Weeknote for the week ending 12 March 2023

Witawita

Nothing new on Witawita this week and kind of deliberately so. I don’t want to suck the joy out of writing here, when it’s meant to be for fun, so I’m not forcing myself to follow any sort of publishing schedule or post target. That said, I’ve written this weeknote, haven’t I?

TV

These past couple of weeks have been all about rewatching seasons 1 and 2 of Ted Lasso, in anticipation of season 3 starting this coming Wednesday, 15 March. I am excited and scared in equal measure. Scared because there is always the fear that the new season won’t live up to the excellence of the first two. Part of me hopes this is the final season of Ted Lasso, as has been hinted in the past by the creators, and it becomes the final, excellent instalment of a three-season wonder that I can watch over and over again.

I also watched The Apprentice. It’s not something I would normally choose to watch but my daughter likes to watch it, so watching it with her is a good way to connect. When I say she watches it, she second-screens it. Not in the way the TV people would like to think, with the show being the primary source of attention and the phone/device being the second screen, but occasionally glancing up from her iPhone to look at what’s going on.

I enjoyed the storm-in-a-teacup the Tory party shills in the media tried to whip up by pointing out that there will only be women in the final of The Apprentice for the second year in a row. The ‘woke’ word was trotted out but then again, the last ethnic minority man standing was fired this week, so it wasn’t that woke. Is Alan Sugar woke when it comes to women but not race? Then again, the first winner of The Apprentice was a black man, who is one of Sugar’s two henchpeople this series, so… 🤷‍♂️

That said, there was no way Simba should have been fired…

I didn’t watch Match of the Day this weekend. But then I don’t watch it any weekend.

Books

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell has been sitting on my bedside table for a good couple of weeks now but I’ve failed to touch it. It’s been usurped by Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, which I started before Christmas but then left to languish. I’ve restarted it now, mainly because ‘bird by bird’ is a phrase uttered by Ted Lasso at least twice. More pertinently, it’s an underlying ethos of the show: AFC Richmond’s motto: gradarius firmus victoria – loosely translated as ‘taking steps towards victory’, according to the internet – can be more pithily paraphrased as ‘slow and steady wins the race’ or, as I prefer, ‘bird by bird’. ¹

That was the week that was for week ending 12 March 2023.