We’re on the Cover of Comms Business – November 2024 Edition!

By Parnita Nimbalkar

We’re super excited to share that Simwood is the cover story in the November issue of Comms Business! The article dives into what we’ve been up to, our latest innovations, BYOC, and even features The Simwood Potato ® Check out…

The post We’re on the Cover of Comms Business – November 2024 Edition! appeared first on Simwood.

Playing with microphones

By [email protected] (RevK)

The latest LED board designs have included a TDK PDM I2S microphone - the idea was to make sound reactive LED strips.

It is tiny (3.5mm x 2.65mm x 0.98mm) and cheap(ish) $0.76. But it is digital.

Now, this was a can of worms for which I was ill prepared. I2S is not like I2C, it seems, and there are a number of ways of doing it.

This particular device is PDM based, so has just a clock and data line - the clock to the microphone, and data comes back. The concept is that you have two of these, one set for right and one set for left channel, on the same clock and data. The left and right are on the rising or falling edge of the clock. It is fixed 16 bit per channel, and works at a specific (wide) range of frequencies of clock and hence sample rates.

But other I2S devices work in a different way, with extra pins.

I went through some stages for this...

What did not work was using WLED, a common LED driver package which works nicely on our LED modules. We realised it wanted I2S, and then realised it only did PDM on left channel, hence the different iterations, but no joy. Hopefully we can get some feedback in to that project so it does work as TDK is likely a good brand. It is amazing how sensitive it is.

My guess is it is not clocking at a rate the device will handle when using WLED, sadly.

So time to do it myself, as always!

I coded I2S as per ESP32 library, and, well, it worked, I got raw data. I could even tell it I want mono only and which channel. Amusingly using the wrong channel works too as the data floats for the other channel - though I picked up some high frequency noise that way. So best to set it correctly (I nearly said "right").

The next step was a simple FFT function - I have not gone for anything fancy or uber efficient, as it keeps up well enough, especially when I went for some simple oversampling on its input. I cannot clock the microphone as slow as I would like for normal working. But even at 30k samples/sec I could keep up with FFT 30 times a second, just, all done with floats. These ESP32s are impressive.

I have made the working audio range configurable, and averaged the FFT down to a small number of bins (24) which are log of frequency to fit better with musical scales (options for linear).

This has led to some simple audio responsive LED schemes - a simple brightness based audio spectograph - smoothing from 24 bins to however many LEDs you have in a chain. And also a simple overall volume based bar graph, and one that is RGB for three levels of sound.

Lessons learned.

Some automatic audio gain was pretty simple.

The next lesson was the log scale on frequency. That was not hard. But made an option.

I reduced the full FFT result to a small number of bands, 24.

Also I needed to make it do a peak level per band and damping (configurable) to give anything that looks nice.

The frequency range is configurable, but log based causes gaps if you go too low, so ended up 100Hz to 4kHz for now, log spread over the 24 bins from a sample rate at a typical 25 blocks/sec and actually sampling over 50-60ks/s down graded (average of oversample) to 12-15ks/s for the FFT giving results to 6-7.5kHz which is more than enough for the bands I am using.

I also ended up making the samples fit the LED update rate synchronously, typically 25 or 30 per second (configurable) to avoid any extra jitter/aliasing effects.

Oh, and when using RGBW, with a colour band for spectograph, before automatic gain kicks in you can have over 1 on a band, so I made that push in to turning on the W, which worked well.

The result

Update: I have now tweaked and got cleaner response across the range, putting 100Hz to 6.4kHz in to 48 log based frequency bins. See youtube for frequency tests.

Now for use with a live band at the pub!

And HIWTSI (my son's business) is doing LED system installs now.

Probabilistic Uncertainty

"One popular strategy is to enter an emotional spiral. Could that be the right approach? We contacted several researchers who are experts in emotional spirals to ask them, but none of them were in a state to speak with us."

I've had a change of heart regarding employee metrics

I know that if you go back far enough in these posts of mine, you will find some real crap in there. Sometimes that's because I had a position on something that turned out to not be very useful, or in some cases, actively harmful. This sucks, but that's life: you encounter new information and you are given the opportunity to change your mind, and then sometimes you actually do exactly that.

Recently, I realized that my position on something else has changed over time. It started when someone reached out to me a few weeks ago because they wanted me to get involved with them on some "employee metrics" product. It's some bullshit thing that has stuff like "work output" listing how many commits they've done, or comments, or whatever else. I guess they wanted me to shill for something of theirs, because from my posts, clearly I was such a fan of making that kind of tool, right?

I mean, sure, way back in 2004-2006, I was making all kinds of tools to show who was actually doing work and who was just sitting there doing nothing. I've written about a number of those tools, with their goofy names and the "hard truths" they would expose, showing who's a "slacker" and all of this.

When this company reached out, I did some introspection and decided that what I had done previously was the wrong thing to do, and I should not recommend it any more.

Why? It's surprisingly simple. It's the job of a manager to know what their reports are up to, and whether they're doing a good job of it, and are generally effective. If they can't do that, then they themselves are ineffective, and *that* is the sort of thing that is the responsibility of THEIR manager, and so on up the line. They shouldn't need me (or anyone else) to tell them about what's going on with their damn direct reports!

In theory, at least, that's how it's supposed to work. That's their job: actually managing people!

So, my new position on that sort of thing is: fuck them. Don't help them. Don't write tools like that, don't run tests to see if your teammates will take care of basic "service hygiene" issues, and definitely don't say anything substantive in a performance review. None of it will "move the needle" in the way you think it will, and it will only make life worse for you overall. "Peer reviews actually improve things" is about the biggest crock of shit that people in tech still believe in.

Once again, if management is too stupid to notice what's going on, they deserve every single thing that will happen when it finally "hits the fan".

Make them do their own damn jobs. You have enough stuff to do as it is.

...

I feel like giving this a second spin right here in case I failed to reach some of the audience with the first approach. Here's a purely selfish way of looking at things, for those who are so inclined.

Those tools I wrote 20 years ago didn't really indicate who was slacking at working tickets or whatever. What they *actually indicated* was that the management at Rackspace, by and large, had no clue what was going on right under their noses. And, hey, while that was true, that can be a dangerous thing to say! You want enemies? That's a great way to get them.

So, why expose yourself? Suppress the urge to point out who's slacking. It will only come back on you.

Weekly Update 424

By Troy Hunt

Presently sponsored by: Report URI: Guarding you from rogue JavaScript! Don’t get pwned; get real-time alerts & prevent breaches #SecureYourSite

I have really clear memories of listening to the Stack Overflow podcast in the late 2000's and hearing Jeff and Joel talk about the various challenges they were facing and the things they did to overcome them. I just suddenly thought of that when realising how long this

Demons

Though they do appreciate how much he improved the heating system for the flame pit.

Keycloak 26.0.5 released

To download the release go to Keycloak downloads.

Highlights

LDAP users are created as enabled by default when using Microsoft Active Directory

If you are using Microsoft AD and creating users through the administrative interfaces, the user will created as enabled by default.

In previous versions, it was only possible to update the user status after setting a (non-temporary) password to the user. This behavior was not consistent with other built-in user storages as well as not consistent with others LDAP vendors supported by the LDAP provider.

Upgrading

Before upgrading refer to the migration guide for a complete list of changes.

All resolved issues

Bugs

Disposal

We were disappointed that the rocket didn't make a THOOOONK noise when it went into the tube, but we're setting up big loudspeakers for future launches to add the sound effect.

