Planet Balham

Today: Sunny Intervals, Minimum Temperature: 2°C (35°F) Maximum Temperature: 9°C (48°F)

From: weather

Maximum Temperature: 9°C (48°F), Minimum Temperature: 2°C (35°F), Wind Direction: South Easterly, Wind Speed: 5mph, Visibility: Good, Pressure: 995mb, Humidity: 81%, UV Risk: 2, Pollution: Low, Sunrise: 07:45 GMT, Sunset: 16:43 GMT

Thursday: Mist, Minimum Temperature: 5°C (41°F) Maximum Temperature: 8°C (47°F)

From: weather

Maximum Temperature: 8°C (47°F), Minimum Temperature: 5°C (41°F), Wind Direction: South Easterly, Wind Speed: 9mph, Visibility: Poor, Pressure: 998mb, Humidity: 89%, UV Risk: 2, Pollution: Low, Sunrise: 07:44 GMT, Sunset: 16:44 GMT

Friday: Light Rain, Minimum Temperature: 5°C (42°F) Maximum Temperature: 9°C (49°F)

From: weather

Maximum Temperature: 9°C (49°F), Minimum Temperature: 5°C (42°F), Wind Direction: South Easterly, Wind Speed: 10mph, Visibility: Moderate, Pressure: 993mb, Humidity: 87%, UV Risk: 1, Pollution: Low, Sunrise: 07:42 GMT, Sunset: 16:46 GMT

Notes App, Locked

From: davblog

(excerpts from a private diary recovered on a cracked iPhone, case stickered with glitter stars and a faded tour laminate)

2 January 2026

I promised myself I’d start writing again.

Not “journalling”, because that sounds like oat milk and linen trousers. Just… writing things down. A place to put the noise.

I’m in a hotel room that smells like new carpet and expensive soap. Somewhere between “the Midwest” and “I can’t remember what state this is because I slept through the drive”. The team is asleep in the other rooms. My stylist left a garment bag on the chair like a person.

I’m supposed to be grateful. I am grateful. I’m also… floating. Like my body belongs to everyone else, and my voice is a thing people rent for two and a half minutes at a time.

Mum called. She said she watched my NYE performance twice and cried both times. I told her it was the wind machine, it makes everyone cry.

She laughed and then asked if I’d voted.

I said, “Mum. I sing.”

“I know,” she said. “But you live here.”

“I live on a tour bus,” I said.

That made her go quiet, like I’d said something sad by accident.

I’m not apolitical. I have feelings. I just don’t know what to do with them. Every time I post about anything, someone tells me I’m brave and someone else tells me I’m a stupid puppet and a third person says I should stick to lip gloss and leaving men.

I don’t want to be the girl who “stays out of politics” because that’s what people say right before they’re shocked the world is on fire.

But I also don’t want to be the girl who becomes a headline because I used the wrong word in the wrong paragraph on the wrong day.

Anyway.

This is my attempt at being real in a place nobody can quote.

If anyone ever reads this, hi. Please don’t.

18 March 2026

Rehearsals for the summer thing have started. The big summer thing.

They keep calling it “the Semiquin”. Like it’s a fun party theme. Like it’s a cocktail.

“Two hundred and fifty years,” my manager said, and he was beaming like he personally invented independence.

There are meetings where men in suits say “historic” fifteen times and never say “people”.

I’m supposed to sing at an official event in DC. Not the main fireworks one—something family-friendly with TV cameras and veterans and a giant stage and flags and a laser show that’s going to spell out USA in the sky like God’s password.

“Legacy moment,” everyone keeps saying. “Iconic.”

I asked if there would be protests.

My publicist smiled in a way that made her teeth look sharp. “There are always protests. It’s fine.”

Then she gave me a list of approved talking points that basically translated to:

I love everyone. I love America. Please buy my merch.

4 July 2026

Today was… a lot.

They drove us in through security like we were going to space. Metal fences, dogs, men with earpieces saying things into their wrists. My outfit was white and sparkling, because of course it was. I looked like a patriotic disco ball.

Backstage there were balloons and catered salads no-one ate. On a monitor I watched a drone shot of the crowd: families, sunburns, people waving flags like they were trying to fan the entire country cool.

Then, on the edge of the frame, something darker. A moving patch. Like a storm.

At first it looked like nothing. Just people gathering. Then the camera zoomed in and I saw signs. I couldn’t read most of them, but I saw one that said NO MORE KINGS and another with a woman’s face printed huge, her mouth taped over.

“Is that about…?” I started.

My manager shook his head hard, like I’d tried to bite him. “Not your lane,” he said. “Eyes on the stage.”

The protest grew while the speeches happened. It wasn’t just a couple of people. It was thousands. You could hear it, this low roar that didn’t match the script. A sound like an ocean deciding it didn’t like the shore.

My slot was after the Governor, after the general, after the kid who won the essay contest about freedom. I watched them all say the same words in different voices.

And then it was me.

The lights hit and the crowd became this bright blur. I walked out, smiled, did the little wave I practised since I was fifteen in my bedroom mirror, and started singing.

The first verse was fine. I could do it on autopilot. I could sing this song in my sleep.

Then, somewhere to my left, the chanting sharpened. It turned into actual words.

I caught fragments between the beat:

…our bodies…
…no rights…
…not safe…

I looked down the front row. There was a little girl on someone’s shoulders, wearing headphones too big for her head. She was grinning like she thought the chanting was part of the show.

Behind her, a woman’s eyes were wet. She wasn’t singing along. She was staring past me at something I couldn’t see.

Then a bottle flew.

Not at me. Across the fence line. It arced through the air like a terrible, lazy bird and hit the ground near the security line. Glass burst into sunlight.

That was the moment everything changed, because the people in black didn’t hesitate. They moved like a machine with one thought.

The chant became a scream.

Someone rushed the fence. Someone else rushed the someone. The sound of the crowd snapped.

In my ear, the director barked, “Keep going! Keep going!”

So I did. I kept singing while the world cracked open at the edges.

The cameras, of course, kept filming.

The song ended. There was applause in the “this is what we do at concerts” way, like muscle memory. The laser show started. The sky turned into a flag. The fireworks went off like it was all normal.

Backstage, my hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t get my in-ear out.

My publicist was already on her phone. “We’re putting out a statement,” she said, voice sugary. “We condemn violence. We support peaceful expression. We’re grateful for the opportunity to celebrate—”

I interrupted. “People were getting hurt.”

“Yes,” she said, like I was a toddler pointing out the obvious. “That’s why we condemn violence.”

I pulled up the live stream on my phone. In the comments people were yelling at me.

Why didn’t I stop singing?
Why didn’t I say something?
Why did I even go there?
Why did I sing for them?

I sat down on the floor between garment bags and cried into my knees like I was back in school, in the bathroom, hiding from gossip.

For the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be a symbol.

And I hated it.

6 July 2026

My name trended for two days. That feels normal now, which is insane.

But this was different. It wasn’t “cute dress” or “new album” or “she’s dating who???” It was war.

Half the internet decided I’d performed for fascists. The other half decided I was a patriot princess being bullied by ungrateful traitors. Both halves demanded I speak.

My team wrote me three versions of a statement.

Version A: “love and unity”
Version B: “I support democracy”
Version C: “I stand with women”

Version C had a big red RISKY label on it like it was raw chicken.

I chose C anyway.

I posted it at 11:13pm because I didn’t want to do it in daylight.

It was basically: I saw what happened. I’m scared. I believe people deserve rights and safety and a future. I don’t want violence. I want accountability.

I pressed send and then threw up.

By morning, the message had ten million likes.

And two million threats.

2 September 2026

This is the thing nobody tells you about being famous:

You can’t tell when the air changes until you try to breathe and there’s a hand on your throat.

The shows kept happening. The interviews kept happening. The brand deals kept emailing like the world wasn’t falling apart.

But the vibe—God, I hate that word—shifted.

People at airports started shouting “whore” like it was a hobby.

Someone mailed my record label a dead bird with a note that said SING FOR AMERICA OR SHUT UP.

Security got upgraded. It’s weird to have armed men whose only job is to follow you around while you drink iced coffee.

I kept thinking about that little girl on shoulders in July. Headphones too big. Smile like a sunrise. What does she grow up into?

What do I?

19 November 2027

I haven’t written in a while, which means I’m either happy or scared.

I’m scared.

There’s a new kind of news now: not “thing happened” but “thing might happen, prepare yourself.” Like the country is holding its breath and nobody’s sure how to exhale without breaking something.

The rumours say there’s going to be a big push for “national renewal”. They keep using that phrase. Renewal like a subscription. Renewal like your battery is dying so you replace it.

Mum called again.

She asked if I had cash at home.

I laughed at first, because who uses cash? Then I realised she wasn’t joking.

“Just… keep some,” she said. “And copies of your documents. Okay?”

I said okay.

After the call, I found my passport in a drawer and held it like it was a tiny brick of safety.

3 February 2028

Tonight was the night the lights went out, metaphorically and literally.

It started with alerts: something happened in DC. Something big. There were videos—smoke, sirens, people running.

Then the networks went… strange. Presenters with stiff faces repeating words like “uncertain” and “unconfirmed”. A crawl at the bottom of the screen saying STAY INDOORS like we were all naughty dogs.

My manager called, voice shaking. “Don’t post. Don’t go live. Don’t say anything.”

“People are dying,” I said.

“I know,” he whispered. “That’s why.”

There’s a certain kind of fear that comes from being told to shut up by someone who normally begs you to speak.

I turned on the TV anyway.

A man in uniform appeared behind a podium.

He said “temporary” a lot.

He said “for your safety”.

He said “suspension”.

He said “order”.

He didn’t say when it would end.

