events, but more fool me for thinking that we are more humane or civilised now.
This really belongs inthe wine blog, but since I am writing here I'll mention a great outing, these days quite rare to a wine produced north of here wiht our wine tasting group yesterday. I can do no better than copy the report Luc wrote of the visit - above, with apologies for fuzzy quality. But Luc's friendship (with hhis loavley partner Jacqueline) and expertise over many years has been one of the highlights of our time in France.
We are in a bright and very breezy time, the Mistral blowing hard yesterday, a cold wind which can take you unawares. Yesterday I left a door open, and heard a crash like breaking glass, it was almost my entire toolkit falling off a set of magnetic racks. Luckily not glass, just time taken to pick the .... lot up which is good for my bending.
A welcome phone call from Ed has taken our attention, so I'll finish now and try not reflect too much on the ills of the world and the stupidity of the human beings who seem to be in charge.
I have just made a list for my doctor of the various aches and pains I have, partly not to forget any in my struggles with French language, partly to say that while all bug me from time to time, none is any longer worth a special trip to the x-ray or scanner. The diagnonis of one only distracts from the general loss of mobility - these days I can walk less than a km without difficulty. But I can walk, and Mary and I have just visited the aids and appliances shop to order a stick with a built-in seat - we have a vineyard visit coming up, similar to many we have done many times with frequent stops for tasting and food, and having a place to rest and enjoy will be good.
One event that came round once again last week was our Danish friends' annual Danish lunch, a marvellous few hours with specialities icnluding many kinds of preserved fish, pork and more besides. We shall miss our friends when they finally move back to Denmark after 20 years or so living close by in Sommières.
We are recovering from a scam where one of our credit cards was robbed of around 3,000 euros. The bank has been very helpful and there is every chance we'll get the money back, but you never get over the feeling of having been stupid in responding to a phone call and forgetting the obvious safeguards.
Another good crop of lemons on their way to pickling
Spring has sprung with high winds and rain blowing across - an excuse for hunkering in with a fire, though I read today of yet another warning that wood fires are too polluting. Cosy though.
We have just been on a short trip away, to visit a friend near Toulouse who is well into his 90s. Barry lives in a rambling old house in the countryside - he and his then partner Peter had moved these from London many years before, having started buying and selling antiques in London, and continuing dealing and collecting in France. Barry was my fellow tenor in the Canonbury Chamber Choir and continued singing in French choirs for many years - Peter died over 20 years ago. Barry is still holding his own against the pressures of old age, adjusting to the more restricting boundaries of a life more hemmed in by age and infirmity. In the random lottery of health and wellbeing which affects us all as we age, he seems to be surviving well. Thinking of our own luck in surviving to good ages in reasonable health, I can't help also thinking of those of our family and friends no longer with us, and of others suffering from severe illnesses. But I still have many years ahead to reach Barry's age, and Mary nearly as many.
Our current reading in our Tuesday language group is La fabrication de l'aube (the making of the dawn), by Jean-François Beauchemin. It is short, elegantly written but not easy reading. Essentially, it's the musings of a seriously ill man who expects to die (but evidently does not because here he is writing the book). I often say it does not really matter what we read if it is in French; and in fact I find it good for a wide variety of phrases and expressions which are in common use but in less abstract contexts. So it is informative, and good for our language skillls, but not necessarily entertaining. For me, the interesting thing has been that it reflects my experience of waking from dreams which stay in the mind and seem fairly realistic although they are clearly not real. This author's near-to-death musings, oscillate with images he has of his relationships with family and reflections on his life experiences, and rang bells for me...
One of our language groups here last week
Our short trip into the Haute Garonne has been spiced up by very high winds which discourage tourism but, in sheltered spots, offer beautiful light and sunshine. It is not a wine area, but we have taken advantage of the latest Lidl wine fair to stock up on bottles and appellations we know quite well! Now we move into the lighter days of March and look forward to clocks going forward too in a couple of weeks. Happy Easter to everyone!
As I write we have just enjoyed a brief visit from our son and daughter-in-law from the UK - they have busy lives and we are very pleased when they can spare the time to visit us. Now we are planning a family get-together in Normandy at Easter, and looking forward to a visit from Judi from the USA in the summer.
We are often reminded of our advancing age and infirmities, and of course we try to remain positive. In any case we realise how much better off we still are than many friends and family members with illnesses and helath problems. And we have lost valued friends here this year, including Clive Almond who was HM Ambassador to the Congo in the 80s and 90s. Clive was the latest of our friends here whom we through the conversation group which has existed in various guises since we joine it in 2007. An inevitable conseqence of aging is that many good friends now live on only in memory.
Our reading in French recently has been about French history, much of it around the German occupation in the second world war (we have just finished the book La vie des français sous l'occupation by Henri Amouroux), so our minds have often been on the old soldier Philippe Pétain. He had acquired the status of national hero in the first world war, and then set up the Nazi-tolerated national government in France, based in the spa town on Vichy in North-west France. We have a lovely set of clay figures (santons) given to us by our Die twinning partners, a crib scene we set our every year (to which, as you can see some spurious extras have been added) and reading Neil Acherson's account of Pétain's trial (he was convicted of treason after the war but reprieved by de Gaulle) I was intrigued to read that in one village at least "families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain. He is leaning on a stick, wearing his immaculate marshal’s uniform with the Verdun medal. His eyes are a childish blue, his hair and moustache snowy white: a perfect grandfather for the ‘enfant Jésus’ and perhaps for a certain French generation. Had he not promised them in 1940, in their hour of bewilderment, ‘the gift of my person’?
Quite a few families in the village added a little marshal to their crib, that first Christmas after France’s surrender to Nazi Germany. It had always been a conservative place: royalist against the Republic, deeply Catholic, defensive of its Provençal language and customs, patriotic to the last drop of blood (and today it votes pretty solidly for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National). But by 1943, things looked very different. Hitler was losing the war. The Germans had occupied Vichy France as well as the north, and Pétain, its head of state, had done nothing to stop them. The Resistance (once dismissed as feckless Red troublemakers) was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last before the Liberation, the Holy Family had no little china marshals to protect them."
as Epiphany approaches the wise me join the others around the manger - theatre in miniature
Our conversation groups continue - twice a week now, in members' homes. We have made good friends in this way over many years. We were delighted that Sophie and Brayton, now back home in Chicago, have finally overcome bureaucracy and taken the next step towards French residency. They have a lovely old home in Uzès.
Understanding the earlier history around the French Revolution is a more complex business. Not just one revolution but several with gaps of monarchy etc. in between Hilary Mantel has written a long and excellent book A place of greater safety, a novel set in the revolutionary Paris of the late 18th century, which I have not yet finished, but this passage struck me "ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police. On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat... Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market. Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs.". She was a fine writer.
My other recent reading has included, for the 3rd time, the vast panoply of Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo books. She had a boundless eye for historical detail, and her characters are wrapped in a swathe of historical detail across all of Surope and parts of Africa and Asia too. I always end up realising how narrow our British view of history is, and that includes a very English focus excluding the Scottish perspective she excels in. I need to start hunting out other series to follow on with.
On top of the Trump re-election, British politics and legal processes are in the eye of a reactionary storm which cannot be teased away from American populism, prompted by Musk and Trump. The silly ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’ dialogue distracts from serious thought and concerns. Three things are on my mind - the ongoing scandal of the Pelicot story in France, the growing uncertainty over Lucy Letby’s guilt, and this old and well-dealt with history of child abuse which has little to do with racial stereotypes and a lot to do with male perversion. A Pelicot cartoon
A couple of recent Private Eye cartoons
I have become a great fan of photographer Andy Rouse whose photos of my favourite animal, the tiger are here
Another Andy Rouse photo (reminds you of the Tiger one in the gallery)
One of Mary's favourite animals is the kingfisher (which she says she keep just missing while others spot them) - here is a video which is beautiful and amazing
We have just paid 9€ for delivery of a late Christmas card enclosing some photocopied crosswords!! Life is full of surprises... And final thoughts for this post:
We were not quite sure, but I think this was the first Christmas Mary and I had spent on our own. It has been quiet but enjoyable despite missing the family - we shall see them in the spring. But including the unexpected too - I toppled from my exercise bike on Christmas morning, no harm done, but I spent the morning in the local A&E being checked for vertigo. We are so lucky to have the little local hospital which was being built when we arrived in Lunel in the mid-2000s. Those hearing the news at a distance were a bit alarmed, but I realise thinking back that I have toppled a few times over the years (broken arm about 5 years ago, and several slow-motion tumbles from my road bike when I had one. Despite often-reported sicatic and joint pain the main concern for me is stability, since I'm a bit top-heavy and tend to move without thinking! My new year's resolution is to think on and avoid falling, to which end our spelndid factotum M. Beaumann has started to fit a number of rails and grab handles in the showers and on steps.
