WE SHOULD BE ON BY NOW [545]

The offending item...

Sometimes, rabbit holes lead to nowhere.

The major appeal of the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow”, for me, has been the level of detail provided by its experts about the featured items, both about their origin and place in history. Their monetary valuation is inconsequential – if the sentimental value is higher, it’s just a number.

But one item left me perplexed. In an episode recorded at Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, first broadcast in May 2025, expert Adam Schoon shows three brass items to host Fiona Bruce, inviting her and the gathered crowd to guess their use. The largest item is a clock dial, with one large hand, but instead of a standard twelve-hour face, this dial counts to sixteen. The engraved “P” on the face links to an either/or guess: was this dial used to record the number of partridges dispatched by a shooting party? Or is it an early 19^th century dial used to display the departure time of a stagecoach to prospective passengers? Why a 16-hour dial? Schoon said, “it didn’t go all night”, so therefore must only show the hours at which that specific stagecoach would leave.

That was all the information given, apart from confirming it was a stagecoach departure clock - apparently partridges could be killed in higher numbers. The clock dial is intricately engraved with a pattern between the dials, but they do not show increments of an hour – you can only indicate the “top” of each hour, from 1 to 16.

But this just refused to make sense to me. Another brass item shown in this guessing game was an Elizabethan (16^thcentury) laundry tally, used to count various items in and out of the laundry process, but this is also done using ten dials that count to 12, like a regular clock. Remember that counting to twelve was more prevalent until decimalisation in the UK – twelve pennies make a shilling, twelve ounces in one troy pound, twelve inches make one foot. Until the advent of computing, I can’t think of a previous need for a hexadecimal counting system, at least in my part of the world.

Describing the time using a twenty-hour hour clock, from 00:00 to 23:59, also only gained more widespread use in the 20^th century, even if clocks with 24-hour faces had existed for centuries before. Could it be that, wherever this clock came from, the only possible departure times were between 01:00 and 16:00? Without being told where it was displayed, I can never know.

Searching any of this information online proved to be a dead end. Searching “16-hour stagecoach clock” only confirmed that the Royal Mail stagecoach from Bristol to London eventually reduced its time to just sixteen hours before steam trains took over from then, accelerating the journey time even further. “Stagecoach clocks” only reveal pictures of similar brass clocks that show standard twelve-hour faces, or ornamental clocks being drawn by ornamental horses, while “carriage clock” creates a minefield: am I looking for a departure display clock, or a hand-held watch that is buffered by metal or wood to prevent its mechanism from being knocked during transit in a stagecoach, or did I want one of those little ornamental carriage clocks that your grandmother had on her mantlepiece?

Even worse as a search term is “stagecoach”: since the deregulation and privatisation of bus services in the UK in the 1980s, the Stagecoach Group has become one of the largest bus operators, and any search for information about stagecoaches from any period in history, or even the 1939 western film “Stagecoach”, will have to try to exclude services that are available right now.

What I am left with here is either a mystery, or nothing at all. It may be just a quirk that this clock face, made to display very particular times in a very particular location, made its way onto television, and left me feeling a little too intrigued... So the coach wouldn’t depart after 4pm, but it could leave at 1am...?

ARE WE NOT MEN? WELL, ARE WE? [544]

The full story of my vertiginous journey into the music of Devo will be told in full detail one day, but until then, an infamously mythologised moment in the group’s history was finally unleashed in full on Friday 19th June 2026, and I was of course ready – I had it on pre-order since the end of March.

“Nitrous Nightmare” is a double-vinyl album (or double-CD, in my case) of one of Devo’s first few live performances, on 31st October 1975 at a private Halloween party in support of the jazz and avant-garde artist Sun Ra, recorded by them to a four-track reel-to-reel tape. Accounts of this event are of Devo’s setlist running so long, having refused to stop playing, that the audience became openly hostile, threatening the group, with their instruments finally being unplugged for them. Another account was Devo overran so much that Sun Ra would never get to perform, and that a rendition of their signature song “Jocko Homo” approached half an hour in length.

Some of this performance appeared in 1990 on “The Mongoloid Years”, a compilation of early live recordings, but “Nitrous Nightmare” is, as far as I know, the entire extant recording of the set, all one hour and twenty-two minutes of it. The British label Futurismo have given this release the full treatment of photographs, artwork and Halloween imagery, collaged together in a sickly green and yellow, with secondary oranges and pinks.

The title “Nitrous Nightmare” was chosen for this release by Devo co-founders Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, as nitrous oxide turned out to be a major ingredient of the evening for the audience, along with alcohol and other drugs, and store-bought Halloween costumes. For their part, dressed in grey overalls, blue hard hats and face masks, Devo appeared as normal. Mark Mothersbaugh as “Booji Boy” on keyboards is the enduring character from a line-up where all then-four members adopted personas: Gerald Casale as “Chinaman” on bass, Bob Mothersbaugh as “Clown” on guitar, and Jim Mothersbaugh as “Jungle Jim” on self-made electronic drums. 

With fifty years of mythologising now over, it is time to listen. The recording wobbles into life with the one “cover” Devo would perform that evening, as Bob Mothersbaugh sings Mark’s reworking of “Secret Agent Man”, followed by two more songs before Casale calls for a DJ to come to the stage, seemingly as a way to seal approval for the group to continue playing: “I know everyone’s looking at their programme right now... there’s a change in the programme... after that introduction, Murray reminded us that we’d better do it now”. That song, “Buttered Beauties”, is one of the initial “Hardcore” Devo songs that would not make it to later albums, although “Secret Agent Man”, “Smart Patrol” and “Auto Modown” soon will.

The Devo sound here is bluesier, rockier and noticeably slower, led by Casale’s bass and Bob Mothersbaugh’s guitar, while Mark Mothersbaugh’s punctuating keyboard sounds feel like a starting point with no tradition before it, although I still think the effect played in “Jocko Homo” sounds like a tiger. Jim Mothersbaugh’s electronic drums are interesting: while they do not match the force and drive that Alan Myers would later produce for Devo with a regular drum kit, you remind yourself that you normally hear electronic beats like these when they are regimentally programmed, not played manually like they are here. It is a tribute to Jim Mothersbaugh that his skill as a drummer is not overshadowed by his having built the kit.

