I am suffering from a book hangover. I have been making time to read, on the advice of my counsellor, and have ploughed my way through a number of books in the last few weeks. A couple have gripped me – ByThe Rivers of Babylon, by Nelson DeMille, whose obituary in the paper last week pointed me to his debut, was a compelling and exciting piece of brutality that seemed to have some relevance to the slaughter going on in Palestine at the moment, but it has left no particular mark, apart from a certain queasy aftertaste of a relish for brutality. I’ll look forward to reading another of his books, when I am in the mood for a well-written but unchallenging thriller, but I am not particularly enlightened by it, only further convinced that Israel’s terminal decline is very much of its military’s own making.
Last Friday, however, I came across American War on my ebook server while I was tidying up my Tolino, and read the first couple of pages. It was immediately engaging, even though it begins with a meta-narrative frame voiced by a character who then disappears from the story until the last fifty or so pages, a conceit I rather dislike. However, for a literary science fiction novel, the exposition in this story is well handled, and the narrator provides a very useful historical framing, while not giving too much away.
The novel is actually about a character the narrator knew when he was a child, Sarat1, whose tragedy is that of the war child: displacement, refugee status, recruitment, betrayal, torture and, well, that would be telling. Although her doom is played out within a broken America, it is the experience of any one of hundreds of thousands of children who have grown up or are growing up under the distant but devastating influence of the American military empire now, and over the last three quarters of a century. Her country is riven by a proxy war, and she is a mote within the storm who rises, through her fury, to achieve the status of decisive pawn.
The story is powerful in its own right. However, as a parable of how the American empire keeps its potential rivals from developing through the fomenting of division and war, it is a masterpiece. In early childhood, Sarat’s family is forced to seek refuge in a breakaway revolutionary territory, The Free Southern State, after her father is killed by a southern suicide bomber (they are not called that in this book, in order, I think, to not stress the comparison too early) and the simmering war between the U.S. and the Southern rebels threatens to reach their home. From the refugee camp, she is, eventually, recruited to the rebellion by an American agent who is in the pay of a controller from the unified empire of the Middle East, The Bouazizi Empire.2
The agent engages in all the shenanigans of an agent provocateur in the pay of the C.I.A. in Iraq, Pakistan, Palestine or anywhere the U.S. wants to keep in chaos. He recruits bombers, pays off their families, whose poverty is too deep to allow them to fight back against him, and sows a sense of belief in the fiction of the rightness of the confected conflict. The cassus belli for the South’s rebellion, incidentally, is the ban on the use of fossil fuels: that is the religious split over which the U.S. tears itself apart, and it is no sillier than the exaggerated distinction between Shia and Sunni, or Arab and Persian. The South fights to retain the right to burn fossil fuels, even after the technology is largely redundant.
The great tragedy of the story is a great crime, but it is a crime committed by a character whose motives we understand fully by the time it occurs. She has my unreserved pity and I have to remind myself that what she does is not justified by her suffering. Her crime is that of every soul-wounded jihadist: allowing her own sufferings and tragedies to eclipse her view of the rights and fears of others.
I am trying to be careful about spoilers, but I must go into the sequence which, in my view, locates this novel as a dark satire of American atrocity, rather than some weak-arsed “warning about the future” so, if you want to read the book unsullied, you should stop reading this post now. At the core of Sarat’s moral undoing is not her choice to join the rebellion, or her commitment to political assassination, questionable as they are. Sarat is broken by imprisonment in a military torture camp. In here, she is taught that she did still hold illusions about the restraints on power, and about her own ability to maintain some thread of agency in a life which has repeatedly beaten her with messages of her worthlessness. She is brutalised by people who believe they are being clever. Their rape-acts are couched in a sort of science that is supposed to make them virtuous torturers. They are the camp guards of Abu-Ghraid and Quantanamo who return to their respectable middle-class lives after making a living from sating their satanic lusts behind the razor wire. They are the least human of us all. El Akkad’s portrayal of these people is a triumph, in their bureaucratic, shoulder-shrugging pretence of disinterested duty, and the fact that he allows his heroine to enact a revenge upon one of these monsters is a weakness of the book – a little too neat, a little implausible, and setting up a ridiculous coincidence in the final act – satisfying as it becomes.
Incidentally, if these people suffer,3 I don’t care. I cannot raise sympathy. It is not a revelation to know that torture is wrong and torture is not hard to recognise. They crossed the line. They had a choice. There are some things that it is worth dying to avoid doing, and the real Guantanamo guards would not have been killed for refusing orders. A few unpleasant years, perhaps, and some economic disadvantage in the richest nation in the world, but still nothing compared to the loss of their eternal souls.
This novel impresses me the way very few do. It is not perfect, but it holds together and, in its cleverly coherent fictional world, it is true to the actual world. Nothing except the great final crime is without precedent in this novel of horrors, and that crime is something we know all militaristic nations have plans to commit, if they can ever find an excuse and overcome their fear of retribution.4
Over the last year, the monstrous, squinting depravity of the military mind, enabled and encouraged by its despotic political lackey-chorus, has been flaunting the worst of its diseased imagination in a holocaust against refugees. The sheer lack of fucks given by the bureaucracy of hate that must have been necessary to enact the pager and walkie-talkie mass assassinations is blinding; as bad as any act in El-Akkad’s fiction. The blind hatred of the Hamas warriors, who employed rape and child murder in their revenge for the near-century of Israeli atrocities is as difficult to justify as the final act of Sarat in her agonised hatred of her oppressors and torturers, but the soullessness, implacability and nihilistic determination of the Israeli mafia-war state, even in the midst of its nation’s obvious death-spiral, is giddying.
This is a novel of history, of prophecy, and of contemporary commentary. I recommend it.
Names matter in this book. El Akkad uses a clever device to give a southern-states black/Latino American girl an Arabic name, pointing to the central satirical theme of the novel. [↩]
It is exhausting, this life. I do it because I love my mother and I want her to be safe and free from fear, but it is a form of imprisonment. I do not have the space to work, or think or dream.
Every respite is ruled by a ticking clock, a time by which I must be back. I cannot wander or dawdle. I must keep to the timetable, do my assigned activity and return to duty.
Nothing I do, apart from housework, cooking, shopping and companionship, is complete. When I pick up the book I’m reading, I don’t remember where I am. This post is a muddle, because it’s made in grabbed moments, tied together from separate half-hours, rather than written as a contemplative day of absorption.
However, thanks to my sister, I have a weekend off from caring for my mother once a month. Very kindly, she agreed to extend that weekend this month, to allow Amanda and me to go away for a few days, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. She arrived late on Wednesday and extended her stay on Sunday morning to make us lunch. For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel I was rushing to get back.
We booked a place to stay far enough away to feel we were having a holiday but near enough that we wouldn’t sacrifice two full days to travel. Amanda bought an electric van last year and had it converted to a mini campervan earlier this year, and she wanted to try it out, but I didn’t want to be camping, so we found a place on a booking site, Martha’s Retreat,1 that would give us scope for some picnic trips.
Martha’s Retreat was, at first sight, a little disappointing. The yard was a bit of a dumping ground, with a horsebox and a rotting JCB spoiling the illusion of rural idyll. The cabin was great – lovely, in fact, but the paddock behind was overgrown with scrub and dead cowparsley, and other mysterious uglinesses. It was rush hour, and the B road that the farm was on was busy. I was tired, though, and hungry, and not yet unwound. Gradually, I took in the paths that had been mowed into the field, the seating area with a wood burner in the middle, the messages of greeting and the extras scattered throughout the cabin. I began to relax.
On the first morning, I took Hazel out early, into the paddock, and, while she chased smells and celebrated the misty sunlight, I picked blackberries to go with our cereal.
We had toast with our second cuppas and then we lay in, something we used to do at least once a week, but something that has been rare for a long time. On other weekends off, we have been trying to fit too much in to the one day I’m at home and Amanda’s not working to allow us to waste a morning on books and breakfast in bed. Hazel loved it as much as we did.
No rush to be anywhere or do anything.
I’m reading Marjery Allingham, her second Campion Novel, Mystery Mile, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, so opened an LRB2 and read several articles in a row; a luxury I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. I recommend the one on a calvinist writer’s view of Genesis,3 the review of three books by Celia Dale, who appears to be a writer of Ealing greyness and gallows wit,4 and Josephine Quinn’s review of a book about the Antonine Plague, which may have been the worst pandemic in human history.5
We’d missed the owner on the day we arrived, the Wednesday. We’d stopped in Southampton for lunch at Thrive6 and he had to go out before we arrived. When we did bump into him, on the Thursday morning, after we had finally got ourselves together from our epic lie-in, he was as warm and generous and quirky as his hospitality suggested and we talked for at least an hour, getting the story of his life, of the JCB, of his Bentley that poked out of one of the sheds in the yard.
It was one of those conversations where everyone is being equally chatty. Our mutual enjoyment was palpable. After an hour, we began to joke about our collective volubility and, eventually, we called a halt, so Amanda and I could go and get lunch and Trevor could get some gardening done.
