Our spring bulbs continue to rise, and the first crocuses I planted are getting ready to bloom. They appear to have some kind of insect’s eggs on them, and I’m not sure if I want to do anything about them. I guess we can’t see what they are until they hatch. At least one muscari has also flowered—and got completely lost in the foliage of the other flowers in the bulb lasagne it’s planted in. Lesson learned for next year, I guess. Hopefully I’ll be able to post more photos as the bulbs continue to grow.

Three purple crocuses rise from a plant pot with their flowerheads starting to open. An insect’s eggs lie on the leaves.

Amongst a lot of foliage, including bulb stems and wilting cyclamen leaves, a single muscari flowerhead rises, looking rather overwhelmed.

In an attempt to tidy the house, I’ve been going through some old papers. I’ve taken handwritten notes and diarised on and off for a long time. It can be quite startling to open up a notebook I filled up in 2011—over a decade ago, now—and realise what in-jokes I can still recall, what little details of a particular course or lesson I remember, and what’s gone in the meantime. Naturally, there’s stuff here to make me cringe. There’s things I stuck in there: train tickets, receipts, McDonald’s Monopoly stickers. There’s also stuff that makes me smile in recognition, or lament a place I’ll never return to (that old house, that hall of residence, that station platform, that coffee shop in Woking by the bus station that did the most amazing bagels that got moved into a dingy concourse when they redeveloped the shopping centre and then apparently got liquidated sometime in 2018.) I even found a Valentine’s Day-themed short horror story I wrote in 2017 (I hasten to add, the year before I met my current partner.) Maybe I’ll put it online. It’ll probably need tidying up.

A full glass of coffee with a mocha-like drink, with cream and chocolate shavings on the top, in a coffee shop lit solely with artificial lighting. — This was New Year's Eve 2017, my last visit to this joint for a mocha and bacon bagel before it disappeared (or so says Companies House.) Shame. It was never the same after it moved away from that choice end of the shopping centre.

I finally got round to watching the first episode of Russell T Davies’s It’s a Sin, around a year late to the party. As unexpected as it was to see Neil Patrick Harris playing a British tailor, it’s a terrific bit of TV, with an immensely appealing ambiance and startlingly relatable characters. Recent discourse around what constitutes a ‘queer elder’ is interesting, because Russell T Davies is a queer elder by any meaningful definition of the word: a lot of the horror, the sense of mounting dread and the fear felt by the characters, the simple fury that comes through in the writing of this show, comes from the fact he lived through it, and remembers it from the first time around. There’s a large number of people who, through some kind of Tumblr reblog-mutated form of history, seem to think that almost all gay men died of AIDS in the 80s and 90s. This is an odd kind of rose-tinted spectacle to view the world through.

Talking of TV, a trailer for the Halo TV series (coming in March) has dropped. It definitely looks the part. I'm intrigued by the direction they appear to be taking. It looks to be focusing on the Master Chief, or rather, his moral compass and his potential connection with alien technology—both on the more ambitious end of the things the Halo games have attempted to explore (neither with much success.) Of course, it may end up being a trainwreck. But we'll see.