Remember Get Lost? Probably not. It was a great Alan Plater 1981 series on ITV (predating The Beiderbecke Affair) about a couple of school teachers who investigate people vanishing. One of the characters was an English teacher and she always made her students write a ‘What I Did in the Summer Holidays’ essay, but the twist was she always had to write one too.
Anyway here’s mine. I had grand plans to make lots of podcasts in Cornwall and didn’t, but I still found a few things to do.
Reading
Best read of the summer was certainly Gordon Corera’s Intercept. This presses all my buttons: computers, espionage, cryptography, Tommy Flowers, Porthcurno, all weaved together in a detailed, compelling account of how governments intercepted the communications of ordinary people on a mass scale from WW1 to the present day.
I also started read the Harry Potter books: shamefully I’ve never read them. Just perfect, really. J K Rowling deserves every penny of her income. I also really enjoyed Boak and Bailey’s Brew Britannia. Microbreweries are nothing new, they have their roots in the 1970s ‘Small is Beautiful’ movement, and this book amusingly charts the history of the big breweries, various campaigns for ‘real ale’ and the recent shift towards kegged or bottled trendy ‘craft beer’.
I also retrieved Laura Barton’s Twenty-one Locks from my mum’s house when we cleared it out. As many similes as locks on the Leeds-Liverpool canal. Enjoyed it in a miserable way, though I’d have written a different ending. Can’t really say what without spoiling it…
I’m now tucking into a copy of John Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Again, shamefully, I’ve never read any Le Carré. 5 chapters in and I love it.
Computers
I didn’t do anything quite as cool as making a web-interfaced RaspberryPi radio this summer, but I did discover ElementaryOS – this is a very slick, Mac-like version of Linux. I’ve only used it on a virtual machine so far, but I love the idea of putting it on a cheap MacBook-like Chromebook (like the Dell) to make a dirt cheap MacBook-killer.
Increasingly I’m using a lot of open-source software, so why go to the expense of buying an Apple laptop? My big find this summer was Inkscape, which does pretty much everything I use Adobe Illustrator for: designing artwork, logos and working with vector graphics.
I started learning Apple’s Swift programming language. If you think it makes developing iOS or OS X apps easier, think again. The language itself seems lovely, but the business of building functioning apps in Xcode is still (to me) mind-bogglingly complex. Every tutorial assumes a previous layer of knowledge: you should be familiar with iOS development to build an OS X app, you should know C, you should know ObjectiveC. I think someone could clean up if they can either write a guide to making simple OS X or iOS apps in Xcode assuming only basic programming knowledge, OR make a new IDE that is way simpler, like REALBasic used to be.
Fonts
I love making fonts, especially bitmapped ones. I made a couple using the ridiculously simple and fun BitFontMaker2. had I the time, I’d have made some vector ones using Glyphr.
Photography
This summer on holiday I only used my old camera, a Nikon D40 digital SLR. It’s on its last legs – often the autofocus jams – but I was really happy with the results when it did work. Windbreaks: not just for windy days.
Perhaps it’s true: it’s a bad workman who blames his tools.
Writing
I was going to write a new story. I started one, but got bogged down in chapter 3. Add it to my pile of unfinished books.
It’s a story with a deceptive setting and I hope the last line makes you want to read more. I have worked out in my mind roughly how things work in this world and why, but I need to do some serious work on the plot arc to work out what gets revealed when, and where exactly the end point should be. It also needs at least one more character to bounce off Kim, and make her challenge her surroundings.
Perhaps I’ll be good in September and get up early every morning and write a few hundred words. Perhaps.
Pollution
I got very annoyed about sea pollution in West Cornwall.
Red flags at Godrevy as Red River discharges brown sewage slick into the sea @piratefm pic.twitter.com/REnAqNAray
— Giles Booth (@blogmywiki) August 26, 2015
Gwithian and Godrevy have some amazing beaches for swimming, body-boarding, surfing and rock pooling. And yet on rainy days, South West Water pump raw sewage into the sea via the Red River that runs out on the beach near Godrevy. Lucky it never rains in Cornwall. Oh, hang on. We’d have a rainy day followed by a fine day when the sea was closed because of the sewage in the sea. This is madness, not least because of the effect it will have on the tourism industry. You can’t control the weather, but you can stop pumping unfiltered waste into the sea. One day we were swimming with the sanitary towels. Nice. A friend of ours who’s been going to Gwithian for years got sick and is going elsewhere next year.
Food & drink
Didn’t do much cooking, aside from a fantastic risotto, but I did bake some cheesy soda bread on a rainy day in Cornwall, and pimped some baked beans in a most delicious way:
I drank a few Cornish micro-brewed beers, but nothing that blew my mind. I can, however, confirm that lobster makes an acceptable alternative to roast chicken for Sunday lunch:
This awesome letterpress cookie cutter was a great find late in the summer. Hours of fun for all the family.
This cookie cutter set could keep me amused for hours. Now where did I leave my Joy Division oven gloves? pic.twitter.com/tRTJBCBYlW
— Suppertime! (@supprtime) August 30, 2015