The audience is not heard all that much on the recording up to now, with distant clapping, whistles and the odd comment. It sounds like the evening is running well enough until Casale, commenting on whether they have cleared the auditorium, says that “you just can’t take it... OK, here’s a man song, no Booji Boys”. To that end, the first public performance of “Jocko Homo” turns into eleven minutes of goading the audience. I remember the first time I heard the album version, thinking “oh, come on” upon hearing “we must repeat” after enduring “are we not men / we are Devo” sixteen times in a row. This time, I know what is going on: keep asking “are we not men?” until you pierce the surface of those who think they can say “no”. The moment one of the audience yells, “you’re not men, you’re fucking assholes”, the song then becomes, “is he not a man?” and “they are not men”. The sheer length of this version of “Jocko Homo”, which doesn’t yet include the middle section of “God made man, but he used the monkey to do it”, will begin to grate, until you laugh at how irritated you became. This is now my favourite version of the song, fully appreciating why “we must repeat”.

From then, you can hear the audience deteriorating, scandalised at their tastes being confronted, the sounds of beer cans hitting the stage. Devo’s answer? “We came here to observe your hatred.” After three more songs, proving they could rock as well as anyone – notably, the synth melody intro to “Chango” would be reused in 1988 for the song “Plain Truth”, on the “Total Devo” album – the question “want anymore?” ends the recording – nothing sudden action, and no popping sounds of plugs being pulled. Devo apparently decamped to a fish restaurant across the road for dinner, returning in their regular clothes to watch Sun Ra, no-one realising who they were.

For what I have heard about how badly this performance apparently went, “Nitrous Nightmare” was a rather good listen. If you have listened to Devo’s older pre-1978 material, recorded mostly in the seclusion of a basement, hearing them being performed in such a confrontational manner, with the audience reacting entirely as expected, is fascinating. You imagine the disparaging voices belonged to people who left before the end, satisfied they had maintained order, provided they were still able to think clearly. Other groups have been called worse, and had larger things thrown at them, but Devo made people look, then look again.

Gerald Casale’s liner notes for this release are much more extensive than those he gave to re-releases of the albums “Total Devo” and “Smooth Noodle Maps”, and read like it could be turned into a theatre or film script at a moment’s notice. I guess you had to be there, but if you did, the adrenaline worked better than the laughing gas could.

To clear up some inaccuracies I found in the notes, it was the album-oriented rock radio station WMMS-FM that held the private party at WHK Auditorium (now known as the Agora Theater & Ballroom) in Cleveland, Ohio, from which the radio station operated alongside the medium-wave WHK, then operating a hybrid country-talk format. Seemingly lining up with the “de-evolution” mindset, WMMS introduced “The Buzzard” as its mascot the previous year, a “scavenger” whose existence commented on the economic decline of its own city. 

The DJ who comes to the stage after the opening songs, yelling “it’s Friday” and “you gotta go low with Devo!” is not “Murray the K” Kaufman, as implied in the liner notes. It is really the WMMS-FM DJ Murray Saul, who yelled “it’s Friday” in the same guttural way on his radio show – I guess “Murray the K” was a much less annoying Murray to remember. Murray Saul does not have a Wikipedia page, but “Murray the K”, who during the 1960s insited upon calling himself “the fifth Beatle”, does.

This Devo line-up was preserved in their later short film “The Truth About De-Evolution”, before Alan Myers joined as drummer, and Gerald Casale’s brother Bob joined on rhythm guitar, the “Bob 2” to the lead guitar of “Bob 1” Mothersbaugh. Jim Mothersbaugh left Devo to continue in electronic engineering, joining the Roland Corporation during the 1980s to help develop the MIDI technology standard that allowed musical instruments to speak to each other, something Devo had been able to benefit from for some time.

I only discovered Bad Company was a British band while writing this article, and I still cannot name any of their songs. Their first album was recorded in a former workhouse in Hampshire. 

IT’S NICE TO BE ALIVE [543]

Having spent as long as I had last time talking about the 2003 anime version of the “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World” series of novels, the following is proof that I was apparently not done. To be more specific, you would have thought, for as much of a fan of Devo as I have proved, I would have mentioned their song “Beautiful World”.

One of Devo's very best pieces, remaining a persistently perfect closer to their concerts, “Beautiful World” is ironic, sardonic and angry, and I love it more now than ever. Having last time considered my sense of place, I realised how quick some people are to define that place without me, and what a “wonderful place” they make it. I never quite understood when Gerald Casale sang of “the way they show they care”, and especially “the way they comb their hair”, but I feel it now. Of course, the payoff of this being a beautiful world “for you” is that “it’s not for me” but, to tie this back to “Kino’s Journey”, witnessing the world at its worst makes encountering the best of it feel that much sweeter.

One sentence I should have included last time when discussing the “Land of Prophecies” was when one character tells Kino why a proclamation is happening: “The book is prophecy because the priest says the book says that it is.” I appreciate how clunky that line sounds, each clause serving to halve the credibility of the prophecy, if that ever existed for a neutral bystander.

Kino’s use of male pronouns in the light novels was something I carried over in discussing the anime, even though the novels established this information after the anime was completed. However, a follow-up half-hour film was produced in 2005, “Life Goes On”, that depicts how a runaway girl, from a country that was about to dispose of her, becomes a traveller. Only since completing my initial research did I find a copy of this film that included English subtitles, and I am happy I did: this is a story of someone learning how to become a different person, one for a different world, because they must.

But a crucial scene happens as Kino prepares to go to sleep, getting used to a name that was not their own. “Kino. Sometimes it still doesn’t feel like it’s my name. I am Kino... I guess ‘I’ fits Kino better after all.” It doesn’t come up again in the film, but this moment resonated with the series I watched – we are seeing someone who is only themselves, and is defined only by themselves, amongst groups of people in countries with identities ascribed to them, ones that must be witnessed.

This makes the final episode of the 2003 anime, with Kino considering staying a further night in one country that resonates with him, more heartbreaking. He is told he cannot break the agreed duration of his visa, but staying would have meant sharing the same fate, buried under a volcanic eruption the country accepted was coming. Kino discovers the country has purposefully left him with their memory to carry forward, carrying what was a beautiful world with them. “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is”, and so is the memory of what had been, if not what could be.

SO, THE BEAUTIFUL WORLD [542]

“Traveller, where are you… where are you headed too?”

I can now say with authority that if you have chosen to create something an average of once a week, every week, for ten years, without anyone asking you to start, that is now something you are, not just something you do. There may be goals and destinations along the way, but no endgames... only the journey.

Saturday 30th May 2026 marks ten years since the first article on this website was published, and if you have read any of these at any point, you have my thanks, because whatever track I am on, I feel it is the right one.