Set me right on whether caring is even possible

I know I have a weird and kind of skewed view of the world, since I expect nobody else to care about some things, and then the world goes and surprises me by jumping on it anyway. About six months ago, I expected the worst for my whole "let's improve the feed reader ecosystem" thoughts, and figured it would go unnoticed, and yet it's been anything but.

Clearly, I am miscalibrated for what the world is willing to do. So, with that in mind, I figured that I need to bring more things up in this context to see what the reaction is instead of just discarding it early due to my own doubts.

Tonight's concern goes like this: I was flipping through some old posts and ran across something from 2013 where I said "your simple (shell) script is someone else's bad day". It was inspired by the "onboarding" process for dev servers at FB which I was going through that week, and it was a total shit-show. It had plenty of the aforementioned scripts that you couldn't restart without making things worse. It took way too long for me to get my hands on a Linux box that had things set up so I could crank on stupid www stuff.

In re-reading that post the other night, it got me wondering what I could do in this space to try to raise awareness of various topics. Maybe I'd look at a few old posts, decide that there's a cluster of problems ("idempotence" in this case), and that maybe it would be a net win for humanity if more people were slightly better at it. Then I'd try to address that directly... somehow.

My goal would be to get more people in this life who, at least for that topic, look at everything they encounter and go "what if this fails, and is restarted". I basically would love to see more people going "what if" for that particular topic. Worry about the robot and the five quarts of oil. (Go look at the 2013 post if that made no sense.)

I don't know if that's plausible. I actually worry that it's not even possible for most people, and that caring about such things is some weird genetic corner case that is born, not made, and it would be unreasonable to expect it from the rest of the world.

This is where I need input. I have this feeling that such topics are not seen as important by reasonable people, and that they honestly never will be. Just because it matters to me is no indication that it will resonate anywhere else. That much has been made crystal clear over the past few years.

Wouldn't it be amazing, though? Just imagine it: groups of people heading out into the world armed with additional things to consider when designing something, and the resulting improvements in reliability for the things they work on down the road.

Then we'd have to continue on to some other fundamental topic, and try to move the needle on that, too.

Finally, I should mention another possible outcome: those same people go into the world with that knowledge, go to apply it, and run into the same brick walls that some of us have already been hitting because nobody else sees the point. They get all bitter and dejected, emit their own "delightful burnout sauce" (I love that line, btw), and start writing their own screeds on things like this, and we start over.

You can bake an amazing cake, but if they aren't hungry for cake, well, you might have just wasted a bunch of time.

Keycloak 26.0.4 released

To download the release go to Keycloak downloads.

Highlights

LDAP users are created as enabled by default when using Microsoft Active Directory

If you are using Microsoft AD and creating users through the administrative interfaces, the user will created as enabled by default.

In previous versions, it was only possible to update the user status after setting a (non-temporary) password to the user. This behavior was not consistent with other built-in user storages as well as not consistent with others LDAP vendors supported by the LDAP provider.

Upgrading

Before upgrading refer to the migration guide for a complete list of changes.

All resolved issues

Bugs

Report URI: Simplifying pricing and changes to free accounts

By Scott Helme

We've been making great progress on developing new features at Report URI recently, and over the coming months, you're going to see many of them launched! As we've expanded the team to achieve this, and as we want to continue to grow, we'

The open secret of open washing – why companies pretend to be open source

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Allowing pretenders to co-opt the term is bad for everyone

Opinion  If you believe Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's AI large language model (LLM) Llama 3 is open source.…

Huawei's farewell to Android isn't a marketing move, it's chess

By Rupert Goodwins

HarmonyOS NEXT sounds dissonant until you get the theme

Opinion  Launching a new mobile OS is what professional historians of technology refer to as a dumb move. It is so shatteringly stupid that even Microsoft stopped bothering after three or four goes – did we all just imagine the Kin?…

Wells

You do have to be careful, though--sometimes, instead of water, you hit this free fuel that you can sell for a lot of money instead.

Weekly Update 423

By Troy Hunt

Presently sponsored by: Report URI: Guarding you from rogue JavaScript! Don’t get pwned; get real-time alerts & prevent breaches #SecureYourSite

Firstly, my apologies for the minute and a bit of echo at the start of this video, OBS had somehow magically decided to start recording both the primary mic and the one built into my camera. Easy fix, moving on...

During the livestream, I was perplexed as to why the

Show HN: Aide, an open-source AI native IDE

Comments

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D Linux Performance: Zen 5 With 3D V-Cache

Comments

Switch 2 will be backwards compatible with Switch, Nintendo confirms

Comments

It's raining PFAS in South Florida – study

Comments

Private Cloud Compute Security Guide

Comments

Bitcoin has made a new all-time high price

Comments

EU opens antitrust investigation into anticompetitive practices by Corning

Comments

What has case distinction but is neither uppercase nor lowercase?

Comments

Show HN: SuperSplat – open-source 3D Gaussian Splat Editor

Comments

Powering the Mars Base

Comments

3D Rotation Design

Comments

Upcoming changes to the DNSSEC root trust anchor

Comments

New images of Jupiter

Comments

Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities

Comments

GoToSocial WASM-based SQLite driver and BSD

Comments

US shares and Bitcoin hit record high on Trump win

The result could have a far-reaching implications for tax and trade policy, as well as economies around the world.

Sara Sharif’s stepmum was ‘possessed’, court hears

A father accused of killing Sara Sharif says his daughter was abused by her stepmum, a court hears.

Sara Sharif’s stepmum was ‘possessed’, court hears

A father accused of killing Sara Sharif says his daughter was abused by her stepmum, a court hears.

Strong US relations crucial, says PM after Trump win

New Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch challenges Keir Starmer on relations with the next US president.

Lebanese rescuers say 30 killed in Israeli strike on apartment building

The Israeli military said it struck Hezbollah “terror infrastructure” in the central town of Barja.

Operation Synergia II sees Interpol swoop on global cyber crims

By Iain Thomson

22,000 IP addresses taken down, 59 servers seized, 41 arrests in 95 countries

Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes.…

Kamala Harris yet to speak as Trump wins White House

Exit poll data suggests Kamala Harris may have underperformed with female voters.

Chaos at fireworks show as children hit by rockets

One woman says her children are "traumatised" and "will never want to go and see fireworks again".

Arrests after boy, 7, and man died in house blast

Police arrest three men on suspicion of manslaughter and the production of a Class B drug.

Zheng crushes Paolini to reach WTA Finals last four

Zheng Qinwen crushes Jasmine Paolini to secure a place in the WTA Finals last four on her tournament debut.

Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error

By Richard Speed

Screens sprayed with coffee after techies find Microsoft's latest OS in unexpected places

Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade.…

Mendy entitled to majority of unpaid Man City wages

Former Manchester City defender Benjamin Mendy should have been paid when he was not in custody, an employment tribunal judge rules.

Disguised GP jailed for inheritance row poisoning

Thomas Kwan injected a toxin that caused a flesh-eating disease, pretending it was a Covid jab.

Want advice from UK government website about tax 'n' stuff? Talk to the chatbot

By Richard Speed

Need to know how to set up a business? There's an (experimental) AI for that

From the department of "this will go well" comes confirmation UK government is trialling an experimental chatbot with 15,000 business users, who can use it to ask questions about tax and available support.…

AT&T settles claims it misappropriated subsidies, with partial admission of guilt

By Brandon Vigliarolo

Changes at the telco giant called for to prevent future abuse

AT&T settled with the FCC over claims it submitted false information to obtain funding from US broadband subsidy programs for low-income customers. …

How are interracial couples viewed in the UK?

