Weeknotes by Mo Morgan

• I now have an NHS dentist that works Saturdays! Never had much luck with dental administration, either finding them available or them honouring my appointments, so being able to go on a weekend appointment feels like a special thing.
• Therefore, I went for an inspection in the dentists’ chair. My most problematic tooth is long gone: pulled out at Guy’s Hospital during the first lockdown, pre-vaccines, while it was impossible for dentists to drill anything. Probably saved me a fortune overall. Of the remainder, one needs filling and another needs its filling amended. Curiously, the couple of temporary lockdown fillings are fine and may as well stay as they are. So going back in a couple of Saturdays to get that done.
• Had a steady week of proposal-writing and research. Some nice chunky challenges with opportunities to make a substantial difference. Nothing at all wrong with that.
• It was Groundhog Day. So I watched Groundhog Day. The comfort of repetition.
• Reconnected with an old friend who, when his wife asked who he was messaging, told her I was the first person he knew in real life who had a blog. A dubious honour.

Bass notes

[In which Mo learns bass guitar]

• Suddenly much harder this week. My subconscious has decided the lower notes are up and to the left; higher notes down and to the right. That’s broadly true until you come to play something: for efficiency, your right hand is also moving up and down between the higher and strings. So a lower note on a string further up might be to the left of a higher note on a string further down. Which is both obvious and counterintuative.
• This all became apparent trying to play the bass part from Billie Jean; the work of the legendary Louis Johnson and possibly the most famous thing you can play on a bass guitar. But it’s the fretboard equivalent of a tongue-twister: I know all the notes and strings but it comes apart when I play them in order. A couple of thousand more repetitions will hopefully break my subconsious. The recording of Billie Jean was famously labourious, so it seems fitting.

• A long old trip to a clients’ site on Monday: a seven-hour round trip by rail. Up early, home late. A good day, though. And I’ve learned there’s no such thing as train-grade wifi anymore. Some appauling, others practically as good as home. And there doesn’t seem to be a mobile mast anywhere in Oxfordshire.
• Archive.org is a splendid thing but (as with other web-archiving sites) the running of Wayback Machine is badly in need of an update. There’s no way for people to administer ‘permanent’ copies of their own stuff. The Wayback crawler abandoned support of robots.txt, probably rightly, but no good solution was ever put in place. There’s plenty of good, solid, legitimate reasons why an individual might want to remove something from the archive, but the only way to do it is to go full GDPR. Who wants to be threatening an important charitable organisation with legal action just to tidy up their own collection? Madness.
• I’m into pumpkin seeds now.
• Went to see Stewart Lee’s new live show. Typically excellent. The illusion of being stripped back and loose. But of course, it’s surgical.
• I’m noticing increasing amounts of work with a broad social purpose, rather than just returns for shareholders, which is welcome. Were I able to tell the me of 2019-ish, this would please him.
• Instagram’s algorithm has decided I’m in the market for a guitar. Y’know, an electric guitar. Like the cool kids have. But there aren’t many big brands doing targeted Insta posts—only Fender—so my feed is full mostly of bespoke or custom or niche instruments, costing several thousands each. And all those folks are paying Meta to run these ads by me even though I’m never going to buy the products, because the algorithm thinks that’s how it all works, and therefore the advertisers do too.

Bass notes

• String-crossing is getting better. What isn’t immediately apparent when you start learning the bass is there’s quite often four things happening at once: the pluck, fretting the same string you’re plucking, muting the higher strings usually with your fretting hand, and muting the lower strings usually with your plucking hand. And then you play the next note.
• The band (yeah the one I was in 20 years ago that has now remotely reformed) has a fair few new songs in the works. For one, they were keen for a string arrangement. A few weeks back I pratted around for a whole weekend trying to find it and it didn’t come. Then last weekend it just descended upon me. Sounds delicious. VST plugins for complex instruments like violas are getting really good now, for not much money. I’m particularly enjoying Appassionata, which in terms of bang for buck is extraordinary.
• Same song: I also wrote the bass part but, for the first time, on an actual bass guitar. But I can’t yet manage to play it at full speed, so the mix currently features a digital approximation. By slight coincidence, that approximate bass passes through a virtualised version of a bass amp I had a hand in designing back in the Nineties. Most people would learn the instrument first and develop a taste for the amp later. But no.