Our evenings were equally contented. There was no wifi, though there was a TV/DVD and a library of soppy films. On the Thursday night, our second night there, we watched Music & Lyrics, an old favourite we saw at the flicks when we were first together. The fact that the disc was in the cabin seemed serendipitous.
On the first night, though, we just let the place seep into us, and the awareness of being free sink in. We’d bought a boxed salad at Thrive and we ate it on the reclining sofa in the last of the fading dusk, and then pulled the curtains and sat with just the spotlights from the kitchenette, in shadow, Hazel curled between us, and had the best conversation we’ve had in a very long while. For once, we weren’t planning or trying to solve things; we just shared impressions and feelings and savoured one another.
The red dot shows the approximate position of Martha’s Retreat.
On the Thursday, after our long chat with Trevor, we had tea in the gardens of a museum, wandered around the town a bit and then, finding nowhere that fitted the venn diagram of dog and vegan friendly for lunch, decided to buy the makings of sandwiches and an easy supper and head back to Martha’s Retreat.
Holiday fully underway.
Is there any better afternoon than one spent on a bed with a book, your lover and your dog? We are not good at sharing the tea-making duties: Amanda has a greater tolerance for empty mugs than I do, so I was up and down a bit, but I read some more articles and dozed a bit, and Amanda dozed a bit more and it was all just very.
Our trips out were more hectic. Amanda likes to fit things in to any journey to the mainland, so we had to post some parcels at an Evri depot on the Thursday – there are none on the Island – and visit a couple of campervan places on the Friday. Wimborne Minster is a lovely town, saved from being swallowed by the Bournemouth conurbation by the A31 which blights its outskirts, as the A14 blights Bury St Edmunds. Unlike Bury, Wimborne Minster is surrounded by protected SSSIs and woodlands and has retained a certain beauty.
All the comforts.
On the Friday afternoon, after one of Amanda’s shop visits, we parked up in Holt Woods, in the car park that sits between the edge of the forestry commission plantation and the moorland that is run by the National Trust. I’d made sandwiches and we had a lazy picnic in the van. It was a success. Small as it is, the van is big enough for me to stretch comfortably in the reversed front seat while Amanda and Hazel have the setee/bed bench thing. Dog walkers and horse riders came and went and we spent a comfortable couple of hours enjoying the quiet, before travelling in search of a campervan place,7 where Amanda bought an awning.
That evening, I had the feeling I remember from the last day of the school holidays: a sense of gloom. It needn’t have been, really. We still had all of Saturday, as Charlotte wasn’t due to go home until Sunday morning, but the anticipation of heading back, leaving this little hideaway, weighed on me.
Amanda went to bed early and I stayed up reading for an hour or so. I lit the woodburner, which was decadent but lovely, and I was at peace.
Hazel, after adjusting to our being in separate rooms, came and joined me, lying on the hearth under my feet, until after I had fallen asleep and the fire had lost its warmth, when she got up in a huff and went through to Amanda. I joined them, I assume, because I was in bed in the morning, but I don’t remember it.
We got home mid afternoon on Saturday, stopping at Waitrose to buy buns and salad. We had an early supper of burgers and oven chips and went to bed to catch up on the last of the most recent series of Dr Who, which we both found disappointing. We’d watched a couple of the other episodes on an earlier weekend off and had loved them: Ncuti Gatwa and Daisy Miller are wonderful together and the writing has recovered this series, but the double bill finale was a bit all over the place and only just saved by the acting. Still, it was a nice ritual.
And, Sunday morning came. I was expecting to be early out, so Charlotte could catch a morning ferry, but when I texted her to say I’d be with her at nine o’clock, she suggested she make lunch for us. Gratitude was unbound. Another morning of lazy tea and dog walk, and then we were back at my mother’s house, feeling okay about it, because we were the guests, for once.
For the first five years or so of our relationship, Amanda and I travelled a fair bit, both in the UK and in Europe. Indeed, one of the reasons I took up cycling to work, and became a cycling enthusiast, was to free up money for holidays. We went to Barcelona, Paris, Gent, St Austell, Northumberland and to festivals in Cornwall and Suffolk. We had fun.
Then came my father’s illness, then his death8 and then my mother’s increasing dependence, and life seemed to close in and become unrelentingly serious. Now, it is as restricted as it has been in all out time together: we actually live apart and I spend my time caring for my mother and she spends her time working and managing the dog and our house, that we really don’t want to give up.
This trip might seem a small thing, and this post a “what I did in my holidays” rote exercise, but it is a holding on, a contributory element in the miracle that is the survival of our marriage through these years of never being first priority in our own lives. I want to preserve it, for the winter, so that I can look back and remind myself that we can have some freedom, some respite and some mutual enjoyment and congratulate us for the fact that we are, somehow, hard as it is, making this work.
It has been seven years since I gave up Twitter;1 almost eight years since I deleted Facebook,2 and though I did get tempted back to tweeting for a few months around the 2019 election, I have otherwise done without the main social media platforms for the better part of a decade. Other ‘socials’ have intruded, most notably Quora and Reddit, and I took a long time to delete my Guardian ‘Comment is Free’ account, but the tug of needing to check whether my breathless prose have elicited any tokens of approval or replies has not been a part of my life for long enough that I look upon people who are too dependent upon that behaviour as slightly pathetic, and I congratulate myself on sticking to my principles,3 and seeing through the lie that is ‘engagement’.
That pleasure has been heightened by the very public psychic, intellectual and reputational collapse of the fragile, racist narcissist who now owns the shoddily rebranded Twitter. He seems to have missed that his new name for it would bring to mind something that is past, as in, “my ex,” but he probably has some personal mantra about only moving forward, regretting nothing, etcetera. I used to admire him, having fallen for the attraction of Tesla cars: the Model X was, and is, a wonderful machine. Now, I despise him, in the era of the Cybertruck. His unravelling seems to be multi-faceted and the only reliably creative thing he has left.
Because my life has changed quite a bit, my blog has remained quiet. I am living with my mother in a bungalow we have bought on the Isle of Wight, eight miles from the home I have shared with Amanda for thirteen years. My mother’s dementia, exacerbated by a fall in which she cracked a vertebrae in January, had left her unable to live alone and accelerated the need for her to move in with someone. The care system in the UK, as with most of the systems whose effectiveness and humanity define a nation’s level of civilization, has been eroded under successive neo-liberal governments to the extent that one cannot guarantee one’s parent will be free from torture in a care home.4 Residential care was, therefore, not an option.
Amanda and I are still together, though we live apart. We had planned for her to move in, at least part time, but it hasn’t happened. She is here a couple of times a week, and I am there a couple more, for a few hours at least, while a personal assistant sits with my mother. Once a month, my sister comes down to stay for a weekend and I spend Friday and Saturday nights at home. For most of the time, though, I have a twenty-four hour a day job, caring for someone with ‘moderate-to-severe’ dementia.
The relationship with my mother is not unalloyed tedium, and I’ll perhaps write more about the rewards and pleasures of caring for someone you love, for there are such things, at another time. However, one of its most devastating downsides is her constant need for attention. She can read a magazine still, or even a book, but it makes less and less sense to her and will, of course, be entirely unfamiliar to her when she picks it up again. She can watch recognizable television, and she can play solitaire on her iPad if it’s set up for her. However, she needs reassurance four or five times an hour, and that’s not just a stock phrase or two. I need to listen to what form her generalized anxiety has taken this time, and respond in kind. I am getting better at anticipating the moment when she will need to engage, but it still means that I am concentrating on my mother for most of the day and into the night. I have no attention for any sort of extended thought, whether it is reading, working on computer stuff, or writing a blog post. If I can’t fit an activity into a spare five or ten minutes, I am unable to do it.
I am the perfect candidate for the unfocussed, atomized flicker of social media addiction.
Last week, I deleted my Reddit account, because I had become too hooked on it. I don’t want to care about how some random musing of mine, on a topic I didn’t have any thoughts on when I logged in, has been received by a mass of anonymous strangers. It has its uses as a reference resource for computing, but the vegan subs to which I subscribed were childish virtue contests. I haven’t missed it as much as I expected. I have, in fact, been able to read again, fitting in a half hour at bedtime and, most days, some time while my mother has a nap after lunch. Until last week, I would have opened my book, but ‘just checked’ Reddit, and have ended up posting until my mother woke up. Since the great deletion, I have read a Jesse Stone mystery (utter crap and totally undemanding), and a Marjery Allingham mystery (shonky story but hypnotic settings) and two editions of the London Review of Books.
Nevertheless, I am fascinated by the possibility of social media, although I don’t want to surrender to the control of it. I have installed a Matrix5 server on my server box, and the chat application, Element, that runs on the Matrix framework. I haven’t really worked out how to use it yet, so haven’t invited anyone on to my server, but I hope to give it some time at some point. For now, if you’ve read this, feel free to leave me a message in this post’s room.6
This morning, the last morning of my weekend off, I was reading an article7 on the Guardian website about how Brazil has blocked Twitter, or X or ex-twitter or whatever. This appears to be quite a devastating move, as Brazilians are the fifth most enthusiastic people for ex-twitter use, and millions of them are looking for an alternative. The one an awful lot of them have settled on is, at first sight, a Twitter clone. It was even set up by the former boss of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, but, instead of sitting on a single entity’s servers, subject to their control and manipulation, it is, like the Matrix.org protocol, decentralized. At the moment, private Bluesky servers are only in beta, so I have signed up to the main server, bsky.social. Somebody had already nabbed my username, Danceswithcats (plagiarist!), so I’m dwcuk.bsky.social.8
I wasted a precious hour this morning exploring it and another precious hour this afternoon working out how to embed it in this site. However, it appears to be all set up. You’ll find a button at the bottom of each page of this website now, as well as a button to my Bandcamp page. If I can work out how to get Mastadon installed on my server and up and running, I’ll add a Mastadon button.