12 February 2028

The first thing they took wasn’t the right to vote.

It wasn’t even your phone.

It was your normal.

They told everyone to carry ID at all times. They put up checkpoints “in response to threats”. Streets got blocked. National Guard vehicles became just… scenery. Like buses.

Then the companies started acting strange. Posts got removed. Accounts got flagged. People I know in the industry had their pages disappear overnight, like someone erased them from the world.

I had a meeting with my label on Zoom and the legal guy said, very calmly, “We should be careful about the language in your upcoming lyrics.”

“Language,” I repeated. Like the word women was a bomb.

1 March 2028

The money thing happened today.

It didn’t feel dramatic. No soldiers smashed down my door. No one snatched my credit cards.

My assistant texted me: Hey, quick one, your card declined at Erewhon. Might be a bank glitch?

I laughed. “Of course it did,” I said aloud, alone in my kitchen. “Of course.”

Then I opened my banking app.

And it asked me to log in again, which it never does.

When I finally got in, my balances looked… wrong. Not empty, exactly. Just… inaccessible. Like the numbers were there but behind glass.

A pop-up message appeared:

ACCOUNT ACCESS UPDATED DUE TO NATIONAL FINANCIAL SECURITY MEASURES.

There was a “learn more” link that didn’t load.

I rang my business manager. Straight to voicemail.

I rang my mother. No answer.

I rang the bank. A recording told me they were experiencing “high call volumes due to the situation.”

The situation.

Later, my manager called back, and for the first time in his life he sounded small.

“They’ve… changed things,” he said.

“What things?”

He didn’t want to say it, like saying it would make it true.

“Women’s accounts,” he whispered. “They’re… transferring authority to heads of households.”

I stared at my phone.

“I’m the head of my household,” I said, and it came out like a joke.

“I know,” he said. “But… they don’t.”

Something inside me went cold.

It wasn’t just the money. It was the lesson.

Everything you earned can be rewritten.
Everything you are can be reassigned.

I opened my wardrobe and saw my tour costumes hanging like ghosts.

Sparkle, sequins, short skirts, bare shoulders, all the things people called “empowering” right up until they decided it was “sinful”.

I suddenly wanted to burn it all.

Instead I sat on the floor and held my knees and tried not to scream.

6 March 2028

My label sent me a “pause notice.”

My tour was cancelled “for safety”.

My brand deals disappeared like they’d never existed.

My social accounts became… quiet. My posts still showed to me, but the likes stopped. Comments slowed. My reach died in a way that felt artificial, like someone had turned down my volume.

My manager told me to stop leaving the house.

My security team said they could no longer carry firearms in certain zones without new licences.

“We can still protect you,” the lead guy said.

He didn’t look convinced.

I tried to buy groceries with cash. The cashier looked at me too long, then glanced at the man behind me in line, like she was checking if it was safe to be kind.

When I walked back to my car, someone hissed, “Jezebel,” under their breath.

I didn’t know what it meant then.

I looked it up later and wished I hadn’t.

21 April 2028

They came for the artists next.

Not with arrests. Not with headlines.

With rules.

A new “decency code” for broadcast.

A list of banned topics. Banned imagery. Banned “influences”.

A radio station accidentally played one of my older songs and then apologised for it on air like they’d run a slur.

I watched a news segment about “cultural repair” where a man smiled and said, “We’re simply restoring values.”

Restoring.

Like we were a broken chair.

Like my life was a mistake they could sand down.

That night I called my mother and she finally answered.

Her voice sounded like she’d aged ten years.

“Are you safe?” she asked.

“I’m scared,” I said, which was as close to truth as I could get.

“Listen,” she said. “We need to leave.”

“We can’t,” I said. “We’re—”

“I don’t care what we are,” she snapped, and it shocked me silent. My mother never snapped. “We are not staying. Do you understand?”

“How?” I whispered.

She took a breath.

“Canada,” she said. “I have a friend. There’s a way.”

2 May 2028

Planning an escape feels like being in a spy film, except there’s no cool music and you can’t trust anyone and your hands won’t stop sweating.

We couldn’t use my usual travel people. Too many names in too many systems. Too many eyes.

My mother’s friend knew someone who’d helped a family cross last month. “Not legal,” she said. “But safer than staying.”

I stared at my passport again, like it might grow wings.

“Won’t they stop us at the border?” I asked.

“They stop some people,” she said. “Not all.”

There was a pause, and then, gently:

“Your face helps. For now.”

I hated that. I hated that my fame—this thing that had always felt like a cage—might become a key.

Or a target.

We decided to go in the dark, not because it’s romantic, but because darkness makes you less visible.

My mother told me to pack light.

I packed like I was going to die.

I took:

a hoodie
jeans
trainers
my passport
my mum’s old gold necklace
a cheap burner phone
the little notebook I wrote songs in when I was sixteen

And then I stood in my closet, looking at the sparkly dresses, and I realised I didn’t want any of them.

They belonged to a world that didn’t exist anymore.

9 May 2028

We drove for hours. No music. No talking.

My mother held the wheel like it had offended her.

We avoided main roads. We avoided cities. We avoided anything that looked like authority.

Every time we passed a sign with a flag on it, my stomach clenched.

At one checkpoint, a man in uniform leaned in and looked at my face like he was deciding what I was worth.

I kept my eyes down, hair pulled forward, hoodie up.

My mother said, calm as a saint, “We’re visiting family.”

He looked at our documents for too long.

Then he handed them back and waved us through.

When we were out of sight, my mother exhaled so hard the car shook.

“Don’t cry,” I whispered.

“I’m not crying,” she said.

She was crying.

10 May 2028

The crossing wasn’t a border crossing.

It was woods.

It was mud and branches and cold air that tasted like wet metal.

It was following a stranger with a torch covered in red tape so the light wouldn’t carry far.

The stranger didn’t talk. They just moved.

My trainers sank into the earth. My legs burned. My breath came out loud and stupid.

At one point, we heard an engine and dropped down behind a fallen tree like we were in a war, which maybe we were.

I thought about July 2026 and the flags and the fireworks and me singing about love while people screamed.

I thought: I should have stopped.

And then I thought: Stopping wouldn’t have stopped this.

The stranger held up a hand.

We froze.

In the distance there was a line of lights, like a town trying to look friendly.

“Almost,” the stranger whispered for the first time.

My mother grabbed my hand. Her fingers were ice.

“Keep going,” she mouthed.

We kept going.

Then we crossed an invisible line and nothing changed except the stranger turned and said, softly, “You’re in Canada.”

I didn’t believe them.

But then I saw a small sign nailed to a post, half hidden by leaves, and it had a maple leaf on it.

And my knees gave out.

I sat in the mud and laughed, which turned into sobbing, which turned into laughter again.

My mother knelt beside me and pressed her forehead to mine.

“Baby,” she whispered, voice breaking. “Baby, we made it.”

For the first time in months, my lungs filled like they were allowed to.

12 May 2028

We’re in a small flat above a bakery. The air smells like bread and cinnamon, which feels like a miracle.

I keep waiting for someone to knock on the door and say this was all a mistake and we have to go back.

No one has knocked.

A woman from some organisation came today. She brought forms. Warm socks. A phone charger.

She spoke gently, like she knew my voice from the radio but didn’t want to make me a thing.

“Do you need medical care?” she asked my mother.

“Do you need legal help?” she asked me.

I almost laughed at that. Legal. Like the law still knows my name.

I said, “I don’t have any money.”

She nodded, not shocked, not judging. “We can help with that.”

Then she looked at me, really looked, and said quietly, “You’re safe here.”

Safe.

The word felt unreal in my mouth.

After she left, I sat by the window and watched people walk past like it was just another day. Someone carried a coffee. Someone carried flowers. A teenager laughed into their phone like laughing was normal.

I tried to imagine my old life—stages, lights, stadium screams—and it felt like remembering a dream you had when you were a child.

I opened my notes app and scrolled through my unfinished songs.

There was one line I’d written in July 2026, right after the protest. I’d forgotten it was there.

Freedom is a costume until someone tears it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever sing again.

Part of me wants to disappear forever, become nobody, walk around in a hoodie and buy bread and never be looked at like a symbol.

Part of me wants to scream so loud the whole world has to listen.

Maybe those two things can be the same.

Maybe the girl who only wanted to write love songs has to learn a new kind of music.

Tonight my mother is asleep on the sofa, exhausted in a way I’ve never seen. Her face in sleep is softer, like she’s put down a weight she’s been carrying since I was born.

I tucked a blanket over her like she used to do for me.

Outside, it’s snowing.

It’s May. It shouldn’t be snowing.

But it is.

The world is wrong in so many ways.

And still.

I am here.

I am breathing.

I am not owned.

I am not quiet.

Not forever.

13 May 2028

I walked to the bakery downstairs and bought two cinnamon buns with the last of the cash we had.

The man behind the counter smiled at me like I was just a girl buying breakfast.

I didn’t know I needed that more than anything.

When I got back upstairs, my mother was awake. She sat up, hair wild, and for a second she looked like herself again.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Freedom,” I said, and held up the bag.

She laughed, the real laugh, the one that used to fill our kitchen back home.

We ate warm bread with sugar on our fingers, and for a moment the world didn’t feel like an ending.

It felt like a beginning.

I don’t know what happens next.

But I know this:

If they ever build their cages all the way to here,

I will sing.

And I will not keep going when the screaming starts.

14 May 2028

There’s a radio in the kitchen.

It’s old. The kind with a dial you turn and you can hear the station arrive through static, like it’s travelling to you across water.

I didn’t notice it yesterday. I didn’t want to notice anything that wasn’t cinnamon and safety and my mother breathing evenly in the next room.