By /u/Federal-Breakfast762

Just curious. I'm an American and I've visited and stayed in the UK for a while, as well as countries within the EU, and I've noticed how more common it was to see interracial couples than over here in the States (Loved it, btw!)

Now I could just be seeing things from my little window of a small town where most people in my area are white (I don't really go to the big cities much). But even in the small areas of England where I'd stayed, I saw a lot more diversity when it came to couples.

Over here, for the most part, people like to couple up with those like them. Which I can understand. But they tend to judge you or question you (a bit too much, in my experience) if you're interested in someone outside of your culture or race ( I remember telling a past coworker (we're both black) that I thought a white coworker of ours was cute and she was genuinely puzzled and asked "You like white boys?" I just replied with "Nah, I like attractive guys." In the past, people would always ask me "Are you gonna marry a (insert literally any other ethnicity here except Gambian because I was into things outside of my culture

-_-) guy?" As a joke. But looking back, it was kind of annoying.

I have relatives in England and France, and I'm pretty sure a good chunk of them are married to people outside of their race, compared to my relatives here in the States, where all of them, as far as I know, are married to people of the same exact backgrounds.

I hope this isn't an ignorant or dumb question. I was just curious. I could be overestimating the diversity tolerance in the UK and underestimating it here in the States.

Thank you

submitted by /u/Federal-Breakfast762 to r/AskUK
[link] [comments]

Weeping Guests at the Election Watch Party at Kamala Harris' alma mater Howard University

By /u/ksyfink

Weeping Guests at the Election Watch Party at Kamala Harris' alma mater Howard University submitted by /u/ksyfink to r/pics
[link] [comments]

Kamala supporters at Howard University watch party seen crying and leaving early

By /u/POISON_loveuwu

Kamala supporters at Howard University watch party seen crying and leaving early submitted by /u/POISON_loveuwu to r/pics
[link] [comments]

Shift in votes compared to the 2020 elections, the longer the arrow the more votes were gained for said party.

By /u/Conamin

Shift in votes compared to the 2020 elections, the longer the arrow the more votes were gained for said party. submitted by /u/Conamin to r/MapPorn
[link] [comments]

US Embassy was sprayed this morning

By /u/Physical_Echo_9372

US Embassy was sprayed this morning

Photos from Just Stop Oil press release

submitted by /u/Physical_Echo_9372 to r/london
[link] [comments]

To not have a racist rapist as president

By /u/ItsReallyDepressing

To not have a racist rapist as president submitted by /u/ItsReallyDepressing to r/therewasanattempt
[link] [comments]

Sadiq's comment

By /u/moleman3000

Sadiq's comment submitted by /u/moleman3000 to r/london
[link] [comments]

Just a friendly reminder :)

By /u/Ill_Tooth3741

Just a friendly reminder :) submitted by /u/Ill_Tooth3741 to r/CuratedTumblr
[link] [comments]

That's not a driveway

By /u/pruaga

That's not a driveway submitted by /u/pruaga to r/drivingUK
[link] [comments]

Donald Trump has officially won the 2024 United States Presidential Election.

By /u/IamYarrow

Donald Trump has officially won the 2024 United States Presidential Election.

Good luck everyone.

submitted by /u/IamYarrow to r/ABoringDystopia
[link] [comments]

Megathread: Donald Trump is elected 47th president of the United States

By /u/PoliticsModeratorBot

submitted by /u/PoliticsModeratorBot to r/politics
[link] [comments]

Donald Trump wins 2nd term in historic return to White House

By /u/ClementePark

submitted by /u/ClementePark to r/news
[link] [comments]

What would you say your biggest everyday problems are living in the UK?

By /u/xaumax

Whether it be financial, educational or smaller more arbitrary things? I’d love to hear them.

submitted by /u/xaumax to r/AskUK
[link] [comments]

The UK must relinquish our crown

By /u/tobotic

The UK must relinquish our crown submitted by /u/tobotic to r/BrexitMemes
[link] [comments]

Russia says Donald Trump's election win "useful for us"

By /u/NaiE007

Russia says Donald Trump's election win "useful for us" submitted by /u/NaiE007 to r/worldnews
[link] [comments]

Generating documentation from tests using files-to-prompt and LLM

Generating documentation from tests using files-to-prompt and LLM

I was experimenting with the wasmtime-py Python library today (for executing WebAssembly programs from inside CPython) and I found the existing API docs didn't quite show me what I wanted to know.

The project has a comprehensive test suite so I tried seeing if I could generate documentation using that:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/bytecodealliance/wasmtime-py
files-to-prompt -e py wasmtime-py/tests -c | \
  llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet -s \
  'write detailed usage documentation including realistic examples'

More notes in my TIL. You can see the full Claude transcript here - I think this worked really well!

Tags: llm, webassembly, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude, claude-3-5-sonnet, ai-assisted-programming, documentation

Quoting NY Times Editorial Board

You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.

NY Times Editorial Board

Tags: new-york-times, politics

New OpenAI feature: Predicted Outputs

New OpenAI feature: Predicted Outputs

Interesting new ability of the OpenAI API - the first time I've seen this from any vendor.

If you know your prompt is mostly going to return the same content - you're requesting an edit to some existing code, for example - you can now send that content as a "prediction" and have GPT-4o or GPT-4o mini use that to accelerate the returned result.

OpenAI's documentation says:

When providing a prediction, any tokens provided that are not part of the final completion are charged at completion token rates.

I initially misunderstood this as meaning you got a price reduction in addition to the latency improvement, but that's not the case: in the best possible case it will return faster and you won't be charged anything extra over the expected cost for the prompt, but the more it differs from your prediction the more extra tokens you'll be billed for.

I ran the example from the documentation both with and without the prediction and got these results. Without the prediction:

"usage": {
  "prompt_tokens": 150,
  "completion_tokens": 118,
  "total_tokens": 268,
  "completion_tokens_details": {
    "accepted_prediction_tokens": 0,
    "audio_tokens": null,
    "reasoning_tokens": 0,
    "rejected_prediction_tokens": 0
  }

That took 5.2 seconds and cost 0.1555 cents.

With the prediction:

"usage": {
  "prompt_tokens": 166,
  "completion_tokens": 226,
  "total_tokens": 392,
  "completion_tokens_details": {
    "accepted_prediction_tokens": 49,
    "audio_tokens": null,
    "reasoning_tokens": 0,
    "rejected_prediction_tokens": 107
  }

That took 3.3 seconds and cost 0.2675 cents.

Further details from OpenAI's Steve Coffey:

We are using the prediction to do speculative decoding during inference, which allows us to validate large batches of the input in parallel, instead of sampling token-by-token!

[...] If the prediction is 100% accurate, then you would see no cost difference. When the model diverges from your speculation, we do additional sampling to “discover” the net-new tokens, which is why we charge rejected tokens at completion time rates.

Via @OpenAIDevs

Tags: openai, llms, ai, generative-ai, llm-pricing

My Keys

By sil

I have a problematic relationship with keys.

Well, that's not true. I have a problematic relationship with key rings. For some reason, my pockets are a violently hostile environment for things I put in them. I don't really understand why this is, but it's true. Keyrings bend out of shape; the concentric rings separate, and my actual keys fall off of them. People have expressed scepticism about this in the past, and they've been wrong and I've been right. The last time I complained about this, I thought I'd come up with a solution where I bought a keyring which was a tiny padlock. It lasted three days before a bolt sheared off. You can see the whole thing on posts made to twitter.

