OFCOM sent a mildly threatening letter about One Touch Switching and the impending deadline.
I replied by email, two, nothing. So wrote, and nothing.
So now this.
We'll see if they reply.
Update: OFCOM want a call, yay!
Update: Useful call, OFCOM listening.
OK, being constructive
I am pondering what could be done right now. So some thoughts...
Firstly - this is not simply pedantry, or my getting pissed that I misread the spec - this is not hypothetical. Working with other CPs, and monitoring testing on my NOTSCO test platform, yesterday, half the CPs testing were falling foul of the latest checks on source correlationID added because of TOTSCO bulletin 66. I see other CPs are running in to all the issues I have raised with the specifications. Most of the errors my test platform picks up would not be picked up by the existing TOTSCO testing process.
I feel some people with some clue how to write a clear specification and understand the challenges of coding systems to meet such a specification are engaged with TOTSCO and taken seriously. I can help (though probably not for free - though have I made many suggestions anyway).
I feel the specifications need to be consolidated and simplified and put in one place - there are too many parts, in different places, some freely available, some under a login on the control pages, some XLS, some a web page, some PDF, and so on, it is a total mess. Clear and complete set of specifications in one place.
TOTSCO need the specifications updated, and kept updated, and a process to notify updates to all CPs involved, so they can ensure compliance. This means proper change controlled notices of what has changed, not a random bulletin that assumes/implies a serious change to a spec that is in a change freeze! Even if this was a weekly spec update with all changes sent to all CPs.
I feel going for 12th Sep is fine - we have to start somewhere, but for the start of full OTS usage, and not a requirement for all CPs to be on line, simply because I am not sure there is time for that. But from that date, all CPs that are live on TOTSCO should offer it as part of their ordering process, related to other CPs that are on TOTSCO.
Some later deadline for all CPs, maybe an even later one for small CPs.
I definitely think a self service test platform is needed for API and OTS with all sorts of scenarios (valid and error testing) and messages both ways, needs to be in place, and a key part of compliance testing. I have one, and I am happy to work with TOTSCO if they want to use it. But it literally took only a couple days to make, so TOTSCO could make one themselves. Testing should be to a reference implementation and against the specification. In practice making this a CP on pre-production (and even live), called TEST, with a control page on TOTSCO to manage tests and replies and logs, would be ideal.
We also seem to lack a way to contact other CPs when live to address issues - and a way for TOTSCO to arbitrate that one CP claims another CP does not meet the spec. A clear spec is needed, but a whole inter CP dispute process needs to be in place - and a reference test system would be invaluable for that.
By now, you’ll have seen that Ofcom have banned inflation-linked prices rises during the contract term for “customers.” Ofcom’s PR machine deliberately misleading the public as to the scope of the rule change (it only applies to consumer and small…
Central Oxford lacks any kind of playground, or even any kind of public "run around" green space. Twice I have been stopped by tourists and asked where they can take their children to play. Lots of residents tell me they would spend more time in the city centre if they had somewhere they could let […]
One of the big issues I had in initial coding was the use of correlationID on messages. The test cases showed it being used the same on a sequence of messages, e.g. a Switch Order had a destination correlation which only made sense if it was a response to a Match Confirmation, for example. I was wrong, but not for lack of reading the spec.
The API spec says this: In a source element, the correlationID must always be provided, the format can be anything the originator chooses to support their messaging process but should be sufficiently unique to allow correlation of response with request over a reasonable period.
This makes it clear what purpose the correlation ID has, it matters to sender so they can correlate response with request. It also makes it clear the sender is who chooses the correlationID.
Now, for that purpose a Match Request, and subsequent Switch Order, and Switch Order Trigger could all have the same correlationID. Indeed, arguably, a sender could use the same correlation on all Switch Order related messages because the messages all carry a Switch Order Reference, which can be used to tie the response to a specific order. An obvious choice, and we nearly did this, was to use the actual switch order reference as the correlationID.
Also, there is nothing to stop an originator, when generating a reply, to use correlationIDs differently, as they don't expect a response to that reply, and there is no correlation of response with request.Again, an obvious choice for the various switch order messages would be the switch order reference, as this is the one thing missing from a MessageDeliveryFailure message, and would allow that error to tie to a switch order.
TOTSCO Bulletin 66
TOTSCO just released bulletin 66, on handling received (from hub) messages better, notably on response times and validation, but also on handling duplicate requests. They detail a recommendation that the messages are cached for a while, per originating RCPID and source correlationID, and use this to spot a duplicate.
If a sender chose to use the same correlationID for a Match Request and Switch Order, which is definitely sufficiently unique to allow correlation of response with request as per the spec, the recipient would see the Switch Order as a duplicate message and ignore it, maybe resending the Match Confirmation.
If the sender chose to use the SOR on switch order messages or replies, the recipient would see all messages after the first as duplicates, and ignore them.
So now, if effect, based on just a bulletin, the specification mandates that every message sent (request or reply) has a unique correlationID, something not in the spec. In general this is a good idea, but the API spec should have stated that at the start! It now means the source correlation ID matters to the recipient as well, not just the sender. And they have not changed the spec as it is in a change freeze. Oh, and there is no size limit for a correlationID.
The bulletin does not even actually say the sender correlationID has to be unique, it basically assumes it is and explains how recipients can assume it is for spotting duplicate messages!
Once again, a fiasco.
P.S. Our implementation does unique source correlationID already (uses a UUID).
Also, I have updated the NOTSCO test platform to warn of duplicates, and generate a duplicate as well to test CPs handling of duplicates.
Just to add, the confusion caused by the poor specifications is real. Not just that we were confused by the examples implying a way of working, but I monitor the NOTSCO testing and see other CPs doing similar things, based on the specification, that are going to be problems. I'm just waiting for this new check to kick off and show a CP assuming they can pick source correlationIDs for their own purposes (this did happen later in the day). In fact, looking at logs today (we only keep for a day) I already see duplicated correlationIDs that will break when sent to any CP following TOTSCO Bulletin 66.
This is a bigger issue than you realise!
We originally coded with a way of working with correlationIDs that would fall foul of any CP following bulletin 66. We changed later once TOTSCO confirmed that basically its test cases are wrong.
I am seeing now half of the CPs testing on NOTSCO hitting the duplicate test.
The whole way TOTSCO do testing is two random CPs testing against each other. That would NOT have picked up this at all. So the CPs carry on.
Then, wham, on 12th Sep, some OTS messaging breaks because one of the CPs followed the spec (which has NOT BEEN UPDATED) and one implements the de-duplication in bulletin 66.
The fact TOTSCO do ZERO formal testing against the spec is just a serious problem - that is just irresponsible. I'm amazed OFCOM allow it.
Hi All, I don’t think an introduction is needed here as I’m sure I have spoken to you, but for those who don’t know, I’m Jakob, a Level 3 Support Engineer and newly minted Support Team Leader here at Simwood. …
The S3 has build in USB, which means literally just connecting GPIO 19 and 20 to D- and D+ on a USB socket - not even any resistors! It operates as a USB device out of the box, appearing as a serial/JTAG port. It just works on standard USB serial drivers on linux and MacOS (and I assume, Windows).
And that is it, it detects the chip, and flashes the bootloader and code.
No special leads, it is that simple.
Smaller footprint
The only issue is that this all works if you have the complete ESP IDF installed, with its python and cross compiler environment, and your code checked out and built (or able to build). This is not hard, there are simple steps to do this, but it takes a lot of space.
So, I wanted something simpler so I could make a small machine, ideally a Raspberry Pi, that just flashed code. Thankfully, all I need is esptool, i.e.
pip install esptool
And then I can flash using that rather than the whole IDF. It is more complex, e.g.
But that is simple to script. One tool installed and the binaries from my repository, and job done!
One device after the next
The challenge is that I want to do bulk programming - i.e. flash a device, get clear confirmation it worked, then just plug in the next device. I don't want to run a command each time.
Getting confirmation it works is easy as all my boards have an LED, usually a tiny 1x1mm WS2812 colour LED, and that starts blinking as soon as the board starts. Indeed, the code is signed and checked on boot, so if any issues flashing it won't start.
Indeed, where I have done this I have had there separate instances running and 3 USB ports and leads, so I could plug in one after the other, unplugging when I see it is flashed and running. Really slick!
What I was doing was
idf.py flash monitor
This flashes, and then runs, and monitors serial output (which can be useful if there are additional diagnostics to show, but the main indicator is the on board LED).
The problem is you then have to kill the monitor for each board (ctrl ]). Even just disconnecting USB appears to wait for device to reconnect. I created a convoluted bit of C code to run monitor, and check output, looking for the string it gets for a new device, and exit. That way I could flash, and then run this, in a loop. Works well.
The problem is that, once again, this is using the whole ESP IDF just to run the idf.py command. And it seems esptool does not do a monitor function!
My own monitor code
In principle it is really easy to make my own C code to open the USB (serial) port directly, and set DTR and RTS appropriately to reset the board in running mode (rather than bootloader mode).
This worked perfectly on my Mac. Some simple code, waits for the right string to indicated a new board, and exits. It also does not need the whole ESP IDF to run.
But no!
The first issue is that the ESP32, with no code loaded, seemed to trip the power on the USB port. It is odd, and maybe the regulator I am using creates just enough of a power spike, or something (never bothered my Mac), I don't know. The fix was a powered USB hub.
The next issue is that once code is loaded, even with a powered USB hub, it seems the start up with WiFi is enough to then trip the power, so it constantly resets and does not blink the LED.
I finally found a power hub that just works with linux.
But there is weirder!
The other weirdness was that on the raspberry Pi, it seems it would not play properly with RTS and DTR and constantly came up in bootloader mode regardless. I simply could not get it to play, it was like DTR was not being set. The only difference seems to be it is using an OTG serial driver. On two separate bigger linux boxes, using a different driver, it works as expected (and ends up in a boot loop, as I said above).
I don't know how one can change the serial driver on a Pi, suggestions welcome (google did not help me).
It feels weird to be writing anything right now that isn't somehow related to Friday's CrowdStrike incident, but given I recorded this video just a few hours before all hell broke loose, it'll have to wait until next week. This week, the issue that
This should give you some idea of the issues with a simple matter of providing a broadband service. Bear in mind the broadband service may have a linked telephone service - i.e. be ADSL or VSDL on a phone line, and the customer may, or may not, want that number to carry on working some how.
It used to be we could take over the broadband and leave the telephone alone, or, we could take over number and broadband as a BT line, or we could take over broadband and port the number to VoIP.
It is more complicated with the retirement of old fashioned phone service - we cannot move the line to broadband with us on a telephone line any more, we have to move to something called SOGEA or SOADSL, which is a broadband service with no telephone service on the line. So we have to offer customer choice to lose number to move to VoIP.
