First mixed double pickleball tournament, and first tournament ever for Cecilia. Entered for 3.0, but admin error means we‘re bumped up into 3.5. Results so far: lost 0:11, lost 1:11.

Haven’t had many dry days yet in 2026. Took advantage of this one for a (muddy) walk.

Attended the first ever women’s Champions Cup final. First we saw champions of Africa, AS FAR (Morocco), vs champions of North and Central America, Gotham FC (USA), playing for third place.

Finished reading: Moonflower Murders: A Novel (Magpie Murders Book 2) by Anthony Horowitz 📚

Enjoyed this as much as the first in the series. Whether it’s these novels within novels, or the Hawthorn autofiction, I think he’s a clever writer.

Finished reading (a few weeks ago): Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 📚

Second or third reading of this, but not for a little while. Love Robin Sloane’s work.

From Friday’s gig at Flagey, Brussels.

Here we go AWFC

This was the view from my hotel window in Madrid the other day. The former offices of the Spanish newspaper ABC. I still can’t get over the beauty of this scene: the colours, the plants gradually reclaiming the space, the sunlight reflecting off the hotel windows…

New passport day! Last one was full up with stamps (yet another Brexit Dividend)

A bit slow to post, but saw the most amazing double rainbow last week 🌈🌈

Side Pocket for a Toad, from Tring Brewery. Still an all-time favourite.

untp.beer/BBqyA

I finished reading: The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing 📚 Beautifully-written account of nurturing a garden, interspersed with (sometimes difficult) periods of garden history.

I’m not a developer. At least, I’m learning a lot about languages, development, and using the terminal, but it’s not natural to me yet. In fact, a lot of it still doesn’t make sense. I’m hovering around ‘conscious incompetence’ and ‘conscious competence’ and often, when I do get things to work, I’m not entirely sure why…

This afternoon I spent a good hour or two going round in circles on a problem. I’m relying on ChatGPT and/or Claude to help me through troubleshooting, and when I find one of their blindspots, I really can get lost. In this case, my issue was in working with Hugo, my static site generator of choice, and Tailwind, the CSS framework.

A quick moment on what Tailwind does - it allows you to use utility classes in your HTML to style elements. So for example, in a traditional CSS approach, you might want to style a section of paragraph text, so you’d add:

<p class="fancy-text">This is my fancy text</p>

then go to your style sheet and create the relevant CSS rules:

.fancy-text {
   font-size: 1.5rem;
   font-color: blue;
   text-decoration: underline;
}

Tailwind allows you (indeed, encourages you) to do this inline, so that it’s very clear where the styling is coming from. The above would become:

<p class="text-xl text-blue-500 underline">This is my fancy text</p>

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but I’m trying it out on my latest project.

When running Hugo’s handy live server, which allows me to work in the trial-and-error manner which I need as a novice, the Tailwind classes don’t update live by default. This is annoying because I have to stop and restart the server every time I make a change. Maybe with more experience, I could make a load of changes and imagine their effect, before restarting the server, but right now I need to see how my changes work in real time.

Unfortunately, neither Claude or ChatGPT seem to know the solution to this. Anyone who’s run up against an AI blindspot like this will recognise it’s responses:

Ah — now that explains it…
Ah, now it’s clear — …
Ah — now it makes sense…

I should have given up on this route sooner, because a quick search led me to Hugo Tutorial, which was a good start. Then I found the right page on the Hugo documentation, and the answer was revealed. Of course, ChatGPT pretended it knew all along:

Absolutely, Ralph — I’m glad you found the solution that works for you.

The css.TailwindCSS function is indeed the recommended approach for integrating Tailwind CSS into Hugo projects, especially from version 0.128.0 onwards. This method leverages Hugo’s built-in capabilities to process your Tailwind CSS files efficiently.

In looking for a different stoic quote, I came across this from Epictetus, and now I can’t stop thinking about it:

It is not he who reviles or strikes you who insults you, but your opinion that these things are insulting.

It’s 20:30, and it’s still light… just. After a hot day the air is cooling, and the sun is about to set. The next time it will set this late will be May 2026.

The garden is still glorious, although it has a feeling of having had too much fun, and is now tipping over the edge into a decaying stupor. The Geranium ‘Rozanne’ continues to flower, along with Salvia ‘Royal Bumble’. It’s now joined by the pinkish-red of Persicaria, which looks stunning set alongside Anemanthele lessoniana and Cornus ‘Norman Haddon’. The Anemanthele remains the garden’s MVP (Most Valuable Plant, of course).