Four months ago, almost to the day, I didn’t feel right on a Sunday morning. Amanda thought I was faking it, because it was the day of her father’s birthday celebration tea, and I might have been a little unenthusiastic about the prospect. Her doubt was good, though, because it allowed me, after my blood test results showed I was having a heart attack or, more correctly, a myocardial infarction, 1 to text her from Accident and Emergency saying, “I told you I was ill,” which was a great, great moment, almost worth having a heart attack for.
The realisation that this was serious seemed to come in little slides, rather than a tumble. The first sign was when a nurse practitioner, a former learner of mine and someone I like very much, went from friendly to grave, about half an hour after my blood test had been taken. An enzyme, troponin, was seriously raised, and Russ’ manner became serious and cautious, and he began to choose his words carefully. Later, while I was sat in a crowded A&E admissions corridor, a registrar came to me after my second set of blood tests and said they’d be finding me a bed fairly soon. He didn’t disguise that there was urgency: they had a certain amount of time to prevent further damage to my heart. I felt as though I was on a cliff edge, the words “damage to your heart” hammering at my balance. I had visions of no more cycling, of oxygen bottles, of short, halting steps in slippered feet, holding on to walls.
“We don’t expect this sort of condition in a person as fit as you,” he said.
Besides the troponin levels, I had very high cholesterol.
“I’m vegan!” I said, and I heard what became a refrain: some people just have high cholesterol. That seemed inadequate, to me. I didn’t have high cholesterol ten years ago, when I had blood tests as part of my registration with my G.P. practice. I don’t eat a lot of processed food. Could it be stress?
There was no room in the Coronary Care Unit, so I was moved to the Acute Care Unit, which is the place where ambulance arrivals are seen. It is not a good place to be put: it means you need immediate help but the specialist ward is too busy for you. I spent a sleepless night in a cubicle as emergencies came in, and as crash teams saved, or failed to save, people much sicker than me. The drip they put me on raised my blood pressure and gave me a headache. I was on half-hourly tests, so couldn’t sleep, and the constant alarms of blood pressure and cardiac monitors made a peal of electronica, one always out of time with another, like a round sung by a soulless robot choir, singing without listening, staring blindly ahead, their brittle harmonies drowning out their desire to scream.
A robotic chorister, singing because that’s all it knows to do.
At dawn, a consultant, reassuringly middle-aged, Asian and bearded, with a smiling gravity, told me that the CCU was unlikely to be able to take me so they were talking to The Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth about transferring me there. I asked how I was to get there and he said they’d take care of that.
The night shift left. The man with COPD in the booth next to mine was wheeled off, every breath a fight to the death, exhaustion and fear warring in his own personal hell. The day shift came to familiarise themselves with their patients but otherwise the hours dragged on into mid morning in uncertainty and exhaustion. The tea trolley lady got used to my request for soya milk in my tea, and the health care assistant got permission for me to stand up so I could use a bottle. I had established a routine.
Towards lunchtime, they were suddenly there. A registrar came and told a health care assistant to get me ready, and then an ambulance crew, a woman my age, and a younger woman, appeared with one of those tank-like, high-tech stretchers. I was strapped on, my possessions were perched on my lap and we were off.
The older woman, a paramedic, was leading the stretcher, so I was looking at her. I asked her how I was crossing the Solent.
“Hovercraft,” she said. “We’ll be coming with you.”
I was loaded into the back of their ambulance and attached to the heart monitor. She checked that it was saying I was alive and then she gave her colleague the all-clear and we were on our way. We chatted as we travelled to Ryde, and she told me that the hospital would have commandeered a hovercraft and the passengers would have to wait for the next one.
“It’s quite an honour,” she said. I thought, it’s a sign that I’m not in a good way, but I didn’t say it. Instead, I said,
“How much do you think that costs?” and she said, “Less than the air ambulance.”
I told her that I was friendly with Russ and that he was studying to become an advanced practitioner and she said that she was lined up to do that, but had deferred because it was her son’s GCSE year. Then she told me that she dreads the hovercraft – she gets seasick.
We arrived at Ryde seafront and they opened the back, but the hovercraft was still disembarking the passengers from the trip over so I lay looking out of the back doors of the ambulance, feeling exposed. The ambulance crew were busy removing bags and equipment from their vehicle, piling it ready to go aboard as soon as they got the signal.
I apologised to the hovercraft crew, but it seemed they enjoyed these situations. A young woman among them had done the course on safe stowage of a stretcher, and directed two men. They worked with cheerful speed, and she checked each of the buckles before giving the pilot the go ahead. I hadn’t been on a hovercraft for many years – it goes to Portsmouth and I prefer to travel via Southampton – and I’d forgotten what an odd sensation it is. It feels like a horse that’s rushing ahead. On that day, it was a horse running over very rough ground, pitching up and down. It’s not like a boat, though: you don’t crash down, but can feel that you’re cushioned. I was facing the stern, strapped into a bed, but I’ve always been a reasonable sailor and I was quite happy, trying not to enjoy the poor paramedic’s distress too much.
We landed at Southsea, and I was wheeled out into a grey afternoon, to another waiting ambulance, with a new crew. These were two young women, and the one who stayed with me in the back was newly qualified, still excited by her job. After a quick debate, they decided they were justified in using the blue lights, and we edged and shouldered our way through Portsmouth’s permanent rush hour towards Cosham.
I expected another crowded ICU and another long wait to be admitted, but they wheeled me through the hospital, into a lift and straight on to a rather luxurious ward. It was a large lobby ringed by single-patient rooms. In the middle of the lobby was a large nurse’s station, looking like the flight deck of a very smart space ship. Two nurses, both male, both young, both handsome and bored, with an end-of-shift distraction, introduced themselves and took me off the ambulance crew’s hands.
The two nurses finished their shift within the hour, and were replaced by an African nurse. I wanted to sleep so badly, and seemed to fall into it, but I was still on half-hourly observations, so was dragged up to wakefulness by this gentle-faced carer throughout the night. It prompted a chaos of dreams, vivid as fever wraiths. To me, it was a relationship, lived out in the echo-realm of faery, sad and lovely.
In the morning, I had to negotiate to have my bowel movement in a proper lavatory. I was not using a commode. I was ashamed by the attention, and annoyed with myself for being so precious. I had a shower and some breakfast and felt better, the strange, distant, fantastical night melting away as I interacted with ward nurses, an angry cardiology trainee who took an echocardiogram – I managed to calm her a little and get her talking about her course – and the Latvian cardiac rehab nurse, who gave me lots of useful information about my condition and was keen to reassure me that I would be able to have sex again.
I thought she was presuming rather a lot, but it was fun listening to her say “intercourse,” in her lovely accent.
I spent a week in hospital, waiting for a slot in the angio lab to come free. After that first, busy day, I was moved to a ward with four beds, and greeted by the other occupants as a welcome distraction. Over the morning, we got to know one another, in that slightly exaggerated blokey way that British men adopt with new acquaintances. Opposite my bed was a man in his late thirties, squarely built and with the air of perilous affluence of a hard-working business owner. He turned out to be a kind, gentle man, though worried about his business, a furniture retail warehouse, which was in the hands of a less interested brother and a couple of staff. His wife, a lovely woman as rotund as him, visited every day and brought him heart-ruining Pakistani delicacies. I liked him at once.
On my side of the room, the other occupant was an older man from the Island, a farm worker, who was waiting for a bypass. This is the hard core patient. Our businessman friend and I were both waiting for stents, but if you need a bypass, you are in serious need. Southampton doesn’t do bypasses – they’re less common these days. He was waiting for a transfer to, I think, St Bart’s, in London. He’d been waiting for a week and was, it became clear, slipping into depression. He hadn’t had any visitors in all that time. The businessman was trying to keep him cheerful, but there was an air of gloom about him that felt dangerous.
Our final comrade had loads of visitors. He was a man in his sixties who, I gradually gathered, was quite autistic. He spent a lot of time colouring, and discouraged conversation. I never established what his condition was, but his sister, who spent every afternoon with him, seemed cheerful.
After two days, I was moved from there. I was, a nurse told me, stabilised. There was no more danger of heart damage and I was now only in hospital for a stent. Unfortunately, each day’s list got hijacked by emergencies, and as you stabilised, you became less urgent and were dropped down the list. The businessman had his and came back to be discharged at around the same time as I was moved to the Cardiac Day Ward. The name was out of date. It was supposed to be an outpatients’ ward but is routinely used for inpatients in the angiography queue.