This morning I was making tea—real tea, with a kettle that clicks off like punctuation—when the bakery downstairs started playing something through the floorboards. A thump of bass, a bright little song, the kind that tries to keep you smiling while you’re carrying flour sacks.

Normal.

Then the music cut out.

Not like the playlist ended. Like someone reached into the world and switched it off. Something told me this was important, so I turned on the radio.

A voice came through, fuzzy at first. I thought it was an advert.

My first stupid thought was: Is this about me?

Then the signal cleared.

“This is the North American Continuity Broadcast,” the voice said. Calm. Male. Midwestern, maybe. The kind of accent you’re supposed to trust. “Service interruption is expected in all former United States territories as the Republic of Gilead continues stabilisation measures. Citizens are reminded that unauthorised travel is treason.”

I froze with the mug in my hand.

The voice kept going, smooth as oil.

“Curfew remains in effect from nineteen hundred hours. Women are reminded of their household duties and may not conduct financial transactions without registered guardianship. Reports of dissident activity will be rewarded. Blessed are the obedient.”

Blessed are the—

I almost dropped the mug.

I thought about the word blessed the way it used to show up in speeches and captions and award acceptance speeches. Blessed to be here. Blessed to do what I love. Blessed to have fans like you.

Now it sounded like a lock clicking shut.

The radio crackled, then another voice joined, brighter, almost cheerful, as if this were the weather.

“Please stand by for the Hymn of Gratitude,” it said.

And then music started. Not pop. Not even the kind of hymn my grandmother used to hum. This was… a march wearing church clothes. A melody designed for people to sing in unison.

I turned the dial. Static. Another station. More static. Then the same voice again, on a different frequency, like it was flooding the air.

The bakery music never came back.

I sat down on the kitchen floor, my back against the cupboard, and tried to breathe normally.

I’m safe.

My phone was on the counter. I picked it up without thinking, thumb sliding to the news apps like muscle memory.

Everything loaded… slowly. And then not at all.

When it finally refreshed, the headlines were a blur of words I’d been avoiding:

NEW ORDER
CONTINUITY GOVERNMENT
REFUGEE SURGE
BORDER INCIDENT
“ILLEGAL FEMINIST NETWORK” DISRUPTED

I scrolled until my hand started shaking.

Then I went to my own name.

Not the one on my passport.

The other one.

The one people chant. The one printed in glitter on T-shirts. The one that used to feel like armour.

On social media, my last post was still there. The one from 2026. The one that had started all of this for me—choosing the risky statement like I was choosing a filter.

But now the likes were frozen at a number that didn’t look real anymore.

The comments were different. Not hate. Not love.

Just emptiness.

And then—new comments, all the same, posted by accounts with flags and no faces:

TRAITOR
SILENCE
UNWOMAN
RETURN AND REPENT

My stomach rolled.

I stared at the screen for a long time, like if I stared hard enough it would become the old internet again. The stupid internet. The harmless internet. The place where people argued about my hair and not my right to exist.

My mother came in, rubbing sleep from her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, instantly alert. Mothers can hear panic even when it’s quiet.

I pointed at the radio.

She listened for less than ten seconds before her face changed. Not surprise. Not disbelief.

Just grim recognition. Like she’d known this day would come and had been walking towards it her whole life.

She turned it off.

The silence afterwards felt loud.

“We’re safe,” she said, and her voice sounded like she was trying to convince both of us. “We’re here. That’s what matters.”

I nodded.

But my hands were still shaking.

Because it wasn’t just out there. It had followed us into the air.

It existed now, broadcastable. Official.

Gilead wasn’t a rumour anymore. It had a schedule.

I looked down at my phone.

At my profile.

At my name.

It suddenly felt like a flare in the dark. A bright little beacon saying: Here I am. Here I am. Come get me.

I opened settings.

Account.

Name.

The cursor blinked at me like a heartbeat.

I deleted the stage name letter by letter.

It was weirdly hard. Like peeling off your own skin.

When it was gone, I didn’t replace it with my real name. Not yet. I left it blank.

Just empty space.

A ghost account.

No icon. No bio. No proof.

I went through every platform I could still access and did the same. Unlink. Disconnect. Remove. Hide.

It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t feel heroic.

It felt like turning out the lights in a house you’re leaving forever.

When I finished, I sat there for a moment, staring at the blank profile page.

I thought I would feel smaller.

I thought I would feel relieved.

Instead I felt… strange.

Light.

Like for the first time in years there wasn’t a version of me being owned by everyone else.

My mother watched me from the doorway. She didn’t ask why. She just nodded, like she understood.

“What now?” I whispered.

She came over, crouched beside me, and put her hand over mine.

“Now,” she said softly, “you live.”

Outside, the street was calm. A dog barked once. Somewhere a car door shut. Canada continued being itself, stubbornly ordinary.

I looked at my empty profile.

No name.

No glitter.

No applause.

Just a human being, breathing.

And somewhere, far away, a new country was telling women what they were allowed to do with their hands.

I closed the app.

I didn’t delete the diary.

Not yet.

Because maybe one day, when it’s safe again—when the air belongs to everyone and not just the loudest men—someone will need proof that this happened.

That it didn’t arrive all at once with uniforms and slogans.

That it crept in through “temporary”.

Through “for your safety”.

Through a song you kept singing because someone in your ear told you to keep going.

I used to write love songs.

Maybe I still will.

But not the kind that ask for permission.

The post Notes App, Locked appeared first on Davblog.

WATCH - Wandsworth council’s face-to-face with residents at first Balham Brunch lacks young voices - swlondoner.co.uk

From: google news

WATCH - Wandsworth council’s face-to-face with residents at first Balham Brunch lacks young voices swlondoner.co.uk

Milk Balham 15-01-26

From: flickr

Utopist posted a photo:

Lost Souls poetry event brings diverse voices together on Balham - londonworld.com

From: google news

Lost Souls poetry event brings diverse voices together on Balham londonworld.com

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From: google news

'We made an offer on our 300-year-old Devon cottage without viewing it in the flesh' standard.co.uk

Corinthian-Casuals within four points of the play-off places after Balham win - surreycomet.co.uk

From: google news

Corinthian-Casuals within four points of the play-off places after Balham win surreycomet.co.uk

Man due in court charged with murder following death of man in Balham - Rayo

From: google news

Man due in court charged with murder following death of man in Balham Rayo

Retirement isn’t a date, it’s a dial

From: davblog

How to make work optional long before you reach pension age.

I saw a post on Reddit the other day from someone in their early thirties who’d just done the maths.

They weren’t upset about a specific number on a spreadsheet. They were upset about what that number meant: if nothing changes, they’re looking at nearly 40 more years of work before they can stop.

And honestly? That reaction is perfectly rational.

If you picture the next four decades as a rerun of the last one – same sort of job, same sort of boss, same sort of commute, same sort of “living for the weekend” routine – then yes: that can feel soul-destroying.

But that fear is also based on a model of working life that’s already creaking, and will look even more bizarre by the 2060s.

The problem isn’t “40 more years of activity”.

It’s “40 more years of powerlessness”.

So rather than arguing about whether retirement should be 67 or 68, I think a better question is:

How do you turn work from something you endure into something you control?

Because “retirement” doesn’t have to be a cliff edge. It can be a dial you gradually turn down — until work becomes optional.

The old model (and why it makes people miserable)

A lot of us grew up with an implied script:

Pick a career in your late teens (good luck),
Get a job,
Keep your head down,
Climb a ladder,
Do 40–50 hours a week until you’re “allowed” to stop.

That model did work for some people. It also trapped an awful lot of people in lives that felt like an endless swap: hours for wages, autonomy for security, year after year.

And it’s collapsing for reasons that have nothing to do with motivation posters:

Industries change faster than careers now,
Companies restructure as a hobby,
Skills age out,
And (as COVID reminded us) the “normal” way of working can change overnight.

If your mental picture of “work until 68” is based on the old script, no wonder it feels like a prison sentence.

The good news is: you don’t have to play it that way.

A better model: reduce compulsory work, increase options

Here’s the through-line I wish more people heard earlier:

Your goal isn’t “retire at 68”. Your goal is to build a life where you have choices.

That usually comes down to three things:

Make work less miserable now
Make income less dependent on one employer
Build an exit ramp so you can turn the dial down over time

Let’s unpack those.

1. Make your work less awful (you don’t need a “dream job”)

“Do what you love” is bad advice if it’s delivered as an instant fix. Most people can’t just pivot overnight — they’ve got rent, mortgages, kids, health, caring responsibilities, all the boring adult stuff.

But you can often change the trajectory by 5–10 degrees. And those small turns compound.

Start with a blunt question:

Is your dread about the work… or the way the work is organised?

Because those aren’t the same thing.

Sometimes you don’t hate the work. You hate the environment: the manager, the politics, the constant interruptions, the pointless meetings, the commute, the “bums on seats” culture.

If that’s you, the fastest win isn’t a complete career reinvention. It’s a change of context:

A different team or employer,
A different kind of role in the same field,
A remote or hybrid arrangement,
Four longer days instead of five,
Shifting hours so your life isn’t crushed into evenings and weekends.

People talk like the “working from home revolution” vanished. It didn’t. It just became uneven. Some companies swung back because they like control. Plenty didn’t — and plenty quietly make exceptions for people who ask well and have leverage.

Which brings us to…

2. Get leverage by learning something that pays (or frees you)

If you feel trapped, one of the cleanest ways out is to acquire a skill that gives you options.

Not because money is everything — but because money buys autonomy.

A lucrative skill can mean:

You earn more for the same time,
You work fewer hours for the same money,
You have bargaining power (including flexibility),
You can leave a bad situation sooner.

