For new year Ingrid and I met up with Ingrid’s friend Ros at Barcelona airport. We went from there to Cadaqués on the Costa Brava. A winding drive over steep hills leads you down to a cute bay with the typical white houses and terracotta roofs. All the window frames were painted just the right shade of blue. The surrealist artist Salvador Dalí lived and worked in the area. This meant a trip to Figueres to see his Theatre-Museum and on new year’s eve a walk over the hill to Port Lligat to visit his house.

10. Grails “Chalice Hymnal” Some albums are good because a band continues making the music that you love. Some albums are good because a band takes their ideas a step or two further than before. Chalice Hymnal is that rare album that does both of these things. The references to past albums include the track Deeper Politics and Deep Snow II, and, as per albums past, these tracks evolve slowly out of languid guitar hooks and smoky atmospherics.

10. Rolling Blackouts CF “Julie’s Place” Sometimes you just want a simple pop song about going out somewhere. I enjoyed the Rolling Blackouts’ EP “The French Press”. It contains many catchy tunes as I noted in my review. “Julie’s Place” is the best, speaking of a need to be somewhere or a promise that you will go there. Given that I often listen to music between places, it’s nice to have a song or two like that on my playlist.

Bjork Utopia “Utopia” is Björk’s ninth album. It’s a happier album compared to the emotional wreckage of “Vulnicura”. But while “Vulnicura” was a compelling if uncomfortable listen, “Utopia” is more comfortable and, unfortunately, not that compelling. This is old ground retrodden with few glimmers of past glories. The brevity, succinctness and sharpness are all gone. Even on the best songs (the first three), there is very little strength in the lyrics.

Here’s a recipe to use up your turkey leftovers after Christmas. You will need a slow cooker or an oven-proof cooking dish. Ingredients About four portions of cold turkey, torn into bite-sized pieces 1 sweet potato, chopped into small slivers 1 carrot, chopped into small slivers 1 onion, diced 2 cloves of garlic, diced 2 tsp mixed herbs 2 tsp smoked paprika 20g butter 50g diced chorizo 1 chicken stock cube mixed in about 700ml water (see method) Method Melt the butter and fry the onions on a medium heat until golden.

We left Gulfoss and drove through the countryside to Fluðir where our next hotel stay would be. The hotel had cute little cabins arranged around a central square and the room itself was comfy and warm. Our dinner was nice enough, although we had a bit of a Fawlty Towers moment with Ingrid’s chicken salad. First it went back because they didn’t leave the BBQ sauce off. Then it came back with tomatoes.

00110100 01010100 “0181” This is a reissue of a Four Tet rarity from 2013 that has recently surfaced on Spotify under an alias1. “0181” collects a series of short experimental pieces from throughout his career, though I’m not enough of a nerd to know whether they are in any particular order. Last month’s ‘proper’ Four Tet album “New Energy” has a lot more bounce to it, but “0181” nevertheless has some interesting moments that raises it above mere curiosity.

In a perfect confluence of last month’s album digest, here’s an excellent Four Tet remix of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s “I Will Make Room For You” from her album “The Kid”. I’ve put it into a playlist with “Lush” from Four Tet’s “New Energy” album and the original version of “I Will Make Room For You.” Enjoy!

After I read “Hello America” and “Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” to Ingrid, it was her turn to read something to me. We settled on Matt Haig’s memoir of anxiety and depression “Reasons to Stay Alive”, which is as uplifting and life-affirming as its title suggests. The book begins with its author standing atop some cliffs in Ibiza, crushed by depression and anxiety and determined to die.

We cook this version of bolognaise with beetroot due to Ingrid’s tomato allergy. This recipe is an attempt to capture what we do on the fly. The key to it is using the wine, the Worcestershire sauce and the herbs to even out the sweetness of the beetroot. If you can manage that, it’s super tasty. The sauce usually ends up being an unusual but pleasing pink/purple colour, as you will see from the pictures.

I had to compute an indicator this week. It had confidence intervals that relied on taking 100,000 samples from the indicator’s approximate distribution. I had to repeat this over multiple GP practices and for twelve different demographic groups. I decided to use dplyr1 because I thought it would help me organise all subgroups involved. I used mutate_at() heavily and thought that dplyr was keeping everything organised. However, when I moved from the 10 samples I’d used for testing to the 100,000 samples required by the specification of the indicator, my code moved to a crawl.