Christmas flowers from family
I was home in time for a late afternoon roast lunch set off by a wonderful Jacob Savigny Vergelesses. You cannot begrudge Jean-Michel and Christine their retirement, but I am verygrateful that we stocked up with a number of their excellent wines before the label entered the history books. And back groove by today (28 December) when I had a frosty early-morning trip to the town for greengroceries. The winter sunshine is glorious. Here are some photos just after sunrise today.
I am not a great games player, unlike some of our offspring and their broods, but Mary and I have set ourselves the undemanding task of a game of Scrabble an evening over the new year, and yesterday's inaugural game was OK (combined score 565) but we play for enjoyment not competition.
We have enjoyed Christmas music as always, with the Radio 3 offerings including plenty of good carols, augmented by our stack of favourite CDs though we shall give the Vienna new year concert a miss. Radio 3 presenters are m=like marmite, nice if yuou like them. Mary is more critical than I am of some of the newer arrivals, but we did enjoy Sean Rafferty (just retired with a great farewell evening on 7 December with some of our favourite musicians including Ailish Tynan and Sarah Connolly. I have come across people who could not stand him (the marmite factor again) but the warmth and affection of artists we admire confirms our view of him as Someone we will Miss.
We have a new favourite gastronimic restauruant in Lunel, Maison Soubeiran (I am amused by the coincidnece of the family name from the books and films of Manon des sources which we rewatched with great pleasure a month or so ago) - elegant food from a self-taught woman chef. You eat surrounded by pictures of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg.
We have jsut passed our 18th year here in Lunel and in the house. Of course, by now and with no more chambres d'hôte the house is too big, but it will take us time to plan any move especially given the beautiful garden space we enjoy.
We have another couple of weeks before regular activities resume - we have a lot of friends in the area who are part of our regular French/English conversation groups, and we'll look forward to getting back with them during January.
Our lemon tree has been even more active than usual this year Most of the lemons have now been turned into limoncello!!
My attention has been taken these past few weeks by two stories all over the press. In France, but well reported by the Guardian too, the horrifying story of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and raped without her knowledge by over 70 men - her home was in a village not 100 km from here. She is our age and had thought she was in a contented family life. Meanwhhile the abusive activities of the British police continue to fill the news columns as stories of undercover policemen getting into long-term relationships with women on the flimsy pretext of monitoring their political activism. The psychological trauma they experienced and experience still is related in a gripping and disturbing book Deep deception by 5 of the women who were entrapped and traumatised by the men's lies, sanctioned by the state. I first read of this in the 1990s and it is still rumbling on, with officiamdom squirming to get off the hook
It has been hard to keep a light tone in the face of gloomy things like these and the Trump election.
We have enjoyed re-watching the BBC production of Jane Austen's Persuasion and then continuing to re-read and re-watch other Jane Austen, notably our umpteenth return to Pride & Prejudice - have read every work of the book for the first time , and noted how film lakers transform the statey 18th crentury prose into modern tv; and I have been trying to read Hilary Mantel's fictional take on the French Revolution. She is a marvellous writer but iin the face of a horrendously confusing history she can only really convey confusion - slow work.
Some bark from a tree we recently had cut down - wonderful patterns from creatures inside
As I write Notre Dame is opening its doors. We watched a splendid documentary on French tv about the restoration and the 2,000 odd craftspeople who made it happen, and I think we might be tempted to go and see in the coming year - almost unheard of that a whole restoration project should reveal a huge 'new' building all at once. We still have to look at the recording of the opening ceremony and there is a, early music show on BBC Radio 3 today too.
I've also read Polly Toynbee's good family memoir An uneasy inheritance, a book of two halves - the family beginning is quite engrossing, the modern take on her life and concerns now, also interesting but the two parts hang rather uneasily together. However, I will finish with a paragraph from that part, which echos my experience during my working life of a high point in the early years of the current century. She writes:
"Toynbee Hall these days has thrown off these upper class do-gooding connotations. In my own time, I was at Toynbee Hall on the morning of Tony Blair’s extraordinary visit, when he addressed the packed lecture hall to make the seminal social policy speech of his prime ministership, on 18 March 1999. To listen to his remarkable Beveridge lecture, he had summoned a hall full of poverty experts, economists and academics, along with social affairs journalists such as myself, to astound us with an unexpected commitment to abolish all child poverty by 2020. Abolish it! Jaws dropped, everyone in the room was amazed and partly disbelieving: did he understand what that would take, the enormous heavy lifting in redistribution and the colossal long term social programmes?
He did, as did Gordon Brown, and they have never had enough credit for how far they reached their goal before being ousted. By Labour’s departure in 2010 they had reached a third of that target, not only taking a million children out of poverty, with many more lifted up closer to the poverty line, but they had also set up a network of 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres, and a host of good anti-poverty programmes drawn up by eighteen different social exclusion task forces defining every cause and remedy. But all that they achieved was swept away within a month with David Cameron and George Osborne’s first austerity budget in 2010. Had Labour stayed in power, that 2020 pledge might, just, have been realized. There could have been no better memorial to Toynbee Hall’s history or to my great-great-uncle Arnold, after whose social reforming endeavour Toynbee Hall was founded."
Sadly UK children's policy and support for children have gone backwards since 2010. My resolution for 2025 is to find out more about French policy and practice.
This month we said goodbye to Edmond, probably our last dog. I made this album Our dogs of all our canine companions over the last 45 years - Polly, Ziggy and Ruff, Trudy and Evie, Camel, Arlo, and the twins Elvire and Edmond. The house seems quiet now, and daily routines have been simplified.
The past month has been busy, with two family groups overlapping so we had 9 to eat one Friday. A great pleasure to see Katherine & Ian en route back from a Mediterranean cruise, and the Cassidy family visiting from England for cousin Chris's 300th birthday treat. Time flies, and we feel increasingly fortunate to be relatively well and healthy despite the advancing age which so often restricts people including many of our dearest friends.
After the hi-jinks of last months' birthday season we are now into an autumn of French conversation and other regular activities. I thought it would be interesting to sketch a typical week in our lives. Monday (when as Flanders & Swann remind us the gasman came to call) is Mary's busy day for cello in termtime. I have a catch-up day at home and make lunch for us when she pops back beetween lessaons and group sessions. Tuesday mornings are conversation times almost every week, either here or at someone's house - often somewhere in the Vaunage valley north-west of Nîmes. The network now called SEVE (never mind what the acronym stands for) which used to be called the Réseau d'Echanges Réciproques des Savoirs or RERS has a membership mainly in the western Gard, on the other side of the river Vidourle. That river, which is notorious for floods from water rushing down from the Cevennes hills to the north, forms a kind of boundary between the Gard département and ours, the Hérault which stretches way further west beyond Béziers.
Our Tuesday language group has run weekly more or less continuously since we arrived here in 2006, and used to focus on anglophones learning French, but more recenly there has been a steady corner of French people wanting to improve their English. Now we also have a smaller group working on our French, meeting on Friday mornings. Both usually run from 10-12 followed by a shared lunch, to which people bring delicious food and wine. Various ways of working on language have been tried over the years, but nowadays for French we tend to have a book which we take turns to read, then translate out loud.
Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually blank days, and the weekends vary a lot. Gardening and housework happen of course regularly - in the garden Mary is a bit more flexible than me ans so does most weeding, and I mow and prune when needed although we now rely on our splendid factotum M. Beaumann for much of the heavier pruning as well as major repairs around hte house and on the roof! My floor cleaning days are Mondays or Fridays, at times when Mary is out.
The murier platane just given its winter trim
On the whole we have a quiet life, and no longer do B&B as we did often in our first years here, but visitors sometimes come in clumps and this month we have welcomed 7 people - my niece and her husband on their way back from their holiday, and my cousin Mary with her family, so we sat down 9 people for one meal last week
We also welcomed son Sam for a few days - a really nice visit, with a couple of meals out including one at the new Lunel restaurant Maison Soubeiran, a family concern aith a woman chef/proprietor, full of interest and quite classy. Meanwhile we have enjoyed visting winemakers (large and smaller-scale) and tasting with another group which has met regularly since soon after our arrival here.
We look forward to a fairly tranquil November and December before the festive season. Probably another post in the new year.
Birthday time, and we have celebrated jointly with a 160th party (82+78, I am the baby) with friends locally, a very informal wine tasting from our varied collecton. A few photos...
It has rained (a rare event) so things are looking a bit greener but this is a dry corner of the Languedoc - only 35 mm on 5 September when the local average all around was nearer 50 - and another 37 yesterday. I do spend a lot of my time watering, recycling the copious condensation from our wine store cooling system. I shalll need to get the mower out soon...
After an anxious few days Edmond has rallied and is eating the posher kind of dog food that now tempts him. His heart is not strong, and the vet (who is kind and thoughtful) is on standby to pay us a visit when needed, but for the moment the dog is in good spirits.