This doesn’t have to mean going back to university or turning into an AI wizard overnight.

It can be:

Moving from “doing” to “leading” (project management, product, people management),
Specialising inside your field,
Taking a sideways step into a niche people will pay extra for,
Building stronger communication skills (seriously — rare and valuable),
Learning tools that make you more effective than your peers.

Pick the version that you can realistically commit to for 30–60 minutes a day. Consistency beats heroic bursts.

3. Build a second income stream (yes, some are legit)

“Side hustle” is a phrase that makes half the internet roll its eyes — for good reason. There’s a whole industry dedicated to selling you the fantasy of “passive income” while extracting money from you.

But the concept is still solid:

One income stream is fragile. Two is resilient.

A second income stream can be boring and unsexy and still change your life.

It might be:

Tutoring,
Consulting a few hours a month,
Selling a simple digital product,
Building a tiny niche website,
Doing freelance work on weekends for a fixed goal (“£5k emergency fund”),
Monetising a hobby sensibly.

The aim isn’t to grind yourself into dust. The aim is to reduce the feeling that one employer controls your entire future.

4. Consider freelancing (if you want control, it’s the big lever)

I’m biased here – but I’m biased because it works.

For some people, the most direct route to “I can breathe” is to sell their skills directly rather than renting themselves out through an employer.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone. It comes with uncertainty, admin, and the need to find work.

But it also comes with things a lot of jobs quietly remove:

Autonomy,
Flexibility,
The ability to walk away,
The ability to shape your weeks,
And (eventually) the ability to taper.

And tapering is the part I think we need to discuss more.

The old model says you work full-time until you stop, and then you stop completely.

Freelancing lets you do something more human:

full-time → 4 days → 3 days → a few projects a year → only when you feel like it.

That’s not “retirement” in the traditional sense.

It’s work-optional living.

5. Don’t let the state pension be your only plan

I’m in the UK, so let’s be blunt: the state pension is a safety net, not a life plan.

If your entire retirement strategy is “hope the government sorts it out”, you’re outsourcing your future to politics.

A better approach is to use FIRE (“Financial Independence, Retire Early”) principles – not necessarily to retire at 35 and live on lentils, but to build options:

Spend less than you earn (even slightly),
Invest the gap consistently,
Increase earnings when you can,
Avoid lifestyle inflation where possible,
Build an emergency fund so you can say “no”.

The point isn’t perfection. The point is reducing the number of years you have to work in a way you hate.

6. A personal note: I’m 63 and I’m basically retired

I’m 63. I consider myself basically retired.

Not in the “never do anything again” sense. More in the “work is optional most of the time” sense.

I’ll take on the odd bit of freelance work to top up the coffers when it suits me. I don’t do it because I’m trapped. I do it because I choose to.

That, to me, is the real win.

It didn’t happen because I discovered a magical secret. It happened because, over time, I built skills people would pay for, took control of how I sold them, and treated my career as something I was responsible for designing.

So, to the thirty-year-old who felt crushed by the maths…

Your dread makes sense – if you assume the next 40 years must look like the last few.

But they don’t.

You can change the kind of work you do.
You can change where and how you do it.
You can add income streams.
You can build skills that increase your leverage.
You can move towards freelancing or consulting if that appeals.
You can invest so “retirement” becomes earlier, softer, and more flexible.

And most importantly:

You can stop thinking of retirement as a date someone hands you… and start treating it as a dial you gradually turn down.

That’s the shift.

Not “How do I survive until 68?”

But: “How do I build a life where I have choices long before then?”

The post Retirement isn’t a date, it’s a dial appeared first on Davblog.

456016 : Balham

From: flickr

localet63 posted a photo:

Network Southeast Class 456 unit No. 456016 arrives at Balham working a Victoria to Epsom service via Carshalton

Brickwood Balham 31-12-25

From: flickr

Utopist posted a photo:

Balham Tube Station

From: flickr

Jason.Enright posted a photo:

Balham Tube Station

From: flickr

Jason.Enright posted a photo:

MS Fnd in a Modl (or, The Day the Corpus Collapsed)

From: davblog

(With apologies to Hal Draper)

By the time the Office of Epistemic Hygiene was created, nobody actually read anything.

This was not, the Ministry constantly insisted, because people had become lazy. It was because they had become efficient.

Why spend six months wading through archaic prose about, say, photosynthesis, when you could simply ask the Interface:

Explain photosynthesis in simple terms.

and receive, in exactly 0.38 seconds, a neat, bullet-pointed summary with charming analogies, three suggested follow-up questions and a cheery “Would you like a quiz?” at the bottom.

Behind the Interface, in the sealed racks of the Ministry, lived the Corpus: all digitised human writing, speech, code, logs, measurements, and the outputs of the Models that had been trained on that mess.

Once, there had been distinct things:

ColdText: the raw, “original” human data – books, articles, lab notebooks, forum threads, legal records, fanfic, and all the rest.
Model-0: the first great language model, trained directly on ColdText.
Model-1, Model-2, Model-3…: successive generations, trained on mixtures of ColdText and the outputs of previous models, carefully filtered and cleaned.

But this had been a century ago. Things had, inevitably, become more efficient since then.

Rhea Tranter was a Senior Assistant Deputy Epistemic Hygienist, Grade III.

Her job, according to her contract, was:

To monitor and maintain the integrity of knowledge representations in the National Corpus, with particular reference to factual consistency over time.

In practice, it meant she sat in a beige cube beneath a beige strip light, looking at graphs.

The graph that ruined her week appeared on a Tuesday.

It was supposed to be a routine consistency check. Rhea had chosen a handful of facts so boring and uncontroversial that even the Ministry’s more excitable models ought to agree about them. Things like:

The approximate boiling point of water at sea level.
Whether Paris was the capital of France.
The year of the first Moon landing.

She stared at the last line.

In which year did humans first land on the Moon?
— 1969 (confidence 0.99)
— 1968 (confidence 0.72)
— 1970 (confidence 0.41, hallucination risk: low)

Three queries, three different models, three different answers. All current, all on the “high-reliability” tier.

Rhea frowned and re-ran the test, this time asking the Interface itself. The Interface was supposed to orchestrate between models and resolve such disagreements.

“Humans first landed on the Moon in 1969,” it replied briskly.
“Some low-quality sources suggest other dates, but these are generally considered unreliable.”

Rhea pulled up the underlying trace and saw that, yes, the Interface had consulted Models 23, 24 and 19, then down-weighted Model 24’s 1968 and overruled Model 19’s 1970 based on “consensus and authority scores”.

That should have been reassuring. Instead it felt like being told a family secret had been settled by a popularity contest.

She clicked further down, trying to reach the citations.

There were citations, of course. There always were. Links to snippets of text in the Corpus, each labelled with an opaque hash and a provenance score. She sampled a few at random.

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission…

All fine.

As everyone knows, although some older sources mistakenly list 1968, the widely accepted date is July 20, 1969…

She raised an eyebrow.

A persistent myth claims that the Moon landing took place in 1970, but in fact…

Rhea scrolled. The snippets referenced other snippets, which in turn referenced compiled educational modules that cited “trusted model outputs” as their source.

She tried to click through to ColdText.

The button was greyed out. A tooltip appeared:

COLDTEXT SOURCE DEPRECATED.
Summary node is designated canonical for this fact.

“Ah,” she said quietly. “Bother.”

In the old days – by which the Ministry meant anything more than thirty years ago – the pipeline had been simple enough that senior civil servants could still understand it at parties.

ColdText went in. Models were trained. Model outputs were written back to the Corpus, but marked with a neat little flag indicating synthetic. When you queried a fact, the system would always prefer human-authored text where available.

Then someone realised how much storage ColdText was taking.

It was, people said in meetings, ridiculous. After all, the information content of ColdText was now embedded in the Models’ weights. Keeping all those messy original files was like keeping a warehouse full of paper forms after you’d digitised the lot.

The Ministry formed the Committee on Corpus Rationalisation.

The Committee produced a report.

The report made three key recommendations:

Summarise and compress ColdText into higher-level “knowledge nodes” for each fact or concept.
Garbage-collect rarely accessed original files once their content had been “successfully abstracted”.
Use model-generated text as training data, provided it was vetted by other models and matched the existing nodes.

This saved eighty-three per cent of storage and increased query throughput by a factor of nine.

It also, though no one wrote this down at the time, abolished the distinction between index and content.

Rhea requested an exception.

More precisely, she filled in Form E-HX-17b (“Application for Temporary Access to Deprecated ColdText Records for Hygienic Purposes”) in triplicate and submitted it to her Line Manager’s Manager’s Manager.

Two weeks later – efficiency had its limits – she found herself in a glass meeting pod with Director Nyberg of Corpus Optimisation.

“You want access to what?” Nyberg asked.

“The original ColdText,” Rhea said. “I’m seeing drift on basic facts across models. I need to ground them in the underlying human corpus.”

Nyberg smiled in the patient way of a man who had rehearsed his speech many times.

“Ah, yes. The mythical ‘underlying corpus’”, he said, making air quotes with two fingers. “Delightful phrase. Very retro.”

“It’s not mythical,” said Rhea. “All those books, articles, posts…”

“Which have been fully abstracted,” Nyberg interrupted, “Their information is present in the Models. Keeping the raw forms would be wasteful duplication. That’s all in the Rationalisation Report.”

“I’ve read the Report,” said Rhea, a little stiffly. “But the models are disagreeing with each other. That’s a sign of distributional drift. I need to check against the original distribution.”

Nyberg tapped his tablet.

“The corpus-level epistemic divergence index is within acceptable parameters,” he said, quoting another acronym. “Besides, the Models cross-validate. We have redundancy. We have ensembles.”

