I’ve started catching up on Star Trek: Discovery, a show with which I have a peculiar relationship. After the complete farce of the series being pulled from Netflix days before launch, I’m enjoying catching up on season 4. There’s something that feels a little off, though. All the elements are here for some spectacular character drama, but the pacing seems to rob the intense, high-stakes action sequences of their impact—because how am I supposed to believe these people are professional starship officers if they’ll stop in the middle of a crisis (often with a countdown literally running!) to talk in depth about their feelings? Star Trek has always fallen into the trap of “big speech makes it better” and to my mind this doesn’t seem to jive with the themes of mental health, trauma, and impostor syndrome that DISCO revolves around.

The weather is feeling more like February again. Yesterday we went to the Tate Britain, and I was taken aback by how fresh the breeze was on the ride there. Afterwards we had a late lunch at Victoria. I always forget how terrible a place it is for walking—although I was pleased to see the Victoria tube ticket hall upgrade seemed to finally be complete, something I’ve seen hoardings around since at least 2014 and probably even sooner. Victoria itself is an awful place to be a pedestrian, though: narrow pavements, speeding cars, windswept privatised shopping areas that seem to suggest an attempt to mimic the aesthetic and financial backing of the awful identikit high streets that seem to have taken over many British towns (when they’re not completely dead, that is.)

I’ve got a new phone, with a new camera. It’ll take a while to get good at getting results out of it, but I’m quite proud of this one:

And finally, I’ve put the Valentine’s Day-themed flash fiction horror story that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago online. You can read THE FEAST OF SAINT VALENTINE here.