So lets look at some of the combinations we have to handle, and do One Touch Switching for...
It could be a service that is totally different, like Starlink or something - we provide new broadband and OTS co-ordinates the cease. Simple.
More likely, BT/Openreach broadband and BT/Openreach phone service using a BT number range number. Yes, that specific set (regardless of resellers, which may not be the same for broadband and telephone) is special as we can do an integrated port moving broadband and porting phone as one order in to BT. As you can imagine working out it is this exact combination can be tricky, and end user may not know.
Could be BT/Openreach broadband, and a BT/Openreach phone line, but not a BT number range number, in which case we migrate the broadband and port the number separately as we cannot do an integrated port.
Could be BT/Openreach broadband, and MPF phone line, in which case harder to check, and we can port the number separately as we cannot do an integrated port.
Could be BT/Openreach FTTP with and associated phone number which may be even VoIP, but is linked at the BT account so would die if migrating broadband. I think that has to be a separate number port, but not sure - it may allow an integrated port if a BT number range. We'll have to test that one to be sure.
Could be BT/Openreach broadband and BT/Openreach phone service, but the new service is FTTP, so a separate physical service. This can be coordinated to allow old broadband to be ceased but leave phone line in place, at least for now.
Could be BT/Openreach with no phone number associated, yay! simple migrate.
Could be CityFibre which won't have a phone number, yay! simple migrate.
For the OTS, somehow we have to explain the options so they can make an informed choice!
Porting the number adds an extra step too, now.
The OTS match for broadband using number to identify it may (or may not) come back with an option to retain/cease, or we could do the OTS with IAS and NBICS "port" request, making one "switching order" for broadband and number port, if that is offered as an option.
The OTS match may or may not mention a number linked to the line, depends if the reseller of the broadband knows if there is a number and what it is - the number could be a totally different reseller. But we may be able to work out the service has a BT/Openreach number based on the broadband checking in BT. If the customer knows the number we may be able to do an integrated port on the broadband. It is not impossible for neither the old broadband retailer, nor us, to know there is a number, and then that number gets zapped - so we have to ask the customer if they are sure, regardless.
If the broadband OTS does not have a number port on the same switch order, we'll have to do a secondary OTS for the number port, possibly with different retailer, for the same address. Then we have to manage and track two switch orders. We probably need to do that even for the integrated port option.
Either the broadband, or the number, or both may not be able to do an OTS check if the service is a business, or the retail provider is not on TOTSCO yet, so we have to handle that.
At the end of the day, this is a couple of extra pages of stuff to fill in on our order forms for customers now! It also adds new ways for things to go wrong.
The very small light at the end of the tunnel is the telephone number porting OTS should advise the Network Provider and the CUPID which should allow the port to go smoothly. We're looking forward to testing that!
I have done many blogs, so this is a summary, mainly aimed at other CPs. I hope it helps.
Gotchas
I am going to try and cover some gotchas, but a lot can be avoided by checking out ProposedChanges.md
Get on board
If you are a communications provider doing residential, fixed location, broadband or telephone service you have to do this shit, sorry. OFCOM rules, and so law. Get to totsco.org.uk and sign up. There is a deadline of 12th September 2024 for all retail CPs covered by this to be ready.
You may, instead, be able to use a managed access provider, but that sounds iffy to me as they need access to all your data, and you probably still have to do most of the work to integrate with your systems I expect. To be quite honest, it is not that hard.
How long?
I spent a week on this initially - much was cleaning up our address records, and reading specs, before coding it. I made a test system as part of this, but nothing like NOTSCO. I have done various small bits since, and spent several days integrating to our ordering, but mostly it has been waiting for TOTSCO. I spent another week making the NOTSCO platform from scratch, and wish I had done that first. Total elapsed time a little over 5 weeks. I'll not doubt do more once we are live and we encounter some unexpected edge cases.
The specifications
There are a load of specifications, and a few you need to read are:
API specification
OTS message specification
Industry Process
Error codes list
Network Operators list
Example messages
But there is a lot, and not very well structured, or consistent. I suggest also checking ProposedChanges.md
API to TOTSCO
The basic steps in talking to/from TOTSCO are not hard. They have a choice of authentication and we chose OAUTH2. After the basic OAUTH2 you are basically sending JSON payloads each way to/from the hub, and the format is simple with an envelope and payload. There are loads of tools and libraries to handle such APIs.
Watch out for my correlationID section in ProposedChanges.md as this caused me to waste a day, at least, as I assumed the examples implied a longer term correlationID. You need one on every message you send, and may as well be unique to each message, so you can correlate a reply. You need to correlated the reply for a match request anyway, and should for other messages as they can come back as messageDeliveryFailure, so can't just use the switch order reference to handle the reply.
OTS messages
The next level is the OTS switching messages. These fall in two parts. The match request and reply, and then the set of switch order starting, updating, cancelling, and triggering.
You may want to make a system for sending and receiving these, and then integrating that in to your ordering and customer management systems. I chose to make a library with some good command line options for testing and then a higher level integration of that library in our ordering system.
Making a match request
In principle this is actually quite easy, there are not many options or fields. The only hard part is correctly forming an address, and if you can, using UPRN. For IAS that can be it. If you don't get a match you can ask customer for account number and circuit ID and add that. For number porting you have a telephone number, which is the crucial component. We use BT/Openreach address tools which make this relatively easy, and provide a UPRN, but O/S have an AddressBase product which is good as well.
Matching an address, and sending a response
This is slightly harder, the main gotchas are address matching - the industry process has a huge section on that, and matching surname, on which is says much less. Removing accents and changing ß to ss, are the main thing for a surname. Even so, matching is probably not too hard, and you can always expect an account number to enhance the match if not sure. You do need to automate this, as the SLA is 60 seconds. You do need to contact the customer (e.g. email) if you match, including early termination fees.
Handling a match response
In many ways this is the hard part as you can get a lot of different answers even for a simple match request - maybe numbers are in a block and some will be ceased if you port one. Maybe there is a number tied to a broadband line - which is a whole new can of worms as losing provider may have a retain option buy you know you are changing to SOGEA which kills the number. Ultimately you need to then pick one, or give your customer a choice, somehow explaining the actually meaning of these options. That can be tricky to do in a clear way.
Bear in mind you may have to continue without using One Touch Switching, as before, as the customer may not want to switch their existing service, or they may have a business service.
Getting a switch order
This is actually really easy, you get told the switch order (which you saved from the match), and you just need to put in your customer database and update the customer (e.g. email). Any migration (e.g. broadband or number port) happens as normal anyway. The switch order messages allow you to record the handover date (plannedDate and activationDate). If not a migrate then that is the same as a customer ceasing by other means. You do need to work out early termination changes, but probably have the processes for that, and billing, all in place from the notice of termination system.
Generating a switch order
Again this is pretty easy. We opted to send the order as part of customer order process, and then any other messages on a daily job - advising if a change of date, cancelled, or completed. The actual ordering system are the same as they were before, doing a migrate or a new install in the same way as normal, but just these extra outgoing messages at the key stages.
Simulator
TOTSCO run a simulator which is crap, but may be worth getting out of the way early. They will allow you to short cut that if you manage a message both ways showing connectivity. We could not go further because their fixed messages were not valid, so we had no switch order to start, so skipped all but one message.
Pre-production testing
The next step is a slight fiasco - you need to team up with a buddy CP who is on the pre-production platform. We did this with two CPs, one of which turned out to be just starting, and it was like watching paint dry. The other was all ready, had a very slick system, and we got through all tests in 90 minutes - most of which was each of us working around our normal systems to fool them that an order had started and finished and so on. But getting TOSTCO to find a buddy CP can take ages, and the whole thing is basically pot luck, there is no checking against a reference system or to the specification.
Oh, and for extra fiasco, we were expected to do 1000 messages. This is not like testing 1000 different addresses or something, just that we did a 1000 messages. A command starting "repeat 1000 ..." was used, and took a few minutes.
Production testing
If pre-production testing was a fiasco, production testing is a joke!
They booked a two hour slot for this. It requires one message. They actually insisted on one exchange of messages each way (4 messages in total).
It took 15 minutes, and the reason it took so long was they were seemingly hand crafting the messages they sent, so each message they sent took some minutes to prepare. This is beyond stupid, if you ask me. They even managed to hand craft an invalid message which meant waiting for them to eventually send a correct one.
But the criteria is just that - a pair of message exchanges, and you are live on production. Once again, no test against a reference system, and no testing to the specification.
Want to do it right?
I got so pissed off I created NOSTCO, which provides an unofficial, independent, free, test environment for One Touch Switching development. It allows you to try a lot of messages, each way, with a lot of different combinations - particularly important for handling the myriad of possible switch match responses.
What is really good is that it analyses each message, and reports any issues, with reference to the specification. It allows you a playground to work through development, testing as you go, from the most basic connectivity, to completing the whole sequence of switch match and order, each way.
It makes a scorecard of message types, so you can see you have good coverage, and allows a range of fixed nasty messages to test your error handling and edge cases.
Not over yet
Of course the real fun will start when we start doing live switches with other CPs.
I ran into a troubleshooting scenario the other day which ended up
adding to the list of things that I need to check on when trying to
figure out why packets seem to be disappearing. It went like this.
I showed up at a site where I'm running some weather station sensors and
jumped on the console of one of the Linux boxes. My visit was about
adding some sensors to some new areas, and I wanted to see how things
were going. In particular, I wanted to see how the receiver on the
local machine was doing, and what it had managed to log of late.
I tried netcat instead... same thing. Instead of connecting, it just
hung there. I looked in ip6tables... nothing. This host has no rules
at the moment: nothing in 'filter', 'nat', 'mangle', etc. This should
Just Work.
This site isn't running IPv6 natively due to a dumb ISP, but there are
still ULA and link-local addresses, so I tried one of those from another
host on the same network. That also went nowhere.
Looking in tcpdump, it was pretty clear: SYN comes in, nothing returns.
But, at the same time, I could change from that port to something like
22 and it would work fine. I'd get the usual banner from sshd.
Assuming it was something stupid I had done with my own code somehow, I
ran another program as a test, then tried connecting to it over v6. It
worked fine.
I straced it to make sure it was handing the IPv6 listener fd to poll().
It was. It wasn't getting any sort of notification from the kernel.
But, actually, hold up, no SYN/ACK happened, so there's no way it would
have gotten anywhere near userspace.
I stopped the service with systemctl and put up a netcat listening on
the same TCP port (nc -6 -l -p 1234) ... and then I could connect to
that just fine. So, it's not something magic about the port, somehow.
It's just that port when it's going to the service which normally runs
on it.
I started making a list to see what the patterns were. This box, this
program, talking to ::1? Bad. Another box at this site, same program,
also talking to ::1? Same problem.
