• West Northamptonshire and North Northamptonshire? Are they on drugs?*
• Too depressed to be on Mastodon much today.**
• Spotted a tiny, tiny lizard at the front of the house
• And this is what happened when Oscar caught sight of it
• Today’s bike ride was up to St. Antoine again, an old favourite.***
• Found a terrifying bug in the kitchen. Had the body of one of those black beetles and the back legs of a grasshopper****

Footnotes

*I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kind of glad right now that the school I teach at isn’t under local authority control. If this kind of thing spreads, if more local councils collapse under the burden of cuts, schools will be among the services suffering (even more than they currently are). What struck me about this story is the complete lack of joined up thinking in the naming of the two proposed “unitary authorities”. Seems symptomatic.

**Mastodon, the safe-space alternative to Twitter, has been around a couple of years, but didn’t gain much attention till this week, when so many people decided, en masse, to leave Twitter. It’s fun on a superficial level, in the stupid joke phase that Twitter went through in its early days; that said, its roots are starting to show to me, a “normie” (in the site’s terms) and a middle-aged white male – the kind of person many on the site were hoping to escape. I feel no resentment about this, but don’t think it’s really the place for me. I appreciate more than most people in my position the importance of pronouns, but it still grates somewhat to see people who are really only talking about themselves in the first person refer to themselves in the third. Anyway, I don’t belong over there, and I question my own motives. With just 300 followers on Twitter (lost very few after the bot purge) after nine years, the heart sighs at the thought of starting from zero again. (Probably just as much as a Twitter celeb with half a million followers.)

I’ve long held the belief that a minimum of 100 of my 300 have muted me. Probably 10-20 of them don’t even see my tweets in the algorithmic timeline. Another 100 or so probably have dormant accounts. And of the 80-90 remaining, probably only a dozen or so actually read my hilarious tweets.

Of course, the Twitter experience is asymmetrical, and I enjoyed reading more than posting, but, after the initial rush of interest, I’m really overwhelmed on Mastodon with feelings of ennui.

***The St Antoine forest is dark and beautiful, with roads that melt in hot weather, cascading waterfalls, and cold, cold mountain water. But getting there involves a lot of climbing. I’m always surprised, heading back down, how steep it was; still, I love the descent, once it gets flatter. It’s my kind of cycling: a long stretch of ever-so-slightly downhill road.

****It was too terrifying to photograph. I just took it outside and stamped on it. Mutation!