This was a long ward with one row of beds, each cubicle curtained and separated from its neighbour by a high, narrow window. Somebody had missed a trick and the windows were rectangular, rather than arched, which would have made the place feel magical. I was in the first cubicle by the main door. It became a home, and I would have defended it if they had tried to take it away from me. Each morning I was woken by a tired night nurse for my observations. I would get up after that and shuffle along the dimly lit room to the bathroom, to shower and shave and clean my teeth in leisurely peace before it got busy. I hadn’t packed pyjamas, so I was in hospital P.J.s, using a gown as a dressing gown. I looked like a very camp jedi.
The tea trolley was my main delight. They were initially thrown into confusion by my request for soya milk but became used to it and made sure there was always a mini pack of bourbons (vegan) among the biscuits. I heard about relatives who’d had heart attacks, their recoveries or, hilariously, given the setting, their failure to recover. I shared dog pictures with one of the housekeepers.
I got used to taking pills and to being connected to a heart monitor. I became adept at removing the clips without disturbing the stickers when I wanted to go to the loo, and replacing them when I returned. I had bloods taken by lovely nurses from various African countries, from the Philippines, from India. I tried to befriend each one, treating the brief interaction as a challenge and a respite, surprised that in such a busy place, I could feel quite so lonely. I became a connoisseur of cannula inserts.
Each morning, the consultant, who did his best to be patient and nice, came round to tell us that we were number one in the queue, number two in the queue, etc. Above number three, you stood a chance of having the procedure that day. Otherwise, you would be stuck until the next day. I tried my best to not show impatience. I was still effected by the night in St Mary’s Emergency Admissions ward, where I had listened to people die. I didn’t want to be in competition with people on the edge of death, when it was clear that I would live, would cycle again, would be okay.
Eventually, on the Saturday afternoon, I was taken in to a cave-like room, part laboratory and part Alien-film spaceship bridge, and put on a weirdly technical chair while filaments were pushed up my arm and a stent was fitted into my aortic artery. There was rock music playing softly: the Spotify playlist of someone who is proud of their taste. Surgical lights lit patches of the room, while the rest was lit only by computer screens and video monitors that showed the inside of my circulatory system, but were angled so I couldn’t properly follow the procedure. The Consultant asked me questions, but was impatient with imprecise answers and did not answer my enquiries. I guess he was doing overtime and, I suppose, concentrating. I’m grateful, but that sense of estrangement from control of my own circumstances is something with which I have become familiar since then. At the time, it annoyed me.
I left hospital the next day. My sister-in-law, Jo, and her partner, Paul, very kindly came to pick me up in their comfy S.U.V. and we got the Fishbourne ferry back. I felt fine, but desperate for home. They took me to their house, where Amanda was waiting, and I was reunited with a joyful Hazel. She squirmed backwards and forwards in front of my legs, rubbing her bottom against me, twisting her body to look back at me, whining a high pitched squeal.
My reception from the humans had the feeling of fragile celebrity that surrounds the patient who has had a life-changing diagnosis. I think that was the moment when I realised I had entered the realm of the unwell, from which there is no real return. It crossed my mind that I was out of work, an invalid, in the eyes of the world if not in fact, and in the middle of trying to move my mother into a house for us to share. It wasn’t the time to think about these things, though. I wanted to get home.
Prior to my heart attack, I was feeling better about life than I had for some years. I had escaped the bullying supervision of my former “colleague” by an act of economic self-destruction, but I was ready to start looking for alternatives, and the extent to which my mother’s care was going to impact my freedom hadn’t quite hit me. I was volunteering for the cargo bike business, trying to write, with my usual progress, walking the dog, shopping, cooking, reading.
Why did it happen? I truly think that ten years of manipulative bullying by a chaos-queen, on top of my long grief for my father, both before and after his death, had a massive impact on my health. I thought, because I ate a decent vegan diet, had given up smoking and cycled a considerable distance most weeks, that I was immune from the ailments of middle age, but it appears not. The one thing I could not control was my mood of anger and frustration. Some of that was political, but my working life was, for a decade, like a toxic marriage, and I stayed because I needed the money. It had some good aspects, but it was all overshadowed by that fucking person. She has her own challenges and sorrows, but she is a past master at division, manipulation and keeping everyone on the back foot, and herself at the centre of things.
On the other hand, my diet wasn’t perfect, much as I have cooked from scratch for many years. I may have relied upon the bad vegetable fats – coconut and palm – more than I should have and I definitely developed a real instant noodles problem over the last few years. Also, I smoked for thirty years and drank for forty. These things aren’t good.
The genesis of this post was a review of my increasing sorrow: the loss of the optimism that had been my characteristic outlook since my teens. I didn’t notice when I lost my gift for happiness. There wasn’t a moment when I felt a whoosh, a gust of cold and a crushing sense of absence. The jolts to my cheery nature have been cumulative,34, rather like my realisation in A&E that what I felt in my chest was serious. I faced each event with the courage it demanded at the time, but, gradually, they eroded me until I had become rather darker than I have been for most of my life, and much sadder.
I’ve been aware of it. I shelled out for counselling for several months last year, and it helped me to confirm my need to ditch the job, and seek more control over my circumstances. And it comes back quite frequently, in moments of understanding, as it did two nights ago, when Amanda and I avoided an argument because, unusually, she let it go.
“You’ve got enough to be dealing with at the moment,” she said. It was dark. We were in the kitchen and I had only put the extractor lights on, so there were shadows surrounding us. I sort of slumped, and she crawled into my arms to hug me.
In her embrace, I remembered that I still have much treasure, a great deal to be grateful for. We will get past this. All will be well.
It’s never been my first priority, but a music server has been on my list of ambitions for many years. I’ve bodged it in the past, giving myself a shared music folder accessible in the house, which was a quite longstanding arrangement, but not a perfect one. It meant I had access to networked music at home, and could stream from the folder to any of the stereos on which I’d set up bluetooth, but I had to anticipate what music I might want outside the house. The freedom of letting one’s music choice be led by one’s mood was still out of my reach.
No more! I bought the 4TB ssd1 and it was waiting when I got home last week. I had planned the migration, but it was still seat-of-the-pants stuff. I had to make an image of the existing drive, store it on my external harddrive, then copy the image to the new, larger drive. Then, and this is not trivial, I had to open up my server and swap the drives. I am not comfortable poking around the physical innards of computers.
Anyway, it worked. There are various disk cloning programs, but I used dd, because I felt at least a little familiar with it. It’s actually pretty simple, in both processes: imaging and duplicating. The trick is being clear about your disk identities and their mount points. I mounted the external drive to the server to make the image and gave it the name /media/seagate. From that, I was able to identify it in the list given by the enquiry lsblk, which lists all mounted drives.
Once that was established, it was a simple enough process to tell dd to make a copy and save it to the Seagate. You invoke dd, use if= to identify the source disk and then of= to name and locate the output image. Adding status=progress gives you a sense of where you are in the process. My first attempt looked like this:
It took an hour or so, but when I came back to my computer, there was a massive file on my external drive, good as new. However, I’d failed to name the file correctly, and was worried that just sticking a filetype on the end of its name would bork the whole thing. Nevertheless, I was cheered by this first run and reran it thus:
Next came the exciting bit. I hooked my new ssd up to a connector that has proved incredibly useful over the years. It’s the end piece of a hard drive caddy I bought from Currys for £15 a long time ago. I had an idea that I needed to partition the disk first. I don’t think I did. However, I opened it with gParted on my desktop machine and set a gpt partition table then created a single, 3.8TB partition. I then plugged the Seagate into my desktop and typed
dd if=/media/seagate/Backups/ynh.img of=/dev/sdc
and pressed enter.
I realised, after a few minutes, that I had been stupid. The terminal had simply stayed still, within the command, suggesting the computer was working, but I had no way of seeing what it was doing. The Seagate was chuntering and the light on the ssd connector was flickering, so I assumed the transfer was taking place, but I had no idea how fast. In a fit of worry, I disconnected the ssd, killing the process.
On the next try, I added the process indicator, thus:
This was much better, I could see that it was working. I could also see that it was working very slowly: about 14MB/s. At that rate, it was going to take about sixteen hours. I nearly gave up there, but decided against it. I went shopping, met Amanda for a coffee in town, came home, cooked, had a nice evening and went to bed and, in the morning, there were only about 230 GB – about three hours at the slightly improved bit rate – to go.
The moment of truth came mid afternoon. Taking apart the ThinkCentre was easier than I had thought it would be. It’s one screw to take off the cover, although the hard drive caddy is not as beautifully easy to access as the later model that serves as my desktop, but it was all obvious and I managed it without too much terror. I plugged it back in, pressed power and then counted to thirty.
I wasn’t sure the best way to test it. Should I log in to Nextcloud or Yunohost admin? In the end, I used ssh to glance into the operating system to see whether that was on. It was. It identified itself as danceswithcats.net and said there were no outstanding updates, so I opened Firefox and clicked on the Yunohost admin page. It came up immediately and, to my delight, so did Nextcloud and Calibre Web. I opened Navidrome, the music streaming software, and it was sitting happily with no content, so I looked for its content folder and, after a few minutes’ confusion, realised that in Yunohost it stores its data in Nextcloud, in a shared multimedia folder.
