We went to a small craft fayre the other day. Little homemade indie stuff. Bit twee for me, for the most part. But in one of the rooms they were listening to The Cooper Temple Clause's obscenely-underrated Kick Up The Fire, And Let the Flames Break Loose and, if anyone noticed, they might have wondered why a guy fitting my description was just standing there and listening to the music at the craft fayre.

I love that record, though. In general, The Cooper Temple Clause were perfectly placed alongside the manufactured garage rock revolution of the early-mid 2000s in the UK, with Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand et al (don't you hate people who say "et al"? Pretentious). There's real depth and soul to their songs, which is severely lacking in the simple, cynical, radio-friendly dreck that their peers were spewing out into the scene. For some reason I have a real affinity with anyone who's willing to sacrifice all classical notions of success in the pursuit of doing what they want.

The Hives and The Strokes were good as well. In many ways I credit/blame The Strokes and their success for flooding the UK music scene with so much samey trash - but you can hardly blame them for their success. That's kinda the point.

I love crisps. Tesco is absolutely crushing it with their seasonal crisps right now. They're all so good. I love crisps.

When Tabitha's school runs trips, they invite parents to volunteer to help. I always volunteer because it's a lot of fun, but they never give enough notice as to whether your help is needed. This time they gave less than one working day's notice, and messaged me this morning to say "no thanks", so I booked in some calls for Monday. They then called this afternoon to see if I was available to help! Two working hours notice.

I feel like I want to let them know that the reason they get so many people drop out is that normal adults need more than 5 hours notice to allocate time in their working week, but I don't know how to do it without sounding like a fake-important jerk. So what I'll do is whinge on my blog instead. That feels very 2005.

If someone is standing in a supermarket, avoidably blocking an aisle just because they're totally unaware of their size and surroundings, you should be legally allowed to flick their ear. Not to harm them; just a quick reminder that there are other people on the planet.

There's a girl in Tabitha's school called Jasper, and every morning I see her on her way in and she says "morning Jasper" and I say "morning Jasper", and I don't know why but I really like that part of my day.

Friday is turning into a proper cat and, as such, she isn't really interested in being near people unless it's by accident. I don't even have any recent pictures of her to share and I haven't for a little while. This little crossover period from cute kitten to grumpy cat where you have a cute, grumpy kitten is weird. Grumpy cute faces are just as believable on kittens as they are on toddlers.

I know I'm literally the last person to start using it but I have become obsessed with Midjourney. I'm having so much fun thinking of prompts.

Andy Weir is sci-fi's Dan Brown. Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi page-turner, just as The Martian is, just as The DaVinci Code is, just as Angels and Demons is.

Me, 3 weeks ago: hmmm it'd sure be nice if it rained.
The world, 3 weeks later, the day before ArcTanGent: sorry, just getting round to this - you wanted rain?
Me, who will be camping tomorrow: no!