At that point most people would give up, or be sad, or just live with split rings continually letting them down. But most people don't have a dad who is a king of engineering.

My dad made me this.

It's a keyring. It's a solid block of brass with the middle cut out, so it looks like a very shallow "U", or like three sides of a long rectangle. There's a hole drilled in each of the short ends, and a long bolt is threaded through those holes. On one end of the bolt is a nut, tight against the outside of the "U", and the bolt protrudes out about an inch where there's another, locking, nut. All the keys are hung from the bolt. To add a new key, I undo the locking nut on the end, undo the tight nut, pull the bolt out, hang another key from it, and then do everything back up. It's brilliant. I've not had a single problem with it.

Those of you carefully studying the picture will notice that there is writing on the brass "U". (And will also notice that I've blacked out the details of the actual keys, because you can cut a key based on a picture, and I'm not stupid.) That's engraving, which mentions my website, so if I lose my keys (which I am really careful to not do1) then whoever finds them can get in touch with me to tell me that happened but my address is not on the keys, so a nefarious finder gets less benefit from it.

I love my keyring. It's the best. I do not know why more keyrings are not like this. It works just like a normal keyring (I have non-key things on mine, such as a USB stick and a tiny flashlight, but they would go on a regular split-ring keyring as well), but it doesn't just fail all the time like normal ones do. I surely can't be the only person who experiences this? Anyway, I don't mind, 'cos I have the solution. Cheers, dad. Maybe I should make this a product or something.

  1. the historical version of checking your pockets, as a man, was to feel for "spectacles, testicles, wallet, and watch" -- this was actually a ribald mnemonic for how to cross yourself as a Catholic, but this modern day man checks his pockets for keys, wallet, and phone in the same way to check they're not lost

Claude 3.5 Haiku

Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Haiku today, a few days later than expected (they said it would be out by the end of October).

I was expecting this to be a complete replacement for their existing Claude 3 Haiku model, in the same way that Claude 3.5 Sonnet eclipsed the existing Claude 3 Sonnet while maintaining the same pricing.

Claude 3.5 Haiku is different. First, it doesn't (yet) support image inputs - so Claude 3 Haiku remains the least expensive Anthropic model for handling those.

Secondly, it's not priced the same as the previous Haiku. That was $0.25/million input and $1.25/million for output - the new 3.5 Haiku is 4x that at $1/million input and $5/million output.

Anthropic tweeted:

During final testing, Haiku surpassed Claude 3 Opus, our previous flagship model, on many benchmarks—at a fraction of the cost.

As a result, we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence.

Given that Anthropic claim that their new Haiku out-performs their older Claude 3 Opus (still $15/m input and $75/m output!) this price isn't disappointing, but it's a small surprise nonetheless.

Accessing Claude 3.5 Haiku with LLM

I released a new version of my llm-claude-3 plugin with support for the new model. You can install (or upgrade) the plugin and run it like this:

llm install --upgrade llm-claude-3
llm keys set claude
# Paste API key here
llm -m claude-3.5-haiku 'describe memory management in Rust'

Here's the output from that prompt.

Comparing prices

I added the new price to my LLM pricing calculator, which inspired me to extract this comparison table for the leading models from Gemini, Anthropic and OpenAI. Here they are sorted from least to most expensive:

Model 1m token input 1m tokens output
Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B $0.04 $0.15
Gemini 1.5 Flash $0.07 $0.30
GPT-4o Mini $0.15 $0.60
Claude 3 Haiku $0.25 $1.25
Claude 3.5 Haiku $1.00 $5.00
Gemini 1.5 Pro $1.25 $5.00
GPT-4o $2.50 $10.00
Claude 3.5 Sonnet $3.00 $15.00
Claude 3 Opus $15.00 $75.00

Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B remains the model to beat on pricing: it's 1/6th of the price of the new Haiku - far less capable, but still extremely useful for tasks such as audio transcription.

Also notable from Anthropic's model comparison table: Claude 3.5 Haiku has a max output of 8,192 tokens (same as 3.5 Sonnet, but twice that of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3 Haiku). 3.5 Haiku has a training cut-off date of July 2024, the most recent of any Anthropic model. 3.5 Sonnet is April 2024 and the Claude 3 family are all August 2023.

Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, llm, anthropic, claude, gemini, llm-pricing

Nous Hermes 3

Nous Hermes 3

The Nous Hermes family of fine-tuned models have a solid reputation. Their most recent release came out in August, based on Meta's Llama 3.1:

Our training data aggressively encourages the model to follow the system and instruction prompts exactly and in an adaptive manner. Hermes 3 was created by fine-tuning Llama 3.1 8B, 70B and 405B, and training on a dataset of primarily synthetically generated responses. The model boasts comparable and superior performance to Llama 3.1 while unlocking deeper capabilities in reasoning and creativity.

The model weights are on Hugging Face, including GGUF versions of the 70B and 8B models. Here's how to try the 8B model (a 4.58GB download) using the llm-gguf plugin:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model 'https://huggingface.co/NousResearch/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B-GGUF/resolve/main/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B.Q4_K_M.gguf' -a Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B
llm -m Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B 'hello in spanish'

Nous Research partnered with Lambda Labs to provide inference APIs. It turns out Lambda host quite a few models now, currently providing free inference to users with an API key.

I just released the first alpha of a llm-lambda-labs plugin. You can use that to try the larger 405b model (very hard to run on a consumer device) like this:

llm install llm-lambda-labs
llm keys set lambdalabs
# Paste key here
llm -m lambdalabs/hermes3-405b 'short poem about a pelican with a twist'

Here's the source code for the new plugin, which I based on llm-mistral. The plugin uses httpx-sse to consume the stream of tokens from the API.

Tags: llm, generative-ai, llama, ai, edge-llms, llms, meta, projects, nous-research

Quoting Tom MacWright

Building technology in startups is all about having the right level of tech debt. If you have none, you’re probably going too slow and not prioritizing product-market fit and the important business stuff. If you get too much, everything grinds to a halt. Plus, tech debt is a “know it when you see it” kind of thing, and I know that my definition of “a bunch of tech debt” is, to other people, “very little tech debt.”

Tom MacWright

Tags: technical-debt, tom-macwright

California Clock Change

California Clock Change

The clocks go back in California tonight and I finally built my dream application for helping me remember if I get an hour extra of sleep or not, using a Claude Artifact. Here's the transcript.

California Clock Change. For Pacific Time (PST/PDT) only. When you go to bed on Saturday, November 2, 2024That's tonight!, you will get an extra hour of sleep! The clocks fall back from 2:00 AM to 1:00 AM on Sunday, November 3, 2024.

This is one of my favorite examples yet of the kind of tiny low stakes utilities I'm building with Claude Artifacts because the friction involved in churning out a working application has dropped almost to zero.

(I added another feature: it now includes a note of what time my Dog thinks it is if the clocks have recently changed.)

Tags: claude-artifacts, ai-assisted-programming, projects, ai, timezones, llms

Docling

Docling

MIT licensed document extraction Python library from the Deep Search team at IBM, who released Docling v2 on October 16th.

Here's the Docling Technical Report paper from August, which provides details of two custom models: a layout analysis model for figuring out the structure of the document (sections, figures, text, tables etc) and a TableFormer model specifically for extracting structured data from tables.

Those models are available on Hugging Face.