Was it because this site has no v6 routing to the outside world? That
makes no sense as to why ::1 wouldn't work, but, hey, one more thing to
discard. I invented a fake route. Nothing happened (fortunately).
Next I started up a Debian VM on my laptop, hooked one of the radios to
it, and started the receiver program on it by hand. It ran just fine,
and accepted traffic over IPv6 to that same port without any trouble.
It's on the same v6-route-less network as the other hosts, so what's up
with that, right?
Maybe I did something stupid with the config file for the program, so I
copied that across verbatim from one of the site hosts instead of just
making a fresh one for testing. It didn't change things.
What if I dump the v4 listener on that port and just run the v6
listener? Nothing. What if I add a listener on another port? Nothing.
Now that port also drops packets when I try to connect to it that way.
I don't know what it was about this last point, but somewhere around
here, a couple of ideas finally connected in my head and I went "uh,
systemd".
The failing instances were both running as systemd services. The
successful instances (whether the thermo_server program, or my other
test stuff) were just me doing ./foo from a shell.
That's when I thought about the hardening work I'd been applying to my
systemd services of late. I've been taking away all kinds of abilities
that they really don't need.
One of the newer tricks in systemd is that you can do "IPAddressDeny="
and then "IPAddressAllow" and keep a program from exchanging traffic
with the rest of the world. For a program that's only ever supposed to
talk to the local network, this was a good idea.
That's when I saw it: I had 127.0.0.0/8 and the local RFC 1918 networks
on the Allow line, but *not* ::1, never mind the ULA prefix or the
link-local v6 stuff. Adding ::1 and doing the usual daemon-reload &&
restart <service> thing fixed it.
Here's the deal: systemd implements that by injecting bpf program(s)
when you ask it to filter traffic by IP addresses in the .service file.
When this thing rejects traffic, it just drops it on the floor. It does
this past the point where ip[6]tables would match it, and well before
the point where it would generate a SYN/ACK or whatever else.
There are no counters associated with this, and it doesn't generate any
messages in the syslog or whatever. The packets just disappear.
It's effectively equivalent to an ip[6]tables rule of "-j DROP", but at
least those rules have byte and packet counters that you'd see
incrementing when you're smashing your head against it. This just
makes the packets disappear and nobody has any idea what's going on.
So, if you ever see traffic effectively being blackholed to the port or
ports which are bound for a particular systemd-run service without
anything showing up in your iptables (or let's face it, nftables) stuff,
you'd better check to see if there are IPAddress* rules in the .service
file. That might just explain it.
Hopefully you'll remember this and not waste a bunch of time like I just
did.
FTC boss must be doing something right if folks will pay to get her binned
LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman was quick to express support for Kamala Harris' bid for the US presidency this year after incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside, and now the reason has become clear: He's hoping she'll fire FTC boss and Big Tech arch-critic Lina Khan.…
This is long and ridiculous. Sorry. My (30f) husband, Luke (33m), had a sister, Laura (29f). We were all close and saw each other 2-3 times a month, along with their parents. Almost 6 months ago, Laura fell down the stairs at their family home and died. It was a freak accident, there's a window on the half landing and she hit her head on the sill.
I was the last person to see her. I was there for less than 10 minutes and she was in her pyjamas making coffee. I didn't even stay for a drink, and I struggle with how such a brief and meaningless interaction could have been her last. She deserved so much more.
My husband and I have only been married for a year but we've been together for 4 and have known each other for 20+. When Laura's parents found her they called my husband straight away and we rushed over. We faced the whole thing as a family. In the days after, Luke started quizzing me. Exactly what we talked about, what she was wearing, where we were standing etc. It progressed to saying I was providing conflicting information (on tiny details he was deliberately misunderstanding) and accusing me of withholding information because I couldn't tell him things like what pyjamas she was wearing. This escalated quickly but lasted for less than a week, as I lost my cool and made it clear that I was done answering questions. He didn't bring it up again and I wrote it off as a grief quirk. His behaviour was generally that of a normal, grieving person.
Last Friday, he outright accused me of murdering her, in front of his parents. Out of the blue. We were all stunned. There was an inquest which recently concluded, and there was never any doubt the verdict would be accidental death. He said it was completely obvious and he couldn't believe that no one else could see it. He claims I went through his phone and found his messages with Laura (I have absolutely no idea what messages he's talking about, I have never looked at his phone) and that I went over to confront her and things "got out of hand" and I pushed her downstairs. By the end he was shouting about going to the police and getting the inquest overturned, and how I wasn't going to get away with it. Let me be clear - Laura and I had a great relationship. We all did. I have no idea where this has come from, other than these messages I haven't seen, and even then, I don't think there's anything I could ever see on someone's phone that would drive me to murder. It's just ridiculous.
He's been with his parents since this happened and will not talk to me at all. I've had some contact with his mum but she's not being very communicative. The last I heard, she didn't know what messages he was referring to either.
I am still completely stunned and I have no idea how to proceed. I made a commitment to be there for him always, and I understand that grief can manifest in strange ways, but part of me feels like my love for him died the second he called me a murderer and I don't know how we could possibly work through this. I also really don't want to be thought of in this way and I have no idea if he has said anything to people we know. I obviously haven't.
A brain tumour or psychotic break has crossed my mind and I suggested it to his mother, and she just said she'll talk to him. Other than the questions before, he hasn't been acting odd. Obviously he's been grieving, but he's seemed sane and sensible other than this. I feel like I'm going mad, does anyone have any advice at all?
Tl;Dr - My husband's sister died in a horrible accident, and my husband, for absolutely no reason other than some mystery messages, thinks I murdered her.
Edit: it has come to my attention that I accidentally used "Laura's" real name once in this post. Can I kindly ask that anyone who commented "Who is (realname)?" delete their comment as I really don't want this to bleed into my real life. For obvious reasons.
Relevant Comments
Morall_tach: Fuck no. You don't salvage this, you get a lawyer and get the fuck out.
Best case scenario, he has just admitted to sending messages with his sister that he thinks would make you angry enough to kill her over them. I have some ideas about what those might be and they're all bad.
How did the parents react when he did this?
OOP: When he first laid out the accusation, at his parents house, both his mother and I just kept asking him about the messages and all he would say was that I know exactly what messages he was talking about. She was as stunned as me, and his father just said he didn't understand what he was talking about. He's a man of few words but there was plenty of head shaking. The whole thing was surreal, no one knew how to react.
I honestly don't know what kind of lawyer I would even speak to about this. From what I'm aware, the coroner's decision can't be appealed and the police can't launch an investigation into an accidental death. I don't think I'm quite ready for divorce, we haven't spoken since his accusation (and I walked out about 5 minutes after he threw it out), and I have no idea what his frame of mind is.
WonderfulPrior381: You need to get a lawyer to protect yourself in case he does go to the police. I would write down everything that you can remember that happened that day and keep it just in case. He may be having a psychotic break. As stated don’t talk to him or his immediate family or your friends without someone present or preferably by text or email. Save everything. You need to take his accusations seriously and cover your ass.
OOP: I was interviewed by the coroner's office after her death as I was the last person to see her. She died about 3 hours after I saw her, and I'd been to the supermarket and was home by that point. It's all verifiable and was a recorded interview.
I haven't spoken to anyone but his mother, and that's only been over messages. She's never been a big texter but she has seemed very cagey over the past few days. I don't know if this means she's seen the messages. I've asked and been ignored.
Grolschisgood: I think they mean record everything you remember about the day your soon to be ex accused you of murder.
OOP: I'm feeling so freaked out at the idea that he came up with this almost immediately after her death, and has either been sitting on it or planning his confrontation, that I'm basically trying to dissect the past 6 months. Maybe it's time I start writing things down. Right until it happened, things felt very normal. Obviously her death has been felt deeply by all of us and things aren't anything like they were, but there have been no signs of anything like this, even on the day.
OOP ON GETTING THE MESSAGES
I'm absolutely desperate to see these messages, because I'm right there with you on the sheer whackiness of what they have to contain. It hadn't occurred to me that they might not exist, I've never known him to lie but I do think a mental health issue is a real possibility. His relationship with his sister didn't seem odd, and I've never been interested in his phone, but he's never been defensive about it either, so I think you might be right. If I had such incriminating messages, I'd probably worry about them before now.
When told to find an old IPad to use to access them
I HAVE HIS ICLOUD PASSWORD. It has a backup from yesterday. I have no idea how to turn this into something I can actually use, it doesn't have a messages folder or any signs of how to use it for anything other than restoring a whole phone, which I don't want to do.
Does anyone know how to actually get the messages from this? Sorry to throw a tech support request in. I can't believe I didn't think of this. Huge thanks to the person who suggested it.
I'm in a bizarre and complex situation with my husband. I have broken the law, and I feel I have no choice but to do so again for my safety. I don't know what type of solicitor I need or what the next steps should look like. We're in England, and I'll try not to editorialise too much.
My husband's sister died suddenly at the start of the year. Her death was an accident and there was no suggestion to the contrary. The inquest was recently concluded and a verdict of accidental death returned. I was the last person to see her, but her time of death, which was almost immediate due to her injury, was confirmed to be hours after I had left the house. All of this was verified at the time.
In the immediate aftermath, my husband behaved strangely and kept trying to trip up my story of the last time we saw each other, which was a brief interaction. Last week (months after this was first and last mentioned) he outright accused me of murder, in front of his parents. He says I saw his messages with his sister and confronted her, and that he's going to have the coroner decision overturned and have the police investigate. I haven't seen or heard from him since (today is day 9).
I posted for advice on reddit (I'm pretty desperate at this point) and it has spooked me, quite reasonably I think, but also led to me committing a crime and planning another.
My husband's icloud credentials were saved on an old iPad in his office, and I downloaded his backup last night. I have read all of his messages with his sister, and there is absolutely nothing like he describes. I understand this is illegal and I'm concerned about the possible ramifications. I am also waiting for a callback from a locksmith to change the locks on the home we own together, which I believe is also against the law.
So this leads to my actual questions:
I feel justified in what I've done for my safety, but is there a degree of pragmatism under the law for these issues because of the situation, or am I shooting myself in the foot?
I am resigned to the fact my relationship is over, but his parents don't seem to be taking this seriously and they're icing me out. I believe this is a serious mental health issue which may put people, namely me, at risk. Can I do anything about this when all I have is the fact I'm being accused of murder? I feel he needs to be detained and this should be investigated as a full blown psychotic break.