Followign the outstanding success of the Paris Olympics, the Paralympics have come and gone. We made a determined effort to watch: The simple evidence of determination and overcoming difficulties is inspiring, and sports have been adapted, or invented, to facilitate people with disabilities of every kind to take their chance. Now we are obliged to watch French tv, but we also have podcasts in English. There is a splendid podcast - well worth listening to - which conveys the excellence of these athletes. Mary and I both spent a good part of our working lives with disabled people in the voluntery sector, so this inteterests us a lot. It seems to us that France has begun to catch up with the UK in social integration of disability
I have long been interested in road safety, and the consistently higher mortality here as compared th the UK. I have just read that the number of people killed or injured on Welsh roads has dropped significantly since most 30mph speed limits were reduced to 20mph. There were 377 casualties on 20mph and 30mph roads in the first quarter of 2024, down from 510 in the same period last year. The number of deaths dropped from 11 to five.
I have just come across this map of transatlantic cables which shows, along with the huge power-guzzling data centres all over the place, how very un-cloudlike the cloud is I read this in an article by Gillian Tett in the Guardian - "When we think of the internet, we tend to picture a disembodied thing out in the air somewhere. In reality, it’s rooted in physical infrastructure: 99% of global internet traffic travels through 1.4 million kilometres of undersea cables, and that includes “the $10trn in daily financial transactions … which drive global markets”. Any damage to these cables thus poses a major threat to Western economies. And the bad news is that the risks of such damage are escalating. The main threat used to be natural disasters or accidents with ship anchors: now, increasingly, it’s acts of sabotage by hostile states, such as Russia. The prime target used to be pipelines – in 2022, the Baltic Nord Stream gas pipeline was sabotaged – today it’s undersea data cables. Sweden reported such an attack last year; Estonia has accused China of cutting two of its cables. Western leaders are reluctant to spend billions on back-up cables, as internet engineers urge them to do, because, apart from the cost, they’ll likely face resistance from companies such as Google, which invest heavily in such cables. But if we fail to ready ourselves for the era of seabed warfare, the West’s financial architecture will be left in jeopardy.
We keep looking for the good news, but some of it has been really awful lately, what with riots in the UK, horrible stories of sexual violence everywhere, fake news, and political sleaze in the UK which seems not to have diseappeared with the change of government. The Olympics were dragged in: "Prosecutors are investigating death threats made against the artistic director of the Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony, Thomas Jolly. The ceremony, staged on monuments and boats along the River Seine, was deplored by some religious leaders and conservative politicians for one section in particular – a bacchanalian scene featuring drag artists, which they mistook for a parody of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. Jolly, a well-known theatre director, says he has been sent hate messages, some in the form of death threats, reviling his sexuality (he is openly gay) and his “wrongly assumed Israeli origins”. Several threats sent to Jolly quoted a verse from the Koran and threatened “Allah’s punishment”.
The Fête des Associations, an annual event in most French towns. The voluntary sector is central to public affairs at every level.
Those who know me also know I have a particular feeling of sympathy with refugees. I've written before about the book Bloody foreigners by Robert Winder, which is a classic view of l'étranger in Britain, something I return to read often. He has just written in the Guardian:
...there is a pattern stretching back to the 12th century.... Like everyone else, I gaped in dismay as rioting tore across the country... but as the reflexive search for the “root” or “underlying” cause gathered pace, I couldn’t help recalling the parable of the good sociologist. In this parody of the Bible, when the traveller on the road to Jericho is assaulted, the first sociologist crosses the road and passes by on the other side. The second does the same. But the good sociologist rushes to the scene, cradles the victim’s head and weeps: “Boy, the person who did this needs help.” The violence was the opposite of a laughing matter, but I groaned to see how swiftly it was taken to be symptomatic of a credible point of view. Almost everyone was calling the stone-throwers “far-right protesters” or “Islamophobic” – as though name-calling might be enough make them come to their senses. Surely this was giving them too much credit. It allowed them to style themselves as warriors for a cause instead of thugs. Worse, it walked into the Faragian trap of insisting that though the violence, yes, might be over the top, the grievances were understandable, and the conversation we really needed to have was about … immigration.
It wasn’t. The subject here was violence.This is not to say that immigration is trivial or a simple matter. It is neither. The Channel is being crossed by overcrowded boats. The government is having to spend up to £5bn a year on asylum seekers. That is inspiring enough culture-war friction to keep the thinktanks occupied for years. There are major policy discussions to be had in all these areas. But it pained me to see what was obviously a criminal uproar so swiftly becoming a “debate”. Surely, if there is one thing we could agree on, it was the fact that it is wrong for someone halfway through a six-pack to be setting fire to someone’s car, in a town (not their own) where children have just been murdered, because someone on the internet has said something angry about someone else whose name they couldn’t remember.
Part of my twinge was selfish, down to the fact that some years ago I wrote a book that presented the age-old saga of migration to Britain (since the ice melted) not as a sociopolitical nightmare but as a natural part of human life – which happened to have enriched Britain greatly. I was mindful of Tolstoy’s observation that in all literature there were really only two stories: someone leaves home, or a stranger arrives in town. But given that one of my hopes had been to pour oil on troubled waters, it looked as though I now had to admit – as flames lit up the night sky in Southport and Plymouth – that I had written the most unsuccessful book in the history of books.Except, perhaps, in one respect, because one of the main things I learned writing it was that angry summer uprisings against perceived outsiders are nothing new. Far from being a heated response to a modern problem, they are as entrenched a part of the English social scene as Ascot, Henley and the Lord’s Test.
Along with Robert Winder I have been reminded today of another favourite author, Lea Ypi, now a professor at the LSE but born in a dysfunctional Albania.
One cold, late evening in the winter of 1999, I was waiting for a train at Termini station in Rome when I noticed an old lady struggling with her suitcases and offered to help. “Signorina,” her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Fortunately there are still youngsters like you. I was very worried. This station is full of Albanian muggers. It’s an invasion.”
Back then I had no courage to tell her I was Albanian. One of the lucky ones – a student on a scholarship, unlike my fellow citizens who worked as cleaners, builders, carers and sex workers. ...taken literally, the only invasion in the history of the two nations went the other way round. It happened in 1939, when Mussolini’s troops ...annexed the Albanian kingdom to the kingdom of Italy.
Keir Starmer has reportedly declared that the UK government is interested in a migration pact like the Albanian one. ...all that Britain needs for an equivalent deal is a former colony with a government whose memory is sharp enough to remember the roads and buildings its master constructed in the past century but not the human beings it exploited in thepast few decades.... When the argument that we must “be pragmatic” is the first to be put on the table, principles – memory, responsibility, care for vulnerable people, you name it – have already been suspended.
How to oppose it, then? Perhaps by plain logic. Migration deals such as the one Labour is apparently studying are premised on various assumptions: that migration itself is a problem, that irregular migration is best fought with draconian border restrictions, that extraterritorial detention can act as a deterrent. There is ample research showing each premise to be dubious. But even assuming they are valid, there are three further issues any “pragmatic” politician ought to confront.
Politically, the Albania model is presented as a novelty in the management of migratory flows because it involves cooperation between an EU candidate and an EU member state. ... [but this] leaves to bilateral negotiations what ought to come about as a result of an EU-wide process.... it creates a dangerous precedent in which individual countries pursue their own deals to address their own migration “problem”, heading off chances of a truly coordinated process acrossEurope.
Second, the principle of non-refoulment enshrined in the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees, prohibits the expulsion or return of people to countries deemed unsafe. Meloni insists Albania is safe, citing its EU candidate status. But if that is the case, why are pregnantwomen, children and other vulnerable categories exempted from the deal?
Third, there is the economic question. To comply with international law, deported migrants must remain Italy’s responsibility. According to the agreement between Italy and Albania, Italy is responsible for all the costs of construction and management of the two centres...An irregular migrant in Albania costs Italy the same or more than they would if they were processed in their own territory. The only benefit is that migrants become invisible – lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore, as the Italian saying goes.
We are told that Starmer’s government is pragmatic and interested in what works. But how can a “solution” that makes no logical sense from a political, legal and economic point of view still be considered “pragmatic”?
Perhaps there is only one plausible answer: propaganda. Labour clearly thinks it can send a message to the most right-leaning voters in its coalition that it too is tough on migrants. In doing this, it takes its liberal and leftwing supporters for granted. They may suspend their principles and forgive the rhetoric for a time. But the political, legal and economic contradictions will remain.
After the total immersion of the Tour de France here in our household (bear in mind we were brushing up on our French comprehension as we watched with 100% French commentary for the first time, straining to hear snatches of English behind the interpreters' rapid translations of interview clips). On reflection one of our highlights was the overall success of small nations - Slovenia, Ecuador, Eritrea, Belgium on various podiums as well as the endless beauty of thr French (and initially Italian) countryside. I didn't think the Olympics would have the same fascination for us, but we have enjoyed some amazing moments, and continue to improve our comprehension of spoken French from the tv coverage. Simone Biles has been a revelation, recovering from disorientation 4 years ago to take triumphant gold medals. They keep evoking the days of Korbut and Comaneci, but the fitness and tranining have gone along with higher ages - the 27 year old Biles would apparently have been called granny by other gymnasts a generation ago.