Here's how to try out the Docling CLI interface using uvx (avoiding the need to install it first - though since it downloads models it will take a while to run the first time):

uvx docling mydoc.pdf --to json --to md

This will output a mydoc.json file with complex layout information and a mydoc.md Markdown file which includes Markdown tables where appropriate.

The Python API is a lot more comprehensive. It can even extract tables as Pandas DataFrames:

from docling.document_converter import DocumentConverter
converter = DocumentConverter()
result = converter.convert("document.pdf")
for table in result.document.tables:
    df = table.export_to_dataframe()
    print(df)

I ran that inside uv run --with docling python. It took a little while to run, but it demonstrated that the library works.

Tags: ocr, ai, pdf, python, ibm, hugging-face, uv

Claude Token Counter

Claude Token Counter

Anthropic released a token counting API for Claude a few days ago.

I built this tool for running prompts, images and PDFs against that API to count the tokens in them.

The API is free (albeit rate limited), but you'll still need to provide your own API key in order to use it.

Screenshot of a Claude Token Counter interface showing: Title Claude Token Counter, system prompt this counts tokens, user message You can attach images and PDFs too, file upload area with llm-jq-card.jpg and dxweb.pdf attached (both with Remove buttons), a Count Tokens button, and JSON output showing input_tokens: 3320

Here's the source code. I built this using two sessions with Claude - one to build the initial tool and a second to add PDF and image support. That second one is a bit of a mess - it turns out if you drop an HTML file onto a Claude conversation it converts it to Markdown for you, but I wanted it to modify the original HTML source.

The API endpoint also allows you to specify a model, but as far as I can tell from running some experiments the token count was the same for Haiku, Opus and Sonnet 3.5.

Tags: anthropic, claude, ai-assisted-programming, tools, generative-ai, ai, llms, claude-artifacts, llm-pricing

Please publish and share more

Please publish and share more

💯 to all of this by Jeff Triplett:

Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it. [...]

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Jeff shares my opinion on conclusions: giving myself permission to hit publish even when I haven't wrapped everything up neatly was a huge productivity boost for me:

Our posts are done when you say they are. You do not have to fret about sticking to landing and having a perfect conclusion. Your posts, like this post, are done after we stop writing.

And another 💯 to this footnote:

PS: Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Tags: jeff-triplett, blogging

SmolLM2

SmolLM2

New from Loubna Ben Allal and her research team at Hugging Face:

SmolLM2 is a family of compact language models available in three size: 135M, 360M, and 1.7B parameters. They are capable of solving a wide range of tasks while being lightweight enough to run on-device. [...]

It was trained on 11 trillion tokens using a diverse dataset combination: FineWeb-Edu, DCLM, The Stack, along with new mathematics and coding datasets that we curated and will release soon.

The model weights are released under an Apache 2 license. I've been trying these out using my llm-gguf plugin for LLM and my first impressions are really positive.

Here's a recipe to run a 1.7GB Q8 quantized model from lmstudio-community:

llm install llm-gguf
llm gguf download-model https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/SmolLM2-1.7B-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf -a smol17
llm chat -m smol17

Animated terminal demo. My prompt is tell me about pelicans. The model responds: Sure, I'd be happy to tell you about pelicans! Pelicans are a group of aquatic birds in the order Pelecaniformes, which also includes the cormorants, darters, and frigatebirds. They are found on all continents except Antarctica, and are known for their distinctive pouch-like bill. There are several species of pelicans. The most common species is the Brown Pelican, which is found in the Americas. It's the only species that plunges into water from a significant height to catch fish and other prey, a behavior known as "fish-grabbing."  Another common species is the American White Pelican, which can be found in both the Americas and Eurasia. It has a white plumage and a large, bright pink bill, and feeds on fish in lakes, rivers, and coastal wetlands.  Pelicans are generally medium-sized birds, but the Brown Pelican is the largest, with an average height of around 26-30 inches. Their bills can be as long as 11 inches!  Below the terminal you can see Activity Monitor showing 378% CPU usage for the Python process

Or at the other end of the scale, here's how to run the 138MB Q8 quantized 135M model:

llm gguf download-model https://huggingface.co/lmstudio-community/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct-GGUF/resolve/main/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct-Q8_0.gguf' -a smol135m
llm chat -m smol135m

The blog entry to accompany SmolLM2 should be coming soon, but in the meantime here's the entry from July introducing the first version: SmolLM - blazingly fast and remarkably powerful .

Via @LoubnaBenAllal1

Tags: llm, hugging-face, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source, edge-llms

From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code

From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code

Google's Project Zero security team used a system based around Gemini 1.5 Pro to find a previously unreported security vulnerability in SQLite (a stack buffer underflow), in time for it to be fixed prior to making it into a release.

A key insight here is that LLMs are well suited for checking for new variants of previously reported vulnerabilities:

A key motivating factor for Naptime and now for Big Sleep has been the continued in-the-wild discovery of exploits for variants of previously found and patched vulnerabilities. As this trend continues, it's clear that fuzzing is not succeeding at catching such variants, and that for attackers, manual variant analysis is a cost-effective approach.

We also feel that this variant-analysis task is a better fit for current LLMs than the more general open-ended vulnerability research problem. By providing a starting point – such as the details of a previously fixed vulnerability – we remove a lot of ambiguity from vulnerability research, and start from a concrete, well-founded theory: "This was a previous bug; there is probably another similar one somewhere".

LLMs are great at pattern matching. It turns out feeding in a pattern describing a prior vulnerability is a great way to identify potential new ones.

Via Hacker News

Tags: gemini, security, sqlite, google, generative-ai, ai, llms, prompt-engineering

Claude API: PDF support (beta)

Claude API: PDF support (beta)

Claude 3.5 Sonnet now accepts PDFs as attachments:

The new Claude 3.5 Sonnet (claude-3-5-sonnet-20241022) model now supports PDF input and understands both text and visual content within documents.

I just released llm-claude-3 0.7 with support for the new attachment type (attachments are a very new feature), so now you can do this:

llm install llm-claude-3 --upgrade
llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet 'extract text' -a mydoc.pdf

Visual PDF analysis can also be turned on for the Claude.ai application:

Screenshot of a feature preview interface showing experimental features. At top: Feature Preview with beaker icon. Main text explains these are upcoming enhancements that may affect Claude's behavior. Shows options for Analysis tool, LaTeX Rendering, and Visual PDFs. Right panel demonstrates Visual PDFs feature with Apollo 17 flight plan image and chat messages. Toggle switch shows feature is Off. Description states Give Claude 3.5 Sonnet the ability to view and analyze images, charts, and graphs in PDFs, in addition to text. PDFs that are less than 100 pages are supported.

Also new today: Claude now offers a free (albeit rate-limited) token counting API. This addresses a complaint I've had for a while: previously it wasn't possible to accurately estimate the cost of a prompt before sending it to be executed.

Via @alexalbert__

Tags: vision-llms, claude-3-5-sonnet, llm, anthropic, claude, ai, llms, pdf, generative-ai, projects

Quoting Question for Department for Science, Innovation and Technology

Lord Clement-Jones: To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the cybersecurity risks posed by prompt injection attacks to the processing by generative artificial intelligence of material provided from outside government, and whether any such attacks have been detected thus far.

Lord Vallance of Balham: Security is central to HMG's Generative AI Framework, which was published in January this year and sets out principles for using generative AI safely and responsibly. The risks posed by prompt injection attacks, including from material provided outside of government, have been assessed as part of this framework and are continually reviewed. The published Generative AI Framework for HMG specifically includes Prompt Injection attacks, alongside other AI specific cyber risks.