In recent weeks I have worn a suit to work. I bought a new furry woolly suit a few weeks ago and have alternated between it and my old one. I also bought new shoes that gave me blisters and made me cry. Enough time has passed that by now it feels natural rather than silly and those shoes don’t eat my feet as much as they used to. I think I feel calmer before I go to work as a result of wearing the suit.

Mary Epworth “Elytral” This album came to my attention because its lead single “Me Swimming” appeared on my Discover Weekly playlist. I’d never heard of Mary before but this album was one of those nice discoveries that one sometimes makes when one tries to broaden what one listens to. The aforementioned “Me Swimming” is probably the best track, a beautiful slice of summery experimental pop layered over a beat that you can imagine as the kicks of a swimmer compared to the swirling lyric that imitates the pull of the strokes through the water.

Three years ago today I moved in to my little flat in Chichester, soon to start a new job. I had no money left but at least, after a character building stint of six months sleeping on the floor, I had a bed. In the intervening three years, my job role has expanded, I’ve done another degree, the flat has become a home, and I’ve met and married Ingrid. Add to that the fact that it’s almost four years since I left for South America and I start to realise that I’ve done a crazy amount of things in that time.

“Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun” is a novella by Sarah Ladipo Manyika. Of all the books nominated for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize, this looked like the most interesting to my eyes. I’ve enjoyed previous Goldsmiths nominated novels including Acts of the Assassins and Satin Island. The title comes from a poem by Mary Ruefle called “Donkey On”. You can read it here. “Like a Mule…” is set in contemporary San Francisco and takes the form of multiple first person narratives, centred around Dr.

Perhaps in today’s modern age of streaming and such, The Coral would be a bigger band and may have survived their eventual burnout. Their work ethic was evident from the start, as rumours swirled in the NME about a fantastic new band from Liverpool who were going to blow everybody’s socks off. I went to see them live in Bristol after they’d released three EPs and they were incredible. Their sound, a bit like the movie “Holy Mountain” set to pop music, imagined a Merseybeat channelled from an alternative universe in which Lennon and McCartney took their acid in the Mojave desert rather than in the English suburbs.

After a day on foot in Reykjavík, and with some trepidation, we returned to the car for our drive through Iceland’s countryside. We started by heading out on route 1, which is like Iceland’s M25 except that it encircles an entire country and about thirty times fewer people. We went to house of Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness, only to be turned away because it was being renovated and wouldn’t open for another month.

We went to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern last year. At the time, I didn’t know much about her, other than the fact she was famous for painting flowers. And that people get a bit hot under the collar about what those paintings might represent. Was the art world of the 1920s and 1930s so repressed that it managed to get into a lather about some paintings of flowers?

Alistair Reynolds’ 2000 novel “Revelation Space” has long been in orbit of my science fiction “to read” list, but it wasn’t until one sleepless night (post “Command and Control”) that I came across it in Ingrid’s audiobooks. I was instantly drawn in as I listened to the opening scene about an archaeological dig facing evacuation ahead of an imminent ‘razor storm’. “Revelation Space” is hard sci-fi set in a universe where the speed of light cannot be exceeded.

I love making plots in R with ggplot. However, there are always a few niggles that I forget about between plots. I wrote this post so that I have somewhere to look the next time I need to tweak a few things in my plots. I intend to come back and add updates in the future as I learn more things. If I keep coming back, I might also remember a few of these too.

We arrived in Reykjavík a few days after a monumental snowstorm. As such the city was still under at least six inches of snow. We collected the hire car from the airport and drove out of Keflavik. The scenery normally looks like a moonscape, but for us it was a frosty white wonderland. After about an hour’s drive, we arrived at the Hotel Nattura. From the outside it looks like a huge secondary school but as soon as you step inside it’s warm and comfortable.

I had low expectations for “Hello America”, the next in the series of Ballard novels that I started reading over seven years ago. However, it turned out to be a hoot. A couple of years ago, this novel would have been a wig-out bit of standard Ballard weirdness (a bit like “The Drowned World” or “The Crystal World”) but given recent events “Hello America” is starting to take on an eerie prescience.

Ingrid and I got married a month ago. It was a lovely day. We had a simple ceremony with two witnesses, our friends Sue and Andrew. We kept it quiet and small, as we just wanted to be married without too much fuss. A month on, we’re happy to report that we are glad we did it. We’d like to thank everyone who nonetheless sent cards and gifts, and to all of those who wished us well on Facebook.

Note: Recent months have been very busy, so this album digest combines a review of the new album by The National with a couple of reviews left over from earlier in the year. I’ve written a few more album reviews in the past months but I’m so far behind (February and March have already been published on a considerable lag) that I’m just going to pepper forthcoming digests with additional reviews of older albums.

“Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser is about the history of nuclear weapons and their safety. This might not seem like a thrilling subject, but it’s absorbing from start to finish. I started it three years ago but only finished it more recently as the subject of nuclear weapons has become more pertinent to current affairs1. There are many people who would stand to gain a great deal from reading this book2.

We bought a cheap package holiday in the British Airways Black Friday sale. The weekend spanned Ingrid’s birthday, so it was ideal. £99 each for flights and a hotel, and we bagged a hire car quite cheaply too. Because our flight was from Heathrow and the trains from Chichester are both expensive and inconvenient for early flights, we spoiled ourselves with a taxi to the airport. It felt very strange to be whisked through the Sussex and Surrey countryside at six am on a Friday morning!

I came late to Orbital’s work. I knew of them through a few remixes and because as a mad Orb fan, they could not have avoided my notice could they? Apart from that, one of my college friends tried to get me into “In Sides” just after its release in 1996. The same friend got me into “Second Toughest In The Infants” by Underworld. I cannot now understand the reason, but “In Sides” just left me cold.

In my last post, I wrote about hills. I tried to use them as a metaphor to explain nagging sense of incompletion when you single out one activity over another. The feeling that there’s always a more exciting hill off in the distance to go climb, instead of the one you’re on. I said my next post would be about how to pick between different options, particularly when you have many to choose from.

I’m a big fan of books. The way they transport you away to other places and so on. As repositories of knowledge and adventure they can’t be beat. I can think of no better way out of an existential fix than reading. The trouble is I tend to hoard them. I’ve posted pictures of book stacks before (on more than one occasion). I could probably repeat that every month if I wanted to, perhaps even more often.

I enjoyed Wonder Woman, which came as a surprise to me given my growing distaste for superhero movies. I can remember seeing the Superman reboot Man of Steel with its phallic rockets and its boring boring fight sequences. But almost everything about Wonder Woman exceeded my expectations. It’s a well-made superhero movie and better still, it gets to the heart of why these kinds of movies matter. Whereas Man of Steel ended up levelling cities and criminally underusing Amy Adams, all while giving us no stake on why Superman even matters as a man or a hero, Wonder Woman focusses tightly on its main character and explains what matters to her, and in turn the movie then explains why she should matter to us.

It can be a struggle to keep writing. I’ve found this happened a lot since I moved the blog. First, there was the business of moving things over. That meant a lot of thought about old posts and which ones I should keep. A lot of the time I thought “how on earth did I have time to write this?!” Then there seemed to be a lot more barriers to writing than previously.

Moving the blog to Jekyll (again, sort of) Et voila, my blog lives! In a new body (Jekyll) and at a new location. The Process I set up Jekyll on my MacBook Air after loads of initial problems with installing the theme and getting assorted Ruby gems installed and working. Stack Overflow is a friend for life now. By way of comparison, getting things up and running on my new Mac was simple.

Blanck Mass World Eater This album is pretty extreme. It’s not for everyone and even for the people who can handle it, it’s not for all the time. This album is a soul crushing experience at points but there are also points of light. Perhaps this makes “World Eater” more reflective of life as a whole than any other of this month’s albums. On balance it’s probably less crushing than the last Blanck Mass album “Dumb Flesh”, which I reviewed back in June 2015.

Grails Chalice Hymnal Some albums are good because a band continues making the music that you love. Some albums are good because a band takes their ideas a step or two further than before. Chalice Hymnalis that rare album that does both of these things. The references to past albums include the track Deeper Politics and Deep Snow II, and, as per albums past, these tracks evolve slowly out of languid guitar hooks and smoky atmospherics.

Mike Oldfield Return to Ommadawn With Return to Ommadawn, Mike Oldfield revisits his third album Ommadawn. He has past form for this, having revisited his masterwork Tubular Bells twice (the third revisit and fourth instalment Tubular Bells 4 is due next year). I wrote about Tubular Bells II for my understated classics series. Of course Mike has in fact made many more than three Tubular Bells albums1, and this is not a first “return” to Ommadawn.

Although I have put off finishing my UNO game for over eighteen months, I thought I would get started with another pet project of mine: making a Carcassonne game. This is not a serious affair, there is an excellent app of Carcassonne available for those of you who have iOS devices (it works particularly well on the iPad). The game just strikes me as having the right level of complexity to be a taxing yet attainable project.