I wrote about what began this journey when I reached the five-year mark and, at that point, it felt like I reached a checkpoint: I talked about doing more videos instead, meaning the rate at which written pieces appear would decline. That ultimately didn’t happen because making videos became too much of a chore at the time and too prone to compromise, so I gave myself an increasingly long break from it. The only reason I never corrected myself since is because I am finding ways of making the video-making process more fun for me, and because I never stopped having ideas for videos. The point is to keep putting things out there, in any form.

 

Having made enough allusions to travel, I want to talk about a story.

 

In a land of countries separated by landscapes and forests, and known by characteristics very specific to them, a teenage traveller and their talking motorcycle venture to learn what is important about each country, and what makes its people unique. Limiting each stay to three days and two nights, exploration taking priority over thoughts of settlement, the traveller experiences the full range of human experience, from generosity and compassion to oppression and prejudice, even visiting countries to witness these extremes. Acknowledging the worst of the world to appreciate its best more wholeheartedly becomes this story’s theme: “The world is not beautiful, therefore it is.”

 

Rarely am I captivated by a story’s premise as much as by “Kino’s Journey – the Beautiful World”, the 2003 anime adaptation of Keiichi Sigsawa’s light novel series that began in 2000, of which there will be spoilers here. Most of the stories from the novels remain not adapted or translated from the original Japanese, which is a shame, although fan translations of most stories exist online. For me, “Kino’s Journey” is almost the inverse of “The Prisoner”, where Number Six is trapped in one extreme place, one deliberately beyond comprehension. When events and the news threaten to overwhelm you, knocking your sense of place, it turns out I turn to stories of strong-minded, stoic individuals in remarkably specific settings.

 

The land in the story, while fantastic enough to allow for tracts of explored but unclaimed land to exist between countries, appears set during the 20th century, according to the level of technology displayed in the show. The countries portrayed in “Kino’s Journey” feel like our own – indeed, the walled states look very European – but each one invites scrutiny. In one land, all adults conduct their work, whatever it is, with good cheer, because children are mandatorily lobotomised at age twelve to become “perfect” adults. In another, everyone lives far away from each other to avoid hearing or feeling what each other is thinking, an empathetic scientific advancement driving everyone apart because they know too much, the pain of others driving them over the edge. Two countries resolved a decades-long war by turning it into a yearly game where they instead bomb a third, indigenous group. Another country practised the rule of the majority until the last of them was sentenced to death. A further country’s ancestors were travellers, who chose to settle for eternity in one place.

 

My favourite episode of the series involved visits to a few countries. In the “Land of Prophecies”, its people are getting ready for the apocalypse to happen the next day, because a priest has proclaimed that a book, which originated from a faraway land, but a “miracle” had sent it to them, has predicted the end of their world. When the sun rises the next day, another priest reinterprets the book to proclaim the apocalypse won’t happen for another thirty years. Passing through another land that ejected its former king and its traditions, unsuccessfully using travellers to test new traditions, like wearing cat ears, Kino and Hermes come across the “Land of Sadness”, where a lament has been recited on a bridge for decades, one that plunged the country into melancholy and withdrawal. It so happens that someone wrote the lament into a book... The episode ends with an army approaching the “Land of Sadness”, a prophecy telling them they must invade it.

 

What I was most struck by was how you are being invited to make up your mind about the events shown alongside the lead characters – we are passing through as much as they are. Pertinent lines of dialogue will be repeated as text on screen, but the on-screen patterns and sound design suggest a fleeting moment to reflect before cutting back to the scene – observations and realisations are highlighted by a soft bell sound. 

 

Acting as a guide without feeling didactic, the effect created by these decisions, alongside a more muted colour palette than early 2000s digitally-painted anime usually suggests, creates a calming and contemplative feeling in me as I watched. This is also aided by the constant presence of lines across the screen, in imitation of a cathode ray tube television showing us a story from another place, and another time, with its own alphabet.

 

Kino, the traveller, is stoic, straightforward and dispassionate in how he approaches each place he visits, helping if required, but not there to interfere. A quirk of Kino’s character design, barely shared by anyone else in the series, is a slight triangular cut from each pupil to make them look slightly “pie-eyed”, to use the term previously applied to Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, but giving the impression of someone mentally putting themselves at a distance from what they are seeing. Hermes, the novels and the series using the German term “motorrad” for a motorcycle, is more a sounding board for Kino than comic relief, and is sympatico with him – one provides speed, the other balance. (Hermes is modelled on a Brough Superior motorcycle, multiple models of which were owned by the explorer T.E. Lawrence.) However, we do not discover this fully in the first episode, your impression of Kino building with time. His level of resourcefulness as a traveller, plus prodigious use of guns and knives – the sound of a “persuader” pistol being drawn is heard many times, Kino continuing to practise their reactive speed – suggest that, if not for Hermes, and indeed the “Master” they supposedly learned under, they would be completely alone.

 

This is because Kino comes from the land where he was expected to have “the operation” at age twelve. The arrival of a traveller at his parents’ hotel led to questioning if they could become an adult simply by being themselves, causing his parents to label him “defective”, and triggering a “right of disposal” – the traveller gets in the way of the father’s knife, killing them, leading to an escape from the country on the motorcycle built during the story, and taking on the name of the traveller who died - “Kino”. Kino was originally a girl whose unsaid name was that of a beautiful flower, which became an insult when one letter was changed. Kino later decided that male pronouns suited them better, during his training with the Master described in the first seventh volume of the light novels, the first published after the TV series aired – perhaps this was a clarification by the author, or one more journey taken.

 

“Kino’s Journey” was a story that made me question my sense of place. I have lived in the same town all my life, but I don’t believe I belong to it – it is by the sea, which always helps, but this may have left something I need to explore, alongside physically leaving its boundaries, if only to work and shop. I am not defined by where I live, but does that mean I could live anywhere? Would I still be the same person if I arrived in another place? Why would it take so long for me to think about that? I have no answers right now, but the series, the stories, and its premise have, intentionally, left me with many questions.

 

Travel has been important to this website over the last ten years: I have written about being caught in the orange sky that descended on New York City in 2023, I have witnessed the work of Hieronymus Bosch in Belgium, and I essentially made a pilgrimage to Liverpool to see the work of Keith Haring. This will continue, and I should continue to make room for opportunities.

 

This may sound silly, but I once had a short trip in 2021, for three days and two nights, to a place that was known to run things its own way, but turned out to be a place where this was tried once, and seemingly never again, due to cost or indifference – it was Milton Keynes. 