Question for Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UIN HL1541, tabled on 14 Oct 2024

Tags: politics, prompt-injection, security, generative-ai, ai, uk, llms

An Electromagnetic Force

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?").

...

The Cloud Is Just My Basement's Computers

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.

...

Life-Critical Side Projects

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:

...

I am, approximately, here

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.

...

A Takahē refactor, as a treat

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.

...

Takahē 0.7

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.

...

Understanding A Protocol

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)

...

Takahē 0.3.0

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.

A screenshot of Takahē

...

Twitter, ActivityPub and The Future

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.

...

Takahē: A New ActivityPub Server

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 screenshot of Takahe

...

I Fight For The Users

By Jeff Atwood

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

The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet

By Jeff Atwood

It's my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice:

By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for

Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

By Jeff Atwood

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.

alt

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

Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing

By Jeff Atwood

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

The Rise of the Electric Scooter

By Jeff Atwood

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, right?

ev-battery-costs

On an

Electric Geek Transportation Systems

By Jeff Atwood

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 VW station wagon

An Exercise Program for the Fat Web

By Jeff Atwood

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.

fat city

Websites have gotten a lot

The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer

By Jeff Atwood

When we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high:

I'm not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications.

We were OK

What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

By Jeff Atwood

I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here's my 15 second answer:

We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It's called Stack Overflow

There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security

By Jeff Atwood

Remember "cybersecurity"?

its-cybersecurity-yay

Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to?

Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world's history. For proof

To Serve Man, with Software

By Jeff Atwood

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 with zero

The Existential Terror of Battle Royale

By Jeff Atwood

It's been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I've done professionally after that. I

Hacker, Hack Thyself

By Jeff Atwood

We've read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if

Thunderbolting Your Video Card

By Jeff Atwood

When I wrote about The Golden Age of x86 Gaming, I implied that, in the future, it might be an interesting, albeit expensive, idea to upgrade your video card via an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.

alt

I'm here to report that the future is now.

Yes, that's

Password Rules Are Bullshit

By Jeff Atwood

Of the many, many, many bad things about passwords, you know what the worst is? Password rules.

Remembering old friends

By [email protected] (Jon North)



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.






Roundup

By [email protected] (Jon North)

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 the past 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 pregnant women, 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.




A quiet summer

By [email protected] (Jon North)

 

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!

just out of hibernation (a year or two ago)






Heat, family and the Tour

By [email protected] (Jon North)



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





Agapanthus in our garden

Voting and things

By [email protected] (Jon North)


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!












Midsummer

By [email protected] (Jon North)

   
 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!




Early June

By [email protected] (Jon North)


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 heroes on 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!





A roundup

By [email protected] (Jon North)


 Sometimes there are carpets of poppies everywhere, this year fewer but this field right next to our car servicing garage kept catching my eye and I caught it just in time while Mary booked the car in for its service.  This post will be a bit of a roundup of things I have posted on Facebook.

A while back I wrote about the plight of migrants and someone thought I might have been referring to our situation.  Of course not - we are incrdibly lucky to have landed on our feet after Brexit thanks to a very fair-minded French government and bureaucracy.  But I am ever more angry and concerned about people who have gone through unimaginable hardships to reach France and the UK, and then find in the UK at least that they are vilified and stranded.  I have been reading the various writings of Sathnam  Sanghera whose disssection of Britains imperial past is trenchant.

His autobiographical The boy with the topknot is among other things a powerful reflection on mental illness in his family; our own experienceshave echos here, and among other things his description of the slow realisation that things are wrong, attempting to rationalise the painful, is something we have known.  I have been fascinated also to see a bit from the inside the experiences of Sikh immigrants to Britain and their cultural context, including marriage exepctations and the complex place of women in his stories.  His novel Marriage material is an excellent read.

Before I pass on to lighter topics, the ongoing inhumaanity of the various refugee themes in the news is not the only awful and distressing thing we hear of and read about daily - the plight of British subpost-people wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office because of long-denied computer problems, the infected blood scandal or the plight of carers forced to pay back benefit overpayments (this links closely to my lontime work with carers through Crossroads) and the ongoing inhumanity around post-war immigrants (from the Windrush etc.) are only somr examples of things which should havce been sorted out long ago but have been swept under bureauratic carpets again and again.  I have often said that Dickens and his Circumlocution Office (in Little Dorrit) seem still  alive and well.  Apart from deliberate inhumanity, there are plenty of ways of mistreating people through shoulder-shrugging neglect - Dickens' "nobody knew" is classic now as then.

Our houshold chugs on, looking forward to a family visit here in a fortnight.  We are daily grateful for Edmond's liveliness at the age of 15!  After a thorough overhaulof the roof, more complex than we had expected, our friendly factotum M.Beaumann has continued his care of our premises with a splendid cleanup of yard and terrace and is now starting on a new front fence.  IN the caourse of this he has discovered some very ancient (well, as old as the house, around 50 years) mains electrical wiring which is still all too live.  A better casing and leaving well alone are the answers.  And our lawnmower is finally going to be cordless!

Lots of my Facebook posts are links to photos published daily in the Guardian, plus th odd cartoon that takes my fancy.  Also photos from French places we know well - the area around the Pic Saint Loup, other parts of our local Languedoc, and the Drôme where our old twin town Die is located, for example.

A night shot of the Pic Saint Loup with boar passing by
by an excellent local photographer, Régis Domergue

Although we have limited opportunity to watch sport on tv (Mary andn I are both gravitating more to radio and podcasts these days - for her it makes knitting easier!) we follow football and cycling keenly at least by results and reports, and I am fascinated to see that Liverpool have appointed another monosyllabic manager, Mr Slot (Arne), to replace the excellent Klopp (Jürgen).

Our language groups (reading and speaking in French with some French people trying their English) continue twice a week, with often excellent shared lunches thrown in - as the weather warms up we can start to  eat outside.

             

We read a lot - among authors we both enjoy are Eva Ibbotson, whose romantic novels with strong links to her Austrian background are beautifully written and full of well-observed characters; and an old favourite, Sara Paretsky whose V.I.Warshawski novels set in Chicago and around.  Sara Paretsky is an avid campaigner for women, and her fearless public profile is simply admirable.

To end, a cartoon and another poppy




Sagas all round

By [email protected] (Jon North)


Sagas have been on my mind in several ways since Easter.  But first, exciting times in the tortoise world.  We were given a new (to us) young one a few weeks ago, and he had been living in a cage inside until the weather warmed.  It has now done so and today the larger tortoise emerged from its hibernation in the enclosure in the garden.  I thought its was a lump of mud at first bat, as you can see, it has scrubbed up nicely and the younger one has joined it in the paddock!




The first saga has been of the literary kind, the Forsytes which have occupied our dvd viewing and my re-reading for the first part of the year.  My name, Jon, was chosen by my dad (who was emotionally attached to the books) because of the young man Jon, the youngest Jolyon of the family.  I think my father was rather muddled because he also professed an admiration for the 'man of property' epitomised by Soames who was on the 'other side' of the family.  Never mind, the story was worth reading again, and the two tv productions  are both good in theier different ways.   But the third part of the 9 volumes, going up almost to Galsworthy's death in the early 1930s, were never dramatised as far as I know and I like them even better than the Victorian and Edwardian ones - a much more nuanced examination of love and marriage, with a dramatic view of mental illness thrown in.