• Went househunting.
  • No matter how carefully you study the listings and photos, you never know what awaits you. Perhaps I was seduced by the Rightmove ad: soft, twinkling sunlight streaming in as soft, twinkling piano music plays on. But I certainly wasn’t prepared for the reality of post-pandemic house sales. It affected me more than I expected.
  • Elderly folks who might have already benefitted from moving, then imprisoned in their homes for months at a time and possibly even cut down by the virus. House after house, exactly as they were left. Families trying to untangle the affairs of their parents or grandparents while still shouldering their loss. Clothes still hanging in wardrobes. Keepsakes still where they were placed. School photos of grinning grandchildren still proudly in their frames. Once-tidy lawns and vegetable patches now muddy and unkempt. Walking sticks still propped up by bedside tables.
• The nice things about hybrid working is enjoying going to the office in person, even if for me it’s a substantial trip. In the new routine, the cost of going in is about the same as my salary for the time I’m there. And I also get much less done there, which means having to catch up. But the non-domestic social contact is good. It’s worth it for intellectual nourishment.
• I used to travel a lot for work, which meant getting as familar with certain airports as I was with my own office. When that’s the role, you get used to the rhythm and cadence of it. Eventually you start to recognise familar faces, presumably doing similar jobs, perhaps for competitors. There’s a certain smile reserved for folks at a gate waiting to board: an acknowledgement of both a shared experience and a social boundary that ought not be blurred. I wonder where those folks are now. Perhaps still riding the travelators.
• I have to manage some of my family relationships carefully, as some relations emit stress the way cats emit fur. This week was shedding season.
• Did some research and thinking around the process by which we make career choices. It’s interesting how many people get a say in the decisions we make about work. It’s also noteworthy that many of our career ‘choices’ aren’t really choices. There’s no option 2. I’ve been researching this to explore ways in which those decisions can be more rounded, with a bit of neutral input from outside. It’s a tightrope between saying things you’d alrteady thought of, and saying things that feel undesirable or inapplicable or downright remote.

Bass notes

• Learning your first (western) instrument is harder than learning subsequent (western) instruments as you have to wade through a bunch of music theory. Even though I don’t love the piano I am at least grateful to have first sat at one aged four. There’s probably. better place than the piano stool to learn the theory of octaves and intervals and whatnot. It’s all graspable on strings but a keyboard is much more visual. I’ve got that image in my head as I now fumble around finding those same notes on the fretboard.
• I can now play Where the Streets Have No Name. Deceptively complex for a new player. You’ve got to master those those chugging 8th-notes faster than you might expect, while also finding four notes across two strings. Not bad for two weeks. I’ve been playing along with Spotify, using a bit of crude EQ to stand in for Adam Clayton. If they do go ahead with this rumoured Vegas residency, I’m sure he won’t mind.
• U2 are unfashionable now; their massive, sustained popularity combined with Bonzo’s synonymity with humanitarianism that often comes over as virtue-signalling puts them in a league of music-press hatred they share with only Coldplay. There is no place for U2 or R.E.M. on Bowie-centric 6Music for example, which is a shame. I like a lot of U2’s work down the years, even the stuff U2 fans don’t like. This is not the golden era of stadium rock, but it wasn’t so long ago that a weekend TV schedule dominated by talent shows and ballroom dancing seemed very much of the past.

Meta

• I’m using Publii to put out these notes; so far, so good. It’s not without its challenges: it works fine on my Intel Mac but not my Silicon one, and there’s no way to compile and publish the site from my iPad or phone. But the same would be true of Jekyll and I preferred an app over running Ruby at the command line. Ruby has never come intuitively to me, so all my experiences with it have been a fight, not a flow.
• At some point it’d be nice to get into the weeds of building a robust site template for doing.digital to be usable in Publii or Jekyll or Eleventy or something, so I can migrate it off Wordpress. Or I might just kill it. Even while setting up that site—even before pressing ‘buy now’ on the hosting plan—I knew I’d regret using Wordpress. But I’d also prefer not to compile locally on the command line, since it ties me to (more or less) one machine that I don’t take everywhere. Even Publii is guilty of this. So maybe Microfeed is the next thing to explore.