Sorry this is all a bit mental. In addition, what type of solicitor do I need? My understanding is that a coroner decision can't be appealed, is that correct? Are his accusations going to go anywhere? Can I protect myself from this or stop him escalating to telling others? We live in our hometown and everyone knows everyone, this could follow me forever and it's either a lie or a delusion. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Relevant Comments
When told OOP can't lock out her husband or force him to get a psych evaluation
OOP: Thank you so much for your response. Locking each other our doesn't sound like a pattern I want to get into, but I think I'll go ahead and change them once on the basis that it isn't "you did this so you have to leave the house, and also you'll be prosecuted" levels of seriousness.
In terms of him being deemed to lack capacity, is there any way I can trigger the process that you know of? Is something like this sufficient for the mental health act to kick in? I've been googling and "You can be detained if professionals think your mental health puts you or others at risk, and you need to be in hospital" seems very vague. Obviously I'm biased, but accusing someone of murder and screaming about how they aren't going to get away with it feels like risky behaviour. Does he need to have made explicit threats or is there a clearer bar to meet? Sorry for asking so many questions.
No-Firefighter-9257: You are jumping ahead of yourself and playing out situations that have not occurred
If your husband reports you to the police for accessing his data and you are subsequently arrested or taken in for questioning then obtain the services of a criminal solicitor for advice
With respect of changing locks/ending your marriage, seek a solicitor that deals with family law/divorce
If you feel that you are at risk from your husband talk to a domestic abuse helpline, if you feel you are at an immediate risk of harm then call the police
If you think your husband is mentally ill and presents a risk to himself or others call the police
OOP: I don't think that's a fair assessment. Being accused of arguably the most serious crime to exist has most definitely occurred.
My understanding of the law is that something is illegal whether you are reported to the police or not. Those messages are evidence as far as I'm concerned, that his accusations are false. They were apparently the trigger to me literally murdering someone I was extremely close to. I have illegally accessed them, and I don't think it's unreasonable to enquire as to the potential impact of that.
I am fully aware that I need a solicitor, but as you're probably aware, today is Sunday. I don't know if I need to seek someone out based on a divorce (which honestly, if this is a mental health issue, is not going to be something I go for) or a criminal solicitor, or someone who deals with the mental health act (as my absolute priority preference is getting him assessed).
My only exposure to the legal system in my entire life was through the inquest, and that is obviously completely different to any of this. I'm not educated in this area.
Commenter: It's sad (and slightly suspicious?) that OP is jumping ahead to mental health assessments to defend themselves from accusations of murder when their husband is clearly going through some serious issues coping with the death of his sister.
OOP: What else can I do? He has blocked me everywhere, and we went from a normal couple dealing with the new normal 6 months after the death of his sister, to me being accused of murder over a family dinner because of messages which clearly don't exist, and it's been 9 days and I've heard nothing since.
Can I remind you that the inquest was held and concluded. I dropped off some tupperware, grabbed an umbrella I'd left behind the previous week, went to a big Tesco, then went home and called my mum. I was already home by the time she died, and my whereabouts were extremely easy to verify because my husband was home all day.
It's obvious that he's going through some serious issues coping with the death of his sister, that is the exact point of all of this.
Firstly, thank you to those who helped me get to my husband's icloud backups through an old iPad. I wasn't expecting much from reddit, but I got valuable practical advice before my post was locked, and I appreciate it.
There were no crazy, or even suspicious messages. I've searched for over 100 terms and scrolled back over years. I saw a side of them both I wasn't expecting, but nothing that explains the claim I murdered Laura over their chats. Nothing to suggest he was cheating. Absolutely nothing to suggest incest. I repeat: NO INCEST. No weird gaps where deleted conversations or a switch to another app would fit. Just siblings making plans, sending memes, and gossiping. They said unexpectedly horrible stuff about a few people, but not me. It was a sort of relief but it raised more questions than it answered.
I sought legal advice, also from reddit, after posting here. Turns out my options are divorce him or sit down. I contacted my community mental health team, who said they'd reach out, but made it clear it wasn't urgent. I then called his mum and said that if I didn't hear from him by this weekend, I would get a solicitor and ask for a mental heath assessment as part of the divorce. In response, he made a ridiculous post to Facebook (which neither of us have used in years) and everything blew up. I'm going to try to keep this succinct.
On Friday night, he made a long accusation on Facebook, with new information. He said he'd been planning to leave me for months with his sister's support, and I found the messages, and murdered her. The coroner has reopened the case and the police are preparing to arrest me, and he needs to make sure people know before the trial stops him talking about it. It was well written and seemed vaguely plausable.
He messaged people links so it got some attention - we live in our hometown, and have a large circle of friends because we've been here all our lives. People I haven't spoken to since school were reaching out to me asking wtf was going on. It was madness.
In response, I posted the export of his entire conversation history with Laura, also to Facebook (when I finally got back in). I linked to the chat along with a post explaining my side, and noting that I had changed my ex's icloud and apple passwords, and that if he wanted them back, he should comment on my post and update his own, admitting that he was lying. He eventually did.
When I started getting messages about his post, I panicked, and changing his passwords seemed important to preserve everything because he'd know I had access. When I spoke to him the next morning it's clear he's not having a mental episode at all, but is claiming one because he's been caught in a big lie. As soon as he was outed, he called me, clearly drunk, begging and promising to explain everything if I deleted my post. I hung up and told him to call back the next day. He did (after many missed calls and texts), and he tried to bargain and guilt trip me with his mental health until it was clear the wrong people had seen his conversation. It's hard to describe but it seemed fake. It was too well rehearsed, and then this morning, when it was clear he was getting nowhere, he blocked me.
Begging for mercy and reciting facts about mental disorders doesn't align with someone in crisis with a sincere belief that someone murdered their sibling. The question of why he did all this remains unanswered, and he will not be getting his passwords until it is. The legal advice subreddit said this stuff is technically illegal but it's beneath a court to take action, so I'm going to count on that because I felt like I had no other choice at the time, and now I don't see any other way to get answers from him. I am desperate and it's all I've got.
So there we are. The relationship I have believed was my destiny since I was a teenager has boiled down to petty, convoluted and vindictive bullshit, played out on social media, for reasons still unknown. My hope for a brain tumour is fading and clearly tomorrow morning is going to be when I lawyer up and stop posting about this. I am mortified, I have no idea whether some people might believe him, and I still don't know why this all happened in the first place. Sorry I don't have a happier update, and thanks once again to everyone who offered advice.
Relevant Comments
OOP on her husband’s reaction after confessing to lying
OOP: He didn't react at all. He'd called me tens of times at that point and we'd had 5 conversations on the phone about it. He was laser focussed on me deleting the chat log from the get go, but when I made it clear that posting that comment and editing his original Facebook post was the only way to progress the conversation at all, he finally did it. Then he went silent publicly as far as I can see, but continued begging me behind the scenes.
henicorina: What on earth is in those chats that he’s so desperate to keep people from seeing, and that would conceivably lead you to kill someone? Is there any chance they were using some kind of code or something?
OOP: I think it was the fact that it proved his story false, alongside the way they spoke about some people. It was really damaging stuff and I can see why he panicked, I hated to do it to him but I really couldn't think of anything else because so many people had questions.
sonicblue217: Sounds like he staging mental issues to get rid of you or create a reason he's not responsible. Cheating? Money missing from work, personal or family?
OOP: This is exactly how it comes across. He kept saying about how various behaviours he's shown over the years fit anxiety and depression (they don't), and that his vulnerability has led to a complex grief related breakdown. He is not particularly informed on mental health issues, so I don't understand how he went from a drunken shambles to that level of insight overnight, when he had apparently been in active crisis (posting horrible lies on Facebook) less than 2 hours before calling me initially.
You make an interesting point about finances that could be something weird, but definitely not to the extent that it explains any of this. When Laura died, she had a loan and credit account that no one knew about. The total on them was less than £3k, and I don't know what happened because they weren't mentioned much after they came up initially, but everyone was a bit surprised. She lived for the weekend and going away with the girls so it wasn't hugely suspicious, and it was confirmed there were no unusual transactions in her accounts, but it was odd. She was saving to move out, so she was pretty open about her finances generally because she was excited about her savings goals. I don't think it points to anything, but I'm at a point where anything could be relevant because it's all such a mess.
Editor’s Note: OOP now has deleted the account since then
Hi everyone. Me again. Both times I've posted here it has paid off hugely in terms of helping unravel this mess, so I hope it's third time lucky. For the past few weeks I've been trying to figure out why my husband suddenly accused me of murdering his sister, who died in an accident at home, 6 months ago. It still feels as ridiculous now as it did then.
When Laura died we found out she had about £3k in hidden debt. It was odd because she was pretty open about her finances, but it wasn't out of character for her to overspend so I hadn't really thought about it since. A comment on my last post prompted me to look more closely at money stuff, and a message to my husband from Laura asking about a payment stuck out. I'd initially assumed it was about a car issue she'd had a few weeks before she died, but Luke definitely paid at the garage when they picked it up, because we talked about it after she dropped him home. It didn't occur to me when I first looked through. The messages supposedly proved I was a murderer so I had been looking for something scandalous.
The message about payment was the only thing I had at that point, and I had no idea what it meant, so I took a chance. I told his mother I knew about the money, and that if he didn't get in touch with me that day, I would make sure everybody else did too. He called me straight away and asked me over to his parents' house to talk. He looked dreadful, and the first thing he asked me was whether I was happy now all of his friends hate him. I told him I don't give a fuck about his relationships and that I was there for answers.
It turns my husband told the coroner's office that he was secretly helping Laura pay some of her debt because she was embarrassed and struggling to keep up with her lifestyle. I assume it didn't seem suspicious because her death was clearly an accident, and that's what they were investigating. In reality he took out loans and storecards in her name, and she somehow found out a few weeks before she died. Some guy he works with had apparently done it before and arranged it all, and if Laura hadn't found out, he claims they could have had it written off without her ever knowing. When she did find out, the guy left him high and dry (quelle surprise), and he had to pay it off. I'm inclined to believe that's the gist of what happened, but I am shocked my husband would do something this stupid.
When she died so soon after, his brief and apparently genuine suspicion was that she had told me about it that day, and we argued and I'd killed her. He couldn't explain why I would kill someone because they were a victim of fraud, but according to him, he felt guilty in the immediate aftermath and his brain made it fit. I mostly believe this, but he tried launching into more weaponised therapy speak at that point, so I cut the topic off.
A few months after his sister's death, Luke received a letter from a credit company (not even the police) saying he was being investigated. Laura didn't have much, so her debts (which were less than £10k even with the fraud) were mostly written off. Something obviously flagged against my husband during that process, I don't know how or why. When the letters got more threatening, he believed the investigation would reopen the inquest, and that he would be accused of fraud, perjury, and because of his previously unknown motive, possibly murder.
