We’re all back to the routine this week – even us retired folk – so I thought I should continue with my weekly updates with what I’ve been doing with my time. Even if that’s just to remind me where the days have gone. It’s actually quite scary how often I wake up in the morning wondering if it’s Wednesday or Thursday although interestingly the weekends are still quite defined as the weekends. I always know when it’s Saturday or Sunday and, on the latter, I still get a buzz out of the fact on a Sunday evening that I’m not packing my bag for the early train to London Monday morning.

I listened to a Tim Ferriss Podcast featuring Alain de Botton which was interesting and pointed me towards seeking out more of the latter’s work. I’ve often seen his books on the shelves at the local library, so I borrowed A Week at the Airport to read as it’s quite short and relatively lightweight. I read it in about two days and found it quite amusing, which I wasn’t really expecting. It was really well written too and led me to reserve his How Proust Can Change Your Life which he recommended on the podcast as his best work. You can also find a couple of his talks on TED which are worth watching even if only to wonder at how much he looks like an Oxbridge egghead.

On the Living a FI blog, I came across a reference to an article about the Hell of working for Amazon as featured in the NYT. I’ve been reading a few things on dystopian futures recently, but this is a real life example that is happening now in the world of work. If this is the future of corporate life, I’m very, very glad I’m out of it. I finished reading and found myself hoping that Amazon fails spectacularly due to employee relations problems.

Christmas telly – it was rubbish, wasn’t it? Fortunately I had Fargo 2 to watch, which I thought was even better than both the original movie and the first tv series. Excellent, quirky entertainment, with great characters brought to life by the cast, and a streak of black humour that rivalled anything seen in Breaking Bad.

I also started watching a new series, Narcos, about the Mexican drug cartels which is proving quite compelling too. Not much humour in it, but then it seems to stick closely to true events that have been documented, as opposed to the tongue in cheek introductions for Fargo that pretend there’s a truth to their stories too.

At the end of the week, an invitation came through for me to attend the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering which, believe it or not, I’d actually love to attend. Unfortunately it’s in Elko, Nevada, which is a bit out of the way. But forget your Burning Man festival in the desert. The thought of cowboys and cowgirls, riding the range with Keats and Yeats upon their side, is what my dreams are made of. Well, some of them, maybe. I’ll put it on my bucket list.