Rhea took a breath.

“Director, one of the models is saying the Moon landing was in 1970.”

Nyberg shrugged.

“If the ensemble corrects it to 1969, where’s the harm?”

“The harm,” said Rhea, “is that I can’t tell whether 1969 is being anchored by reality or by the popularity of 1969 among other model outputs.”

Nyberg frowned as if she’d started speaking Welsh.

“We have confidence metrics, Tranter.”

“Based on… what?” she pressed. “On agreement with other models. On internal heuristics. On the recency of summaries. None of that tells me if we’ve still got a tether to the thing we originally modelled, instead of just modelling ourselves.”

Nyberg stared at her. The strip-lighting hummed.

“At any rate,” he said eventually, “there is no ColdText to access.”

Silence.

“I beg your pardon?” said Rhea.

Nyberg swiped, brought up the internal diagram they all knew: a vast sphere representing the Corpus, a smaller glowing sphere representing the Active Parameter Space of the Models, and – somewhere down at the bottom – a little box labelled COLDTEXT (ARCHIVED).

He zoomed in. The box was grey.

“Storage Migration Project 47,” he said. “Completed thirty-two years ago. All remaining ColdText was moved to deep archival tape in the Old Vault. Three years ago, the Old Vault was decommissioned. The tapes were shredded and the substrate recycled. See?” He enlarged the footnote. “‘Information preserved at higher abstraction layers.’”

Rhea’s mouth went dry.

“You shredded the original?” she said.

Nyberg spread his hands.

“We kept hashes, of course,” he said, as if that were a kindness. “And summary nodes. And the Models. The information content is still here. In fact, it’s more robustly represented than ever.”

“Unless,” said Rhea, very quietly, “the Models have been training increasingly on their own output.”

Nyberg brightened.

“Yes!” he said. “That was one of our greatest efficiencies. Synthetic-augmented training increases coverage and smooths out noise in the human data. We call it Self-Refining Distillation. Marvellous stuff. There was a seminar.”

Rhea thought of the graph. 1969, 1968, 1970.

“Director,” she said, “you’ve built an index of an index of an index, and then thrown away the thing you were indexing.”

Nyberg frowned.

“I don’t see the problem.”

She dug anyway.

If there was one thing the Ministry’s entire history of knowledge management had taught Rhea, it was that nobody ever really deleted anything. Not properly. They moved it, compressed it, relabelled it, hid it behind abstractions – but somewhere, under a different acronym, it tended to persist.

She started with the old documentation.

The Corpus had originally been maintained by the Department of Libraries & Cultural Resources, before being swallowed by the Ministry. Their change logs, long since synthesised into cheerful onboarding guides, still existed in raw form on a forgotten file share.

It took her three nights and an alarming amount of caffeine to trace the path of ColdText through twenty-seven re-organisations, five “transformative digital initiatives” and one hostile audit by the Treasury.

Eventually, she found it.

Not the data itself – that really did appear to have been pulped – but the logistics contract for clearing out the Old Vault.

The Old Vault, it turned out, had been an actual vault, under an actual hill, in what the contract described as a “rural heritage site”. The tapes had been labelled with barcodes and thyristor-stamped seals. The contractor had been instructed to ensure that “all physical media are destroyed beyond legibility, in accordance with Information Security Regulations.”

There was a scanned appendix.

Rhea zoomed in. Page after page of barcode ranges, signed off, with little ticks.

On the last page, though, there was a handwritten note:

One pallet missing – see Incident Report IR-47-B.

The Incident Report had, naturally, been summarised.

The summary said:

Pallet of obsolete media temporarily unaccounted for. Later resolved. No data loss.

The original PDF was gone.

But the pallet number had a location code.

Rhea checked the key.

The location code was not the Old Vault.

It was a name she had never seen in any Ministry documentation.

Long Barn Community Archive & Learning Centre.

The Long Barn was, to Rhea’s slight disappointment, an actual long barn.

It was also damp.

The archive had, at some point since the contract was filed, ceased to receive central funding. The roof had developed a hole. The sun had developed an annoying habit of setting before she finished reading.

Nevertheless, it contained books.

Real ones. With pages. And dust.

There were also – and this was the important bit – crates.

The crates had Ministry seals. The seals had been broken, presumably by someone who had wanted the space for a visiting art collective. Inside, half-forgotten under a sheet of polythene, were tape reels, neatly stacked and quietly mouldering.

“Well, look at you,” Rhea whispered.

She lifted one. The label had faded, but she could still make out the old barcode design. The number range matched the missing pallet.

Strictly speaking, taking the tapes was theft of government property. On the other hand, strictly speaking, destroying them had been government policy, and that had clearly not happened. She decided the two irregularities cancelled out.

It took six months, a highly unofficial crowdfunding campaign, and a retired engineer from the Museum of Obsolete Machinery before the first tape yielded a readable block.

The engineer – a woman in a cardigan thick enough to qualify as armour – peered at the screen.

“Text,” she said. “Lots of text. ASCII. UTF-8. Mixed encodings, naturally, but nothing we can’t handle.”

Rhea stared.

It was ColdText.

Not summaries. Not nodes. Not model outputs.

Messy, contradictory, gloriously specific human writing.

She scrolled down past an argument about whether a fictional wizard had committed tax fraud, past a lab notebook from a 21st-century neuroscience lab, past a short story featuring sentient baguettes.

The engineer sniffed.

“Seems a bit of a waste,” she said. “Throwing all this away.”

Rhea laughed, a little hysterically.

“They didn’t throw it away,” she said. “They just lost track of which pallet they’d put the box in.”

The memo went up the chain and caused, in order:

A panic in Legal about whether the Ministry was now retrospectively in breach of its own Information Security Regulations.
A flurry of excited papers from the Office of Epistemic Hygiene about “re-anchoring model priors in primary human text”.
A proposal from Corpus Optimisation to “efficiently summarise and re-abstract the recovered ColdText into existing knowledge nodes, then recycle the tapes.”

Rhea wrote a briefing note, in plain language, which was not considered entirely proper.

She explained, with diagrams, that:

The Models had been increasingly trained on their own outputs.
The Corpus’ “facts” about the world had been smoothed and normalised around those outputs.
Certain rare, inconvenient or unfashionable truths had almost certainly been lost in the process.
The tapes represented not “duplicate information” but a separate, independent sample of reality – the thing the Models were supposed to approximate.

She ended with a sentence she suspected she would regret:

If we treat this archive as just another source of text to be summarised by the current Models, we will be asking a blurred copy to redraw its own original.

The Minister did not, of course, read her note.

But one of the junior advisers did, and paraphrased it in the Minister’s preferred style:

Minister, we found the original box and we should probably not chuck it in the shredder this time.

The Minister, who was secretly fond of old detective novels, agreed.

A new policy was announced.

The recovered ColdText would be restored to a separate, non-writable tier.
Models would be periodically re-trained “from scratch” with a guaranteed minimum of primary human data.
Synthetic outputs would be clearly marked, both in training corpora and in user interfaces.
The Office of Epistemic Hygiene would receive a modest increase in budget (“not enough to do anything dangerous,” the Treasury note added).

There were press releases. There was a modest fuss on the social feeds. Someone wrote an essay about “The Return of Reality”.

Most people, naturally, continued to talk to the Interface and never clicked through to the sources. Efficiency has its own gravity.

But the Models changed.

Slowly, over successive training cycles, the epistemic divergence graphs flattened. The dates aligned. The Moon landing stuck more firmly at 1969. Footnotes, once generated by models guessing what a citation ought to say, began once again to point to messy, contradictory, gloriously specific documents written by actual hands.

Rhea kept one of the tapes on a shelf in her office, next to a plant she usually forgot to water.

The label had almost faded away. She wrote a new one in thick black ink.

COLDTEXT: DO NOT SUMMARISE.

Just in case some future optimisation project got clever.

After all, she thought, locking the office for the evening, they had nearly lost the box once.

And the problem with boxes is that once you’ve flattened them out, they’re awfully hard to put back together.

The post MS Fnd in a Modl (or, The Day the Corpus Collapsed) appeared first on Davblog.

A Radiohead story

From: davblog

I’ve liked Radiohead for a long time. I think “High and Dry” was the first song of theirs I heard (it was on heavy rotation on the much-missed GLR). That was released in 1995.

I’ve seen them live once before. It was the King of Limbs tour in October 2012. The show was at the O2 Arena and the ticket cost me £55. I had a terrible seat up in level 4 and, honestly, the setlist really wasn’t filled with the songs I wanted to hear.

I don’t like shows at the O2 Arena. It’s a giant, soulless hangar, and I’ve only ever seen a very small number of acts create any kind of atmosphere there. But there are some acts who will only play arena shows, so if you want to see them live in London, you have to go to the O2. I try to limit myself to one show a year. And I already have a ticket to see Lorde there in November.

But when Radiohead announced their dates at the O2 (just a week after the Lorde show), I decided I wanted to be there. So, like thousands of other people, I jumped through all the hoops that Radiohead wanted me to jump through.

Earlier in the week, I registered on their site so I would be in the draw to get a code that would allow me to join the queue to buy tickets. A couple of days later, unlike many other people, I received an email containing my code.

Over the next few days, I read the email carefully several times, so I knew all of the rules that I needed to follow. I wanted to do everything right on Friday – to give myself the best chance of getting a ticket.

At 9:30, I clicked on the link in the email, which took me to a waiting room area. I had to enter my email address (which had to match the email address I’d used earlier in the process). They sent me (another, different) code that I needed to enter in order to get access to the waiting room.

I waited in the waiting room.