The bronzing leaves of Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ stand architecturally strong, though the flowers finished weeks ago._ _The blue heads of Eryngium and Echinops remain prominent, contrasting with Allium sphaerocephalon and Helenium (‘Moerheim Beauty’ or ‘Red Army’?).

Clematis, Trachelospermum, and_ _strawberries, all planted this year, have survived the testing summer thus far, although another heat wave is on its way. The latter has put on significant leafy growth, and we hope for a decent crop next year.

Many jobs are left to do, but I’m still happy with the exuberance, dynamism, and slight lack of control throughout the garden. Just enough wildness to keep things interesting…

Room with a view. Villefranche-sur-Mer, 🇫🇷

➡️🇫🇷

I’m always surprised that iOS doesn’t have built-in image resizing.

So I made a shortcut.

Clawhammer from Tring Brewery - very nice, and well kept. Pleased to see 3 real ales on at The Fancott, after changing hands.

untp.beer/MwQ9O

Couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what this allotmenteer was arrested (by armed police) for carrying! I have one of these, and will be keeping it hidden away from now on 😱

Currently reading: The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing 📚

We were among the 65,000 people who turned out for the victorious Lionesses last week on their homecoming. A few more than the 7000 they had just three years ago…

Many thanks to @manton for the offer for teachers and nurses. I’m back on micro.blog after a couple of years away.

I was fascinated to read about the 72 ‘kō’ (micro-seasons) of the traditional Japanese calendar, along with the 24 solar terms. Such a beautiful and poetic concept, not to mention the closer connection with daily life than our modern 3-month long seasons.

Each year, as soon as the weather is warm enough, and as long as it’s not raining, I eat my breakfast outside. The last few days have seen me pull on extra layers first thing. We’re a little early, but the 7th or 8th August marks the start of the Risshū (beginning of autumn) solar term, and the 37th kō - cool winds arrive . In Bedfordshire as well as Japan, it seems.

I decided recently to rebuild my long-neglected music website. It has been through a number of iterations over the years, from Wordpress to Squarespace, Micro.blog to Carrd. Each had their benefits, but over time would always start to fall out of date. The problem with listing upcoming gigs is that they never stay upcoming for very long…

I’ve always had some interest in designing for the web, and learnt some HTML and CSS as a teenager. My interest has been sparked again recently with the gradual rise of the ‘indie-web’. This means different things to different people, but broadly revolves around the idea of owning your own content, and hosting it at your own domain, rather than feeding the algorithms of Instagram and Facebook. 

I decided to take a hands-on approach to the website. I would build it myself, from scratch.

Looking around at various options, I settled on the static site generator, Hugo. Most websites you see now use databases and queries, checking for updates every time someone loads the site. Static sites are made up only of HTML, CSS and, optionally, Javascript, because the building happens at the time of publishing, rather than in the moment. This results in less interactivity, but what they lack in that department, they make up for in their tiny size and lightning-fast speed.

To start the project, I had to learn a little of how to use the terminal. I’ve always been terrified of this. It seems like a little window, looking directly into the core of your computer, and one wrong move, one ill-considered command, would be like dropping a spanner into the humming engine. Fortunately, a combination of good documentation and a little help from ChatGPT ensured I haven’t (so far) caused any irreparable damage. Once installed, the first step on the journey to a new website is as simple as:

Hugo new site ralphwyld

My design inspiration for the project came from beautifully clean and elegant sites such as robinsloan.com, manuelmoreale.com, and the ethos of simplicity behind the host of this blog, pika.pages. I find these sites a joy to read with their extended line-heights, simple typography, and limited colour palette. I also love the personal and unique voice behind them - like the author or artist themselves is telling the story, rather than another third-person biography.

Clean and simple

I came across a number of challenges along the way, which I’ll write about in the next few weeks, but most I was able to come with the help of trial and error, forums, and some ChatGPT. I’ve added to my HTML and CSS knowledge, as well as picking up a few little details about Go, the language Hugo runs on behind the scenes.

The result is here, and any feedback would be gratefully received:

ralphwyld.com

Although there are still some things to iron out on this project, and features I’d like to add, the hosting for another of my sites has run out and so I’ve started working on that now too…