Weeknotes 2026 W34: Rain!

Quick bits

• Rain! Cooler temperatures! Oh, how much I have missed this.

• A—— is visiting London from Berlin! It makes London and Berlin feel so close.

• I’ve started using Ocado for my grocery deliveries. My local grocery stores don’t really stock what I want, or at least not of the quality that I want. There is a Lidl, a Coop, and a Tesco Express, and none of them really suit me. I miss the huge REWE within walking distance in Berlin. I could find anything there, and had a huge selection of vegetarian and vegan ingredients. In London, the local supermarkets seem to only stock one type of tofu — assuming it’s not sold out.

• Last week I complained about the mis-use of the national emergency system. Perhaps what’s missing is a channel for important messages (do not BBQ during a protracted drought) that doesn’t count as an emergency. I’d like such notifications, but I really, really do not want to get jump-scared by a maximum-volume alarm sound.

• I sent a letter to a friend and forgot to sign it with my name. On an email, a signature appears automatically; on a physical letter, it obviously does not. I had my fountain pen ready, and then somehow completely missed it, even though I practiced a fancy new calligraphic signature. Next time!

• I have finally got around to applying proper wood oil my dining table. It really brings out the colour, and I’m happy with the new protection it brings. I’ve added a repeating to-do item for maintaining my table, too, because this is exactly the thing I’d forget about.

• New hobby: mispronouncing Shoreditch as shored itch. Oh, I am so drôle.

• New (rhyming) slang learned: “not a scooby” (not a clue, from Scooby Doo).

Multiple language

One thing I miss from Berlin is speaking multiple languages. London is on easy mode like that. It feels weird not having to switch languages.

I’ve been meaning to brush up on my French, so I started listening to innerFrench. My listening comprehension is probably at 99%; I have no issue with any of the podcast episodes. Perhaps I need something more advanced. Other podcasts, maybe. Or a conversation group? French-language cooking classes in London?! French-language acting classes?!?

One might wonder: What about keeping up my German? I’ve got no real intention of doing that. For reasons that I don’t fully understand, I don’t like German. I suspect that this is because I don’t really click, culturally speaking, with Germans.

My (Belgian) Dutch is doing just fine and needs no attention. Ge moet u geen zorgen maken.

Acting

I attended a drop-in acting class last weekend. It was good to get the opportunity to try things out, but I feel that I haven’t found a way to make drop-in classes work for me. The stakes are low and I don’t feel pressure to perform, and then I end up doing a performance that’s just average. It’s too casual, and one doesn’t end up working on a scene or monologue for longer than one session.

I am also tired of monologues. I worked almost exclusively on monologues in the last two acting courses in Berlin, in part because having a scene partner is well, ever so slightly inconvenient; doing something fully on one’s own is much simpler. I’d love to put my attention towards real scenes going forward, with a fixed and reliable scene partner.

One thing I found particularly rewarding about the drop-in acting class is the request by the teacher to direct one another. This is tough, but I put my mentoring and coaching experience to good use and managed to get a surprisingly good performance out of a first-time acting student. It’s not quite directing, of course, but I was successful at it — and I rather like teaching in all its ways.

More exciting than the drop-in acting class is a proper six-week acting class that I signed up for! I had the first session yesterday, and it was instructive; it’s good to have a new teacher to learn from, because every teacher has different insights. This particular teacher is strong in blocking and stage movement, which is something I’ve always struggled with.

The housing situation

I continue doing flat viewings. So far, I’ve not found anything that would be worth moving for. Even though I live next to a busy train line that frequently wakes me up at 3am, I still believe that my next flat needs to be a significant improvement rather than an incremental one.¹¹1 I don’t want to end up in a place that turns out to be shit in different ways. That would be less of an incremental improvement and more of an excremental improvement. 

So many rentals are furnished. It’s certainly possible to negotiate with the landlord about having some furniture removed, but rental agents have generally told me that my desire to have everything removed is not going to be accepted by the landlord. R—— suggested renting storage space and moving the landlord’s furniture in there, but that’s more work and expense than I’m willing to consider at this point. For now, I’m looking at unfurnished places only.

The furniture in furnished rentals is the lowest common denominator. In contrast, my own furniture is tailored to my own needs and wants. I’ve got an extra-long bed and a gorgeous oak dining table, and I do not want to give up either of those. And I want even more: a bookcase, a sideboard, a dresser, and a writing table. I don’t want these things to be just functional; I need them to be pretty and reflect my taste and values. My desires are therefore fundamentally incompatible with furnished rentals. Because I’ve got taste!

I love going for walks in residential neighbourhood after dusk and look inside all the pretty houses.²²2 Look, It’s not voyeuristic if houses have big front windows with the curtains open. Clearly, some of these homeowners want to show off. It’s just a little guilty pleasure on my part.  Some of them really get interior design right. I’m feeling constructive envy! I think I’ve had a sense of design since childhood: my mother and my godmother both have excellent taste in design, and growing up around them in all likelihood has rubbed off on me.

Another issue is that the housing stock in London is really not great. I miss my Berlin flat: spacious, bright, relatively cheap, and mould-free. Mould is commonplace in London, especially in bathrooms, which typically have neither windows nor adequate ventilation systems. My current bathroom, slightly mouldy, is pristine in comparison to some of what I’ve seen. Some real estate photos have giant patches of mould clearly visible. What happened to our society that mould has become entirely acceptable and expected?

Perhaps I will need to wait until I’m able to purchase property to find that freedom that I so want. I don’t feel like getting into the rent-or-buy debate in detail here, but there’s a good chance that my desires are not just incompatible with furnished rentals, but with renting as a whole. In any case, buying will unfortunately have to wait.³³3 In the meantime, help me save up for a down payment! 

Meanwhile, I’m still sleeping on a bare mattress on the floor.⁴⁴4 It’s not all bad. There are health benefits to sleeping on the floor! Though perhaps I’m rationalising at this point. 

Links

• Contronym: I only learnt about this concept recently! In Dutch, there is the word “sebiet,” which can mean either now (immediately and without delay), or later (soon but not now).

• Video Essay Creep (Carlos Maza): Glad to have Carlos back!