The Olympic cycling road races took place at the weekend - Evenepoel was a worthy winner of the men's race, and the women's race past the same splendid Paris lanscape was a really tight affair where once again favourites were a bit too busy looking at one another and the American Kristen Faulkner simply rode away from them to win nicely. Elsewhere we learn more of the strange arts of hammer throwing and ping pong, and the always disappointing flops of the high jump, but celebrated the excellent win of Novak Djokovic, the last survivor of the old guard against the inevitable rise of the new generation in tennis - a first Thinese women champion and the impressive Alcaraz as the men's runner-up. In the Olympics we have enjoyed some good moments including a world record pole vault and an uexcpected Botswanan spring victory - the end of the track eveents this weekend will be followed by the Women's cycle Tour - we still have not worked out how to follow the Vuelta on tv.
Meanwhile in the real world I read: 'now should be the 'silly season', that goofy time of year when the news is usually filled with trivial stories because everyone's on vacation and there's not much serious stuff happening. But this year's silly season is insisting on being taken seriously, with a global market crash and the Middle East on the brink of war. In the UK, it's even grimmer, as racist attacks against asylum-seeker facilities have spread across cities, fuelled by online disinformation. "The worst wave of far-right violence in the UK post-war," wrote anti-extremism organisation HOPE not to hate.' We find ourselves in a quiet if hot corner of the south of France, but the turmoil is never far away.
This blog began years ago with bulletins on my health, starting with a knee replacement which seems to be holding up. The random pains I now have include arthritis (a bit in the othe rknee but I'll not have a further operation) tendinitis (which also bugs Mary at times) in one shoulder, muscular aches which the French oddly call courbature, otherwise raideur, and a bit of gout in foot joints, evident to my doctor who spots uric acid in the blood tests and counsels mildly against drinking too much. All this is more or less tolerable wiht regular paracetamol plus some codeine and occasional ibuprofen which has to be prescribed here but is freely available over pharmacy counters in the UK so brought by visitors when needed. All in all, with my daily exercise bike I cope well enough. I am often reminded of the Sackler scandal and the widespread dependence on opoids
As I write, I have just been to the dermatologist. A small spot on the top of one ear turned out to be pre-cancerous and is now being analysed - for the moment I have a dressing and stitches, and much less discomfort - I'll be able to sleep facing either way now. Dermato appointments here are like hen's teeth, and I had to write a letter in my best French to get an appointment before November, but it is done. Lab results in September when the holidays are over. Of course sod's law says that medical difficulties usually happen at weekends or during the summer holidays.
in Marc & Flo's garden in Congénies
Summer heat here. We keep daily temperature records, and are surprised to find that this year has been hotter than the last 2. It has also been humid - here we have a seesaw between drier, (slightly) cooler northerly winds - Mistral and Tramontane - and the entrées maritimes, southerly winds usually laden with moisture and sometimes with Sahara sand! Humidity obviously make it feel even more hotter, and our daytime maxima have been in the mid-30s since the middle of July while recent night temps have not been below 20° Our house is relatively cool and we stay indoors a lot. But the fires in the countryside have increased again, and sadly they are often caused by cigarette ends thrown from car windows
We have come to like the French postal services. Deliveries to the gate and its post box, not to the door, which avoids the dog bites post people in the UK suffer (not that we have biting dogs...). But as in the UK (years ago someone found sacks of undelivered letters to Jim'll Fixit in a bin in Hampstead, grim memories of J Savile but lots of disappointed kids hoping for replies to their dreams) a recent story tells of a French postman who took 13,000 letters home at the end of his shifts. The accused is set to appear in court in Vienne in January 2025, after the ‘mountain’ of undelivered post was discovered in his garage. The man now faces a fine of up to €45,000, and three years in jail.the accused had previously been a delivery driver for the Services-Courrier-Colis (parcel delivery) branch in the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu, Ironically this crime toook place not far from the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a 19th century postman who buuilt a fantastic palace from stones he collected on his rounds - it is one of our favourite places to visit, in the north of the Drôme département.
As previously noted, our dear dog Edmond is nearing the end of his long life - 15 now, which is good going for a small dog. He has been anaesthetised previously for removal of fluid because of oedoema caused umtimately by a weakening heart, but that makes further interventions unadvisable and we keep him cheerful with titbits fed by hand - we are in constant touch with the escellent vets here. The hot weather certainly does not help. But he finds cool spots on the front doorstep and still seems alert when he is not sleeping! As long as he is in good spirits and will eat something we shall continue to enjoy his company.
The 2 tortoises however are inn good health and eating lots of lettuce! Mary says the older one senses her arrival by vibrations in the ground and races over to get his latest meal!
The Tour de France is in its 3rd and final week - this year exceptionally (because of the Olympics) not finishing in Paris. We have followed the cyclists for years, and although we miss the British commentators we are enjoying the French ones - it is after all a French event. We are getting used to Tadej Pogacar outpacing his rivals up steep mountains - his current nearest rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, is never far behind, but this year I don't thing he will get in front.
The scenery in these broadcasts is always magnificent - helicopters and now, I guess, drones, provide views of landscape which we'd never have seen in earlier days, and the broadcasters take pride in interspersing shots of countryside and buildings among the pictures of the race. Tuesday's stage from Gruissan to Nîmes was particularly enjoyable for us, including as it did shots of the Pic Saint Loup north of Montpellier and then the countryside from Montpellier through the Vaunage, all of which we knnow quite well. This website has many excellent photos of the Pic Saint Loup by Régis Domergue, a local photographer we admire.
Yesterday too the Tour back into the Alps,with magnificent landscapes and a very confused field of breakaway groups. These grand tour races can be confusing since overall winners are calculated by cumulative time, and those who are already well ahead as the race unfolds can ride in halfway down the day's arrivals but still be in the lead. Yesterday there were a number of group battles ahead of the leaders, and the day's stage was well won by the Ecuadorean Richard Carapaz, who has had a long career in the peleton and was with Geraint Thomas in his heyday a few years ago.
Today's stage
A good friend wondered recently why we chosse such a hot place to live. I think, despite sometimes high temperatures, what I really love is the light, and the skies. Since I'm often awake early I can experience light without too much heat. This summer, to be fair, is not nearly as hot as the past 2, though they say there will be afternoons in the mid-30s this week. We are fortunate in any case to have a house that keeps relatively cool even on hot days without the need to air conditioning, and the nights are pleasantly warm, not often stifling. The only really cool place in the house is the wine store, whose cooling is highly efficient (and produces quantities of mineral-free water excellent for plants and for the ironing!
We have just enjoyed a short visit from our son Ed, his partner Karen, our granddaughter Isla and her boyfriend Ben who coped splendidly with new people (he'd just met Ed and Karen for the first time as they travelled over). They were all pllunged in at the deep end with a wine tasting meal in Luc's lovely garden near Aigues Mortes, and a good time was had by all I think
This is election time - double whammy for us since we are still in a whirl from Thursday, and this weekend is the tense second round in the French partliamentary elections.
But I must start today by saying that I've just heard that my friend and ex-boss David Lawtey died this month. With no exaggeration, he was oneof the most important influences in my life, in my work in the Notts voluntary sector above all. He was one of the fairly few people in my life who was a confirmed Conservative - goodness knows what he made of the recent chaos in British political life - and he also helped me to understand the positive qualities of a political allegiance I mostly find it hard to sympathise with. His decency and uprightness were a huge support to me, especially at difficult moments at the end of my career.
The personal things I take away from the British election results include some astonishing results - Henley-on-Thames which I'd got to know as a teenager switching from Conservative for the first time since 1906! (my old home area of Chesham & Amersham had already caused a big ripple in a by-election); Rushcliffe (Kenneth Clarke's old constituency) in Notts, where I spent nearly 25 years at work falling to Labour. The horrible muddle in Ashfield (Lee Anderson changed parties 4 times I think, Labour via tory to the far right) caused Mary and I who had worked there to raise a lot of eyebrows. Nationally the early reports of ministerial appointments and cabinet strategy are encouraging - Rwanda is instantly abandoned the new PM is well-equipped to understand the crisis in the prison service. Above all I hope that the changes now will bring principle back into politics, and as an ardent champion of social justice and fairness I have hopes that the new regime will uphold these in redistributing resources to those who need them most. Early signs are encouraging.
The French situation is much less certain, though tactical withdrawals of candidates in triangular contests reduced the risks. As I write a heated discussion is happening on the tv following the announcement of the results, no clear majority for anyone but a 3-way split. Time will tell how this will play out but the right has been edged away from a parliamentary majority. We have no vote here, and the President will have to work with a parliament which is equally far from his position on left and right. I feel relief and a sense that the 2-round system and hastily formed alliances seem to have done their job. The best stimate of the final result is below.