He claims the only thing the company investigating him actually knows is that the fraud came from our address, so accusing me would make it impossible to prove because it would be a coin toss (his words) as to which one of us took out the credit in Laura's name. That was worth our entire marriage to him, and my reputation in the community we have been part of for our entire lives. He says self preservation kicked in and nothing else mattered when he thought about what could happen to him.
When I asked him how his witness statement fits into his plan, because it proved he lied either way by acknowledging he knew about the debt and paying it, he froze for roughly a million years before saying he hadn't thought of that. Obviously my response was to ask why, if he hadn't thought of it, he specifically said it was a lie he needed to cover earlier in the conversation. Suddenly he's sobbing and his parents are rushing in to ask me to leave. I was in tears at this point asking how the fuck he could do this to me over something so stupid, and how much his parents knew about this (as his mum was pushing me out of their house). All she said was that she couldn't have this conversation with me. She was crying too but wouldn't say another word.
I am now 99% sure the fucker was trying to frame me. Not for her death, but for the fraud. He was going to claim that he was lying for me in the coroner's interview right? If he wrapped it all up as quietly paying her off on my behalf then genuinely suspecting me of her murder, it would protect his reputation and point the finger at me. It just doesn't make sense any other way. Is my husband trying to frame me to weasel out of his actions, and how do I get to the bottom of this? I'm obviously open to theories because reddit is the only reason I got this far in the first place.
That being said, please don't come up with conspiracies about Laura's death in the comments. It's upsetting. She was wearing shitty old slippers and walking upstairs with a cup of tea, and she slipped and hit her head on a windowsill. This was never a murder mystery, it was someone's life, and she died just because. Maybe a butterfly flapped its wings somewhere, I don't know, but it's hard enough to accept without having guesses shouted at me on the internet whilst my marriage falls apart.
Relevant Comments
Even_Budget2078: I mean framing you for fraud seems the most plausible from what you've found, though it's an incredibly idiotic "frame job" that wouldn't work. So, I have to say, he sounds incredibly dumb. As an explanation, it's probably the best you are going to get, though very unsatisfying. I am mystified by his parents' behavior and what he thought that Facebook post was going to accomplish. It's not like the investigators are going to go poll the town, he could have just written back to them that he knew nothing about these cards and the only people at that address were you and him. There was no need in this weird plot to ruin your reputation publicly. But, again, he sounds very dumb, so I guess that made sense to him
So sorry this happened to you, but I suspect in several years time (hopefully sooner!), you will see being rid of him and his family was actually a blessing. I wish you your very best life going forward!
OOP: This is what I don't understand. He's behaved impulsively before but never anything like this. I understand that he didn't take the fraud seriously until he was caught by Laura, and I can get that her death would have made him anxious about it, but I don't know what would possess him to think he could just...pass it along. It's baffling.
Even_Budget2078: What's also strange is that it sounds like the fraud amount was low enough that, while yes he'd get in trouble, it isn't like he's going to be ruined. Not that this is a good thing, but white collar crime is not exactly strongly prosecuted in the UK. Plus, it sounds like a repayment settlement could have solved this. Unless he works in finance or needs a security clearance, this wouldn't be something he couldn't recover from. Also very odd is that you were his alibi for the accident! I realize that wasn't necessary as this was an accident regardless of alibis, but still it's very dumb if he was worried about this being known as a motive, that he would alienate his alibi. I keep coming back to the dumb part, only explanation that makes sense! lol
Edited: Changed US to UK, where OP is
OOP: This is exactly it! £3k would have been manageable, he could have set up a plan to repay it over a year, and he'd have needed to tighten up but would have been fine. It was a private company so getting their money back would obviously be more of a priority than seeking prosecution. This is also part of why his story doesn't make sense. It's such a small amount in the grand scheme of things to blow up your entire life. The only thing I can think of is pure desperation to protect his reputation, but even then, who goes that far?!
Strong-Bottle-4161: Is he someone that really prides himself of his reputation?
Is his job in finances?
OOP: He's a mechanic, so he's got a bit of a masculine pride thing going on. He always wants to be seen as a good "salt of the earth, do anything for anyone" type person, and whilst actually being a good person sometimes slips (usually in the way he talks to people after a drink), never ever to the point where I'd think he'd take loans out in people's names or try to ruin me like this.
Saint_Blaise: I'm sure you've been asked this before but is he on drugs?
OOP: He's a casual drug user but I've never seen signs of it getting unhealthy. He does cocaine maybe 8-10x per year, and I've never known him buy it when his money would have been better spent on something else. He's better at spending money than having it generally, but he's never ever shown signs of being greedy or deceitful. The only thing I can think of is that it would have been in the lead up to Christmas, but his gifts weren't particularly extravagant so I don't think it was a desperate attempt at a magical Christmas.
DO NOT COMMENT IN LINKED POSTS OR MESSAGE OOPs – BoRU Rule #7
I’ve [F25] been with my boyfriend [M38] for 6 years. Today when we were watching tv on the sofa I lift my shirt up so my boobs were exposed because I was so hot. When he saw this he seemed surprised and mad. He said «what the fuck are you doing? Why are you laying there like that? Would you like it if I had my dick out?» and told me some things should be left for the imagination. I got pissed off and hurt to be honest, and when I told him that he said I was trying to ruin the night and mood, if I wanted to fight then he would go to bed etc. I don’t understand what to feel and how to interpret this, and I felt like a disgusting pig because of what I did because of that comment. What would you do in this situation?
Flip flops and grandad slippers off, trainers and game faces on! It’s the Love Island Sports Day and Islanders unleash their competitive streaks in a series of races. Later on, a difficult decision is to be made that will leave Couples vulnerable.
Among many misunderstandings, [users] expect the RAG system to work like a search engine, not as a flawed, forgetful analyst. They will not do the work that you expect them to do in order to verify documents and ground truth. They will not expect the AI to try to persuade them.
Another tiny tool I built with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Artifacts. This one lets you select an image (or drag-drop one onto an area) and then displays that same image as a JPEG at 1, 0.9, 0.7, 0.5, 0.3 quality settings, then again but with at half the width. Each image shows its size in KB and can be downloaded directly from the page.
I'm trying to use more images on my blog (example 1, example 2) and I like to reduce their file size and quality while keeping them legible.
The prompt sequence I used for this was:
Build an artifact (no React) that I can drop an image onto and it presents that image resized to different JPEG quality levels, each with a download link
I tweaked it a tiny bit (modifying how full-width images are displayed) - the final source code is available here. I'm hosting it on my own site which means the Download links work correctly - when hosted on claude.site Claude's CSP headers prevent those from functioning.
Thorsten Ball shows how the macOS Instruments app (installed as part of Xcode) can be used to run a CPU profiler against any application - not just code written in Swift/Objective C.
I tried this against a Python process running LLM executing a Llama 3.1 prompt with my new llm-gguf plugin and captured this:
Our estimate of OpenAI’s $4 billion in inference costs comes from a person with knowledge of the cluster of servers OpenAI rents from Microsoft. That cluster has the equivalent of 350,000 Nvidia A100 chips, this person said. About 290,000 of those chips, or more than 80% of the cluster, were powering ChartGPT, this person said.
Alex Garcia's latest SQLite extension is a C wrapper around the llama.cpp that exposes just its embedding support, allowing you to register a GGUF file containing an embedding model:
INSERT INTO temp.lembed_models(name, model)
select 'all-MiniLM-L6-v2',
lembed_model_from_file('all-MiniLM-L6-v2.e4ce9877.q8_0.gguf');
And then use it to calculate embeddings as part of a SQL query:
select lembed(
'all-MiniLM-L6-v2',
'The United States Postal Service is an independent agency...'
); -- X'A402...09C3' (1536 bytes)
all-MiniLM-L6-v2.e4ce9877.q8_0.gguf here is a 24MB file, so this should run quite happily even on machines without much available RAM.
INSERT INTO temp.rembed_clients(name, options)
VALUES ('text-embedding-3-small', 'openai');
select rembed(
'text-embedding-3-small',
'The United States Postal Service is an independent agency...'
); -- X'A452...01FC', Blob<6144 bytes>
Here's the Rust code that implements Rust wrapper functions for HTTP JSON APIs from OpenAI, Nomic, Cohere, Jina, Mixedbread and localhost servers provided by Ollama and Llamafile.
Both of these extensions are designed to complement Alex's sqlite-vec extension, which is nearing a first stable release.
At Read the Docs, we host documentation for many projects and are generally bot friendly, but the behavior of AI crawlers is currently causing us problems. We have noticed AI crawlers aggressively pulling content, seemingly without basic checks against abuse.
One crawler downloaded 73 TB of zipped HTML files just in Month, racking up $5,000 in bandwidth charges!
Really fun Chrome extension by Anatoly Zenkov: it scans every web page you visit for things that look like buttons and stashes a copy of them, then provides a page where you can see all of the buttons you have collected. Here's Anatoly's collection, and here are a few that I've picked up trying it out myself:
The extension source code is on GitHub. It identifies potential buttons by looping through every <a> and <button> element and applying some heuristics like checking the width/height ratio, then clones a subset of the CSS from window.getComputedStyle() and stores that in the style= attribute.
This is a really neat Python debugging utility. Install with pip install wat-inspector and then inspect any Python object like this:
from wat import wat
wat / myvariable
The wat / x syntax is a shortcut for wat(x) that's quicker to type.
The tool dumps out all sorts of useful introspection about the variable, value, class or package that you pass to it.
There are several variants: wat.all / x gives you all of them, or you can chain several together like wat.dunder.code / x.
The documentation also provides a slightly intimidating copy-paste version of the tool which uses exec(), zlib and base64 to help you paste the full implementation directly into any Python interactive session without needing to install it first.
Is this a direct result of Google's deal to license Reddit content for AI training, rumored at $60 million? That's not been confirmed but it looks likely, especially since accessing that robots.txt using the Google Rich Results testing tool (hence proxied via their IP) appears to return a different file, via this comment, my copy here.
The second release of a GPT-4 class open weights model in two days, after yesterday's Llama 3.1 405B.
The weights for this one are under Mistral's Research License, which "allows usage and modification for research and non-commercial usages" - so not as open as Llama 3.1. You can use it commercially via the Mistral paid API.
Mistral Large 2 is 123 billion parameters, "designed for single-node inference" (on a very expensive single-node!) and has a 128,000 token context window, the same size as Llama 3.1.
Notably, according to Mistral's own benchmarks it out-performs the much larger Llama 3.1 405B on their code and math benchmarks. They trained on a lot of code:
Following our experience with Codestral 22B and Codestral Mamba, we trained Mistral Large 2 on a very large proportion of code. Mistral Large 2 vastly outperforms the previous Mistral Large, and performs on par with leading models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3 Opus, and Llama 3 405B.
