Matthew Hurst

Finished reading: Sociopath by Patric Gagne 📚

I had far more sympathy for sociopaths after reading this than I did before. Which is exactly what a sociopath would want, when you think about it…

I’ve lost interest in politics. British politics isn’t relevant, I don’t have the appetite to the learn the detail of Canadian politics, and anyway, it’s all mad and scary, and will happen whether or not I know about it.

As everyone says, McCloskey’s very good, and shifting more to character and personal betrayals just makes him even better.

Another one of those tech bro biogs where all the good bits have been in the news anyway.

The sexton had seen this before. A year after the funeral, a thin strip of pale dead yellow grass outlined the shape of a coffin in the burial ground, like it had been crushed by the dark. The sexton had known the occupant of the coffin and he was happier now she was in the earth instead of on it. But the outline worried him. He imagined malignant goo seeping up from crack of the coffin lid. He closed his eyes and prayed it was nature’s goodness fleeing the evil inside the coffin, not her evil returning to wreak revenge.

Finished reading: Everybody Knows by Jordan Harper 📚

Well executed LA Confidential/Chinatown update. Quality pulp fiction.

The lino round the base of the toilet is badly cut, leaving a few millimetres of gap between the porcelain and the curled edge of the vinyl. He lays on his side just a few centimetres away, the floor digging into his shoulder. He’s surrounded by the unforgiving hardness and months of built up scum, and the smell of shit and bleach sliding into his nostrils. In the bath, his guitar lies smashed, its neck broken, the slack strings echoing in the tub, water drumming on it from the showerhead. I am a rock, he thinks.

Finished reading: Patriot by Alexei Navalny 📚

There’s a really good doc with him on BBC iPlayer, which would be time better spent.

Finished reading: Daughter Of Mine by Megan Miranda 📚

Murky past and the web of family tensions in small town America wrapped round a murder mystery. Smart and nuanced, if a bit complicated to keep tabs on if you listen rather than read it.

She catches up with him in the corridor outside the classroom. He’s backed into a corner, she’s holding back, swaying from her ankles, her hand gripping her shoulderbag, pulling the strap down taut. They each have thousands of words - using a few is what just turned the classroom into a killing jar of derision at them they’ve just fled - but nothing will return the humanity that was just sucked out of that room. He tries “Where do they get that…. certainty?” She says “Fear of each other”. He says quietly “We don’t have that”. She says: “We don’t”.

The reason it’s a cliché is because it’s true, Lloyd Cole sung, clunkily. But the cliché is also true, like mirrors facing each other, infinitely reflecting each other, or a fractal. And none more cliched than American motels. Neon signs, a strip of single storey down at heel rooms at the back with cars parked in front, a crumbling swimming pool with the hint of algae, the simmering highway roaring past a few feet away. Even the quirk is clichéd, or at least having a quirk is a cliché. In this case, a small friendly octopus in the swimming pool.

Finished reading: Don’t Point That Thing at Me by Kyril Bonfiglioli 📚

PG Wodehouse on a bad day pastiching Raymond Chandler. Still wittier than most allegedly ‘humorous’ thrillers though, and an appealingly nasty darkness.

Finished reading: Lucifer’s Banker by Bradley C. Birkenfeld 📚

Messianic blowhard international banker turns dickwaving/self pitying whistleblower after his employers clip his self aggrandising ego. Worth reading for the epic lack of self awareness.

You wouldn’t look twice at the Butterflies Of The Night. The secret of their international dominance has been keeping it drab. Even their outer clothing is matte, as though absorbing light and reflecting none back. You have been surrounded by them and never noticed, I guarantee. When the emergency services roll up after one of their kinetic operations, nobody remembers them. Their operations have led to great wealth and power but it’s never used showily or gaudily. And like discreet old-moneyed families in St James’s or the Hamptons, they recognise each other. Sadly for me, they also recognise impersonators. Instantly.

The winches at the back of the Jerry’s boat creak and haul the net into the stern, and Jerry’s eyes are pinned on the winch, his hand tight on the throttle lever, his breath tight in his chest. Finally the net’s all reeled in, except for its end coiled up in a layered tube, like a bright orange mermaid. We stare at it, shifting our balance as the boat bobs, listening to the waves slapping on the hull, frozen. The net’s not a mermaid. We both know this, because we both did the wrapping, twenty years ago. It’s Jerry’s brother.