The transfer of my music took another six hours: I have a lot of music, all stored as fairly large FLAC files, but it was finished by dinner time. And this is how it looked on the server.
“Eclectic”
Navidrome uses the Subsonic server model, so I installed a compatible app on my Fairphone and fiddled with the server settings and…BINGO!
I’m on a train at the moment, and I’m listening to music cached on Dsub from my bedroom that must already be the better part of a hundred miles away. I have access to all my music and will have for all the time I’m away. In modern terms, it’s a pretty normal thing, but the fact that it is possible at all is a little bit of a miracle.
And the fact that I have built this, that I control it, and that I am not paying a subscription to a service provider who can change their terms at any time, or paying for the service with data about me, about my habits, interests and moods, is a little bit miraculous, really, isn’t it?
After eight months,1 I have got round to setting up my website again, and laboured, over the last month, to repost the archive of old articles which I had, in a fit of optimism, converted to Hugo format. Hugo, it turns out, requires coding skills to use, despite the YouTube ‘walkthroughs’ that assure you it’s as easy as picking a new hipster flannel shirt. I could have had a standard, moody, sans-serif photography portfolio blog, with google integration and serious off-the-shelf attitude baked in, but I want something else, and so I have returned to WordPress.
I gave up my commercially hosted website because I was on an economy drive after quitting the job that was driving me to ill-health. That chicken actually came home to roost in October, when I had a mild heart attack, but that’s another story.2 Anyway, this current version is home-hosted, thanks to a wonderful piece of software called Yunohost, which I mentioned in another post.3 If you are reading this, you have accessed it on a little ThinkCentre computer that sits in my office in my home. I am very happy about this. I love having a blog, but I cannot justify paying for hosting. In this version, it is merely a side-project on a server that performs other functions, including hosting my Nextcloud instance. It is, effectively, free.
The previous few iterations of my blog have been on the domain danceswithcats.uk. However, I had over a year’s worth of email service paid for on that one, and didn’t want to transfer it to my server, so I have returned my blog to its original domain, danceswithcats.net. Given that the U.K. may not survive as a political entity to the end of my contract with Gandi, I think this is a clear-sighted move on my part.
It is likely that the next few posts will be about computers and software and, in particular, my server. It is a real triumph, limited only by my inability to properly integrate a network attached storage, so I haven’t yet been able to set up any media, apart from a Calibre server to host my ebooks, which are small files and don’t take up too much space. At the moment, the ThinkCentre has a 1TB ssd. My Nextcloud setup takes about a third of that, and this blog barely touches it, but if I were to host all my music and a music streaming server, it would need over a TB just for that, before I started looking at video. I have a NAS of 4TB in a Raspberry Pi box I put together. However, it doesn’t allow for direct attachment and Network links are symbolic links, which the server software doesn’t like. I’m sure there are ways around this, but they involve deep coding knowledge and maintenance. I need simple.
However, a 4TB ssd is not such an exotic beast now: there are unbranded ones available for £1504 and I’ve even seen a Crucial ssd available for £195.5 I’m tempted by the cheapo. I have good backup strategies, and, by the time even a delicate ssd fails, replacements will be much cheaper, if the decline in the price of 1TB discs is anything to go by.
The process of transferring the server to a new disc will require a bit of careful study. I know how to clone a disc, in theory, and have actually done it with sd memory cards, for my Raspberry Pi. On that occasion, I used a command line program called dd.6 It requires a bit of care, but I am fairly confident.
So, adventures await and I now have a blog where I can boast about them.
The other topics I want to write about are more personal. I have given up work, partly because I felt bullied by my supervisor and was constantly stressed, but mainly to be free to become a carer for my mother, who will be moving down to the Island very soon. I expected to get a part time job, and had all sorts of ambitions in that direction, but then I had the heart attack. It is entirely possible I have had my last day of employment. That deserves reflecting upon. I also want to write about my heart attack. It was a bit of a big deal. I took notes and I’d like to preserve those.
And, I still want to write about books. I had a bit of an obsession with Thomas Mann a couple of years back.789 I’m not sure what that says about me, but my writing about him is all wrapped up in my sense of doom surrounding Russia’s atrocity against Ukraine. Since then, I haven’t read a great deal of ‘literature’, but I have listened to audiobooks, some of which have been fascinating. Over the last few years, starting in early 2022,10 I have listened through most of The Witcher books, by Andrzej Sapkowski.11 Fantasy they may be, but they have a truth to them, and they strike me as superior, in every respect, to any fantasy that I have ever read. I’ve bought the ebooks and am planning to read them more closely because, masterful as Peter Kenny’s readings of them are, listening to a book is a sort of grazing. It colours one’s experience at the expense of detail.
So, if you are reading this, well done you. I am the most amateur of bloggers. I do not attempt to optimise my experience or try in any way to manipulate people into coming to this website, clicking through it, or staying once they are here. You are special. Thank you.
Nevermind. This site will be down from 15th June, for as long as it takes me to get myself sorted out. I’ve disabled automatic renewal on my hosting, and have started the process of creating a home server, using Yunohost,1 on which I plan to host a static version of this website. That excellent project seems more accessible now, thanks to my having learnt a fair bit about networking recently, and to the fact that the Yunohost documentation has been refreshed and is now rather excellent, in my opinion.
I’ve already installed Yunohost onto the SD card of my Raspberry Pi, fired it up and been able to access the admin page.
Exciting!Back to life!
At the moment, it is just a box under my desk, transmitting very little to my local network. It’s the Raspberry Pi, box, incidentally, that I mentioned in a recent(ish) post.2 However, come the end of my hosting contract, I hope it will be the new home of danceswithcats.
Doesn’t the naive hope break your heart!
My task list towards this goal is long and fussy, as all computer projects are. I’ll also need to make backups of backups of my Nextcloud data as I’m planning a new instance, rather than a migration of my existing Nextcloud. I want to bring all my digital stuff under one domain name, so that I can cut costs. At the moment, I am paying for three domain names. That wasn’t such a problem when Gandi offered free email with a domain, but now they’ve whacked a £3/month charge on that, it adds up. Getting rid of hosting and two domains with associated email will save me around £300 a year.
I’ll need to think about domain management. I’ve already created an A record on my domain, pointing at my home IP address, and I’ll change the CNAME on the 15th, assuming I have the time: annoyingly, it’s a Thursday, which means I’m teaching. Anyway, there has to be a Yunohost admin page, but I’m not clear whether that hogs the top-level of the URL. I hope not, as I’d like to keep this website as the main domain. Nextcloud3 will be a subdomain, of course, and I’d like a Calibre server,4 a Matrix server5 and a music server. At the moment, I’m favouring the idea of using Navidrome6 for that. Quite how much one can tax a Raspberry Pi with is an open question at the moment. No one in the forums seems keen to talk about hardware limits, but they must be a factor. I won’t, for instance, be installing the Nextcloud Talk app: video conferencing is not a thing when you’re using an ARM processor, I wouldn’t have thought. However, the Matrix server should be entirely practical and will allow me to, maybe, also install other Fediverse-linked services in the future. Let’s see how the initial setup goes: I’ve got port-forwarding and storage configuration to get through before I get any more ambitious.
As it is, I’m a little bit stuck until my domain is ready, and I’m tight enough to not want to waste the cost of the hosting for which I’ve already paid. However, it gives me time to focus on becoming used to using a static blog application. I’ve chosen Hugo, because it’s well supported and has lots of themes. Once this post is up, I will use the WordPress to Hugo Exporter7 to download a copy of this website and start playing with Hugo on my local machine. I hope that, in the week-and-a-bit until the 15th, I will have a site ready to upload.
Hugo builds a website on your own computer, so that you have a site to simply upload to your web server, complete and independent of databases and other complications. The program uses Markdown as its composition language, which is fine: I use that on the excellent Nextcloud Notes app.8 The only snags I really anticipate with Hugo, having read a very helpful overview,9 are formatting my theme with a serif font, which doesn’t seem popular with the Hugo community, and my use of footnotes. I really prefer them to direct links in a blog, but I haven’t yet worked out whether they are available in a static site generator.
There’s a chance that I will have to troll through all my posts, converting my footnotes to conventional in-text links. That will be a chore, but it might discipline me to do some editing and pruning.
Anyway, enough of this. I’ve got my task list. Onwards and downwards.
The Leviathan, whose spotted history I outlined at tedious length1 not two months ago, has died. It has passed on, ceased to be, is no more, etc., etc. I have fused the motherboard by plugging in things with batteries, apparently. Said gizmos draw power that is not supposed to go through motherboards. Thus, it is an ex pooter.
The pertinent bit is the line about the USB.
My feelings are mixed. I had it pretty much as I wanted it, and it was wonderfully fast. Using it felt like driving a luxurious 1950s saloon, with more power than you could ever need and seats that both supported you and moulded around you.