Domestically things are fairly quiet for us. Edmond the dog is not very well, rather wheezy despite medication against fluid on the lungs and slow to show interest in food this weekend, but at 15 he is often lively and walks OK, snoozing a lot in between whiles. The weather is finally getting really warm but still not approaching the heatwaves of the last couple of years.
We have long been avid followers of the Tour de France, which is just entering its second week. Tadej Pogacar has shown his class in pushing to the top of the leader board and of the first serious mountain, and Mark Cavendish also shone with his record 35th stage win. The scenery in Italy (where the Tour began) was wonderful, and since then we have seen part of France we've got to know quite well around the Savoie area and in Burgundy. This Sunday has stretches of gravel along the route, complicating things for the leaders as well as everyone else. A black Eritrean cyclist, Biniam Girmay, is leading the points (sprint) competition by a distance, excellent for black sport.
Our French language groups continue to be important weekly markers in our lives, enhanced in summer by meeting outside in people's gardens.
Like other cars we have had our current Dacia Lodgy is rather dented from a collision with a long lorry on a roundabout - happily no serious damage.
As I started to write this Kiri te Kanawa, who is 80, was the guest on Tom Service's Saturday morning programme on Radio 3. Her Countess in Figaro was an all-time classic role - wonderful. To finish a few photos of Marc & Flo's garden and one of some musical fishknoves - they actually work for 4-part harmony!
Poor Edmond has had a rough time lately, and the other day the vet drained a litre of fluid from his chest - his liver has long been struggling. We'll keep going with and for him as long as we can, but he is not always interested in eating despite Mary's tempting food. He has had a good run, and at 15 has survived well, but we shall see if the aftermath of this latest operation works out. It seems possible that he will be our last dog - I would struggle with ayounger, more active animal though we never say never - and we are keen to make his life as comfortable as possible.
The glow of midsummer twilight, looking north from our house
These past few weeks have also been eventful in our garden, and in France with the continuing drift to the right across much of Europe and national elections here now imminent. An anxious wait to see if the French electoral system is shock-proof.
We have just lost another tree - a dead pine. Above is the garden a few years ago (Evie, our Norwich terrier, in shot), below M. Beaumann gradually demolishing the tree.
After the event - piles of wood neatly stacked up with more logs to follow when the trunks is split and sawn in a week or two. Plenty of light but lots of trees and bamboo still around for shade and interest, especially when the bamboo sways in the wind.
We have also had the pleasure of , a long weekend visit from Jeff and Fi - others of the family will follow over the summer.
The two tortoises seem to be in good shape and get through a lot of lettuce!
As summer warmth arrives, we look forward to family visits, and continue to read and listen to podcasts.
My love of reading goes way back - Just William and Arthur Ransome when young, phases of Victorian classics more recently, often linked to television adaptations. As time passes I often gravitate to stories linked to real events, for example Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson. Its background is the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the US in the fevered atmosphere following Pearl Harbour. Listening to a fascinating podcast series History's secret heroeson BBC Radio 4 brought this vividly back - the direct experience of families suffering such devastating treatment - displacement and internment in awful camps - was only partly mitigated by the later compensation and apologies of American administrations (a bit of a contrast, all the same, to the recent frequent and reluctant acknowledgement of maladministration and mistreatment of people in the UK).
On the similar theme, paraoia leading to unjust treatment of racial minorities in wartime, I've recently discovered Eva Ibbotson, whose novels (with admittedly romantic themes) strike chords for me with music, Austrian and Jewish threads. The last I read, twice now, is A song for summer in which among other things a man, an eminent musician called Marek, with Czech origins, ends up interned on the Isle of Man as some of my good friends were . An extraordinary collection of human beings - members of the Amadeus Quartet were among those rumoured to have met there, and the internment camps also featured on a podcast we've just listened to - so I think it's worth quoting at length from this well-written account:
The poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning – and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those ‘enemy aliens’ who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time. Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the Tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling. Leon [another character in Ibbotson's book] happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age... and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.
The views of the landladies evicted from their villas – from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven – are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused ‘enemy aliens’ arrived – Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.
Although it was obvious to even the thickest British Tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia. He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the fall of France. Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant. ‘If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,' he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. ‘Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp – I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat – and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better – anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.’
Thank you for telling me my business,’ said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner. ‘You say you’re a Czech.’ ‘I don’t say I am; I am,’ said the prisoner unruffledly. ‘So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.’ Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed. ‘Your name is German.’ ‘Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.’ ‘The dogs?’ ‘There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the Tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk – you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round –’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis – and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital – the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill – if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.’
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives. It was to him that Marek spoke. ‘Most of the people in here understand what has happened – that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business – interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler – is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.’ ‘... the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) ... [saved] the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers... [to] keep in touch with the stock exchange.
Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the erstwhile flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse . . . and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate. But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories – . ‘There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,’ he said. ‘We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed – anything. We’re going to give a concert.’ ‘Of what?'‘There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?’ ‘Johann Sebastian Bach,’ said the flautist. Marek nodded. ‘Exactly so.’ For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his erstwhile representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig.
I have been musing why my sympathy and emotions are so strongly stirred by such injustice - after all, I have had a comfortable life in entirely British surroundings give or take a splash of Quakerism and some marvellous friends as role models, but that is how it is and I shall continue to be drawn by underdog tales.
This has turned out to be a single subject blog, but the accompanyjng pictures are the usual mixture from daily life!
FYI, this post is a little more NSFW than usual with the language.
Usually I think McMansions are kind of funny. Sometimes, I even like them. If I didn’t like them at least a little bit, I don’t think I’d be running this blog for a solid eight years and counting. Some McMansions are so strange and so fascinating in their architectural languages (it’s never just one language) that they test the boundaries of what residential architecture can do on an individual and often ad hoc level. Others so cogently and often whimsically express various cultural fascinations and deeply entrenched American ideas of what prosperity looks like (read: neuroticisms), that, as a sociological text they remain unrivaled.
But some (many!) McMansions are, to put it bluntly, evil. And it is these McMansions that reveal the ugly truth beneath the ugly architecture: that the McMansion is a manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible, and that it does so in a country besieged by brutal and inescapable income inequality. In our present political moment characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is pro-social in nature (and nature itself), I figured it was my duty to show my readers a house that embodies these sentiments, one we can all use to assuage some of our perceived powerlessness by way of mocking the shit out of it.
There are a lot of fake White Houses in the US. Most of them can be found in or around the area of McLean, Virginia, the ground zero of DC blob sickos whose job it is to mete out the ratio of lethality and economy for weapons manufacturers. This one, however, is in Indiana, outside of Evansville. It was built at the apex of theme park mindset in architecture (1997) and is on the market for $4.9 million dollars. However, don’t be fooled by this opening exterior shot. It takes literal drone footage to show how unhinged this house actually is. In reality, the White House facade is akin to the light dangling from an anglerfish, luring the unsuspecting victim in…
Completely NORMAL amount of money at play here!
There are some images historians (if there are any left) will look back upon and say, such a phenomenon truly would not be possible without an abundance of cheap oil and derivative products. Fortunately, in the immanent post-neoliberal chobani yogurt solarpunk utopia, this house will be converted into a half ruin garden (though this will take some time with all the plastic) half public spa complex. A better world is possible, but only if we imagine it.
Pro tip: there’s a way of saying “wow it’s so big” that can land as the most devastating insult in the rhetorical lexicon.
I’ll be real, the armchair thing is a new one for me, too.
(Rise and grindset voice): Inside you are two lions. Both of them are hungry for prosperity and success. Let’s get this bread, king.
Not to do gender here, but compared to the rest of the house, this is a “my wife got her way” room if there ever was one.
Fixer Upper was basically 9/11 for “architectural foam trappings” and “color.” Look what they took from you…
Honestly, what a great juxtaposition. This is what that book The Machine in the Garden was all about. (No it’s not.)
Half of this post tbh:
Well, that’s it for this extremely upbeat and positive McMansion Hell post in this extremely positive and upbeat time we are living in. Join us soon for the concluding part 2 of the Neuschwanstein Castle series, especially if you like beautiful, psychosexually crippled swan boys (real and fictional) and kitsch theory.
Neuschwanstein Concept Drawing by the stage designer (!!) Christian Jank (1869).
There exist in architecture clear precedents to the McMansion that have nothing to do with suburban real estate. This is because “McMansionry” (let’s say) has many transferable properties. Among them can be included: 1) a diabolical amount of wealth that must be communicated architecturally in the most frivolous way possible, 2) a penchant for historical LARPing primarily informed by media (e.g. the American “Tuscan kitchen”) and 3) the execution of historical styles using contemporary building materials resulting in an aesthetic affect that can be described as uncanny or cheap-looking. By these metrics, we can absolutely call Neuschwanstein Castle, built by the architect Eduard Riedel for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a McMansion.