Just watching the Trump Not State Of The Union. Do you think Americans understand what a bunch of thick twats they come across as when they chant ‘USA USA USA’?

He knows where each stair creaks, whether it will groan when his foot hits the left, the right, or the middle, as he creeps slowly down from his bedroom. Through the living room door at the bottom, he maps the peaks and crevasses of his parents’ war. Or worse, he hears nothing but the burning fuse of silence, fizzing like a cartoon bomb. The only question is which shrapnel sliver will lodge underneath his skin This is family. This has always been his world. He plans his escape when he gets his 18th birthday card parole.

Finished reading: Fire Weather by John Vaillant 📚

Scary and inclusive, with a nice linking of the fire’s voraciousness with the oil industry’s greed.

Amongst the increasing dross on Substack, there’s someone putting up a word each day as the prompt for a 100-word ‘story’. Plot’s pretty limited at that length, but there’s room for brief character sketches. Here’s a first bash.

“Saloon to the left. Snug to the right. No handsome dangerous cowboys here, just a grubby arse pub in the Midlands. Hers for the last thirty years. She opens the door every day with her soul dribbling out of her like the clogged-prostate drip of piss she’ll find miama’d over the floor of the gents later. She knows the culprit. His daily pint is one of the three she can guarantee to sell every day so she says nothing, but as she pulls it into his named tankard, she visualises the beer as piss. No handsome dangerous cowboys here.”

As a child, I never got lost when I was out. That only happened once I got home.

Famously in the family, as a three year old found wandering alone in a department store in Norwich, a shop assistant had asked me if I was lost, and I’d told her I wasn’t. Which, I wasn’t. I knew where I was. That my mother didn’t know, was her problem.

I especially didn’t get lost with my friend Chris on a bike ride in Norfolk country lanes in the 1970s.

Bike riding was a staple of the passing the holidays, mostly up and down the two hundred yards or so of suburban pavement outside our street 1970s bungalows, up as far as the cul de sac, where we could safely loop round and return.

It was in a network of suburban detached houses, quiet streets segmented with radial spokes of very slightly less quiet roads. We’d been riding up and down that pavement remorselessly for weeks and now we wanted to go further afield.

There was a creased Ordnance Survey map blutacked to the back of the door of my father’s study, laying out the villages around the ours, at two and a half inches to the mile. The map showed places called plantations and old airfields, left over from the war. To the naked eye from the back of a car they looked like woods and fields, but the map labels surely implied they were far less mundane than that. We pored over the maps like staff officers planning a daring raid across enemy territory, crossing the spokes between villages, and negotiated permission for an afternoon’s ride with doubtful parents, as long as I was back in time for tea.

The joke about crossing the border into Norfolk was about putting your calendar back 20 years. My mother went twenty years better. If she didn’t understand it to be a normal part of life in the 1950s in Norfolk, then it was morally wrong. If this sounds like a sepia-warmed “gawd bless ‘er” fond exaggeration for nostalgic effect, it’s not. It’s the literal truth, backed up by hours of furious screaming damnation-wielding rows. She wasn’t religious, just a psychopath who hated everything that happened after her own puberty.

By the time I was 12, I’d worked out that the path of least screaming damnation for me was to emotionally hunker down in the 1950s too, with books by Enid Blyton and Anthony Buckeridge, set if not in the literal than spiritual 1950s.

They had freedom and warmth and safeness. They were an escape into a world where things were clear. You knew there would be outings where people wouldn’t have to give up and come home again because one of the adults was screaming and shouting.

You knew the children would break the rules, but the rules would be consistent and have some kind of logic to them.

You knew the punishments would be something simple and finite and understandable. The muffled shouting of adults while you lay in bed listening wasn’t the parents, it was the bad guys, who would be caught and the world put to rights.