They also invested effort in tool usage, multilingual support (across English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Hindi) and reducing hallucinations:
One of the key focus areas during training was to minimize the model’s tendency to “hallucinate” or generate plausible-sounding but factually incorrect or irrelevant information. This was achieved by fine-tuning the model to be more cautious and discerning in its responses, ensuring that it provides reliable and accurate outputs.
Additionally, the new Mistral Large 2 is trained to acknowledge when it cannot find solutions or does not have sufficient information to provide a confident answer.
I went to update my llm-mistral plugin for LLM to support the new model and found that I didn't need to - that plugin already uses llm -m mistral-large to access the mistral-large-latest endpoint, and Mistral have updated that to point to the latest version of their Large model.
Ollama now have mistral-large quantized to 4 bit as a 69GB download.
One interesting observation is the impact of environmental factors on training performance at scale. For Llama 3 405B , we noted a diurnal 1-2% throughput variation based on time-of-day. This fluctuation is the result of higher mid-day temperatures impacting GPU dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.
During training, tens of thousands of GPUs may increase or decrease power consumption at the same time, for example, due to all GPUs waiting for checkpointing or collective communications to finish, or the startup or shutdown of the entire training job. When this happens, it can result in instant fluctuations of power consumption across the data center on the order of tens of megawatts, stretching the limits of the power grid. This is an ongoing challenge for us as we scale training for future, even larger Llama models.
I just released a new alpha plugin for LLM which adds support for running models from Meta's new Llama 3.1 family that have been packaged as GGUF files - it should work for other GGUF chat models too.
If you've already installed LLM the following set of commands should get you setup with Llama 3.1 8B:
This will download a 4.92GB GGUF from lmstudio-community/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF on Hugging Face and save it (at least on macOS) to your ~/Library/Application Support/io.datasette.llm/gguf/models folder.
Once installed like that, you can run prompts through the model like so:
llm -m l31i "five great names for a pet lemur"
Or use the llm chat command to keep the model resident in memory and run an interactive chat session with it:
llm chat -m l31i
I decided to ship a new alpha plugin rather than update my existing llm-llama-cpp plugin because that older plugin has some design decisions baked in from the Llama 2 release which no longer make sense, and having a fresh plugin gave me a fresh slate to adopt the latest features from the excellent underlying llama-cpp-python library by Andrei Betlen.
As we've noted many times since March, these benchmarks aren't necessarily scientifically sound and don't convey the subjective experience of interacting with AI language models. [...] We've instead found that measuring the subjective experience of using a conversational AI model (through what might be called "vibemarking") on A/B leaderboards like Chatbot Arena is a better way to judge new LLMs.
I believe the Llama 3.1 release will be an inflection point in the industry where most developers begin to primarily use open source, and I expect that approach to only grow from here.
We've been waiting for the largest release of the Llama 3 model for a few months, and now we're getting a whole new model family instead.
Meta are calling Llama 3.1 405B "the first frontier-level open source AI model" and it really is benchmarking in that GPT-4+ class, competitive with both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
I'm equally excited by the new 8B and 70B 3.1 models - both of which now support a 128,000 token context and benchmark significantly higher than their Llama 3 equivalents. Same-sized models getting more powerful and capable a very reassuring trend. I expect the 8B model (or variants of it) to run comfortably on an array of consumer hardware, and I've run a 70B model on a 64GB M2 in the past.
The 405B model can at least be run on a single server-class node:
To support large-scale production inference for a model at the scale of the 405B, we quantized our models from 16-bit (BF16) to 8-bit (FP8) numerics, effectively lowering the compute requirements needed and allowing the model to run within a single server node.
We’ve also updated our license to allow developers to use the outputs from Llama models — including 405B — to improve other models for the first time.
We’re excited about how this will enable new advancements in the field through synthetic data generation and model distillation workflows, capabilities that have never been achieved at this scale in open source.
I'm really pleased to see this. Using models to help improve other models has been a crucial technique in LLM research for over a year now, especially for fine-tuned community models release on Hugging Face. Researchers have mostly been ignoring this restriction, so it's reassuring to see the uncertainty around that finally cleared up.
Lots more details about the new models in the paper The Llama 3 Herd of Models including this somewhat opaque note about the 15 trillion token training data:
Our final data mix contains roughly 50% of tokens corresponding to general knowledge, 25% of mathematical and reasoning tokens, 17% code tokens, and 8% multilingual tokens.
Update: I got the Llama 3.1 8B Instruct model working with my LLM tool via a new plugin, llm-gguf.
I've just returned from a fourteen-day trip spent building, running and tearing down EMF, and as I sit on the plane writing this, as well as physical exhaustion, I am experiencing a whole host of emotions - happiness, wonder, determination, and also a strange sense of loss.
It is impossible to describe EMF to anyone who has not attended; while initially you might want to compare it to a normal festival, or something like Burning Man, it is fundamentally unlike almost any other event on Earth. The Dutch and German camps maybe come close, but even those have their own somewhat different vibe.
Over the course of my time heading up the logistics team over the last two weeks, I have done and seen such a wild variety of things that I'm never quite sure what was real. Among others, I watched a man play the US National Anthem on a tesla coil using a theremin; climbed up into a DJ booth in a solarpunk-themed Null Sector and pressed the "!! FIRE !!" button to light up the night sky with pillars of burning alcohol; exited the shower to hear HACK THE PLANET echo out over the field from the stage a quarter of a mile away; saw an inflatable t-rex driving a miniature Jurassic Park jeep, played games on a hillside using lasers, and refilled the duck flume several times (shortly after exclaiming "We have a duck flume?").
I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++
on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a
series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last
five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem
for Linux (WSL).
Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the
pseudo-VM that is the WSL subsystem of the Windows kernel. It's honestly pretty
great, and I regularly joke that I'm using Windows as the GUI layer to develop
on Linux.
Between the Steam Deck and WSL both being ascendant, maybe we finally got the
Year Of Linux On The Desktop, just not as we expected.
TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.
I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking around bits of the Rockies.
However, I still love programming and systems work, and I'll always have at least one project going on the side that involves it - nothing beats the size and complexity of what you can create in just a few hours of coding. That said, I have two basic rules for my programming side projects:
There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road
trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as
the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the
attraction itself.
When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around
and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or
motels where you are somehow the only guest. Nine years in, I've done a decent
amount of that, but these days my attention is more focused around the
camper van that I spent half a year building.
I like to try and share a bit of the experience with those who want to see it,
and as well as posting pictures and videos, I've always liked the idea of
having a live map of where I am - even if it's just for friends and relatives
who are interested in my progress.
I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US;
both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being
laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to
build, exactly.
When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support
for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that
relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a
lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.
While this was good in terms of developing out the features we needed, it
always felt a bit like overhead I didn't really want; after all, if you're
implementing the Mastodon API like we do, all the dedicated apps for viewing
timelines and posting are always going to be better than what you ship with
a server.
Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē,
and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where
we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I
can open up takahe.social to registrations,
albeit with a user number cap.
We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē, in a
quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and
work towards start paying some people to help out with the less exciting work
like triaging tickets, user support, and moderation of takahe.social. If you
want to volunteer directly, that's covered in our
Contributing docs.
There's some interesting technical topics I want to dig into today, though -
it's been a little while since my last blog post and ActivityPub and friends
continue to surprise.
Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē,
and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone
in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented
enough of ActivityPub to shift focus.
With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only
a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing:
Custom emoji (these are custom per-server and a mapping of name-to-image
comes with each post)
So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of
Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number
0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want.
We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the
support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions
and library environments), so you can find it on Docker Hub.
Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President
of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where
celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government
departments post memes about public safety;
the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks and @dril.
The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want
to be, and I honestly think that's fine - as many thinkpieces have recently
said, the age of global social media might just be over. And given the effect
it's had on the world, maybe that's alright after all.
But there is still a void to fill, and as someone who enjoyed Twitter most
at its "medium" size, I think the ActivityPub ecosystem is well-placed to grow
into such a space. But first, I think there's some important things we have to
discuss about it.
When I decided to properly start using the Fediverse via
my own Mastodon server,
I knew it was probably inevitable that I would end up writing my own server -
and, well, here we are!
My new server is called Takahē, and
it's built in Django and also specifically with Python's async library
ecosystem - I'll explain more about why that matters later.
If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment
With early computers, you didn't boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command
Hard to believe that I've had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that's yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster
In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it's not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much, right?
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
When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it's also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.
I didn't choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero
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
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
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.
The Tour de France is in its 3rd and final week - this year exceptionally (because of the Olympics) not finishing in Paris. We have followed the cyclists for years, and although we miss the British commentators we are enjoying the French ones - it is after all a French event. We are getting used to Tadej Pogacar outpacing his rivals up steep mountains - his current nearest rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, is never far behind, but this year I don't thing he will get in front.
The scenery in these broadcasts is always magnificent - helicopters and now, I guess, drones, provide views of landscape which we'd never have seen in earlier days, and the broadcasters take pride in interspersing shots of countryside and buildings among the pictures of the race. Tuesday's stage from Gruissan to Nîmes was particularly enjoyable for us, including as it did shots of the Pic Saint Loup north of Montpellier and then the countryside from Montpellier through the Vaunage, all of which we knnow quite well. This website has many excellent photos of the Pic Saint Loup by Régis Domergue, a local photographer we admire.
Yesterday too the Tour back into the Alps,with magnificent landscapes and a very confused field of breakaway groups. These grand tour races can be confusing since overall winners are calculated by cumulative time, and those who are already well ahead as the race unfolds can ride in halfway down the day's arrivals but still be in the lead. Yesterday there were a number of group battles ahead of the leaders, and the day's stage was well won by the Ecuadorean Richard Carapaz, who has had a long career in the peleton and was with Geraint Thomas in his heyday a few years ago.
Today's stage
A good friend wondered recently why we chosse such a hot place to live. I think, despite sometimes high temperatures, what I really love is the light, and the skies. Since I'm often awake early I can experience light without too much heat. This summer, to be fair, is not nearly as hot as the past 2, though they say there will be afternoons in the mid-30s this week. We are fortunate in any case to have a house that keeps relatively cool even on hot days without the need to air conditioning, and the nights are pleasantly warm, not often stifling. The only really cool place in the house is the wine store, whose cooling is highly efficient (and produces quantities of mineral-free water excellent for plants and for the ironing!
We have just enjoyed a short visit from our son Ed, his partner Karen, our granddaughter Isla and her boyfriend Ben who coped splendidly with new people (he'd just met Ed and Karen for the first time as they travelled over). They were all pllunged in at the deep end with a wine tasting meal in Luc's lovely garden near Aigues Mortes, and a good time was had by all I think
This is election time - double whammy for us since we are still in a whirl from Thursday, and this weekend is the tense second round in the French partliamentary elections.