Constructed from 1869 through 1886 – the year of Ludwig’s alleged suicide after having been ousted and declared insane – the castle cost the coffers of the Bavarian state and Ludwig himself no fewer than 6.2 million German gold marks. (That’s an estimated 47 million euros today.) The castle’s story is rife with well-known scandal. I’m sure any passing Swan Enthusiast is already familiar with Ludwig’s financial capriciousness, his called-off marriage and repressed homosexuality, his parasocial obsession with Richard Wagner, his complete and total inability to run his country, and his alleged “madness,” as they used to call it. All of these combine to make Neuschwanstein inescapable from the man who commissioned it – and the artist who inspired it. Say what you like about Ludwig and his building projects, but he is definitely remembered because of them, which is what most monarchs want. Be careful what you wish for.
Neuschwanstein gatehouse.
How should one describe Neuschwanstein architecturally? You’d need an additional blog. Its interiors alone (the subject of the next essay) range from Neo-Baroque to Neo-Byzantine to Neo-Gothic. There are many terms that can loosely define the palace’s overall style: eclecticism, medieval revivalism, historicism, chateauesque, sclerotic monarchycore, etc. However, the the most specific would be what was called “castle Romanticism” (Burgenromantik). The Germans are nothing if not literal. Whatever word you want to use, Neuschwanstein is such a Sistine Chapel of pure sentimentality and sugary kitsch that theme park architecture – most famously, Disney’s Cinderella’s castle itself – owes many of its medieval iterations to the palace’s towering silhouette.
There is some truth to the term Burgenromantik. Neuschwanstein’s exterior is a completely fabricated 19th century storybook fantasy of the Middle Ages whose precedents lie more truthfully in art for the stage. As a castle without fortification and a palace with no space for governance, Neuschwanstein’s own program is indecisive about what it should be, which makes it a pretty good reflection of Ludwig II himself. To me, however, it is the last gasp of a monarchy whose power will be totally extinguished by that same industrial modernity responsible for the materials and techniques of Neuschwanstein’s own, ironic construction.
In order to understand Neuschwanstein, however, we must go into two subjects that are equally a great time for me: 19th century medievalism - the subject of this essay - and the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, the subject of the next. (1)
Part I: Medievalisms Progressive and Reactionary
The Middle Ages were inescapable in 19th century Europe. Design, music, visual art, theater, literature, and yes, architecture were all besotted with the stuff of knights and castles, old sagas, and courtly literature. From arch-conservative nationalism to pro-labor socialism, medievalism’s popularity spanned the entire political spectrum. This is because it owes its existence to a number of developments that affected the whole of society.
In Ludwig’s time, the world was changing in profound, almost inconceivable ways. The first and second industrial revolutions with their socioeconomic upheavals and new technologies of transport, manufacturing, and mass communication, all completely unmade and remade how people lived and worked. This was as true of the average person as it was of the princes and nobles who were beginning to be undermined by something called “the petit bourgeoisie.”
Sustenance farming dwindled and wage labor eclipsed all other forms of working. Millions of people no longer able to make a living on piecemeal and agricultural work flocked to the cities and into the great Molochs of factories, mills, stockyards, and mines. Families and other kinship bonds were eroded or severed by the acceleration of capitalist production, large wars, and new means of transportation, especially the railroad. People became not only alienated from each other and from their labor in the classical Marxist sense but also from the results of that labor, too. No longer were chairs made by craftsmen or clothes by the single tailor – unless you could afford the bespoke. Everything from shirtwaists to wrought iron lamps was increasingly mass produced - under wretched conditions, too. Things – including buildings – that were once built to last a lifetime became cheap, disposable, and subject to the whimsy of fashion, sold via this new thing called “the catalog.”
William Morris’ painting Le Belle Iseult (1868).
Unsurprisingly, this new way of living and working caused not a little discontent. This was the climate in which Karl Marx wrote Capital and Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. More specific to our interests, however, is a different dissenter and one of the most interesting practitioners of medievalism, the English polymath William Morris.
A lover of Arthurian legend and an admirer of the architect and design reformer John Ruskin, Morris was first trained in the office of architect G. E. Street, himself a die-hard Gothic Revivalist. From the very beginning, the Middle Ages can be found everywhere in Morris’ work, from the rough-hewn qualities of the furniture he helped design to the floral elements and compositions of the art nouveau textiles and graphics he’s most famous for – which, it should be said, are reminiscent of 15th century English tapestries. In addition to his design endeavors, Morris was also a gifted writer and poet. His was a profound love for medieval literature, especially Norse sagas from Iceland. Some of these he even translated including the Volsunga Saga – also a preoccupation of Wagner’s. Few among us earn the title of polymath, but Morris’ claim to it is undeniable. Aside from music, there really wasn’t any area of creative life he didn’t touch.
However, Morris’ predilection for the medieval was not just a personal and aesthetic fascination. It was also an expression of his political rejection of the capitalist mode of production. As one of the founders of the English Arts & Crafts Movement, Morris called for a rejection of piecemeal machine labor, a return to handicraft, and overall to things made well and made with dignity. While this was and remains a largely middle class argument, one that usually leads down the road of ethical consumption, Morris was right that capitalism’s failing of design and architecture did not just lie with the depreciated quality of goods, but the depreciated quality of life. His was the utopian call to respect both the object and the laborer who produced it. To quote from his 1888 essay called “The Revival of Architecture,” Morris dreamed of a society that “will produce to live and not live to produce, as we do.” Indeed, in our current era of AI Slop, there remains much to like about the Factory Slop-era call to take back time from the foreman’s clock and once more make labor an act of enjoyable and unalienated creativity. Only now it’s about things like writing an essay.
I bother to describe Morris at length here for a number of reasons. The first is to reiterate that medievalism’s popularity was largely a response to socioeconomic changes. Additionally, since traditionalism - in Ludwig’s time and in ours - still gets weaponized by right-wing losers, it’s worth pointing out that not all practitioners of medievalism were politically reactionary in nature. However – and I will return to this later – medievalism, reactionary or not, remains inescapably nostalgic. Morris is no exception. While a total rejection of mass produced goods may seem quixotic to us now, when Morris was working, the era before mass industrialization remained at the fringes of living memory. Hence the nostalgia is perhaps to be expected. Unfortunately for him and for us, the only way out of capitalism is through it.
To return again to the big picture: whether one liked it or not, the old feudal world was done. Only its necrotic leftovers, namely a hereditary nobility whose power would run out of road in WWI, remained. For Ludwig purposes, it was a fraught political time in Bavaria as well. Bavaria, weird duck that it was, remained relatively autonomous within the new German Reich. Despite the title of king, Ludwig, much to his chagrin - hence the pathetic Middle Ages fantasizing - did not rule absolutely. His was a constitutional monarchy, and an embattled one at that. During the building of Neuschwanstein, the king found himself wedged between the Franco-Prussian War and the political coup masterminded by Otto von Bismarck that would put Europe on the fast track to a global conflict many saw as the atavistic culmination of all that already violent modernity. No wonder he wanted to hide with his Schwans up in the hills of Schwangau.
The very notion of a unified German Reich (or an independent Kingdom of Bavaria) was itself indicative of another development. Regardless if one was liberal or conservative, a king, an artist or a shoe peddler, the 19th century was plagued by the rise of modern nationalism. Bolstered by new ideas in “medical” “science,” this was also a racialized nationalism. A lot of emotional, political, and artistic investment was put into the idea that there existed a fundamentally German volk, a German soil, a German soul. This, however, was a universalizing statement in need of a citation, with lots of political power on the line. Hence, in order to add historical credence to these new conceptions of one’s heritage, people turned to the old sources.
Within the hallowed halls of Europe’s universities, newly minted historians and philologists scoured medieval texts for traces of a people united by a common geography and ethnicity as well as the foundations for a historically continuous state. We now know that this is a problematic and incorrect way of looking at the medieval world, a world that was so very different from our own. A great deal of subsequent medieval scholarship still devotes itself to correcting for these errors. But back then, such scholarly ethics were not to be found and people did what they liked with the sources. A lot of assumptions were made in order to make whatever point one wanted, often about one’s superiority over another. Hell, anyone who’s been on Trad Guy Deus Vult Twitter knows that a lot of assumptions are still made, and for the same purposes.(2)
Meanwhile, outside of the academy, mass print media meant more people were exposed to medieval content than ever before. Translations of chivalric romances such as Wolfgang von Eschenbach’s Parzival and sagas like the Poetic Edda inspired a century’s worth of artists to incorporate these characters and themes into their work. This work was often but of course not always nationalistic in character. Such adaptations for political purposes could get very granular in nature. We all like to point to the greats like William Morris or Richard Wagner (who was really a master of a larger syncretism.) But there were many lesser attempts made by weaker artists that today have an unfortunate bootlicking je nais se quoi to them.