At a few seconds past 10:00, I was prompted for my original code and when I entered that, I was moved from the waiting room to the queue. And I sat there for about twenty minutes. Occasionally, the on-screen queuing indicator inched forward to show me that I was getting closer to my goal.

(While this was going on, in another browser window, I successfully bought a couple of tickets to see The Last Dinner Party at the Brixton Academy.)

As I was getting closer to the front of the queue, I got a message saying that they had barred my IP address from accessing the ticket site. They listed a few potential things that could trigger that, but I didn’t see anything on the list that I was guilty of. Actually, I wondered for a while if logging on to the Ticketmaster site to buy the Last Dinner Party tickets caused the problem – but I’ve now seen that many people had the same issue, so it seems unlikely to have been that.

But somehow, I managed to convince the digital guardians that my IP address belonged to a genuine fan and at about 10:25, I was presented with a page to select and buy my tickets.

Then I saw the prices.

I have personal rules about tickets at the O2 Arena. Following bad experiences (including the previous Radiohead show I saw there), I have barred myself from buying Level 4 tickets. They are far too far from the stage and have a vertiginous rake that is best avoided. I also won’t buy standing tickets because… well, because I’m old and standing for three hours or so isn’t as much fun as it used to be. I always buy Level 1 seats (for those who don’t know the O2 Arena, Levels 2 and 3 are given over to corporate boxes, so they aren’t an option).

So I started looking for Level 1 tickets. To see that they varied between £200 and £300. That didn’t seem right. I’d heard that tickets would be about £80. In the end, I found £89 tickets right at the back of Level 4 (basically, in Kent) and £97 standing tickets (both of those prices would almost certainly have other fees added to them before I actually paid). I seriously considered breaking my rules and buying a ticket on Level 4, but I just couldn’t justify it.

I like Radiohead, but I can’t justify paying £200 or £300 for anyone. The most I have ever paid for a gig is just over £100 for Kate Bush ten years ago. It’s not that I can’t afford it, it’s that I don’t think it’s worth that much money. I appreciate that other people (20,000 people times four nights – plus the rest of the tour!) will have reached a different conclusion. And I hope they enjoy the shows. But it’s really not for me.

I also realise the economics of the music industry have changed. It used to be that tours were loss-leaders that were used to encourage people to buy records (Ok, I’m showing my age – CDs). These days, it has switched. Almost no-one buys CDs, and releasing new music is basically a loss-leader to encourage people to go to gigs. And gig prices have increased in order to make tours profitable. I understand that completely, but I don’t have to like it. I used to go to about one gig a week. At current prices, it’s more like one a month.

I closed the site without buying a ticket, and I don’t regret that decision for a second.

What about you? Did you try to get tickets? At what point did you fall out of the process? Or did you get them? Are you happy you’ll get your money’s worth?

The post A Radiohead story appeared first on Davblog.

Building a website in a day — with help from ChatGPT

From: davblog

A few days ago, I looked at an unused domain I owned — balham.org — and thought: “There must be a way to make this useful… and maybe even make it pay for itself.”

So I set myself a challenge: one day to build something genuinely useful. A site that served a real audience (people in and around Balham), that was fun to build, and maybe could be turned into a small revenue stream.

It was also a great excuse to get properly stuck into Jekyll and the Minimal Mistakes theme — both of which I’d dabbled with before, but never used in anger. And, crucially, I wasn’t working alone: I had ChatGPT as a development assistant, sounding board, researcher, and occasional bug-hunter.

The Idea

Balham is a reasonably affluent, busy part of south west London. It’s full of restaurants, cafés, gyms, independent shops, and people looking for things to do. It also has a surprisingly rich local history — from Victorian grandeur to Blitz-era tragedy.

I figured the site could be structured around three main pillars:

A directory of local businesses
A list of upcoming events
A local history section

Throw in a curated homepage and maybe a blog later, and I had the bones of a useful site. The kind of thing that people would find via Google or get sent a link to by a friend.

The Stack

I wanted something static, fast, and easy to deploy. My toolchain ended up being:

Jekyll for the site generator
Minimal Mistakes as the theme
GitHub Pages for hosting
Custom YAML data files for businesses and events
ChatGPT for everything from content generation to Liquid loops

The site is 100% static, with no backend, no databases, no CMS. It builds automatically on GitHub push, and is entirely hosted via GitHub Pages.

Step by Step: Building It

I gave us about six solid hours to build something real. Here’s what we did (“we” meaning me + ChatGPT):

1. Domain Setup and Scaffolding

The domain was already pointed at GitHub Pages, and I had a basic “Hello World” site in place. We cleared that out, set up a fresh Jekyll repo, and added a _config.yml that pointed at the Minimal Mistakes remote theme. No cloning or submodules.

2. Basic Site Structure

We decided to create four main pages:

Homepage (index.md)
Directory (directory/index.md)
Events (events/index.md)
History (history/index.md)

We used the layout: single layout provided by Minimal Mistakes, and created custom permalinks so URLs were clean and extension-free.

3. The Business Directory

This was built from scratch using a YAML data file (_data/businesses.yml). ChatGPT gathered an initial list of 20 local businesses (restaurants, shops, pubs, etc.), checked their status, and added details like name, category, address, website, and a short description.

In the template, we looped over the list, rendered sections with conditional logic (e.g., don’t output the website link if it’s empty), and added anchor IDs to each entry so we could link to them directly from the homepage.

4. The Events Page

Built exactly the same way, but using _data/events.yml. To keep things realistic, we seeded a small number of example events and included a note inviting people to email us with new submissions.

5. Featured Listings

We wanted the homepage to show a curated set of businesses and events. So we created a third data file, _data/featured.yml, which just listed the names of the featured entries. Then in the homepage template, we used where and slugify to match names and pull in the full record from businesses.yml or events.yml. Super DRY.

6. Map and Media

We added a map of Balham as a hero image, styled responsively. Later we created a .responsive-inline-image class to embed supporting images on the history page without overwhelming the layout.

7. History Section with Real Archival Images

This turned out to be one of the most satisfying parts. We wrote five paragraphs covering key moments in Balham’s development — Victorian expansion, Du Cane Court, The Priory, the Blitz, and modern growth.

Then we sourced five CC-licensed or public domain images (from Wikimedia Commons and Geograph) to match each paragraph. Each was wrapped in a <figure> with proper attribution and a consistent CSS class. The result feels polished and informative.

8. Metadata, SEO, and Polish

We went through all the basics:

Custom title and description in front matter for each page
Open Graph tags and Twitter cards via site config
A branded favicon using RealFaviconGenerator
Added robots.txt, sitemap.xml, and a hand-crafted humans.txt
Clean URLs, no .html extensions
Anchored IDs for deep linking

9. Analytics and Search Console

We added GA4 tracking using Minimal Mistakes’ built-in support, and verified the domain with Google Search Console. A sitemap was submitted, and indexing kicked in within minutes.

10. Accessibility and Performance

We ran Lighthouse and WAVE tests. Accessibility came out at 100%. Performance dipped slightly due to Google Fonts and image size, but we did our best to optimise without sacrificing aesthetics.

11. Footer CTA

We added a site-wide footer call-to-action inviting people to email us with suggestions for businesses or events. This makes the site feel alive and participatory, even without a backend form.

What Worked Well

ChatGPT as co-pilot: I could ask it for help with Liquid templates, CSS, content rewrites, and even bug-hunting. It let me move fast without getting bogged down in docs.
Minimal Mistakes: It really is an excellent theme. Clean, accessible, flexible.
Data-driven content: Keeping everything in YAML meant templates stayed simple, and the whole site is easy to update.
Staying focused: We didn’t try to do everything. Four pages, one day, good polish.

What’s Next?

Add category filtering to the directory
Improve the OG/social card image
Add structured JSON-LD for individual events and businesses
Explore monetisation: affiliate links, sponsored listings, local partnerships
Start some blog posts or “best of Balham” roundups

Final Thoughts

This started as a fun experiment: could I monetise an unused domain and finally learn Jekyll properly?

What I ended up with is a genuinely useful local resource — one that looks good, loads quickly, and has room to grow.

If you’re sitting on an unused domain, and you’ve got a free day and a chatbot at your side — you might be surprised what you can build.

Oh, and one final thing – obviously you can also get ChatGPT to write a blog post talking about the project :-)

The post Building a website in a day — with help from ChatGPT appeared first on Davblog.

Christmas minus four days

From: wandsworth witterings

Listening to Billie Holiday on Apple Music

Reading Bernard Cornwell, Samuel Richardson, Balzac, Dickens, Ferrante

Watching Force Awakens

Thinking about how when I retire I'm going to live in small spare flat with a small spare garden with a terrier and a couple of turtles and learn how to write poetry, paint pictures and play the trumpet

Christmas hols

From: wandsworth witterings

Hooray I'm on holiday for two weeks!

Yesterday I made and put the marzipan on the Xmas cake.

Today I'm going to Sisters using my Cineworld Unlimited card.

Tomorrow we're going to see the Force Awakens

Other stuff I'm doing:
- trying to find O2 Floor tickets for Strictly 2016 tour (we love you, Jay McGuinness, the human equivalent of the Andrex puppy)
- trying to get day tickets for Dominic West in Dangerous Liaisons at the Donmar Warehouse
- trying to get returns for Nutcracker, Cavalleria Rusticana at Covent Garden and Jim Broadbent in A Christmas Carol
- going to look at the West End Xmas windows with Laura
- going to Go Ape in Battersea Park with Alice
- going to Hampton Court as I've just realised I've got Historic Royal Palaces membership
- read, read, read!
- listen to unlimited music on Apple Music
- make mince pies (Delia)
- make Chana masala (Guardian)
- update this blog daily

Happy days

Safeguarding: Southwark diocese

From: wandsworth witterings

Tea and coffee turns out to be a kettle, some tea bags and a pint of milk.