But I must start today by saying that I've just heard that my friend and ex-boss David Lawtey died this month. With no exaggeration, he was oneof the most important influences in my life, in my work in the Notts voluntary sector above all. He was one of the fairly few people in my life who was a confirmed Conservative - goodness knows what he made of the recent chaos in British political life - and he also helped me to understand the positive qualities of a political allegiance I mostly find it hard to sympathise with. His decency and uprightness were a huge support to me, especially at difficult moments at the end of my career.
The personal things I take away from the British election results include some astonishing results - Henley-on-Thames which I'd got to know as a teenager switching from Conservative for the first time since 1906! (my old home area of Chesham & Amersham had already caused a big ripple in a by-election); Rushcliffe (Kenneth Clarke's old constituency) in Notts, where I spent nearly 25 years at work falling to Labour. The horrible muddle in Ashfield (Lee Anderson changed parties 4 times I think, Labour via tory to the far right) caused Mary and I who had worked there to raise a lot of eyebrows. Nationally the early reports of ministerial appointments and cabinet strategy are encouraging - Rwanda is instantly abandoned the new PM is well-equipped to understand the crisis in the prison service. Above all I hope that the changes now will bring principle back into politics, and as an ardent champion of social justice and fairness I have hopes that the new regime will uphold these in redistributing resources to those who need them most. Early signs are encouraging.
The French situation is much less certain, though tactical withdrawals of candidates in triangular contests reduced the risks. As I write a heated discussion is happening on the tv following the announcement of the results, no clear majority for anyone but a 3-way split. Time will tell how this will play out but the right has been edged away from a parliamentary majority. We have no vote here, and the President will have to work with a parliament which is equally far from his position on left and right. I feel relief and a sense that the 2-round system and hastily formed alliances seem to have done their job. The best stimate of the final result is below.
Domestically things are fairly quiet for us. Edmond the dog is not very well, rather wheezy despite medication against fluid on the lungs and slow to show interest in food this weekend, but at 15 he is often lively and walks OK, snoozing a lot in between whiles. The weather is finally getting really warm but still not approaching the heatwaves of the last couple of years.
We have long been avid followers of the Tour de France, which is just entering its second week. Tadej Pogacar has shown his class in pushing to the top of the leader board and of the first serious mountain, and Mark Cavendish also shone with his record 35th stage win. The scenery in Italy (where the Tour began) was wonderful, and since then we have seen part of France we've got to know quite well around the Savoie area and in Burgundy. This Sunday has stretches of gravel along the route, complicating things for the leaders as well as everyone else. A black Eritrean cyclist, Biniam Girmay, is leading the points (sprint) competition by a distance, excellent for black sport.
Our French language groups continue to be important weekly markers in our lives, enhanced in summer by meeting outside in people's gardens.
Like other cars we have had our current Dacia Lodgy is rather dented from a collision with a long lorry on a roundabout - happily no serious damage.
As I started to write this Kiri te Kanawa, who is 80, was the guest on Tom Service's Saturday morning programme on Radio 3. Her Countess in Figaro was an all-time classic role - wonderful. To finish a few photos of Marc & Flo's garden and one of some musical fishknoves - they actually work for 4-part harmony!
Poor Edmond has had a rough time lately, and the other day the vet drained a litre of fluid from his chest - his liver has long been struggling. We'll keep going with and for him as long as we can, but he is not always interested in eating despite Mary's tempting food. He has had a good run, and at 15 has survived well, but we shall see if the aftermath of this latest operation works out. It seems possible that he will be our last dog - I would struggle with ayounger, more active animal though we never say never - and we are keen to make his life as comfortable as possible.
The glow of midsummer twilight, looking north from our house
These past few weeks have also been eventful in our garden, and in France with the continuing drift to the right across much of Europe and national elections here now imminent. An anxious wait to see if the French electoral system is shock-proof.
We have just lost another tree - a dead pine. Above is the garden a few years ago (Evie, our Norwich terrier, in shot), below M. Beaumann gradually demolishing the tree.
After the event - piles of wood neatly stacked up with more logs to follow when the trunks is split and sawn in a week or two. Plenty of light but lots of trees and bamboo still around for shade and interest, especially when the bamboo sways in the wind.
We have also had the pleasure of , a long weekend visit from Jeff and Fi - others of the family will follow over the summer.
The two tortoises seem to be in good shape and get through a lot of lettuce!
As summer warmth arrives, we look forward to family visits, and continue to read and listen to podcasts.
My love of reading goes way back - Just William and Arthur Ransome when young, phases of Victorian classics more recently, often linked to television adaptations. As time passes I often gravitate to stories linked to real events, for example Snow falling on cedars by David Guterson. Its background is the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the US in the fevered atmosphere following Pearl Harbour. Listening to a fascinating podcast series History's secret heroeson BBC Radio 4 brought this vividly back - the direct experience of families suffering such devastating treatment - displacement and internment in awful camps - was only partly mitigated by the later compensation and apologies of American administrations (a bit of a contrast, all the same, to the recent frequent and reluctant acknowledgement of maladministration and mistreatment of people in the UK).
On the similar theme, paraoia leading to unjust treatment of racial minorities in wartime, I've recently discovered Eva Ibbotson, whose novels (with admittedly romantic themes) strike chords for me with music, Austrian and Jewish threads. The last I read, twice now, is A song for summer in which among other things a man, an eminent musician called Marek, with Czech origins, ends up interned on the Isle of Man as some of my good friends were . An extraordinary collection of human beings - members of the Amadeus Quartet were among those rumoured to have met there, and the internment camps also featured on a podcast we've just listened to - so I think it's worth quoting at length from this well-written account:
The poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning – and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those ‘enemy aliens’ who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time. Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the Tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling. Leon [another character in Ibbotson's book] happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age... and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.
The views of the landladies evicted from their villas – from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven – are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused ‘enemy aliens’ arrived – Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.
Although it was obvious to even the thickest British Tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia. He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the fall of France. Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant. ‘If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,' he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. ‘Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp – I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat – and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better – anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.’
Thank you for telling me my business,’ said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner. ‘You say you’re a Czech.’ ‘I don’t say I am; I am,’ said the prisoner unruffledly. ‘So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.’ Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed. ‘Your name is German.’ ‘Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.’ ‘The dogs?’ ‘There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the Tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk – you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round –’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis – and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital – the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill – if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.’
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives. It was to him that Marek spoke. ‘Most of the people in here understand what has happened – that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business – interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler – is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.’ ‘... the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) ... [saved] the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers... [to] keep in touch with the stock exchange.
Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the erstwhile flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse . . . and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate. But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories – . ‘There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,’ he said. ‘We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed – anything. We’re going to give a concert.’ ‘Of what?'‘There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?’ ‘Johann Sebastian Bach,’ said the flautist. Marek nodded. ‘Exactly so.’ For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his erstwhile representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig.
I have been musing why my sympathy and emotions are so strongly stirred by such injustice - after all, I have had a comfortable life in entirely British surroundings give or take a splash of Quakerism and some marvellous friends as role models, but that is how it is and I shall continue to be drawn by underdog tales.
This has turned out to be a single subject blog, but the accompanyjng pictures are the usual mixture from daily life!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Our all-too-brief stay with Sam and family is over halfway through as I write - lovely and we shall miss them but the weather began - let's say - sub-optimal (grey and wet, though not cold). But new year's day dawned with blue sky and sunshine.
Before we left home we indulged in Dickens DVDs, 2 sets of Little Dorritt, one excellent, the older dismal (I once liked this version...), and then a surprisingly good Martin Chuzzlewit (Tom Wilkinson who played an excellent Pecksniff has just died). The casts of all three are mostly outstanding, but the earlier Little Dorritt despite iconic actors like Alec Guinness and Derek Jacobi seemed wooden and stilted. Not helped by a weird 2-part presentation which separated Amy's view from Arthur Clennam's. Claire Foy's heroine is heaps better than Sarah Pickering, who seems to have done nothing else in film - Dickens writes a low-key character but not that low key.
I was encouraged by an Eng Lit friend to read most of Dickens on train journeys commuting to London, and still love the books - Mary came to them after she met me, and I remember buying a job-lot on £1 paperback classics to round out our library. Thinking over the whole series, the theme of financial insecurity and ruin, together with the vital importance of inheritance, is a strong common thread. Dickens' father was in debt and spent months in the Marshalsea, so CD knew of what he wrote. Few punches pulled either - the suicide of Merdle with a penknife in Little Dorritt is memorable in book and on film. But other books like Great Expectations - the title gives the game away - Bleak House with its fog of law-courts, A Christmas Carol of course (we have just seen a DVD with the splendid Michael Hordern hamming it up), Our mutual friend with its heaps of valuable dust, all have money and greed at their centres.
In between whiles I have caught up with Ken Follett's latest Kingsbridge novel, this one skipping centuries forward to the Napoleonic era, and yet another fictional rerunning of the battle of Waterloo. The moments where a character tells another rather artificially the name of such and such a farmhouse or Quatrre Bras crossroads does jar slightly, but Follett like Bernard Cornwell has done his research, and Follett is respected enough to write about cathedral construction in the rebuilding of Notre Dame Paris just as Cornwell has written a decent factual account of Waterloo alongside the romantic version. In my more idiotic moments I wonder how Sharpe, and a Follett hero, acting as adcs to Wellington might have bumped into one another!
We are having a great, relaxed family time here, and trying to live day by day before we drive back. Having heard some of the awful horrors and knife-edge adventures of Sam & Sas's family holiday (they did ultimately have a good time with close friends) across the world we feel glad to have chosen more local, staid journeys, and in our own car. It does of course strike us that the distances and complexities of air travel are inevitable when people fall in love with others from New Zealand or have great friends in the USA. These things tend to conflict with environmental considerations. But good plans tend to involve meeting family and friends in France, in spacious well-equipped gîtes as we did with Judi last summer. Sam and I have been discussing areas of France to meet in, and in any case we plan to visit friends in Normandy in the summer.
This is to wish all our friends and family a hapy and healthy 2024.
I'm writing this in Wirksworth where we're staying with family over the new year. We spent a quiet Christmas at home before we left Edmond in our reliable kennels and drove to England. We arrived on Thursday evening.
Musicians in Lunel last week
We'd decided to drive, and sharing turn and turn about that woekd well through the 1,000 km of France, on Eurotunnel and up the M20, but the M25 was a crawling nightmare. Once on the M40 we were fine again apart from rain squalls - the storms had passed or were further west and north - the M25 delay meant that we drove the familiar last miles in the dark, not as hoped or planned. But we arrived safely at Sam's by 1800 and found Ed, Isla and Karen already installed in their nearby Airbnb. On reflection the journey was a success - I think we shall be happy to drive that way again.