 

Perhaps it explains why I have found myself thinking about Milton Keynes since: the grid system, separating pedestrians and cyclists from the roads becoming a place of wheeled robots and abandoned scooters for hire; buildings and trees kept to a maximum height, a rule since abandoned by new developments; a shopping centre so iconic in its design, it has now been preserved as a listed building, unable to develop further. 

 

Indeed, my trip to Milton Keynes was to look at an exhibition of postmodern Memphis furniture. I have joked that I would like a square of Milton Keynes to call my own, but just because it is a place I have visited, doesn’t mean there are other places where I could settle better – Oxford comes close, but again, it is not near the sea.

 

With the twenty-third and latest volume of “Kino’s Journey” published in 2020, I found no information online to confirm if this was the last. Going so far as ordering a copy of it, resolving to use my phone to translate the conclusion for my benefit, volume twenty-four was announced before it arrived, marking its twenty-fifth anniversary. The journey goes on.

 

Once again, thank you for the last ten years – let’s keep going.

I AM BRANDED ON MY FEET [541]

Some decisions make so little sense, you must write about them to understand the situation. Business decisions, I find, make less sense than those which are personal: it is not just that making money can involve surmounting moral ambiguity, making money is the reason to do anything at all. Whatever the implications, the arrangement I am attempting to parse here sounds surreal, if not dubious.

Inevitable derision followed the rebranding of the high street stores of booksellers, stationers and newsagent WH Smith as TG Jones, following the chain’s sale to the private equity group Modella Capital in 2025. WH Smith, whose stores remain in train stations, airports and hospitals, did not include use or licensing of their name in the contracts signed, except in the continued selling of their stationery range. The attempt made to provide continuity with the old brand by choosing initials and a surname that mirror the original enough produce some sort of recognition, remains a bizarre move, but I can’t name a bookshop that doesn’t use someone’s surname.

Modella Capital, approaching a year since the sale, will be able to start closing unprofitable stores, after a moratorium period in the contract ends. In the shops I have visited, only the name above the door has changed, issues about tired decor and cluttered shelves remain unresolved. When the closures were announced, “The Guardian” newspaper reported that TG Jones owes £2.9 million to its owners in licensing fees to use the name “TG Jones”. 

At the time, this was discombobulating. Surely, the chain could have chosen a further name they could use for free: QT Taylor? AB Brown? JD Williams? (The last is a catalogue, now online-based department store, so perhaps not.) Modella Capital had said “the forced name change from WH Smith has also negatively impacted consumer awareness”, but after stepping in to provide “The Guardian” with more context, no actual money is changing hands, and any licensing fees that have appeared on paper would be waived subject to a restructuring deal, to be approved with a lender.

But why do this at all? Why do anything like it? It reminded me of the ownership of record store HMV by another private equity group, Hilco, between 2013-19, which accrued payments to Hilco for operational and licensing purposes. Surely, if you wanted a payment from one of your subsidiaries, you could just mandate it. (I originally wrote “ask for it”, as if it were a benevolent act.)

After HMV fell into administration a further time in 2019, bought out by its current owner for just £883,000, the “His Master’s Voice” brand and Nipper the Dog were just about the only non-stock asset left to it - Hilco’s 2013 purchase of HMV was for £50 million. You want to accuse someone of profiteering, but making a profit remains the name of the game, no matter how it is achieved.

It just so happened that I needed a TG Jones in the last week, knowing they would sell a certain brand of gel pen without resorting to ordering online. It is “that store” for me, the name change being so clumsy it cemented the connection in my mind instead of severing it.

But with the TG Jones name not being there, and with any licensing costs, whether they exist to be paid or not, being linked to profits, is there any incentive to create value in that name, when that will only cost you more in the long run?

I’VE GOT FRIDAY ON MY MIND [540]

So, there was me reaching the Friday before the publication date of my next article, and once more having no idea of what to write about, and reaching an often-considered quandary: what comes to mind next that I haven’t already covered? Do I take the week off? Or do I break the emergency glass and write about the mere act of thinking of a subject, thinking this will be a clever way out of a jam?

It was a nice thought at the time, but it never works in practice. Whoever was the first to say that writing is ninety percent perspiration, and ten percent inspiration, either did well to keep themselves anonymous, or the adage itself was effectively crowdsourced.

Aside from having a social-media based trailer ahead of my next piece each week, I use my Friday to say that, yes, you are writing about this, so you must do it now. Oddly enough, the Tim Burton film “Ed Wood” was the inspiration for this, a film producer showing Wood the poster for a film that he will then make, the promises made on the poster of what the film will be like having been used to raise the money required to make it. This practice was used widely by producers like Samuel Z Arkoff and James H Nicholson of American International Pictures, the purveyors of monster horror movies and teenage beach party films – it was where Roger Corman got started, continuing the practice himself.  American International was also among the first film studios to use focus groups to find out what films their prospective audience wanted them to make, but I don’t need to go that far at this stage.

My process upon reaching my Friday deadline, which I now realise is the first of two deadlines I set myself each week, is to engage in a very literal thought process: what stands out in the street? What open tabs do I have on my phone’s web browser? If I clear my mind, what comes to mind first? Having an innate curiosity about the world around me is something I have often deployed to meet a deadline?

You would by now think that I would have a list of possible subjects ready to go, but that would be terribly convenient. I think I have come to realise that, if having a system was helpful, I would have implemented it years ago.

But, to use a film analogy again, my name is above the title. It is not the subject that is central, it is my observation of it. What comes to mind is what makes the right subject that week. It is not the fact, but the thought.

Should I really do this every week? I am making this sound exhausting. It is not like I will wither and die if I don’t do it, and it is not like people won’t go uninformed. This is when you know you are doing this for yourself, and perhaps only yourself. One million views is just the bonus.

IT'S ALMOST THE DEADLINE [539]

The General Strike of 4th to 12th May 1926 was called by the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in sympathy with British coal miners, whose wages and working conditions had eroded and declined in the years after the First World War. The first day saw an estimated 1.5-1.75 million workers on strike, the TUC had restricted participation to key industries: iron and steel, transport, shipping ports, and printing.

However, as “The Times” reported in its edition of 5th May, “The printing industry is at a standstill, but lithographers have not been withdrawn, and compositors in London have not received instructions to strike.”

I have owned a copy of this issue of “The Times” for years, but never properly scrutinised its bizarre appearance. It is a single sheet of foolscap-sized paper (32 x 20 cm) – I have since discovered this edition is known as “Little Sister”, in comparison with the “Big Brother” of the regular broadsheet – printed on both sides in dense typewriter text, the only picture being King’s coat of arms in the paper’s masthead. 