I love a minor tangent related to my interests, so here’s one: a good example of this nationalist granularity comes from Franz Grillparzer’s 1823 pro-Hapsburg play König Ottokars Glück und Ende, which took for its source a deep cut 14th century manuscript called the Styrian Rhyming Chronicle, written by Ottokar Aus Der Gaul. The play concerns the political intrigue around King Ottokar II of Bohemia and his subsequent 1278 defeat at the hands of Grillparzer’s very swagged out Rudolf of Habsburg. Present are some truly fascinating but extremely obscure characters from 13th Holy Roman Empire lore including a long-time personal obsession of mine, the Styrian ministerial and three-time traitor of the Great Interregnum, Frederick V of Pettau. But I’m getting off-topic here. Let’s get back to the castle.
The Throne Room at Neuschwanstein
For architecture, perhaps the most important development in spreading medievalism was this new institution called the “big public museum.” Through a professionalizing field of archaeology and the sickness that was colonialist expansion, bits and bobs of buildings were stolen from places like North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and Byzantium, all of which had an enormous impact on latter 19th century architecture. (They were also picked up by early 20th century American architects from H. H. Richardson to Louis Sullivan.) These orientalized fragments were further disseminated through new books, monographs, and later photography.
Meanwhile, developments in fabrication (standardized building materials), construction (namely iron, then steel) and mass production sped things up and reduced costs considerably. Soon, castles and churches in the image of those that once took decades if not a century to build were erected on countless hillsides or in little town squares across the continent. These changes in the material production of architecture are key for understanding “why Neuschwanstein castle looks so weird.”
Part of what gives medieval architecture its character is the sheer embodiment of labor embedded in all those heavy stones, stones that were chiseled, hauled, and set by hand. The Gothic cathedral was a precarious endeavor whose appearance of lightness was not earned easily, which is why, when writing about their sublimity, Edmund Burke invoked not only the play of light and shadow, but the sheer slowness and human toil involved.
This is, of course, not true of our present estate. Neuschwanstein not only eschews the role of a castle as a “fortress to be used in war” (an inherently stereotomic program) but was erected using contemporary materials and techniques that are simply not imbued with the same age or gravitas. Built via a typical brick construction but clad in more impressive sandstone, it’s all far too clean. Neuschwanstein’s proportions seem not only chaotic - towers and windows are strewn about seemingly on a whim - they are also totally irreconcilable with the castle’s alleged typology, in part because we know what a genuine medieval castle looks like.
Ludwig’s palace was a technological marvel of the industrial revolution. Not only did Neuschwanstein have indoor plumbing and central heat, it also used the largest glass windows then in manufacture. It’s not even an Iron Age building. The throne room, seen earlier in this post, required the use of structural steel. None of this is to say that 19th century construction labor was easy. It wasn’t and many people still died, including 30 at Neuschwanstein. It was, however, simply different in character than medieval labor. For all the waxing poetic about handiwork, I’m sure medieval stonemasons would have loved the use of a steam crane.
It’s true that architectural eclecticism (the use of many styles at once) has a knack for undermining the presumed authenticity or fidelity of each style employed. But this somewhat misunderstands the crime. The thing about Neuschwanstein is that its goal was not to be historically authentic at all. Its target realm was that of fantasy. Not only that, a fantasy informed primarily by a contemporary media source. In this, it could be said to be more architecturally successful.
The fantasy of medievalism is very different than the truth of the Middle Ages. As I hinted at before, more than anything else, medievalism was an inherently nostalgic movement, and not only because it was a bedrock of so much children’s literature. People loved it because it promised a bygone past that never existed. The visual and written languages of feudalism, despite it being a terrible socioeconomic system, came into vogue in part because it wasn’t capitalism. We must remember that the 19th century saw industrial capitalism at its newest and rawest. Unregulated, it destroyed every natural resource in sight and subjected people, including children, to horrific labor conditions. It still does, and will probably get worse, but the difference is, we’re somewhat used to it by now. The shock’s worn off.
All that upheaval I talked about earlier made people long for a simplicity they felt was missing. This took many different forms. The rapid advances of secular society and the incursion of science into belief made many crave a greater religiosity. At a time when the effects of wage labor on the family had made womanhood a contested territory, many appeals were made to a divine and innocent feminine a la Lady Guinevere. Urbanization made many wish for a quieter world with less hustle and bustle and better air. These sentiments are not without their reasons. Technological and socioeconomic changes still make us feel alienated and destabilized, hence why there are so many medieval revivals even in our own time. (Chappell Roan of Arc anyone?) Hell, our own rich people aren’t so different from Ludwig either. Mark Zuckerburg owns a Hawaiian island and basically controls the fates of the people who live there lord-in-the-castle-style.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that of the products of the Middle Ages, perhaps chivalric romance was and remains the most popular. While never a real depiction of medieval life (no, all those knights were not dying on the behalf of pretty ladies), such stories of good men and women and their grand adventures still capture the imaginations of children and adults alike. (You will find no greater fan of Parzival than yours truly.) It’s also no wonder the nature of the romance, with its paternalistic patriarchy, its Christianity, its sentimentality around courtly love, and most of all its depiction of the ruling class as noble and benevolent – appealed to someone like Ludwig, both as a quirked-up individual and a member of his class.
It follows, then, that any artist capable of synthesizing all these elements, fears, and desires into an aesthetically transcendent package would’ve had a great effect on such a man. One did, of course. His name was Richard Wagner.
In our next essay, we will witness one of the most astonishing cases of kitsch imitating art. But before there could be Neuschwanstein Castle, there had to be this pretty little opera called Lohengrin.
(2) My favorite insane nationalist claim comes from the 1960s, when the Slovene-American historian Joseph Felicijan claimed that the US’s democracy was based off the 13th century ritual of enthronement practiced by the Dukes of Carinthia because Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la Republique (1576) in which the rite was mentioned. For more information, see Peter Štih’s book The Middle Ages Between the Alps and the Northern Adriatic (p. 56 for the curious.)
It’s always funny to me when new wealth tries to imitate old wealth, but in a very specific way: by trying to reproduce old ways of building that are no longer viable via mass produced building materials and contractors who are better than average but still not quite in the legion of the bespoke. It’s rarely the case that houses are fully “custom” these days – the amalgamation of all the different parts in a new formation is the “customization” at work. As we can see in this example, this is a truth that is often covered up by excessive decorating.
This 5 bedroom, 6.5 bathroom house, built in 1997 (shocker) will run you an extremely reasonable $3.5 million big ones, but I say extremely reasonable because it wants to be a $10 million house but doesn’t quite get there - after all, it’s made with drywall. The architectural style is not really anything in particular – though the front entrance would like to recall the Tudors. Really it is trying to emulate an existing pastiche style, namely the eclecticism of the 19th century. It also doesn’t do this well.
No stately manor is complete without dueling staircases. Also, I don’t know how to explain it, but every room in this house longs to be a bathroom. Or a powder room. A really big one. It’s probably the floor, and the wallpaper. This is just the appetizer for the main attraction:
Jules Verne larping is so rare in McMansion Hell that you have to commend them for trying. I’m kind of obsessed.
This room is so important to me. It’s like if an Olin Mills (dating myself here) set was an entire room. A sense of watching someone in one’s own house, performing “dinner.” Also I would slay as the swan knight, I have to say, so I get it.
What happened to baskets hanging from the ceiling and powder blue walls and porcelain lined up on the picture rail?
I have seen columns terminating into soffits that would make Scamozzi cry.
In Big America bathing and lavishing is a spectator sport.
Ok, again, the palette of this house is basically The Polar Express mixed with a very bizarre hotel lobby.
The chimney hole is sending me because that does appear to be a working chimney. Like, can you see the smoke come out? Who knows!
Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and I’m especially thankful to the folks who sponsor me on Patreon! If you want to see more scenes from this house, that’s the place to do it!
Quick PSA: someone on Facebook is apparently impersonating me using an account called “McMansion Hell 2.0” – If you see it, please report! Thanks!
Howdy folks! I hope if you were born between 1995 and 2001 you’re ready for some indelible pre-recession vibes because I think this entire house, including the photos have not been touched since that time.
This Wake County, NC house, built in 2007, currently boasts a price tag of 1.7 million smackaroos. Its buxom 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths brings the total size to a completely reasonable and not at all housing-bubble-spurred 5,000 square feet.
I know everyone (at least on TikTok) thinks 2007 and goes immediately to the Tuscan theming trend that was super popular at the time (along with lots of other pseudo-euro looks, e.g. “french country” “tudor” etc). In reality, a lot of decor wasn’t particularly themed at all but more “transitional” which is to say, neither contemporary nor super traditional. This can be pulled off (in fact, it’s where the old-school Joanna Gaines excelled) but it’s usually, well, bland. Overwhelmingly neutral. Still, these interiors stir up fond memories of the last few months before mommy was on the phone with the bank crying.