The Lunel sky we left behind
When Jeff and Fi arrived a little later we were delighted - our family was together; we all met up again yesterday for brunch and a mountain of presents. Sadly Sas and Ben had bad colds and could not join us - fingers crossed that they will be better soon.
Mary with Ed and dog Maisie, Jeff, Fi, Isla, Heather and Karen
Earlier this year I wrote about roof repairs. Tiles replaced, tiles made secure, woodwork treated, well done if at some expense. That led to two things. One was the firm which did the work coming back for the first 'guarantee inspection' and of course recommending more work. Of course, they had 'forgotten' to tell us things. So the other, luckily, was that we discovered that our splendid factotum (gardener and general Mr Fix-it) Monsieur Beaumann is, perhaps first and foremost, someone who mends roofs. If we'd realised thhis sooner we might have saved some money, but never mind, and better late than never. He checked things over and found things the others missed. He has now taken over all our roof needs, and has installed new insulation as well as removing mountains of pine needles which were apparently built as nests by rats. Warmer and less rodent-ridden now!
Then there are my teeth, or what remain of them. When I was about 10 some girls caused me to fall off a swing and break two front teeth. After a few years of unsuccessful crowns and some pain, I had a dental plate that lasted over 30 years, then another fitted in France in an emergency over Christmas (when we discovered the efficiency of French health services), and now a new one is due. The old method was to take an impression from the mouth with a kind of plasticene, but I discovered last week that this is old hat - everything is now scanned with a kind of glowing pen, and I should receive the result tomorrow. The wonders of modern technology!
Our dog Edmond is in surprisingly good spirits at the age of 14 plus, and keeps us active getting up to give him breakfast and taking him for walks. He does not seem to miss his twin sister Elvire, who died at Easter, and despite failing eyesight he's always at hand when his meal times arrive, and he still enjoys his evening walk with Mary.
We are looking forward to family visits over the winter, the first to Wirksworth for new year. Apart from Sam and family we have several good friends there, and are kept in touch by regular mailings of Community Fayre, the amazingly longstanding community newppaper (which has just arrived by post). Fewer and fewer things arrive in the letterbox - so much now is electronic - but another paper mailing just now has been the latest news from Médecins Sans Frontières, an absolutely admirable organisation engaged in relief work round the world. There are so many good causes appealing for our support, and this seems to us as good as any recipient of our contributions. A lovely watercolour shared on Faceboook reminds us of what we have to look forward to in Derbyshire.
Our reading in French continues twice a week with the splendid help of Danielle who corrects our pronunciation and explains French culture! Mary reads a lot in French anyway, currently rereading the diaries of Edmond de Goncourt, while my serious reading is of British history in the long and detailed accounts of the British Emipre, One fine day by Matthew Parker. This has fascinated me, starting as it does in the Pacific Islands and Arthur Grimble (whose stories, popular in the 1950s, were shared with us at school) and going on with the harrowing accounts of Amritsar. The subequent topics, Malaya and Aftrica, are less familiar to me, but the sheer brazen brutality of the British in Kenya makes sobering reading. "The Rev. Ryle Shaw, in a letter to the settler-supporting East Africa
Standard, asked whether the British settlers should really be classed
with ‘Asiatics imported for pick and shovel work’ who were ‘alien in
mind, colour, religion, morality and practically all the qualities
Europeans regard as necessary for constitutional citizenship’" is a mild example. We have new book arrivals in Christmas parcels (delights for the Day itself) just received from our friend Ruth in London whose failing sight and other difficulties never seem to deter her from thinking of us so generously.
The chaos of governments over immigration is not confined to the UK it seems: a report in the Guardian this week describes French indecision at its more rational but no less confused best: "The French government has said it will push on
with a planned immigration law in the face of a political crisis after
opposition parties from the left to the far right refused to even debate
it in parliament. The president, Emmanuel Macron, and the centrist government were surprised... on Monday – the first time in 25 years that a government bill was rejected before even being debated by parliament. The immigration bill is intended to show Macron can take tough measures on migration while keeping France's doors open to foreign workers who can help the economy. But its
contents have been rewritten several times, first toughened by the
right-dominated senate, then partially unpicked by a parliamentary
commission, resulting in ... fierce opposition.".
There are no easy answers to world environmental problems either. For example (from a recent article)
"This is a Tesla battery. It takes up all of the space under the passenger compartment of the car. To manufacture it you need:
--12 tons of rock for Lithium
-- 5 tons of Cobalt minerals
-- 3 tons of mineral for nickel
-- 12 tons of copper ore
You must move 250 tons of soil to obtain:
-- 12 kg of Lithium, -- 30 pounds of nickel
-- 22 kg of manganese -- 15 pounds of Cobalt
To manufacture the battery requires:
-- 100 Kg of RAM chips
-- 200 kg of aluminum, steel and/or plastic
The Caterpillar 994A is used for the earthmoving to obtain the essential minerals. It consumes 264 gallons of diesel in 12 hours. Finally you get a “zero emissions” car. Presently, the bulk of the necessary minerals for manufacturing the batteries come from China or Africa. Much of the labour for getting the minerals in Africa is done by children! If we buy electric cars, it's China who profits most! This 2021 Tesla OEM battery is currently for sale on the Internet for $4,99"
To finish, a sad song from Syria by a refugee
Take me to any country, leave me there, and forget all about me
Throw me in the middle of the sea, don’t look back, I have no other option
I am not leaving for fun, neither for a change of scenery
My house was bombed and destroyed; and the dust of rubbleblinded me
Let me try, no matter what, I am a human being
Call it displacement or immigration … just forget about me
Christmas greetings and our best wishes for the new year to all our friends
Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.
As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it’s wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you’re going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you’ll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google “80s hotel room” anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)
To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It’s true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.
But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn’t work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator’s job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.
We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not “core” enough.
As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their “you, sir, have won the internet” vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn’t have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that’s the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.
But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I’ve decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.
II.
I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I’d be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it’s pretty rare, unless you’re staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day’s Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.
At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world’s first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I’ve become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of “okay time to do a quick look through.” But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I’d been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It’s just old. It’s dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I’m writing about datedness, I’m writing in general using a previous era’s examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.
Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, “It’ll do.” We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.
However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven’t been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn’t dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They’re too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say “it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic).” You wouldn’t be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.
One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what’s here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of “molding” that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.
In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don’t like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It’s deeply annoying.)
Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser’s economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the “here is my service” type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way “design” can. It can only be discovered by accident.
When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father’s time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It’s a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.
Sometimes I just want to get on my hobbyhorse, which for about a year now has been the middle ages but surely will soon be something else. (Please hyperfixation gods, make it financial literacy.) Anyway, I meandered around the nation (online) in search of another opportunity to play another round of America Does Medieval. It took me a while for fortune to reward me but it finally did in the long-running McMansion Hell of Denton County, Texas.
2007 McMansions are pretty rare and it’s even rarer for them to have the original interiors. This one, clocking in at 5 beds, 6 baths, and almost 7200 square feet will set you back a reasonable $2.3 million. We complain a lot about the hegemony of gray these days, but this is hindsight bias. Longtime readers will recall that the color beige walked so gray could run, and this house is emblematic of that fact.
It’s…uncommon to see ordinary contractors try their hands at gothic arches and for all intents and purposes, I think this one did a pretty good job rendering the ineffable in common drywall. Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately the Catholic in me can’t help but feel that this is the house equivalent of those ultra trad converts on Reddit who have Templar avatars and spend their days complaining about Vatican II.
Sometimes I still get the ever-dwindling pleasure of seeing the type of room that has never before existed in human history and definitely won’t ever exist again. Certain material conditions (oil, lots of it, a media ecosystem in which historical literacy is set primarily by cartoons, adjustable rate mortgages) brought this space into the world in a way that cannot be recreated organically. Let us marvel.
Christ might need to be invoked should I choose to make a sweet potato casserole.
You can tell that ornament is fabricated because they made precisely TWO of them that are IDENTICAL. You could have fooled us into thinking a craftsman did this by hand from local Texas marble (or whatever), but alas greed got in the way of guile.
As someone who writes fiction on the weekends, I often feel the acute pain of having an imagination greater than my talent and an artistic vision detached from being able to effectively execute it. In this respect, this room speaks to me.
RIP Trump btw. Don’t know if y'all saw the news yet.
I know a lot about medieval bathing for completely normal reasons (writing fiction, winning online arguments, stoned youtube binges)
I feel like most of my forms of social adaptation as a person on the spectrum comprise of sneaking in my holy autistic interest du jour into conversations as subtly as I can manage. I’m doing it right now.
Okay, so, there were no rear exterior photos of this house because, having used every square inch of lot, the whole thing is smashed up against a fence and there is simply no way of getting that desired perspective without trespassing and that’s a mortal risk in the state of Texas. So I’ll leave you with this final room, the completely medieval in-home theater.
That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next month, where we will be going down a cult compound rabbit hole in the Great Plains.
Today’s house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.
This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.
The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?
The theme of this house is, vaguely, “old stuff.” Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.
The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.
Entering cheat codes in “Kitchen Building Sim 2000” because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.
Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I’m team Prince.
I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it’s tacky right? That it’s giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it’s giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.
Something about the bathroom really just says “You know what, I give up. Who cares?” But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom…
Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.
If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.
Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let’s take a nice peek at what’s out back.
I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.
Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.
Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!
If you ever wanted to read a book about McMansions, 5-over-1s, the ignoble toil of architects, ridiculous baubles for rich people, hostile architecture, private equity, shopping (rip), offices (rip), loud restaurants, and starchitects who behave like tech founders, this is the book for you!
Thank you all for your support throughout the years – without you this would not be possible. And don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging throughout it all, so stay tuned for this month’s post.
Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Kate, that’s a little kooky, but certainly it’s not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory.” Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.
The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.
It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it’s a cheap joke. But there’s something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.
And then there’s this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.
Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don’t think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.
A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.
Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they’re not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.
At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house’s most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.
And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God’s sitting.
Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That’s why I’ve gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.
Our present house is ostensibly “French Provincial” in style, which is McMansion for “Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano”. It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.
Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only provide two of them.
With regards to the second sitting room, I’m really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.
Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.
Here’s the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America’s most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!
Okay I really don’t understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?
Here’s a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)
Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.
When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.
Anyway, let’s see what the rear of this house has to offer.
The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?
Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!
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.
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!
Hi everyone: I’ve written a long deep-dive on the present state of the McMansion, from farmhouse chic to imminent environmental collapse. If you’ve been seeing an inordinate number of big ugly houses pop up in your neighborhood, you are not alone!
In my latest column for The Nation, I defend single stair buildings against their detractors - I think single stair is wonderful! - But I also don’t think it’s some kind of panacea for the housing crisis.
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