I had seen similar examples of other newspapers printed during the strike in similarly reduced circumstances – there exists rudimentary editions of the “Daily Mirror”, “Daily Mail” and “The Daily Telegraph” – but with “The Times” being Britain’s (unofficial) newspaper of record, with an unbroken print run since 1785, this was the one to have. My copy now resides in a mylar bag, to prevent decomposition of the fragile newsprint paper, a relic of a moment in time.

As “The Times” recently discussed [link], its 5th May 1926 edition was produced and distributed by volunteers and helpers corralled by John Jacob Astor, the then owner of the paper, having already been made aware at a meeting, of newspaper proprietors with the British Government, that its intention was to publish an official Government newspaper to provide both official news and the Government’s viewpoint during the strike, either as a collective effort with the industry, or by itself. This became “The British Gazette”, published by His Majesty’s Stationery Office from the requisitioned premises of “The Morning Post”, using staff from that paper and the “Daily Express”, and edited by the former journalist and current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill.

With printing presses unavailable, six “Multigraph” machines were used to print my copy of “The Times”. These table-top devices, more used by offices for printing direct mail and forms, these involved sliding individual letters, spaces and punctuation onto a cylinder, with motorised versions printed six to seven thousand copies an hour. Haste and inexperience with loading sentences backwards explain many spelling errors, most notably the “WEATHER ORECAST” at the top of the front page, but these were apparently fixed for a second edition the same day, so I now know my copy was from the first edition.

The following days’ editions of “The Times” looked more like the regular paper, printed on its regular presses by an amateur team only just shown how to operate the equipment, but with its page count reduced to one broadsheet folded into four pages. This was partly a result of Churchill requesting newsprint stock for printing “The British Gazette” – originally requesting access to their entire stock for an explicitly Government mouthpiece, “The Times” would only relinquish a quarter of it.

In media terms, the legacy of the General Strike is usually the granting of a Royal Charter to the then-private British Broadcasting Company, having maintained its independent and impartial radio broadcasting during the strike in the face of a threat from Churchill to requisition it for Government use in a manner similar to “The British Gazette”, which still published programme listings for BBC stations like it was a regular paper. The “Little Sister” edition of “The Times” is a further reminder that the UK only ever had state media once, a hundred years ago, for less than two weeks.

The 1926 General Strike ended without agreement, with miners continuing to strike for a further few months. Much later, an industrial dispute over modernising work practices at “The Times” and “The Sunday Times” led to Thomson Newspapers, which bought them from the Astor family in 1966, to suspend production of the papers for nearly a year from December 1978, breaking a near two hundred year print run.

I'VE GOT THE KEY TO ANOTHER WAY [538]

Before leaving for work each morning, I check the app for my local bus company, which holds both my pre-paid ticket and their timetables, to see if my bus has left the station. 

I couldn’t have written that sentence before 2020. A byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to tell passengers if they had a chance of getting on a bus. Social distancing guidelines following the initial outbreak restricted the maximum number of passengers on my local buses to a quarter of their original number so, I am guessing, the bus company added a global positioning system to the ticket machine on each bus, telling you how many spaces were left as each bus moved closer to your stop. Would you be lucky? Or would the additionally reduced timetables cause you to wait for longer still? You could always walk to the next stop in the meantime.

With restrictions having lifted, the real-time map and capacity figures have remained in place, meaning I can leave home when I know a bus is coming. That said, I have only a notional idea of when it should have left the station: my local bus company also stopped providing books of printed timetables in 2020, which were always easier to find and read than a PDF on your phone.

However, one day last week, I couldn’t even access the valuable app. I had made the mistake of allowing my phone to update apps automatically, so when I went to use it as normal, I unexpectedly had to log in, which I am rarely asked to do. Putting my password this time around, an on-screen message said it was incorrect. My phone fills in the password automatically, and even after accessing the secure place where it was kept, so I could remind myself of it and type it in manually, I was still being told it was incorrect.

Passwords are a tyranny of modern life. Until my phone sprouted a dedicated directory for my passwords, I used to keep them written down in a safe place – ideally, that is something I should continue to do, if something ever happens to the phone.

I realised that the update to the bus company’s app had also changed the requirements made of a password, which must now have a minimum length of twelve characters, one capital letter, one number, and one non-alphanumeric number. These requirements had already been decried in 2017 by the person that came up with them, who instead preferred less often used combinations of words.

However, the use of human reasoning will still get you nowhere, as I found out in a separate incident. Because I had removed an e-mail address that was previously used to send passcodes to log into another e-mail address – yes, I know – the login screen started to ask me if I could match two symbols to the shadows they would cast if they existed in real life, or match a symbol to that which a small man was standing on in a ring of other symbols. These strange tasks, using inscrutable symbols that looked downright unclear on screen were, apart from being time-consuming, were enough to wrong-foot me, someone who used to only have to tick a box to confirm they were not a robot. I was being made to feel like one, so I wound up attaching my personal e-mail account to an authenticator app, which I sign into using my face, having now failed to separate its use from what I need to sign in for at work.

With phones now able to collect biometric information via face and fingerprint scans, with the intention (and hope) that this information never leaves the device, it is no wonder that passkeys are being touted as the way to go. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre unambiguously states that passkeys are safer than passwords, and is as safe, or safer than, two-factor identification. I may well have to move to using more passkeys in future, but it does mean I will dread upgrading my phone in future, having encountered problems at work when I did that last time.

With the password for the bus app no longer meeting two of the new criteria, it was never going to work, and I had never received an e-mail ahead of time to inform me of any changes. By this point, I was on the bus, having paid extra because I couldn’t reach my pre-paid ticket. I had also realised there was no way I could reset my password via the app, resorting to the bus company’s website to change it there.

There was no reason for me to write about any of this except to get it out of my system. If there is a takeaway, it is to be more mindful about your apps, and your passwords, until you can get rid of them.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE? [537]

I will start with the facts. As of 8.03am BST on Friday 17^th April 2026, this website, www.leighspence.net, has had one million page views since it went live at midday BST on Saturday 1^st May 2021. Thank you for being one of those viewers. I have never added a page counter to this website, as I think people stopped doing that when GeoCities closed in 2009.

This website was originally found at www.dancingwiththegatekeepers.com from 30th May 2016 – yes, I will be doing something to mark a decade since then – and I regret having not used my name from the start. Before the 2021 switch, I had amassed over 185,000 views, but despite the usual promotion on social media, including reposting new links for everything I had done to that point, it took until July 2016 for the new site to achieve one thousand views. 