At the same time, it was huge, ugly, quite noisy and used a lot of electricity. Also, a lot of the pleasure I had in using it for writing was thanks to the size of the monitor, and that is working perfectly well. The joy of a decent sized monitor, when you are a person of a certain age, is being able to have documents at a perfectly reasonable size on the screen, without taking up the whole of it. For instance, uploading the images for this post, which I did a moment ago, was a real faff on my laptop screen: I had to click between applications, minimising one to get another, and couldn’t drag and drop, but had to copy and paste, which is no hardship, really, but feels like an embuggerage when you’re used to having ample acreage of screen space on which to play.
Space to clutter: lovely!
I am going to take The Leviathan to Just PC’s (sic) in Newport and get him to assess whether it’s worth putting a new motherboard and processor in, but I’m not optimistic. Also, I wonder whether I wouldn’t be better served by getting hold of a mini computer and using that. My Nextcloud server box, a Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, is an excellent machine that would do the job well. Slightly newer, more powerful versions are to be had, refurbished, from ebay, for around £130. That’s £130 I’d rather not spend this month, but I’m keeping it in mind.
The Rolls Royce option is to go for a brand new computer, with whistles, bells and a warranty, but that would be an even longer-term proposition. The one I have is mind is this little beauty:
It’s called a Star Labs Byte,2 and it’s got an AMD eight core processor, built in Radeon graphics, an open-source BIOS and is supported as a Linux machine. No rubbish cost for a Windows license I don’t want. I’ve been mooning over their Starlite laptop3 for some time, since my experiment with replacing parts on an old Thinkpad went awry.4 I thought it might make an excellent travelling laptop, if I ever do get round to bicycle touring. Idle dreams. Anyway, the attraction of Star Labs is that they are British, which means there are no problems with trying to sort out import duties on machines coming from Germany or America, which is where the majority of Linux-focussed computers come from.
However, the Byte starts at £700, with a fairly small SSD and less RAM than I’d want for my main computer. And that is a competitive price for a well-specced mini-computer. It’s academic, anyway, as I’m not spending the best part of a grand on a computer when I’m planning to give up my job. The consumerist nag has got into my head, though. I wants it. It’s shiny.
A little trooper.
But, for now, I thought I’d try a bootstrap method. We have two mini computers which I have tried to use for media centres, with mixed success. One, a Zotac, serves a useful ongoing purpose. With Peppermint Linux5 on it, we can watch iPlayer, ITVX, and other catchup services on our non-smart TV through it. very nice. We also used to stream video from the media server, but we haven’t missed that enough for me to struggle to revive it.
Don’t judge me.
The other one is this oddness. It’s an Acer Aspire Revo 3600, from around 2009. It has a single core Atom processor and a curious onboard graphics arrangement called Nvidia Ion, that is a bugger to get going with Linux but does make up for some of the CPU’s shortcomings. It was taken quite seriously in its day.6 It’s basically a netbook but in desktop form, so it wasn’t powerful when it was new. Fourteen years on, it’s feeble. However, thanks to the graphics setup, it does manage a little better than my little Dell Netbook from around the same time, of which I was so fond.1
I thought it might just do as a stopgap measure though, so last night I brought it upstairs and put Lubuntu on it. This was not a success. It froze at boot and hadn’t got anywhere after ten minutes of struggling, so I pulled the plug and downloaded copies of antiX and Bodhi. antiX was ready first, so I stuck that on a memory stick and installed it.
Result? A working computer, just about. This morning, gingerly, I tried setting up Nextcloud sync client on it. It managed that, although updates brought it to a screaming halt for ten minutes or so. However, the two screenshots here were saved into Nextcloud on the Acer and appeared, dutifully, on the Thinkpad when I wanted them, so all is not useless.
The email client packaged with antiX, Claws,7 is okay, but the calendar app is incomprehensible, so I uninstalled Claws and put Thunderbird on and, again, it coped, with a bit of a wheezy struggle, being linked to my Nextcloud calendar, task lists and contacts. I’m keeping things fairly minimal, but I could, I think, write on this machine, without being completely frustrated. LibreOffice Writer, after taking quite a while to start up, seems to work smoothly on it. It doesn’t like Firefox, though. Blogging on it would be a painful process.
It feels touch and go, as if it could freeze at any moment if I absent-mindedly ask too much of it. It has conky on the desktop as standard, giving lots of system monitor readouts, and the processor indicator spends a lot of time solid blue, which is not optimal. It’s been quite a while since I’ve had to walk on egg-shells with my computing, and I’m not sure I’m going to adapt to it.
A simple webpage makes the processor indicator flouresce – see the top-right status bar.
So, I’m writing this on my laptop, the good old Thinkpad that seems to cope with anything. The keyboard is not as comfortable as the one I use on desktops, and the screen means I have to lean forward and wear my reading glasses, but it is still quick and responsive.
I think I will buy a second-hand Lenovo Tiny, probably after payday. A new computer, whizzy as it would be, is an unjustified extravagance and an environmental misstep. I was planning to buy a year’s subscription to Presto music’s streaming service8 this month, but, instead, I shall put aside the money to get as good a refurbed computer as I can.
And The Leviathan shall be consigned to the depths, not unmourned, but not without a certain relief, either.
It’s coronation weekend. I’ve not participated and I have felt more annoyed by it than interested when it has intruded. You know the cringe inspired by a performance that’s slightly off-key? That’s how I feel about it all. I don’t want to join in with The Guardian’s self-admiring republicanism: like most of the Guardian’s attempts to paint itself as still relevant, it has a whiff of trust-fund radicalism to it, but, on this point, my sense of events chimes with its.
A billionaire gets a ceremonial celebration of his privilege that costs the state millions, and we’re told we can’t afford to fund a decent health service, to educate children properly, or treat victims of war and oppression who seek safety here with human dignity.
For most of my life, I’ve been an intellectual republican but a sentimental monarchist, but I’m alienated from all of it now. It’s a farce: a Netflix mega-production pretending to be real history. It’s the simulacrum in the middle of our national breakdown, an embarrassment.
Computers seem to gather. This slightly incriminating image shows seven laptops, six of which belong to me, and two desktops. One of the desktops, the mini-lenovo in the top-left, is my Nextcloud server, and the other, sitting, in defiance of the term desktop, under the desk, is my main computer, an Asus gaming machine of impressive age.
Of the laptops, three are in useable working order, but one of those – the red Dell netbook, is so old that its uses are limited. I have put antiX Linux1 on it, but connecting to a modern webpage, of even the most static and undemanding design, sets its poor little processor into terminal sprint and sends its temperature up to alarming levels. I’m loathe to get rid of it, because I bought it almost new, from the Dell outlet store, in 2010, and it has served me well, but I think it may be time to offer it to the computer recycling people, who might be able to find a use for it.
The live machines are the two Thinkpads in this second picture. The one to the left (it’s the one with the yellow sticker on it in the first pic) is a slightly more modern machine than its stablemate (orange Ubuntu sticker). That is an X220, which my wife bought second hand, but could never get on with. I always thought it had the most amazing keyboard, but she broke the trackpad buttons at some point, and I took it on when she replaced it. I fitted a replacement keyboard, but it’s a cheapo Chinese rip-off that has a lot of flex. Yesterday, I popped into Just P C’s (sic) in Newport and asked whether he could fix it, and he said I could just stick it down with a double sided foam pad. I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll give it a try soon.
I hadn’t used it much since the disappointment of finding that the keyboard repair was shonky. I’d put a small SSD in it and loaded Xubuntu2 on, and liked that operating system so much that I’d done the same on the other ThinkPad, my main laptop. I was happy enough with that for some time, but wanted to try systems other than Ubuntu-based ones and, a few weeks ago, I stuck Manjaro Plasma3 on the X220, as an experiment.
And there, children, the tale begins. But first, some history.
Manjaro on the Thinkpad.
Linux & Me
Ubuntu, which was designed to be ‘Linux for the rest of us’, was the first Linux OS I managed to get running, when a Toshiba I couldn’t afford to replace got so many viruses that its Windows XP system became useless. At the time, my attitude to computers was turn-on-and-use: it seemed outrageous to me that I might have to pay, a second time, for the operating system to get my expensive property working again.
So, with many false starts and struggles, I downloaded a copy of Ubuntu, made a CD of it, discovered how to boot into BIOS and managed to install my first linux OS. WiFi was a new and wonderful thing in those days, and I had to buy a wireless card, something like the one in this picture.
The first Ubuntu OS I installed was 32 bit, and it fit on a CD. I was immediately hooked, not to mention, extremely chuffed with myself. At that time, it felt like a major operation to install an operating system. This morning, I installed Kubuntu on my desktop before breakfast.
I’m pretty sure this is Ubuntu 07.04, the first version I installed. It is running Gnome 2 with the BUUF icon scheme.
Anyway, for several years I used Ubuntu, and very happy I was with it too. It made writing and editing and other work very easy, and it also made the new media, such as electronic images and digital music files, enjoyable to create, store and use. I became a bit of an experimenter, putting an open source operating system onto an ipod,((https://www.rockbox.org/)) and making my first, stumbling attempts to understand the command line.
