Barlow and his customer marvel as the escapement begins to rotate. His workshop is laced with tobacco and damp and the fading scent of industry.

Breakfasts in Cirebon are simple. Sickly sweet Coco Crunch with milk that never tastes quite right. On the humming fridge, three-quarters of the way up, is my first drawing, a cat with a jet engine for legs, crudely rendered in blue and red felt tip.

A week ago I tried switching my web browser's default search engine from Google to Perplexity.

I've deleted my Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.

A round up of the year.

As I recently posted, I bought the AirPods Max and one of the nice features there was its massive 20-hour battery life. This is actually the third device I've bought in six months where battery life has been a massive part of loving it.

As a lifelong Apple user - yep my parents were designers and I've never owned a PC - I've always slightly tongue-in-cheekily said that Apple products just work. And, of course, they do work pretty well.

I absolutely love wandering around stationery shops and it's taken me a good long while to begin to resist buying absolutely unnecessary notebooks which I inevitably end up not using very much of.