Fortunately, the momentum reappeared, feelings about starting from scratch being replaced by the safety of having over three hundred articles already available: ten thousand views were reached by September 2021, and twenty-five thousand by the end of the year. Growth was steady, taking until August 2023 to reach one hundred thousand views, but it only took one more year to double that, and only until May 2025 to double that again to four hundred thousand views. 

This means that www.leighspence.net has been visited over six hundred thousand times in the last year...

This is why I am sceptical about page views for websites: it is not from seeing counters on the sites that do have them, or from media reports about other sites, or claims made to attract advertising, but from having seen the data about my own work, for it appears to be thriving to the extent of having taken on a life of its own.

I can only guess that having written about so many different subjects over nearly ten years means that work will appear in search engine results – the main driver of traffic to the website is Google, followed by itself via links from other sites, with social media in third place. Although I will continue to use social media to promote my work, it may be that I am in a good place to survive any eventual decline in the general use of social media, as people move on to other things – it may be a good opportunity to resurrect GeoCities.

I still have my suspicions about A.I. robots scraping my writing, much as anyone who has created anything and put it on the internet will do, despite all the attempts you have made to mitigate or prevent this. However, it this is simply an evolution of how people are searching for information, no matter my misgivings on checking the veracity of what they are being told, then I am glad to be considered a reliable online presence.

The conclusion I should reach from here is accept the figures, instead of being bemused by them, and don’t question why the numbers are so high. I should take it as a sign that I must be doing something right... and if you’ve read this far, I probably have.

Thanks to all of you again.

ALL I NEED IS HELP FOR A LITTLE WHILE [536]

IBM MT/ST

When the spy thriller writer Len Deigthon died in March 2026, his 1970 novel “Bomber”, about a fictional air raid during World War II, was reportedly the first novel to have been written during the word processor. However, Deighton did not use what we would picture to be one: the IBM MT/ST recorded the keystrokes of an IBM Selectric typewriter onto a magnetic tape drive built into a desk, most devices having at least two drives to allow merging sections together, often onto a third drive. The instruction manual advised users to “Think Tape”, like inputting a program. There was no screen, but it could “play back” its output to the typewriter. 

Introduced in 1964, and intended more for composing mail for businesses, IBM withdrew the MT/ST in 1970, as floppy disc drives and terminals with screens became more commonplace. But Deighton’s reason for using the machine was clear: it eliminated the constant retyping of drafts by his assistant, chapters often being revised dozens of times, gaining the ability to edit something that already existed. The tapes are now considered to be lost, but it may be the first time where the record of a novel-in-progress was held on something other than paper.

Over fifty years since the writing of “Bomber”, it appears I still need to reckon with what I should consider to be a permanent record of my work, and where that should be held.

I have two writing projects to which I attach a “permanent record” status: these articles, and a diary. The former exists, save for written notes, as computer files, each one holding the numerous re-edits made during their writing. The latter is a succession of books, written out longhand, and in many cases, especially from 2012-19, ripped out of other books and kept in folders, with some vague intention of copying them up at some point.

Both approaches carry risks, from the lack of backup made of those computer files, to the corruption of data, to paper getting mislaid or removed, or coming into contact with water – only one incident like that will lead you to writing with semi-permanent ink as a minimum for the rest of your life. But should I print out my articles, or type up my diary in future?

The short answer is to embrace the fact that both options require levels of maintenance in order to attach a notion of permanence to them: computer files need to be backed up, ideally to more than one place, and at regular intervals to avoid data loss through file corruption and the lifespan of the devices on which you hold the data; written works can be copied, either by hand, scanning them or typing them up.

Ideally, I should wean myself off pen and ink, leaning more into typing as where the creative work starts, instead of where it ends. Because I essentially come to the screen with something to finish, I am already less perturbed by the flashing cursor on a blank screen than if I started with it. I should make use of that fact.

I WANT A NEW DRUG [535]

I had the hope that, if I visit a store in a foreign country selling DVDs and Blu-rays, I will find something obscure and intriguing. In Belgium, that certainly did happen, but two facts became apparent: no film company is obliged to offer English subtitles if they are not selling to an English-language country, and if you happen across the Brussels branch of HMV, their stock is the same as their UK stores, except labelled as “UK Import”.

Fortunately for me, the French distributor Carlotta Films had released an American film from 1989 that I have only ever heard about, its name promising an interesting journey. “Dr Caligari”, directed by Stephen Sayadian and co-written with Jerry Stahl, is a loose remake of the German Expressionist horror film “The Cabinet of Dr Caligari” (1920), turning it into a surreal, postmodern erotic horror, a descendent of the original doctor conducting chemical experiments to balance out the psychoses of her patients. Capturing the “midnight movie” crowd that loved Sayadian and Stahl’s previous films, the pornographic “Nightdreams” (1981) and “Café Flesh” (1985), “Dr Caligari” disappeared after its theatrical run, save for limited, sporadic releases on home video - this was the first time I had come across a copy I could buy.

The art direction and the acting in “Dr Caligari” are most definitely surreal. The setting is like a more adult version of Tim Burton’s film “Beetlejuice”, but with more vivid colours, geometric shapes and angles, reminding me of Memphis furniture once again. The acting is highly theatrical and choreographed, the result of a four-week rehearsal period: stylised and emphasised poses are held, no-one allowed to just sit or stand naturally, actors are often brought into and out of shots on platforms and turntables, and movement is also simulated by moving backgrounds.

I had wondered if “Dr Caligari”, with its strange performances and themes of fantasy and erotica, with scenes of nudity and gore - a Hollywood writer’s strike during the film’s production meant its sub-$200,000 budget could stretch to special effects artists and actors that wouldn’t have otherwise been available - was deliberately made to appeal to an audience that wanted to see something wild and screwed up. I think you can consider it to be a surreal work, thought it might be up to the viewer as to whether the “s” should be capitalised – the art direction is not a gloss on a standard Hollywood script, there is symbolic use of wounds, tongues and televisions, and there is a sense of this film working within its own reality, while also commenting on how our reality “fixes” people.

