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2026-07-15

Week 288: Lost baguette

This comes to you from a field in Gloucestershire, at the end of day two of my human-powered journey to Electromagnetic Field.

Much of the week has been taken up with polishing my talk for the festival. I find writing a talk to be one of those things where I’m always nearly done, like Zeno’s paradox approaching but never reaching 100%.

As I was walking back from Tesco with a bag loaded with several kg of flour, etc., the baguette I had put at the top of the bag for my lunch slipped free of its polythene sheath, fell onto the pavement, and rolled under an idling van.

I abandoned it.

There were also things that I had to get from Lidl – perhaps not so much “have to” buy there, but they cost significantly less – so I cycled there and picked up what turned out to be a much nicer baguette. I just had to wait longer for lunch than I’d intended.

I should have cycled to Tesco in the first place, and saved myself a laden down trudge home, and a lost baguette.

I renewed our house insurance. The same insurer that we were already using offered us a deal that was cheaper than last year, and cheaper than I was quoted elsewhere. That’s the opposite of the predatory behaviour I usually expect from insurance companies.

There were a few things I needed for my bikepacking trip. As you can infer from the opening paragraph, I sorted them out. I fitted a frame bag. That’s useful, but it blocks the cage mounts and leaves me with nowhere to carry water. I fitted bottle cages to the front forks, using SKS universal cage mounts, hose clamps (because the supplied rubbery velcro isn’t secure enough for fork mounting), and sections of inner tube to protect the forks and prevent slipping.

I also bought a 21W solar panel “for hiking” that is even now, at 19:15 in the evening, oriented to face the sun, generating 11W of electricity to charge my power bank.

If I could figure out a secure way to lash it onto my rear rack it would be even more useful.

We saw Malagasy singer Hanitra perform on Friday night at a concert organised by Tuned In London. It was an intimate audience, and it’s a shame it wasn’t more, because she is extremely talented as a singer and as a performer.

We spent Sunday in Margate, visited the Turner Contemporary and the Crab Museum (recommended to us by someone in a shop, and worth seeing), drank beer in micropubs, and it was a pleasant temperature significantly cooler than London.

I still hate sandy beaches though.