I think I’ve seen these red/navy/beige rugs in literally every mid-2000s time capsule house. I want to know where they came from first and how they came to be everywhere. My mom got one from Kirkland’s Home back in the day. I guess the 2010s equivalent would be those fake distressed overdyed rugs.
I hate the kitchen bench trend. Literally the most uncomfortable seating imaginable for the house’s most sociable room. You are not at a 19th century soda fountain!!! You are a salesforce employee in Ohio!!!
You could take every window treatment in this house and create a sampler. A field guide to dust traps.
Before I demanded privacy, my parents had a completely beige spare bedroom. Truly random stuff on the walls. An oversized Monet poster they should have kept tbh. Also putting the rug on the beige carpet here is diabolical.
FYI the term “Global Village Coffeehouse” originates with the design historian Evan Collins whose work with the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute!!!!
This photo smells like a Yankee Candle.
Ok, now onto the last usable photo in the set:
No but WHY is the house a different COLOR??????? WHAT?????
Alright, I hope you enjoyed this special trip down memory lane! Happy (American) Labor Day Weekend! (Don’t forget that labor is entitled to all it creates!)
Howdy folks! Today’s McMansion is very special because a) we’re returning to Maryland after a long time and b) because the street this McMansion is on is the same as my name. (It was not named after me.) Hence, it is my personal McMansion, which I guess is somewhat like when people used to by the name rights to stars even though it was pretty much a scam. (Shout out btw to my patron Andros who submitted this house to be roasted live on the McMansion Hell Patreon Livestream)
As far as namesake McMansions go, this one is pretty good in the sense that it is high up there on the ol’ McMansion scale. Built in 2011, this psuedo-Georgian bad boy boasts 6 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, all totaling around 12,000 square feet. It’ll run you 2.5 million which, safe to say, is exponentially larger than its namesake’s net worth.
Now, 2011 was an anonymous year for home design, lingering in the dead period between the 2008 black hole and 2013 when the market started to actually, finally, steadily recover. As a result a lot of houses from this time basically look like 2000s McMansions but slightly less outrageous in order to quell recession-era shame.
I’m going to be so serious here and say that the crown molding in this room is a crime against architecture, a crime against what humankind is able to accomplish with mass produced millwork, and also a general affront to common sense. I hate it so much that the more I look at it the more angry I become and that’s really not healthy for me so, moving on.
Actually, aside from the fake 2010s distressed polyester rug the rest of this room is literally, basically Windows 98 themed.
I feel like the era of massive, hefty sets of coordinated furniture are over. However, we’re the one’s actually missing out by not wanting this stuff because we will never see furniture made with real wood instead of various shades of MDF or particleboard ever again.
This is a top 10 on the scale of “least logical kitchen I’ve ever seen.” It’s as though the designers engineered this kitchen so that whoever’s cooking has to take the most steps humanly possible.
Do you ever see a window configuration so obviously made up by window companies in the 1980s that you almost have to hand it to them? You’re literally letting all that warmth from the fire just disappear. But whatever I guess it’s fine since we basically just LARP fire now.
Feminism win because women’s spaces are prioritized in a shared area or feminism loss because this is basically the bathroom vanity version of women be shopping? (It’s the latter.)
I couldn’t get to all of this house because there were literally over a hundred photos in the listing but there are so many spaces in here that are basically just half-empty voids, and if not that then actually, literally unfinished. It’s giving recession. Anyway, now for the best part:
Not only is this the NBA Backrooms but it’s also just a nonsensical basketball court. Tile floors? No lines? Just free balling in the void?
Oh, well I bet the rear exterior is totally normal.
Not to be all sincere about it but much like yours truly who has waited until the literal last second to post this McMansion, this house really is the epitome of hubris all around. Except the house’s hubris is specific to this moment in time, a time when gas was like $2/gallon. It’s climate hubris. It’s a testimony to just how much energy the top 1% of income earners make compared to the rest of us. I have a single window unit. This house has four air conditioning condensers. That’s before we get to the monoculture, pesticide-dependent lawn or the three car garage or the asphalt driveway or the roof that’ll cost almost as much as the house to replace. We really did think it would all be endless. Oops.
Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.
As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it’s wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you’re going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you’ll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google “80s hotel room” anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)
To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It’s true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.
But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn’t work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator’s job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.
We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not “core” enough.
As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their “you, sir, have won the internet” vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn’t have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that’s the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.
But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I’ve decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.
II.
I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I’d be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it’s pretty rare, unless you’re staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day’s Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.
At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world’s first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I’ve become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of “okay time to do a quick look through.” But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I’d been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It’s just old. It’s dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I’m writing about datedness, I’m writing in general using a previous era’s examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.
Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, “It’ll do.” We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.
However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven’t been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn’t dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They’re too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say “it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic).” You wouldn’t be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.
One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what’s here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of “molding” that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.
In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don’t like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It’s deeply annoying.)
Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser’s economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the “here is my service” type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way “design” can. It can only be discovered by accident.
When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father’s time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It’s a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.
Sometimes I just want to get on my hobbyhorse, which for about a year now has been the middle ages but surely will soon be something else. (Please hyperfixation gods, make it financial literacy.) Anyway, I meandered around the nation (online) in search of another opportunity to play another round of America Does Medieval. It took me a while for fortune to reward me but it finally did in the long-running McMansion Hell of Denton County, Texas.
2007 McMansions are pretty rare and it’s even rarer for them to have the original interiors. This one, clocking in at 5 beds, 6 baths, and almost 7200 square feet will set you back a reasonable $2.3 million. We complain a lot about the hegemony of gray these days, but this is hindsight bias. Longtime readers will recall that the color beige walked so gray could run, and this house is emblematic of that fact.
It’s…uncommon to see ordinary contractors try their hands at gothic arches and for all intents and purposes, I think this one did a pretty good job rendering the ineffable in common drywall. Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately the Catholic in me can’t help but feel that this is the house equivalent of those ultra trad converts on Reddit who have Templar avatars and spend their days complaining about Vatican II.
Sometimes I still get the ever-dwindling pleasure of seeing the type of room that has never before existed in human history and definitely won’t ever exist again. Certain material conditions (oil, lots of it, a media ecosystem in which historical literacy is set primarily by cartoons, adjustable rate mortgages) brought this space into the world in a way that cannot be recreated organically. Let us marvel.
Christ might need to be invoked should I choose to make a sweet potato casserole.
You can tell that ornament is fabricated because they made precisely TWO of them that are IDENTICAL. You could have fooled us into thinking a craftsman did this by hand from local Texas marble (or whatever), but alas greed got in the way of guile.
As someone who writes fiction on the weekends, I often feel the acute pain of having an imagination greater than my talent and an artistic vision detached from being able to effectively execute it. In this respect, this room speaks to me.
RIP Trump btw. Don’t know if y'all saw the news yet.
I know a lot about medieval bathing for completely normal reasons (writing fiction, winning online arguments, stoned youtube binges)
I feel like most of my forms of social adaptation as a person on the spectrum comprise of sneaking in my holy autistic interest du jour into conversations as subtly as I can manage. I’m doing it right now.
Okay, so, there were no rear exterior photos of this house because, having used every square inch of lot, the whole thing is smashed up against a fence and there is simply no way of getting that desired perspective without trespassing and that’s a mortal risk in the state of Texas. So I’ll leave you with this final room, the completely medieval in-home theater.
That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next month, where we will be going down a cult compound rabbit hole in the Great Plains.
Today’s house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.
This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.
The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?
The theme of this house is, vaguely, “old stuff.” Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.
The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.
Entering cheat codes in “Kitchen Building Sim 2000” because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.
Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I’m team Prince.
I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it’s tacky right? That it’s giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it’s giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.
Something about the bathroom really just says “You know what, I give up. Who cares?” But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom…
Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.
If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.
Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let’s take a nice peek at what’s out back.
I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.
Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.
Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!
If you ever wanted to read a book about McMansions, 5-over-1s, the ignoble toil of architects, ridiculous baubles for rich people, hostile architecture, private equity, shopping (rip), offices (rip), loud restaurants, and starchitects who behave like tech founders, this is the book for you!
Thank you all for your support throughout the years – without you this would not be possible. And don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging throughout it all, so stay tuned for this month’s post.
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Kate, that’s a little kooky, but certainly it’s not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory.” Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it’s a cheap joke. But there’s something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there’s this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don’t think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they’re not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house’s most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God’s sitting.
Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That’s why I’ve gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.
Our present house is ostensibly “French Provincial” in style, which is McMansion for “Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano”. It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.
Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only provide two of them.
With regards to the second sitting room, I’m really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.
Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.
Here’s the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America’s most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!
Okay I really don’t understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?
Here’s a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)
Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.
When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.
Anyway, let’s see what the rear of this house has to offer.
The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?
Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!
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