Even if so, the film is so identifiably a work by Stephen Sayadian, also its production designer and art director, record as saying it needed to attract the “midnight movie” crowd to be a success. In his work as a creative director for “Hustler” magazine, in charge of advertising, the editor of the satirical magazine “Slam”, the films “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh”, the video for Wall of Voodoo’s version of the Beach Boys song “Do It Again”, and “Jackie Charge”, a “midnight movie” style play – all of which were either written or co-written with Jerry Stahl, who would also write scripts for TV shows as disparate as “ALF” and “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, reveal similarities in performance and production design. Sayadian has also said it made sense to hire himself as production designer on “Dr Caligari”, as hiring anyone else would have taken up a substantial fraction of the overall budget. “Dr Caligari” director of photography Ladi von Jansky also shot print advertisements with Sayadian, informing further the held poses and stylised motion.

I was happy to see a film that was unlike most I have seen, but if I wish to look up the remainder of Stephen Sadayian’s catalogue, I will need to remember that the even-more-adult “Nightdreams” and “Café Flesh” were released under the pseudonym “Rinse Dream”.

DIES IRAE, DIES ILLA [534]

"The Temptation of St Anthony"

Once I was finally able to stand in front of the triptychs by Hieronymus Bosch that I was fortunate to see in Belgium, I came to realise that the level of detail in them was overwhelming. That said, I spent most of that trip with aching legs and feet from all the walking, every gallery visit being punctuated by finding opportunities to sit down for a bit, so the whole trip had its overwhelming moments.

I should have known all of this ahead of time. Having heard the term “triptych” more when talking about groups of large canvasses by Francis Bacon, what I am seeing here are altar pieces, cabinets made to be opened for the benefit of a single person, or small group of people, a level of intimacy wrecked by displaying them permanently open behind a wall of glass. I only realised once back home that another painting was on the outer panels of “The Last Judgement” on display at the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, known as “Christ Crowned with Thorns”.

But the details... a hump-backed bird, with Goofy-like dog ears and wooden skis, carrying a letter on its beak wearing a red robe a hat comprising a funnel with a branch coming out of it, a bauble hanging from a branch (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a being comprised of a human head with legs coming from its metal shell, an arm coming out of the top holding a sword (“The Last Judgement”); a monk-like figure with a large head and no arms walks with a frame on wheels, an antenna coming out of their head (“The Temptation of St. Anthony”); a hooded blacksmith about to bring their hammer on a naked body slumped over their anvil (“The Last Judgement”).

Detail from "The Last Judgement"

No amount of description, and no amount of choice, will ever do justice describing the sheer... amount of imagery there is. Looking through Stefan Fischer’s book of the complete works of Bosch, as published by Taschen, the many pages that zoom in on detail, for example printing the dog-bird larger than it is in the painting, would make you think Bosch completed hundreds of paintings, despite only 25-30 works attributed to him or his atelier still being extant. The examination of his work, and the endless reproduction of it – of course we could have bought figurines of details from Bosch works in the gallery shops after seeing the real thing – truly makes every frame a painting.

I initially had the impression of the imagery of the hellscapes depicted in these altar pieces being an extension of the medieval doodles made in monastery documents by scribes, known as “marginalia” or “drolleries”, all strange creatures and people with trumpets coming out of their behinds. As much as I mentioned Bosch’s “personal inventiveness of his surreal imagery” last time, and wondering if there is a similar building of symbolism as would be found at the Magritte Museum, next door to “The Temptation of St. Anthony”,  bigger indicator was its subsequent influence, as indicated by Jan Provoost’s own “Last Judgement” featuring similar hellish imagery in one corner only a decade after Bosch’s death, and in the composition of more realist works by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

The presence of this imagery helps to decentralise the subject of each painting overall – Jesus is pushed to the top of “The Last Judgement”, and St. Anthony is to the right in his depiction, their depictions no longer than other elements in each work. You are forced to look everywhere, from left to right, from up to down, taking in the whole, zeroing in on detail, then considering the external artwork. The hellish imagery could indicate an inevitability of evil, or even its ultimate triumph, but having hundreds of years to get used to seeing such imagery, reproduced in any form, could indicate its inevitable slide into banality.

The most famous of all Bosch works is “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, which I have not mentioned only because I did not see it on my trip – it is found in Madrid, Spain, or across numerous gift items at the Groeningemuseum, when I was expecting them to have a “Last Judgement” notebook at the very least.

Detail from "The Temptation of St Anthony"

I HAVE SEEN EYES IN THE TREES [533]

The Last Judgement (c. 1500-1505)

This is the first of a two-part look at the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, where I talk about everything up to the point of describing the works I saw, which will be for next time.

Having no knowledge of Bosch’s work other than the intricate and surreal figures contained in perhaps his most famous single work, the triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”, I knew even witnessing the personally creative artistry in such works would be truly special. 

This would form a lynchpin of a family holiday in the Belgian capital of Brussels, with a day trip to the historical centre of Bruges, a holiday of walking around art galleries, and walking between them.

The three pieces I saw, were, from the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels, “The Temptation of St. Anthony”, and from the Groeningemuseum in Bruges, “The Last Judgement” and “Triptych of Job”. All of these were painted in the early 16^th century, Bosch having lived until 1516.

If you already know your Bosch, you will immediately know where I will have slipped up: “The Temptation of St. Anthony” is a copy produced by Bosch’s atelier (workshop), with the original found in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon, Portugal, while “Triptych of Job” is actually by an unnamed “follower of Bosch”. Only “The Last Judgement” is by Bosch, while acknowledging the input of his atelier.

I personally don’t think it mattered that I wasn’t seeing “original” works, not because of any questions over provenance, but more that I was getting used to the idea of the atelier, over the work of a singular person – it is not accurate to describe someone like Bosch, or Jan van Eyck, as like a film director, but once directors began to be talked about as “auteurs”, their vision as a “master” or “teacher” guiding a multi-person production, while painting the most important figures and details themselves, things began to make more sense. 

What I would have liked to know is how copies came to be made of these works, but with any documentation for this unlikely to survive, you can only speculate as to who could afford to request one, and their reasons for it, in a time when images were rarely reproduced at all, rarer still to the same quality as the original.

But now, in are age of endless reproduction of images, I had only noticed the “follower of” notice by the “Triptych of Job” when looking on my phone later. I have talked about not being too keen on people taking pictures of art in a gallery, removing their ability to take in the work in the moment, and removing context like how Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory” without considering how small the painting is in real life.

However, if you have fortuitously been afforded to encounter a Bosch triptych in full, then my guess is that you attended the gallery on the day, arranged to attend outside of normal opening hours, or you patiently waited for the right moment to take photographs of what you need before moving on, which in my case involved taking one picture to cover the whole work, then going in for details that either capture you in that moment, or that you have seen before. Only once you look at what pictures you took do you then start thinking about the lighting in the gallery at that moment, regardless of the settings of your camera, or why you neglected to think if there was any art on the other sides of the left and right panels, these triptychs having been made to be opened.