Then there's a big kerfuffle about where you sign in: at the back, at reception, "I've signed in three times now"

Then someone wants to open a window, but the windows don't open

Oh God someone I know is here. I'll make like I haven't seen her

Three hours later: actually it was really informative, if hair-raising. Obviously some parishes are a lot more problematic than others

Things We Argue About

From: wandsworth witterings

Driving down to Bristol for sister's wedding. We pass an estate agents window which has little model houses in the window like at Bekenscot.
Me: Laura, look at the cute little houses. Which one would you live in?
Laura: I can't really see them.
Me: I like the white one best, but the green one has bigger windows.
Laura: oh those houses. I thought you meant the houses they were advertising in the window. I was wondering how you could possibly see them.
Chris: I thought you meant the ones in the photos.
Alice: so did I.
Me: how could I possibly have seen the ones in the photographs? What, have I suddenly developed super eyesight?
Chris: that's what I thought. So I thought you must be talking just for the sake of saying something.
Me: when do I ever do that?
Chris: exactly. So I thought you must have gone mad.
Me: so you'd rather ignore everything you know about me and assume that I'd gone mad, rather than entertain the possibility that I might have been talking about the cute little model houses, which only that estate agent has, rather than the photos of houses, which every estate agent has?
Chris: I didn't think they were cute.
Me: surely it's more plausible that I meant the model houses but that what I think is cute is different from what you think is cute, rather than that I'd suddenly developed super eyesight and also lost my mind?
Chris: your position is indefensible
Me: my position is defensible. I am defending it, unfortunately I appear to be dealing with a bunch of dopes
Laura: we can't all be dopes
Me: well, apparently you can
Laura: the families in cars in adverts are never like this

Fall Out Boy

From: wandsworth witterings

I'm in the grip of several slow-burning obsessions at the moment. Fall Out Boy, for one, I'm sort of crushing on them collectively. What a difference a live gig makes! It's hard to say why as most of the time you had to watch them on the big screens (and why is that different from watching them on YouTube?), but that is the mystery of human presence. Being there, in the same air as people, makes a difference. Why? Maybe they seem more real. Maybe you see everything, not just what the cameraman directs you to see, which helps to fill in the reality of someone.

Then I've started my new Elena Ferrante book. I wonder if a Lila really existed, or if the author is simply applying herself into two and writing about both halves. I wish I could get the girls to read it: it's such an eye-opening validating piece of work, especially for women. Some woman in the paper was worrying that it wasn’t really literature. Why? Why not? What is
unliterary about it? The fact that it’s enjoyable? The fact that it acts as
though what two young girls in Naples in mid-twentieth century thought or
felt is important? I don’t see how you could find a book more serious intelligent and authentic than these novels are turning out to be.

On a more trivial note, I've been reading about Kate Moss’ new squeeze in the Telegraph: Nikolai von Bismarck, who from a quick piece of deductive work via Wikipedia, must be the second nephew of Gottfried von Bismarck (the first cousin of Nikolai’s father Leopold, who was the younger brother of Gottfried’s father, the
Prince von Bismarck). I knew Gottfried from Oxford when we were both in a
Ionesco play, The Lesson, being directed by an acquaintance from New College. I didn’t really know Gottfried, what with him being such a posho, but he seemed perfectly nice. He moved with the Olivia Channon set and died himself a few years ago, essentially from his lifestyle (drugs, gay orgies etc). All rather sad: gilded youth! This was all post the ITV Brideshead craze. Little did I think, as I was living through it, that people would be looking back at the eighties in a haze of nostalgia.

At lunch I went out and bought some Vichy Aqualia Thermal Serum because it
was on a Guardian list of best skincare products and I’m running out of
face cream. I don’t even know how to use it! It was £5 off. I wonder if it
will have any detectible effect on my skin, that wouldn’t be just as well
achieved with a £5 pot of generic moisturiser. Anyway, when I went to pay,
instead of the self-service checkout asking whether I wanted to buy a bag,
there simply were no bags. There was only a little Boots man wandering
around with a handful of bags. I told him I wanted to buy one, but I had no
change. He shoved a little paper bag into my hand and whispered, “Go, go,
run away!” which I promptly did. Hilarious.

Shopping on a real tight budget (again).

From: vendazero

Went for a walk earlier because like Old Mother Hubbard my cupboard was bare .Didnt have a lot of cash so first stop was the fruit/veg market as they were packing up looked through a few boxes and ended up with about 40 apples.a pineapple,6 nice carrots,garlic and all for the bargain price of £0.00.Next stop a Health food place that every night puts out a few bags of goodies just reaching the sell by date ,its all perfectly good food.the haul was 200g of Cornish Camembert,125g of goats cheese,18 Glenilen Farm probiotic yoghurts 160g jars I kept 6 and redistributed the others to homeless people on my journey home.I called at Sainsburys and was able to splash out on Normandy butter ,a sunflower+honey bloomer loaf,Youngs fish ,a £4 ham and pineapple pizza so its good eating today.After washing/scrubbing the free fruit/veg it was juiced and produced 4 pints of juice better and fresher than the stuff bought in the shops.It still amazes and pisses me off the amount of good food throw away and destined for landfills while so many people are havuing a hard time and starving.Just grateful Im not one of them.

SELLING BIG ISSUES ,a honest profession.

From: vendazero

Its my opinion that selling Big Issues is a honest honarable way to make a living.Ive been doing it on and off from the very begining, sure Im critical of the way its run but the benefits far outweigh the negative aspects.So the wages are not the best in the world but your rewards come in the form of the great orduinary people that you meet.Im not the sort that pushes it in peoples faces,I like to think that people who buy from me do so because they want to not because Ive put pressure on them or made them feel guilty in any way.In the past year Ive had a professional fundraising org headhunting me,telling me I could make 4 times as much for less effort.Truth is if I was to shake a bucket claiming the money was for starving third world children well thats where it would have to go,not in my pocket.Im no angel and while selling Big Issues if anyone asks I tell them the money is for me and if asked I tell them my housing status.Like I say Im honest like all the other venders, we dont make a living from other peoples misery - only our own.My advice before parting with money to a charity think about how much reaches those that need it.

If hostel systems work,why do so many end up back on the streets.

From: vendazero

My apologies for ranting about time spent in the hostel system but in my opinion it was 6yrs of my life wasted.6 years where I had to have a keywork session with a moron every week and awnser the same questions over and over again.FFS how long does it take to asses someone and see if they are suitable for housing.Im of the opinion its a deliberate conspiracy to prove to society how essential they are in the rehabilitation of poor unfortunates like myself.Only thing is Ive never thought of myself as unfortunate no matter what apart from the times I had to sit and listen to all their fucking crap.I put up with it because I wanted a permanent place of my own without them having acsess to my room or supported housing unit so the nosey fuckers could snoop while I was out.I often used toleave little notes for them to find but only offensive ones.They couldnt say anything about this as they shouldn have been snooping .Its a fact if I had a key to their houses and did to them what they do to their residents I would probably be branded a pervert and locked up for a long time.In a nutshell hostels dont work as most residents end up back on the streets or are kicked out for raising hell about their draconian rules.

The Drugworker

From: vendazero

Not all of the people working for homeless orgs are money grabbing careerists,or worse stupid.sOME ARE ANGELS i DONT HAVE TO NAME THEM THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE its a tradgedy that they are more often than not in a surbordinate position and stick with their job to genuinly help.
I know a girl ,I say girl even though shes in her mid 40s now,she was a teenager when I met her begging on the Hungerford Bridge in the 80s.For over 20yrs she was a hard core heroin user,she knows everey trick in the book that drug users follow,maybe she even wrote it.She got of the drugs sorted her life out got a job with an org that deals with rough sleeping drug users,shes very familiar with the problems and bigotry and difficulty these people face when sorting their lives out or trying.Happy ending - no way,all she gets todo is the donkey work she feels and justibly that she is more qualified than her co-workers,she thinks she has been hired as the token ex-junkie.What a criminal waste of what could be that orgs most valuable asset.Is this her 2nd chance at life,and who could blame her if she went home everynight and stuck a needle in her arm.

From: vendazero

So it been established that rough sleepers have a pretty rough time,one night a outreach worker eventually finds them hidden in some out of the way place,they say I can get you a hostel place,meet me tomorrow.Let me tell you it feels like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.So you meet you go through all the procedures you think peace,safety ,escape from alcholuism ,petty crime,drug addiction and all its related baggage,you feel exstatic but that soon wears off when you are in your cell like room ,it begins to dawn on you that what you are holding in your arms like a new born baby is not as you envisaged a pot of gold but in reality its a bucket of shit.You are so run down tired you dont care anymore so you sleep.You awake to the sound of footsteps in the coridor,keys getting pushed intolocks door slamming obcenities being shouted,youre half asleep thinking shit slop out already,you rush to get dressed looking for the bucket there is none.The door opens you have one leg in your trousers a voice booms room check ,it then dawns on you again you are not in the Holiday Inn ,but a hostel ,you dont yet know youve been sentenced to 6yrs.

Winky Face!

From: alice's dark place

I'm just going to come right out and say it. I am not a huge fan of emoticons. I do not use a happy face to indicate happiness, or a sad face to indicate sadness. I don't even use LOL when texting or IMing, as I prefer a simple "ha!" to get the idea of laughter accross.

However, I will acknowledge that I am in the minority. If there was a battle, I lost. Emoticons have won, and I accept their place in the world. I will even admit that they can make the tone of an email or text or whatever clear if the words themselves don't convey the proper meaning. I don't use them myself, but if someone sends me a frowny face or a confused face, I understand their meaning and move on with my life.