However, in 2011, Canonical, the company who developed and maintain Ubuntu, took their netbook remix layout and pushed it on to their main distribution, calling it Unity. It was a wrench and I was somewhat miffed. It was the first time I had felt that Ubuntu was trying to limit my computing freedoms, as opposed to trying to help me realise them. As you’ll see, over the years, that has become a theme.
My gripes at the time were that it was much more difficult to personalise the Unity desktop, and I couldn’t install my favourite icons or make it look the way I like my computer to look. In frustration, I began experimenting with other distributions and found Bodhi Linux.4 I was using the Dell netbook as my main laptop by now, and Bodhi, being very lightweight, made a huge difference. It was also accessible and easy to customise, and I stuck with it for some years.
I had, however, bought a cheapish but reasonably powerful desktop computer when we moved into this house. It was, incidentally, the last new computer I bought, except for a Raspberry Pi I keep as a media server. Bodhi felt a little stretched on a large monitor, and in 2014, having read enthusiastic things about Unity, I switched back. For a few years, it was love.
Another shot from 2014. I don’t think my Ubuntu setup has ever looked lovelier.
I was using, although not yet self-hosting, a cloud computer by then, so I had discovered the pleasure of integrating files across a network and, more importantly, contacts, task-lists and calendars between devices. I had also, finally, succumbed to the smartphone pressure in either 2012 or 13. I had, I felt, entered the future. I could take a photo on my phone and it would appear on my computer when I turned it on. I could write a page of text on my laptop and the updated version would be synchronised to my desktop. It still all felt new and wondrous.
Then, Canonical fumbled the ball again. They had been developing Unity so that they could achieve “convergence”: creating an operating system that would be useable on computers, phones, tablets, TVs and, for all I know, jetpacks, and the launch of the Ubuntu phone was crucial to this. Alas, it flopped, partly because Google and Apple were not likely to allow their cartel to be challenged, partly because the phone operating system was simply not ready when they released it, and partly because of Canonical’s hubris. I remember feeling quite angry about the way the phone was marketed. ‘Ubuntu insiders’, an elite clique of supporters, contributors and docile bloggers, got well publicised freebies, while the paying mugs were forced to hang on social media announcements to have a chance of buying one. At the time, I tried to get the tag #Ubuntuoutsiders going, but none of my twelve Twitter followers were interested, so it died a death.
Anyway, I did eventually get an Ubuntu phone, and it was a bit of a dog. The hardware was underpowered, and the OS lacked the very elements that would set it apart: the calendar, for instance, only had the option for local storage, or Google. For me and, I suspect, many people who use Linux, escaping Google’s creepy, coercive, bullying oversight is a major motive for the work it takes to remain an open-source software user. Assuming that everyone would have a Gmail address and would be happy to donate their personal information, creative endeavours and political interests to the monopolistic parasites of Mountain View, California, seemed a discordant clang.
In fact, Ubuntu Touch was a beautiful piece of work in many ways. A few years later, I bought my first Fairphone and loaded the system, now maintained by an heroic community of volunteers,5 onto it. It was, and remains, I should imagine, a distinctive, clever and attractive way to manage multiple functions on a small touchscreen device. It’s just too niche to be useful for everyday interaction. Its app store is tiny, and it hasn’t flown. Not all Canonical’s fault, but they didn’t do it justice.
Linux and Me: The Next Generation
At about this time, I made a mess of my commercially hosted OwnCloud setup, and became interested in self-hosting a cloud server. This is not a straightforward process, whatever the Nextcoud homepage6 may say, and, for me, it represented the start of a multi-year struggle to get to grips with topics for which my intellect is woefully underpowered.
A cloud server consists of a machine running an operating system, on which a specialised web server program manages files in a database, making them available over the internet for the users to access, while securing them from internet users other than the permitted owners. There are a number of quite specialised areas of expertise within this melange, including database management, command line proficiency and networking skills.
Quirky, like worn brakes.
When I started this process, I had none of these. Indeed, I still don’t, really. As a result of my clumsy endeavours, I do now have a little more than basic command line understanding, but I still have to do a websearch for any sort of database management, and am resigned to giving up a weekend to correcting even the most minor error message. As for networking, it remains a clouded mystery. I dogged forums, nagged my ISP and begged my domain hosts for information as I got my first experimental Nextcloud server set up, but, somehow, I managed it. For the hardware, I had used my mother-in-law’s abandoned Dell Latitude D430, a quixotic little laptop that was manufactured in 2007.7 The problem with that was that it has a hard drive like the ones used in ipods, and there wasn’t the space to upgrade it. Thus, I had the advantage of being able to use an online calendar, contacts manager and tasks manager, but I had to be very frugal with my file uploads, to avoid overwhelming it. Also, it ran an integrated chip, and that ran hot. I was never entirely sure it was safe to leave it running.
That’s better.
Eventually, though, I was able to afford a small, fanless computer, refurbished, from ebay. After that, I had to save up for a 1 TB SSD, and went through the process again. I had used Debian as the base operating system for the Dell setup, as the smaller it is, the better and, running ‘headless’, without a GUI, the specifics of the operating system are pretty unimportant, so long as it supports a software repository with the required packages for the task for which it is being used. Ubuntu is based on Debian, but is somewhat larger, even in server form, but I was persuaded to use it this time by the fact that most people on the Nextcloud forums used it.
However, even in the command-line-only, server edition, Ubuntu has, for some years now, been pushing their version of containerisation, called Snaps. Containerised apps are computer programs that have been bundled together with all their dependencies – the other programs and snippets of code that they require in order to work on a real computer. In Linux, traditionally, programs have remained focussed upon their own tasks. If a music player needs to use the sound card, for instance, it doesn’t include sound card management. Instead, when it is loaded into a repository, from which the users will download and install the music player software, its dependencies are listed. The user will get the software using a package manager: a piece of software that reads the dependencies, compares them to what is on the computer already and then adds any that are missing to the download of the software package.
Snaps make installing and maintaining a computer much easier, at least superficially. Unfortunately, they introduce their own set of problems. Unless you are a programmer, what you are given is what you get. Nextcloud, when I was trying to install it in 2019, was an example. It had the basic Nextcloud installation that would set up a database and the Nextcloud web server with one click. However, I never discovered how to link it to an SSL certificate: a fundamental security process without which a web server is so vulnerable as to be useless. In the end, I scrubbed the machine and started over again, and this time I didn’t hit the snap button, but dragged myself through the manual install process.
And, for nearly three years now, I have been able to keep my files on the little box on my desk. With very little maintenance, apart from the occasional upgrade, it has allowed me to not worry about losing data on my computers, as they are stored externally. A few years on, I became a little anxious about depending upon a self-maintained machine for all my data and bought a 10 TB external disk drive as a backup machine and that is an added level of security. I’m pretty happy.
Wires are good
I also set up a samba server, to store and share my media files and Nextcloud and email backups within the house. This was a simple enough task: at first, I used my Raspberry Pi with the external hard drive connected. It was a bit Heath Robinson, but it worked. However, the transfer rates, from the spinning disk hard drive to the computer processor via USB, were rather slow; though fine for music streaming and transfer, it was liable to stutter with decent quality video.
Pretty, but not much use at the moment.
So, I started saving for enough SSD storage to hold all my music on an integrated system and bought a case last summer. It worked well enough, but the software I was using, Open Media Vault, had a major upgrade and the Pi version hadn’t caught up. On a routine update, it stalled and I panicked and shut it off, wrecking the operating system. This is not a complete disaster, as it’s not harmed the files, which I have backed up on the external drive anyway, but I haven’t been able to be arsed to reinstall it yet. I have an idea I’d like to learn how to use Docker8 – another containerisation system, rather more developed and useful than Snaps, but that is another major learning task, and I just haven’t got started.
Back To The Desktop
My experimentation with servers satisfied my computer curiosity for several years. I did play around a bit with desktop operating systems, but I stuck to safe choices: mostly stock Ubuntu, then the wonderfully stable and accessible Zorin OS,9 then, for a while, on a whim, Lubuntu.10
The Leviathan, lurking.
Sometime in 2018, I’d been offered and had bought an old gaming machine. It’s a real beast, but wasn’t particularly useful to me. I didn’t have the desk space for another monitor and I was in the habit of using laptops most of the time, anyway. My Old desktop didn’t last all that long: I got about six years out of it, and I had a bit of a prejudice against desktops, as power-greedy, space-hungry white elephants. However, I did, eventually, find a use for the monster Asus.
I had always needed to maintain a Windows machine, for one, annoying purpose. Epub files are DRM protected and I read a lot. I still buy real books, but for my junk reading, science fiction and, as I get older, crime thrillers, I buy ebooks. To purchase a DRM protected epub, you must use a piece of software owned by the odious patent trolls Adobe: it’s called Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe don’t support Linux, just out of spite, I think, or because Microsoft pays them not to. So, I used to keep one laptop with Windows 7 installed, just to download my book purchases. As soon as I’d got them, I’d run them through Calibre and strip the DRM, and then load them on my Tolino, but to first buy them, I needed a Windows machine.