Once I have been able to put all of this to one side, I am left with what made me excited to see these Bosch triptychs in the first place, which is the personal inventiveness of his surreal imagery... which, as advertised, I will discuss next time.

YOU’RE A GENUINE PONY! [532]

Some things insist on being written about.

On Christmas Day 1975, BBC Two broadcast a studio-based rock musical retelling the Trojan Wars headlined by the great Bernard Cribbins, alongside former Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones, and with a pre-“Evita” Julie Covington among the cast. The name of the show would be “Great Big Groovy Horse”.

Starring a young adult cast, with the then 46-year-old Cribbins in the nominal role as both teacher, narrator and Agamemnon, the breaking up an argument between two men over a girlfriend in a community club becomes a metaphor for confrontation between the Achaeans and the city of Troy, with Paul Jones plays Meneleaus, whose wife Helen (Patricia Hodge) was taken by Paris (Nigel Williams).

Man, you had to be there… literally, for apart from a repeat showing on BBC One two Christmases later, I don’t think it has been since, save for a viewer with the foresight and money to own an early video recorder.

The songs are catchy, acting as points to highlight emotion amongst Cribbins’s narrative, although the lyrics are very Seventies, and very Musical: “Paris, you’re a rat, you’re a mean cat”, and “Heed my word if you wanna get wiser, it’s the saddest little story that you’ve ever heard, everybody better heed my word”. You will also see people getting to belt out the line “you’re a genuine pony!” after describing the Trojan horse as a “tourist attraction”. The main point is to get across the outline of the story in as entertaining a way as possible, and it achieves that, but just don’t give yourself a test on what information it told you, as you realise you went with the flow of the songs.

You must use your imagination: the performers, singing into microphones with trailing wires, largely wear their own clothes, while the set is made of functional scaffolding, incorporating stairs, gantry and double doors, set on a floor marked out in black and white zones, marking out Troy by writing on the floor in purple. The bare studio walls are also seen occasionally. The Trojan horse itself, nearly twenty feet high and mounted on bicycle wheels, appears to be made of coloured blocks, like a computer game that couldn’t have been made yet.

Like “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” was originally written to perform in schools, Elmgrove Junior School in Harrow originated “Great Big Groovy Horse”, the musical’s writers Simone Bloom & Arnold Shaw being friends of the school’s music teacher. Some BBC staff must have had children who attended there too, for the corporation bought the broadcast rights, recording its fifty-minute production at studio 1 of Television Centre in April 1975. I have seen later evidence from a local newspaper that the stage version was performed in High Wycombe as late as 1979. The producer of the TV version was Paul Ciani, who continued his career with Basil Brush, “Crackerjack!”, The Krankies and Keith Harris, later graduating to producing shows later in the evening like “The Kenny Everett Television Show”, “Call My Bluff” and “Top of the Pops”.

This production of “Great Big Groovy Horse” looked and felt like an upscaled version of “Play Away”, the children’s musical series that Julie Covington appeared in at the time alongside future star Jeremy Irons. Jonathan Cohen, musical director of “Play Away” and of incidental music for “Jackanory” and “Rentaghost”, co-adapted and arranged this production, and performer Kim Goody would later appear in “Play Away” and “Number 73”, alongside her work as a composer for shows like “Playdays” and “Mike & Angelo”. Meanwhile, both Paul Jones and Cribbins had stints reading stories on “Jackanory”, Cribbins in particular having appeared in everything from “The Railway Children” to “The Wombles”, alongside his own musical career with songs like “Right Said Fred”, “Hole in the Ground”, “Gossip Calypso” and a very affecting version of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from “My Fair Lady”.

If you can find “Great Big Groovy Horse”, give it a try, for it is a great time capsule for what British children’s TV could produce in 1975. I wonder how many watched at the time, seeing as its competition on BBC One that Christmas Day was “The Morecambe & Wise Show” with Diana Rigg.

BLINDED BY THE LIGHT [531]

Ten years and counting...

I remember writing “16/02/2016” on the box of a spare lightbulb, having just screwed the other two into the light fixture in my bedroom. 

These were the first “energy-saving” bulbs I had bought, having decided that even their cost, at £15 for three, will be cheaper in the long run, over incandescent bulbs that wouldn’t survive the year. I was also making the switch from “warm white” to “cool white” light bulbs, reasoning that simulated daylight has its benefits – I don’t have any form of seasonal affective disorder, as far as I know, but I am not comfortable in gloominess or darkness either.

I figured these will last for a few years – they were rated to last for sixteen thousand hours, or 1.8 continuous years, so figured that, when I need to replace them, bulbs like them will be easier to find than ordering them online. Having now entered March 2026, I am still waiting for both moments come to pass.

What I bought were “corn cob” bulbs, cylinders lined with white LEDs in their most common form, squares of yellow phosphor covering a blue diode. They remain surprisingly effective, a level of light that makes people wonder if I ever sleep – they are not dimmable, but each bulb uses only twelve watts of power per hour – but I always thought warm white was too akin to candlelight, and what I wanted was brightness. 

Admittedly, the bulbs are bright enough that I only need to use two of the fittings in my light fixture, but that level of cool white light, and the fixture’s ability to swivel around, act as an effective fill light when I have made videos for YouTube. Later, a petrol station nearby would replace their sign displaying their prices with one using the same LEDs, legible from a great distance, but I remain undeterred.

I have again started to think about getting replacement light bulbs, but only because I have entered uncharted territory – after ten years, they really could stop working at any time, and I know having only one working bulb does not produce enough light for the room, and produces too many shadows, so I need to be ready. I have considered buying smart bulbs, using an app on my phone to select warm white light if I wish, or other colours entirely, but they do not produce enough overall light – I would need at least three of them, each one costing as much as the original pack of three bulbs did. Supermarkets, the place most people would buy their bulbs, also sell only the most popular bulbs, i.e. warm white only, but even DIY stores don’t routinely sell cool white bulbs that produce enough light for me – it makes me wonder if my long-lasting bulbs are illegal in some way.

So, what I need is a plan: do I find a like-for-like replacement for my long-lasting bulbs, or do I find other ways of solving the same problems they solved? Shall I get separate key and fill lights for when I return to making videos, and get less powerful bulbs for the room? Any which way, I won’t be living in darkness.