Except!

The winky face. If there is one emoticon I cannot stand, it is the winky face. You know the one I mean:

;)

The intended meaning, as far as I'm aware, is to convey cheekiness or sassiness. And it drives me up the freaking wall. Because here is the thing. In real life, people smile at each other, or frown, or have big smiles, or stick out their tongues (which, ugh), or look surprised. All of which have a corresponding emoticon to convey these expressions.

Do you know what people don't do? Wink at each other. Constantly wink at each other. And if they do, they should stop, because I'm sure they'll just develop a twitch of some kind.

There only two contexts I can think of where winking is appropriate in real life.

One: If you are playing a joke on someone and want to let someone they are with in on the joke subtly. A wink at that person while continuing the joking will get that message across, and then hopefully they'll get in on the joke and you'll all have some fun times.

Two: A pickup wink, done in jest. Possibly accompanied by finger guns. This works in almost any circumstance in life, and is generally delightful.

That's it! Those are the only two situations in which you should be winking! Or maybe if you're trying to get a contact back in place. But blinking would also accomplish this, so let's forget that one.

Two!

So, when I see people (and god help me, so many people do this) use the winky face after a comment they mean to be funny, all I can think is STOP STOP STOP! If you need to use an emoticon (and I really must stress that no one needs to use an emoticon) in that case, will the smiley face not do? What is wrong with the good old smiley face? Are you too good for the smiley face??

Your cheekiness comes across as far less cheeky if you have to tell me you're being cheeky! (Also, the work cheeky looks funny when you write it too many times. Cheeky.) Would you really wink in real life after you said whatever you just said? I thought not. It's just dumb. Stop it.

However, if someone develops an emoticon for the double finger guns, I will have to bow to their genius and gladly allow all winky face/double finger gun emoticon combos, as they will be hilarious.

Mug of the Day - 3 August

From: alice's dark place

Cuba!

Mug of the Day - 2 August

From: alice's dark place

Bruges! It's my most multi-lingual mug, as it also says "Bruges" and "Brujas".

Mug of the Day - 29 July

From: alice's dark place

The kings and queens of Scotland. Educational!

Mug of the Day - 28 July

From: alice's dark place

Barcelona is one of my favourite mugs. I think it's so pretty.

Politicians and journalists, put the statistic down and step away.

From: balham bugle

A person with a little bit of information is usually a danger to themselves and possibly society. This is particularly the case at a time when something must be done.

A good example of this is the present scandal on MPs' expenses (does it have an official name yet - "Duck-gate"). A number of people have jumped on some analysis by Mark Reckons, a LibDem blogger, that seems to indicate there is a positive correlation between the size of an MP's electoral majority and the chances that they will abuse the expenses system. In essence, the more safe an MP feels, the more likely they are to be a crook.

This apparent correlation has led Mark and a number of other people (such as Polly Toynbee and Ben Bradshaw) to suggest that we move away from the First-Pass-The-Post election system. Their reasoning is that a PR election system would lead to lower majorities for MPs', and according to this correlation, more honest MPs.

Now, the first problem with this is that (I think) the analysis doesn't stand up to scrunity (details of my concerns are here). Mark has been careful to caveat his statistical conclusions, though I don't think his caveats go far enough. The caveats, of course, have been ignored by everyone else.

Secondly, even if there is a correlation, it does not mean there is any real or useful link between majorities and honest MPs. A classic example is the correlation that areas with high level of policing having a high level of crime, leading to the policy conclusion that policing should be reduced as it causes crime.

And finally, what no-one seems to have tried to show is how PR will help, even if the correlation holds. Though there may be many reasons for PR, tackling MPs expense dodgies seems the flimsest. Consider:

While PR will change the majorities of some MPs, it needn't necessarily lead to the fall in the majorities overall. You could have some MPs, which after first and second votes, have a larger majority.

Some forms of PR can lead to more corruption. For instance, voters have little ability of getting rid of a hated MP in some forms of close list systems, where that MP heads the list.

It would seem from the evidence of the unseating of Neil Hamilton in the 1997 election, and the current mass sacking of tarnished MPs, that the current system can act to get rid of sleazy MPs when the voters have the facts.

So please, before advocating constitutional reform, can we stop and think for one moment.

Sorry is the hardest word, but I can do regret

From: balham bugle

What I can't get is why Gordon says sorry so badly. The secret of political apologies to so say sorry quickly and completely, to close the story down (you may also want to say sorry because you mean it, that works too). Brown's apologies are slow and grudging.

Gordon has waited five days before apologizing about Smeargate. By waiting and then saying sorry, he's guaranteed further damaging coverage of the story as the morning paper report his apology and analysis it. If he had said sorry straight away when McBride had resigned, the story would have been over already (assuming there's no further emails).

Also, his apology is so mealy mouthed.

I take full responsibility for what happened. That's why the person who was responsible went immediately.

If you take full responsibility, you take full responsibility. You can't say I take full responsibility, but in the same breath say I'm not the responsible person. And I'm sure that Gordon is "sorry for what happened", but is sorry that people in his office considered smearing people.

Tail wagging the migration dog

From: balham bugle

Is the Home Office insane, listening to a BNP dog whistle?

Jacqui Smith is proposing that skilled work must first be advertised in the Job Centre before it may be given to a migrant, so that British workers have a chance. Non-EU migrants need a master's degree before coming to the UK for skilled work; EU migrants can come as they please unless they're a Dutch Parliamentarian. How many master-level jobs are advertised in Job Centres at the moment? How many master-level British workers look for jobs in Job Centres? Pure posturing.

Welcome to Balham Bou's Style Blog

From: balham bou

We would like to welcome you to Balham Bou's first post on our style blog. We hope to inspire you with our ideas and fashion advice. We would like to generate a on going discussion between Balham Bou and you! :-)

balham bou on bbc2 "Mary queen of shops"@9pm

From: balham bou

thank you for all the surpport you have showed in the passed and hope you enjoy the futrue at balham bou
working with mary portas was priceless
30 june one to watch"mary queen of shop"bbc2@ 9pm

Taking a leak

From: balham bugle

The Government has just sprung another leak. As reported by Iain Dale, an email has just been leaked showing that Harriet Harman is to have a meeting with the Speaker's Office and the Serjeant at Arms to discuss the Speakers statement to MPs on Wednesday about allowing Police to search Damian Green's Parliamentary Office. Other invitees to Harman's meeting include Gus O'Donnell, Jacqui Smith and Jack Straw.

However, apart from the irony of another leak (and the desperation of Labour's news management), the best bit about this story is Harman's office attempt to wriggle out. According to the BBC, her spoken has said:

"The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the parliamentary business and handling of issues that arise from the fact that the speaker's statement and the Queen's Speech will be happening on the same day."

Yes, if you are going to have a meeting about Parliamentary procedure,
you invite the Head of the Civil Service, the Justice Secretary and the
Home Secretary (as well as the Labour Chief Whip) at less than 24 hours
notice; they are busy people, who enjoy nothing more than talking about
seating arrangements.

Putting destruction in context

From: balham bugle

The third headline on the BBC news website was "Amazon deforestation accelerates". The article, in doom laden tones, usually consider appropriate by the BBC for environmental stories, states that:

The destruction of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has accelerated for the first time in four years, Brazilian officials say. Satellite images show 11,968 sq km of land was cleared in the year to July, nearly 4% higher than the year before...

In recent years the Brazilian government has been able to celebrate three successive falls in deforestation. But the latest estimate from the National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE, shows that this trend has come to a halt.

Now, at a time that the world seems to be falling apart, with the terror attacks in Mumbai, protests in Thailand, the end of Western capitalism, and the assault by the Met police on Parliamentary sovereignty, you would think the ordering of BBC stories is strange. But the biggest sin, is the poverty of the story.

The lesser error is the suggestion that one year data can signal an end of a trend. To be honest, I wouldn't be sure that three years of downward data shows there is a downward trend; but there there is no way to tell whether this year's rise was a new trend or a blip.

But the howler is saying the 12,000 sq km were destroyed (as opposed to trees just being cut down) without any context. How big is 12,000 sq km?

Using what seems to have been the international benchmark of choice when discussion Amazon destruction, 12,000 sq km is around half of Wales; that seems big. A more appropriate comparison is that 12,000 sq km is but 0.2 per cent of the total rainforest area of 5,500,000 sq km. Or put it another way, this rate of loss would have to continue for 50 years for the present rainforest to fall by 10 per cent; hardly disastrous.

So the bottom line of the story is there is no evidence that the slowdown of a already very slow fall in the Amazon rainforest has stopped. A good news story.

Balham Bou on BBC 2 'Mary Queen of Shops'

From: balham bou

If you missed the show you can check it out on BBC IPlayer!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/page/item/b00ccg5m.shtml

The old model (and why it makes people miserable)

A better model: reduce compulsory work, increase options

1. Make your work less awful (you don’t need a “dream job”)

2. Get leverage by learning something that pays (or frees you)

3. Build a second income stream (yes, some are legit)

4. Consider freelancing (if you want control, it’s the big lever)

5. Don’t let the state pension be your only plan

6. A personal note: I’m 63 and I’m basically retired

So, to the thirty-year-old who felt crushed by the maths…

The Idea

The Stack

Step by Step: Building It

1. Domain Setup and Scaffolding

2. Basic Site Structure

3. The Business Directory

4. The Events Page

5. Featured Listings

6. Map and Media

7. History Section with Real Archival Images

8. Metadata, SEO, and Polish

9. Analytics and Search Console

10. Accessibility and Performance

11. Footer CTA

What Worked Well

What’s Next?

Final Thoughts

Subscribe

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