The children in those books would disappear off for the day with no objections. That’s why I expected the whole bike ride expedition not to be a problem. By the standards of Enid Blyton this was no kind of adventure at all. hazy field with a path

It wasn’t even an adventure by my father’s standards. He regularly talked about how he cycle twelve miles each way to school at my age, with its implications of freedom and unmonitored time. You could, I supposed, get up to a lot in the window of time someone would reasonable assume you’d been pedalling home from Norwich.

The day of the ride was bright and summery 1950s-ish days. At least, it was in my head, because that’s where I wanted to be.

The first spoke to cross was the biggest and most dangerous. It separated us from other villages to the north, and this is the one we crossed and cycled to the next village, the one that was just out of the commuter belt of villages mostly made up of streets built by builders when they built houses. These were roads that had existed for hundreds of years. We went to the next village, and the one after that, and it seemed to take hours.

I just measured it Google Maps, now. Five miles and three villages away. It would have been nothing to the Famous Five. But in rural Norfolk, when you’re 11 in the 1970s with no Google and virtually no payphones, five miles away was a whole other world.

It turned out in fact woods and plantations were the same thing. The old airfields were planted with the cabbage and sugarbeet now, just the occasional pillbox and concrete loading ramp surrounded by hedgerows.

Chris and I faffed around, in the vain hope that some Enid Blyton style ne’er do wells would appear, but they didn’t, so we turned our bikes round and headed back. The return journey felt faster than the outward trip and we made good time, were back for tea. We split up at the end of our drives, which faced each other across the suburban street.

In the back garden, I flicked the bike stand down and went inside.

Which was when I discovered that I’d been lost. Lost had been the least of it, in fact, possibly because I was demonstrably no longer lost. The episode had revealed, according to my mother’s onslaught, the full depth of my selfishness, thoughtlessness, evil, and eccentricity. Any deviation from normality was a moral failing.

My father joined the inquest as barrister for the prosecution and the hearing went on for some hours.

I have no idea why, I almost never had any real idea why.

I hadn’t been lost. I known where I’d been. I’d had a few hours of not being answerable or checked up on.

The cycling trip was never repeated. I didn’t dare suggest it. I huddled up with more of the Enid Blyton books, and moved on to a book the neighbour leant me, The Day Of The Jackal, which had sex in it.

Trump planned the ambush to make up ground with his base after he was nice to other foreigners earlier in the week, but the angle of attack was a straightforward narcissistic rant because Zelensky wasn’t being grateful enough to placate the big fragile orange ego.

For at least the last 25 years, since I read Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, I’ve flirted with Linux every so often, and it’s so much better now than it was. I think Apple’s pricing and Windows' cruft and AI might be making it time to move.

My latest flirt is with the Linux partition of my Chromebook, partly for sheer tinkering, and also because there’s a specific notes app which is best in Linux, and also ChromeOS’s file management app is execrable and even a lightweight Linux file manager is vital. But as ever, Linux has thrown weirdness at me, and it’s taken a few hours of trawling Reddit to sort out. Wider web searches are pointless even on DuckDuckGo, because useful results have been ratio’d to homeopathic proportions by AI slop.

I simply wanted to have the notes app appear in the Chromebook launcher in a folder called Linux, which is what normally happens with Linux stuff installed via the commandline. But I’d had to use AppImage (another learning point) and it didn’t happen here. With a Chrome app, or even a web app converted to its own container with a couple of clicks in Chrome, it would be a matter of selecting something from a context menu. Linux, more complicated.

But I still will probably move at some point.

Firstly, cost. My computing needs are modest, apart from occasional video editing and I have a lowend Mac Mini which is fine for that. Everything else is basically browsing and writing. I’m fine with whatever 10 year old ThinkPad I can get for a couple of hundred bucks, in terms of hardware.

Secondly, the operating system. Windows sounds more and more of a crufty nightmare, aimed at feeding Redmond’s AI beasts more than doing what users want, and demanding ever higher specs in the process. Macs are lovely but stupidly overpriced. My Chromebook is great but I trust Google less and less.

It’s a big contrast though, between the slickness of ChromeOS, in which I am the product to be sold to marketers, and where my content is used to train AIs, vs the stroppy, awkward independence of open source.

But in the end, the geeky 14 year old who spent his computer science lessons learning what hexadecimal codes to ‘poke’ down the school network to make rude words appear on his mate’s BBC B computer lives on.