Two less welcome 'sagas' lately have been to do with roof and health, both happily resolved.  You'll recall perhaps that the roof was repaired last year by a firm which promised excellence and, as we thought, delivered it.  It turned out that what they did not do was the issue - first neglecting to tell us of very old insulation which we've now had replaced, and secondly failing to fix any but the end tile in a whole ridge.  Of course we could have no idea that there were problems - in the second case the rattling of tiles in the wind (after a long period of fairly calm weather) told us sometehing was amiss; and luckily our regular house and garden person Monsieur Beaumann was able to sort both.  It turns out that he has long been a roof specialist - if only we had known...

Our conversation groups still active, with new arrivals from Chicago




The health saga is not, for once, my various aches and pains but the long-running one of Mary's heart and blood (since a minor stroke in 2010), very well surveyed but needing careful supervision.  Not for the first time we have been glad of the very local A&E hospital, all built since we came here.  In the past week the care has involved feeet up and suppport stockings which are too hot for comfort when the weather warms up.

The warm srping is a lovely time for flowers, so here are a few more from our garden.






And finally a word of praise for one of the few bits of the British administration that actually seems to work.  With luck and a following wind my new passport should arrive soon, and like Mary's it was efficiently and quickly dealt with despite Brexit horror stories elsewhere.






 

Springtime with rain

By [email protected] (Jon North)

I have written before about the dry conditions here.  But when it rains it really does.  Last week we had 60 mm in a few hours, and another 40 at the weekend, but this morning we are back to bright sunshine and blue skies.  The photo above was taken a few days ago, a pink evening sky which we see quite often.


We have been a bit concerned about Edmond, 14 years old and with dodgy kidneys.  But we've just returned from the vet, and all seems to be fairly well after a blood test and with a bit more diuretic - desmite occasional wheezes, he is lively and has put on a bit of weight.  We hope he will be with us for a little whhile yet.

After our trips to the UK we have mostly stayed home and slotted back into our regular activities.  These photos of our regular Tuesday French conversation group were taken by someone elsse for once, so I'm in one or two!

After a good excursion on DVD into the works of Mrs Gaskell we have passed onto John Galsworthy, not just through 2 tv series of the Forsyte Saga but, for me, rereading the books.  I started on the paper versions but have passed over to the Kindle (lighter to hold in bed).  The Forsytes have a particular association for me because I was called after Jon, son of young Jolyon F.  My father pretended to admire the 'Man of Propeerty' characterised by Soames but much about Dad seems to me to have been nearer the softer, more emotional other side of the family, the Jolyons and their ilk.  Rereading for the 4th or 5th time I find much in the detail of the written version which can only be hinted at in a tv adaptation, and in the end it is the characters of Soames and his daughter Fleur which dominate the first 6 of the 9 books in the saga.  Of the final 3, which are far less well-known, I may write more anon.

Since we returned from the UK for the second time this year, we had one very enjoyable outing to see our friend Barry who lives in these rural surroundings in the area called the Laurargais south-east of Toulouse.  Barry is South African in origin but had long re-acclimatised to England where I met him in the Canonbury Chamber Choir in the 1970s.  He and his partner Peter (now sadly no longer alive) moved to France with their interest in antiques, and the house is a living reminder of those interests.  

A few garden pittures to end with.  Spring is with us, and the clocks go forward this weekend.





Home and more or less in good shape

By [email protected] (Jon North)

 

The light greeting our return

It is lovely to be back in the bright, light Languedoc.  Don't get me wrong, we had a very good trip (apart from the first few hours when the motorways here were closed by prefectoral decree, because of farmers' protests - 5 hours to get near Lyon then a speeding fine for going 8 km/hr too fast in our relief at escaping the jams).  We spent excellent days with our family, saw interesting things and ate and drank well.  Our return trip, despite threats of farmers' blockages) was calm and trouble-free.  We have established a simple, untiring driving routine, turn and turn about at the wheel with short breaks for fuel and snacks, and the hotels we used were convenient and reasonably comfortable.  

But on return our  wifi was (literally) on the blink, and we waited 3 days for the engineer to arrive.  The new world of telephones, internet, tv and radio has changed everyting.  Like most people, a few years ago we had a fixed telephone line through which an adequate internet connection could be made.  Then fibre arrived, and everything became much faster.  Above all, the internet require more and more capacity to keeep up with graphics and so on.  Now, everything comes in theory through the fibre-optic cable, much faster - if it works.  If not, there is no longer a fixed phone line, no internet and only the old tv signals via the aerial (if they work at all - I have not checked).  The tv satellite dish no longer works for British tv.  I am a sad old geezer who has not taken on board the brave new world of mobile phones which our children and theirs swear by.  For one thing the screens are too small - I love my iPad and computer whhich my old eyes can read.  And of course, we pay for the service we are not getting.

Goodbye to Jeff and Fi at the end of a marvellous week together

Since I started to write this a very helpful man arrived, fixed up our internet and left before we had a chance to make sure our phone line was working.  It was not and is not.  So now we decide whether to abandon our 'landline' phones and tell everyone to call on our mobiles, or try to get things straight  for the time being it's the mobiles or nowt.  Watch this space, as they say.  Above all,  do not phone 04 67 85 52 12 - you may leave a message which is never heard.

Until we arrived home, the only shock of our return trip was seeing the appalling mess strewn across the roundabout as we left the A9 here  for the main N113 road.  At the risk of being a serial moaner, I was shocked by the piles of rubbish left behind by the protestors.  I think we have always been in favour of fair prices for farmers - we enjoy good food and have the privilege to be able to pay for it.  So I support the agriculteurs in their demands for better conditions, and for proper rewards for local produce rather than cheap imports.  we love our local greengrocer who knows his local growers personally and guarantees freshness.  I just cannot understand why protestors should not clear up their mess.  We saw the final traces being bulldozed and shovelled away as we drove around yeterday, presumably a week or more since the first demos.  A lot of work for people not at all involved in the original  protests.



Anyway, this blog was among other things a way of sharing the odd notes I post on Facebook most days with you who do not use that dodgy medium.  Here are a few recent ones.   Letter to the Guardian: “I am grateful to His Maj for his encouragement to men to have the check (King Charles ‘doing well’ after prostate treatment, 26 January). I visited my GP and was examined, blood-tested and referred to my local NHS hospital in March 2022. I have now waited 22 months for an appointment. And waited etc. Of what exactly is he an example? (John Dinning, Cardiff)”

Another letter to the Guardian: ”Your article on a reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry (29 January) should have mentioned the copy in Reading Museum, sewn by 35 women from Leek in the 19th century. It’s beautifully exhibited in the lovely town hall, with free entry. (Plus older Londoners can travel there on their Freedom Pass on the Elizabeth line.) A great day out. (Rosie Boughton, London)”

And part of yet another letter to the Guardian, which rings strong bells: “…the huge issue for me, and many other drivers according to recent RAC research, is the dangerous dazzling effect of higher, brighter LED lights. I am an older driver, and acknowledge this is likely to impact on my night driving, but my optician has assured me that it’s not me, it’s the cars. I find night-time driving, if there is a lot of oncoming traffic, utterly terrifying, and feel trapped at home on winter evenings. It’s time for a close analysis of accidents attributed to dazzle, and legislation to ensure the safest possible headlight design and position. (Sheila Hutchins,Tregony, Cornwall)”


This on my mind very often: the face of local decline and fall. “Many councils are barely able to carry out their statutory and growing responsibilities in adult and child social care, let alone engage in the kind of “discretionary” spending that enhances the life of their communities. Last week, facing a rebellion by Conservative MPs fearful of further cuts in an election year, Mr Gove made an extra £600m available to local authorities. Useful but nowhere near enough.” The sign of timid, scared central government is to keep ever tighter central control over local spending.