Starting up a Windows machine you don’t use very often takes a full morning. You will, inevitably, be stopped in your tracks by the infuriating Microsoft update process, which is designed, it seems, to divert you from whatever task you need a computer for. Its voice is that of the creepiest sort of teacher: moralistic and cautionary, with a vague hint of dark consequences if you don’t cater to his every perverted whim, articulated in the light, jocular bullying boss’s language of camaraderie and mutual purpose. I loathe Microsoft, not just on a practical level, but on a tonal, cultural level. It is deeply, instinctively fascistic, in a uniquely white, wealthy, passive-aggressive, American way. And that is why I have persisted, for so long, with Linux.
My father’s old laptop, vast and beautiful to look at, but with a processor just powerful enough to run a fridge if the door’s not opened too frequently, added to the pain. So, I hatched a plan to set up the gaming machine as a virtual host for Windows.
Virtualisation is a real computing marvel. It allows you to run a computer within a computer. So, on a Linux machine, you can set up another Linux machine, or a Windows machine, or even a Mac, if you don’t tell Apple’s lawyers, borrowing some of the host machine’s resources to do things you don’t want to do to the main machine. Its main use is as a way to manage complex networks: up until recently, it was the safest way to give large numbers of users access to a network while controlling their impact upon the network. It is also used to experiment with development and it is useful in education. Indeed, another reason I wanted a machine powerful enough to run as a virtual host was so I could complete a Linux Foundation course,11 which involves a lot of trying things out in the command line. In this situation, when you’re presented with the “DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON” bit of code, it’s nice to be able to press it and see what it does, without having to constantly re-install my operating system.12
And it worked! I used VirtualBox,13 bought an OEM Windows 10 licence from a cheapo online store and had Windows when I needed it, without sacrificing a machine to it. I completed my course and thought I was happy with my computer setups.
But then, a serpent began to eat at me.
The Lure of Computer Games
I realised, using the desktop, just how powerful it is, compared to the machines I’ve used up to now. That knowledge became, after a while, like a serpent, leading me towards the forbidden fruit of computing: games, weak sinner that I am.
Overall, I haven’t taken much interest in gaming, mainly because I think it is a poor substitute for books, but also because I’ve always thought the entry cost was absurd. Nevertheless, after I was made redundant in 2013, I bought a second-hand Playstation3, played five games (Bioshock,14 Journey,15 Mass Effect 1, 2 & 316), started a fifth (Bioshock __Infinite17), got bored, and gave it up as a bad job. I didn’t regret this little experiment: at the time, I needed a boost, and Journey, in particular, was a spectacular piece of art, which I was able to share with my wife and which has stayed with us as a treasured experience. All the same, gaming just didn’t really feel like being true to myself.
It’s a little like giving up smoking, though. So long as the cost of getting back into it is high, you can fight it, but if it’s made easy, it’s a problem. The gateway drug, for me, was a video extolling the virtues of Witcher 3,18 which I drifted onto on Youtube, and the audiobook of one of the short-story collections on which it is based being available on my library app.19
Witcher3 is what it is; I’m not going into it here. The books are good, though. I recommend them. What’s relevant is that the game was five years old by the time I decided I must play it, and I got it for a song on Gog,20 which is an online game store, similar to Steam,21 but with more of a commitment to open source or something. Then I tried to play it on my Virtual Windows machine and discovered that Virtual machines don’t use graphics cards.
Well, no: that’s not completely true. However, Virtualbox doesn’t support graphics cards, and the main competitor, VMWare, is commercial and the process for mounting a GPU is not available in the free version, and is really complex anyway23. In effect, though, it’s not a straightforward process, and unless your computer is very, very powerful, which the Leviathan was in its youth, but really isn’t now, it probably won’t be adequate for playing modern-ish computer games anyway. I can remember being really angry with myself when I discovered this, which might explain my bad decision making.
Remember what I said about Microsoft, above.22 If you recall, I’m not a fan. I use Windows on my work laptop, of course. I work for a Council, and the subservience to Microsoft’s imperialism is total in such environments. We use Microsoft 365, rather than a proper office package, which is unbelievably stupid and means that the Council will never be able to escape Microsoft’s clutches.23 For a Linux user, Windows is a continuous series of annoyances. It’s not because I’m not used to it: I am, like most wage slaves whose job has some clerical component, a moderately expert Windows user. It is the unnecessary complexity, the ‘guided’ processes, the ugliness, the distraction of the cluttered, intrusive, authoritarian medium. It takes creativity and introduces a slightly competitive, suburban American mundanity into every use. It interrupts to assert itself. It is needy.
All that being true, I still shamed myself. I reinstalled Windows as the base operating system on The Leviathan. This was about a year ago and, in that time, I have spent more hours than I want to admit playing, first, Myst,24 then Warcraft II25 then Witcher3.18 I reached level 20 on Witcher3. No man in his fifties should be able to say that.
I was running it, though, with only a 128 GB SSD as storage, having cannibalised the larger 1 TB SSD for my Samba server, and, as Windows boxes tend to, it got filled up with stuff, without me adding much to it. In particular, it didn’t like the attempts by GOG to update Witcher, a vast program, leaving me looking at error messages which wouldn’t go away. At some point, this lack of utility began to feel like a sign.
I bought another 1 TB SSD, fully intending to reinstall Windows. Then, having installed Manjaro on my Thinkpads, I decided to see how it would run on The Leviathan.
This is where we came in.
Back to the Beginning
The weekend before last, I put Manjaro Plasma on The Leviathan. It ran like a bullet and looked even prettier than it does on the Thinkpads, but, for a non-programmer, it has some limitations. The worst of these is that it is based upon Arch, rather than Debian: it is an entirely different branch of Linux operating system to the Ubuntu family, for which a lot of Linux software is packaged. VirtualBox, for instance, does not have an Arch package that is easily installable on Manjaro. There are instructions for making it work on the forums, but they look pretty intimidating.
So, wanting to use Plasma, I tried KDE Neon, which is an Ubuntu distribution maintained by the KDE community. Alas, a piece of software I use regularly, Manuskript, doesn’t load in Neon. Neon is built on the latest long-term-support version of Ubuntu, and that has some quirk which prevents Manuskript starting up. No one has yet managed to fix it.
Finally, this weekend, I settled on Kubuntu. This is an ‘official flavour’ of Ubuntu, meaning it is supported by Canonical. It seemed perfect, but then…
Firefox on the newest versions of Ubuntu and its ‘flavours’ is a snap. Even if you try to install it via the command line, using the apt-get command, it converts the command to a snap install. I really do not like snaps. For a browser, they can be a real nuisance, as their updates happen in the background and lead to random restarts of the application. If you’re in the middle of an online form, or a TV programme, you lose your data, unless you save manically.
And they don’t look as good. I like a rather beautiful set of icons called Buuf, originally designed by a young artist called Mattahan, way back before I was using Linux. I’ve used them from my earliest experiments with Ubuntu26 A very active, responsive and kind volunteer called Phob1an27 maintains a set of them for Plasma28 and they look pretty amazing.
Nice, or what?
Snaps, however, don’t conform to the GTK theming: they have their own icons included and that’s that.
There is, of course, a way around it. One of the real strengths of Linux is that you can change everything, if you have the skill. If you don’t, people with the skill will share their knowledge. So I have a new repository (program source) added, maintained by the Mozilla Foundation, who make Firefox, and Firefox integrates prettily into my desktop while being properly and safely updated.
For, me, with sixteen or so years’ experience of playing with Linux, that process was a bit of a challenge, taking several hours to sort out properly, but for a new user, fed up with being bossed around by Windows, the sense that Canonical are trying to limit your choices on Ubuntu would be an off-putting welcome. I have a lot to thank Canonical for: they took the community endeavour, Linux/GNU, and made it simpler to get into and to use for all the things that computing makes better or even makes possible. However, I think they do have a tendency to try to compete with Apple in making a consumer product that requires no engagement and allows not variation. They should not be despised: they have created server software that runs over 35% of the internet, second only to Debian in the field.29 And, unlike Windows and Apple, they have done that while remaining a company with a modest income, that doesn’t exploit oppressed people in their supply lines or try to trap people, schools or other public bodies into holding their data on systems from which they can’t export (Microsoft).30
It’s just that Ubuntu has begun to feel, again, that it knows better what’s good for us than we do. Its use of a strict, difficult-to-modify version of the Gnome desktop system and its push to make snaps the standard way of installing applications, has the odour of Apple, late Steve Jobs era, with just a hint of recent Microsoft preacher-knows-best tonality.31
Or, maybe the problem is with me. After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve paid Canonical for a copy of Ubuntu, although I do make payments to open-source software projects – my last donation was to Thunderbird. And, if I’m really so fed up with Ubuntu, maybe I should move to Arch,32 on which Manjaro is based, or to Debian,33 Ubuntu’s fully-open-source big sibling, or Fedora,34 the independent, community arm of RedHat.35 It’ll take some work to change from what I’m used to, but it might be fun.
However, for now, I’ve got a lovely looking desktop on which I am happy to do my writing, and I have to put up with feeling slightly left behind.
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
There’s a discussion of the point in this podcast. I recommend listening to the whole thing if you have time, but I’ve specifically bookmarked the pertinent passage [↩]
