I’m very lucky to be able to walk to work… but walking to work by the light of the moon is a bit of a downer. Not as much of a downer as the alternatives, but a downer nonetheless.

Even with the solstice on Saturday, there’s a little while longer to go until the sunrise begins to get a little earlier.

I’m behind in my reading, so this isn’t really new, but I’ve just enjoyed this David Sedaris essay published last month in The New Yorker. There was something quite festive about it in a bit of a Chris Rea sense—it’s an account of driving through the night from Maine to Manhattan.

Nothing says ‘Christmas’ quite like a giant cuddly peanut with reindeer antlers.

Just a recommendation: I can’t remember how long I’ve been reading the Jennifer Mills News, but it has been brightening my week for years. It’s a single-page ‘newspaper’ about Jennifer Mills, published by her once a week, with its own distinctive journalistic style.

It is just personal, fun and delightful.

This is Flying Angel in Custom House, a building built as a seafarer’s mission in 1936 when the nearby docks were thriving. Note the little model ship on the roof. These days, the building has been converted to flats.

I’m approaching two years of daily blogging. One consequence of this, as Wendy will tell you, is that I’m prone to whip out my phone and photograph any public artwork or memorial I happen across.

This one, in Hartlepool, struck me as one of the better artworks I’ve seen this year… but it’s been on my list of things to post for longer than usual, as I’ve struggled to find out anything about it.

But now, I’ve cracked the mystery. It is the output of a competition from the 7-9 year olds at the nearby Ward Jackson Primary, 18 years ago. The kids were asked to design an artwork to replace frequently-vandalised lamppost. This winning design belonged to Jessica Draper.

An interview with the artist at the time revealed her motivations: “Most people like the sun and say it makes them feel better, so I thought I would include it in my design.”

Honestly, I think that may also be one of the best justifications for a bit of civic art that I’ve read this year as well.

As someone who has occasionally been a little grumpy about children’s art, even I think this example is worth celebrating.

This is an ex-RAF Jet Provost which looms over the car park of the Hartlepool College of Further Education. It’s there because the college specialises in aerospace courses, among other things.

I’ve driven and walked past it many times, but most recently thought about it when I was in Stockholm earlier this year, and saw this Bell 206 helicopter on a stick:

A lot has been written recently about the development of artificial intelligence tools hitting a wall: that is, we’re reaching a point where the pace of improvement in models has slowed considerably. Some have made the point that this may not matter as we’re not yet close to exploiting even a fraction of what the existing models can do.

I think this is a reasonable take. One of my main uses of ChatGPT has been to help with the finer points of coding. I’m not really a coder, but I occasionally throw together a bit of PHP or Javascript to solve a specific problem: to tweak the output of an ical feed, for example, or to tweak the layout of a webpage, or to use an api to very quickly check public transport departures for a specific stop. This has been made much easier by being able to paste the code into ChatGPT and ask: “Why isn’t this working?!”

But just recently, I’ve been playing with the ChatGPT api and plugging in into some of those small scripts—with great results. When my alarm goes off in the morning, ChatGPT gives me a quick, sensible verbal briefing on my calendar events, tasks and so forth before I’ve even opened my eyes. I plug it into scripts where I’d like the wording to be a bit varied rather than identical every time, with pretty good results each time.

None of these things are lifechanging, but they are the sorts of small quality of life improvements that haven’t yet become commonplace—but will no doubt spread over coming years.

Visible for miles around, and prominent in the landscape from the nearby Metro line, Cleadon’s 1860 water tower is the village’s best-known landmark. It has a very distinct and decorative Italian style.

I’ve always wondered why a water tower would be needed in the middle of nowhere. I usually think of a water tower being required to power industrial processes, such as canal locks, dock works, railways, or systems that need sudden deluges of water. But there’s nothing obvious nearby that would need such services… so why does it exist?

Well, in a sense… it doesn’t. Despite its name, it isn’t a water tower at all, and never has been. The Sunderland and South Shields Water Company used to pump water from the limestone in this area to supply to local residents and businesses. It used steam boilers to do this work, and the tower is actually a disguised, aesthetically pleasing chimney. You can see how easily a ‘tower’ associated with a water company would become known as the ‘water tower’ in local parlance, even if that was never its function.

The tower also contains a staircase around the central flue, and a balcony at a height of 25m. In the Second World War, it was therefore repurposed as a lookout for enemy aircraft. These days, it is used as a site for radio aerials and the like.

But Cleadon Water Tower isn’t, and never has been, a water tower.

This rock, which gives strong ‘Permanently Low Prices Forever’ vibes, commemorates the opening of Seaton Carew’s Esplanade by Councillor R Sargeant in August 1905.

The area on which it now stands was in fact constructed in 1997 as part of a new coastal protection scheme for the town.

So the rock is commemorating the opening of something that, in a sense, closed some time ago. I’m not sure I’d have retained it in the new scheme for that reason—but, then, no-one is ever likely to put me in charge of any commemoration of anything being opened. Thank goodness.