Then, Jurgen Klopp is retiring as Liverpool manager - what a loss, but we all get older - he certainly deserves the rest of his life.  And Nottingham is among many local councils nearing bankruptcy - how can this be alowed to happen?



Photos from our travels

By [email protected] (Jon North)

More from our UK trip this week, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Parrk and in Uttoxeter


















Travellers' tales

By [email protected] (Jon North)

We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the French farmers' protests. We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening (original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it). 

Most of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures, so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales, interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey. 

 Despite the tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits. Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up for the lack of a full meal. 

We have gravitated towards the Logis de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the familiar ambience still attracts us. The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have plenty of time. 

Our first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave for home at the end of the week.

 

Travellers' tales

By Jon North ([email protected])

We are in the UK for the second time since Christmas, this time visiting Jeff and Fi in their new home in Uttoxeter. Like the first trip to Sam and Sas in Wirksworth, over new year, we are driving which has all sorts of advantages. However, this time things are complicated by the French farmers' protests. We set out from Lunel at 7.30 a.m. last Wednesday, but what should have been a quick 2-3 hours' journey to Lyon turned into 9 hours, and we eventually arived at our hotel in Cambrai around 9.30 in the evening (original plan, before 5 and in daylight - we are frequently caught driving after dark however much we try to plan to avoid it). 

Most of the motorway closures were officially organised by the Préfectures, so we drove most of the way south of Lyon on routes nationales, interesting but much slower. After that we just trundled on fairly empty motorways, but continuing on Thursday we were held up again by closures even on the short stretch to Calais and the tunnel. But there was no major holdup and we arrived at our friends Elizabeth & Nigel in good time, well tucked away in rural Surrey. 

 Despite the tedium of the Wednesday morning journey we were glad to get a different perspective and view of the northern Rhône vineyards around Crozes Hermitage whhich we have known for many years on occasional visits. Later on the town of Cambrai seemed interesting, with a splendid redbrick railway station just opposite our hotel - we resolved to exlor in the future when less pressed by travel unknowns. And the hotel itself was, as we found out on our earlier visit, very comfortable and friendly, with an excellent and welcome range of bar snacks to make up for the lack of a full meal. 

We have gravitated towards the Logis de France chain over many years because it always welcomes pets, and although we left our current dog Edmond in kennels on these trips the familiar ambience still attracts us. The farmers' protests look likely to continue, and we don't know if we'll be delayed on the way home next weekend. But luckily we have plenty of time. 

Our first day was delayed by official motorway closures, but more often the hold-ups are caused by long slow queues of tractors, one of which we saw heading south as we set out for Calais on Thursday. Shortly after that the authorities closed the A26 motorway for a short stretch, but we had a short journey and good alternative routes to the Tunnel. So after out overnight with friends on Thursday we drove at a leisurely pace to our home for the week in Uttoxeter, where we are very comfortably housed by Jeff and Fi who find a bit of time for us despite their busy working lives. We saw Sam, Sas and Ben for lunch on Sunday and shall see other friends and visit Wirksworth again before we leave for home at the end of the week.

A new year with wine - a post for everyone, not just wine buffs!

By Jon North ([email protected])

Solutré, near Macon

Some of my friends are not really interested in wine and tend to skip these blog posts.  So before you  do that this time I will just add a note about the fascination for me apart from the stuff in the bottle or glass.  As you  can see from the photos, scenery is one of the many attractions.

 

Châtillon-en-Diois
 

 Wine exploration has shaped our visits to France ever since we started regular trips here 30 years ago.  If you look at the map of France, relatively small physical areas are taken up by vineyards, and you are much more likely to find yourself in logging forests or endless of cereals and grass, like the open horizons and rolling slopes of the northern plain we drove through on our way to England at the end of last year.

Beaujolais
 

But we hunt out the vineyards not just for nice wine but for the interesting people and scenery we discover, get to know and love.  I think of the beautiful villages just near us in Lunel or north of Montpellier around the Pic Saint Loup; or of the vineyards of the Entre Deux Mers area south of Bordeaux - the two 'seas' here are the rivers Garonne and Dordogne as the flow northwards to join together as the Gironde at Bordeaux; or of the cossetted iconic hilly  country of Beaujolais and the Côte d'Or in Burgundy and the breathtaking rocky beauty of the Rhône valley, whether near the great river at Condrieu and Crozes Hermitage just south of Lyon or, one of our favourite places, Beaumes de Venise tucked under the Dentelles de Montmirail, once best known for its fortified sweet muscat wines but now among the best red wine labels.

 

While I always liked wine, it was meeting people who were and are involved in making it that has captured our  attention.  Jean-Michel and Christine Jacob have just retired from their Hauts Côtes de Beaune vineyard and J-M will doubtless now have more time for his beautiful  art/sculpture, two pieces of which adorn our hallway.  Jean-Philippe Servières, our best local winemaker near Lunel, would probably like to retire, having had precious little chance of a holiday over the past 20 years; and Benoit Viot of the wonderfully-named Chemin des Rêves north of Montpellier has gone from small beginnings - we bought our first wines sitting in the kitchen in Grabels - to becoming president of the prestigious appellation Pic Saint Loup.  

 

We have got to know many other landscapes in the Languedoc, Rhône valley, the Diois (where twinning opened our interest in the Rhône Valley and beyond), or the wide variety of landscapes we have explored across the south - the wild hillls of the Corbières, coastal étangs around the Mediterranean where Picpoul de Pinet is produced, or tiny appellations with unusual grapes like Fronton north of Toulouse.  We discovered Seyssel in the far north of the Rhone valley towards Geneva thanks to musician friend and mentor Stéphane Fauth (and his wife Chantal whose cooking helped to 'oil' the many music courses we  shared).  And we have started to discover the Loire Valley, one of the longest river courses in France which always confused me because the river flows north a long way, just a short distance from the south-flowing Saone and Rhône, before turning left and west at Orleans towards the Atlantic; we got to know various bits of the river - Sancerre, the Touraine, a stretch towards Angers, on various drives south from different channel ports and thanks to good friends Sue and Ian who have a house south of Tours.


Fronton


2007-core nostalgia extravaganza

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!)

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namesake mcmansion

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.

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the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

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.

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texas gothic revival

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.

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ode to a faux grecian urn

Howdy everyone,

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.

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Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!

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.

we’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven

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.

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pre-recession, post-taste

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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Bonus McMansion Hell: Ye Olde Barrington

In which I am in my castle era.

mojo dojo casa house

Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I’m back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I’m sure you’ve all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.

Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It’s just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.

Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.

Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.

It is undeniable that they put the “great” in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.

The island bit is so funny. It’s literally so far away it’s hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.

Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.

The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.

Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.

Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.

You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it’s planned but:

Not really.

Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I’ll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today’s bonus posts.

Also P.S. - I’m the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

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BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition

BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition

dome sweet dome

As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:

This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.

First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind’s eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.

Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.

The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.

Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.

The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi…but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.

(elevator music starts playing)

This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don’t think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood…..,

Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it’s been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)

And finally:

We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.

Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!

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Hi everyone: I’ve written a long deep-dive on the present state of the McMansion, from farmhouse…

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