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[Something I wrote in my head at the end of last week, cycling home.]

The bright full moon is floating down the river, trembling and fractured by the breeze. A rider’s lamp behind me spawns my shadow sister, moving in front of me, solid and hunched against the chill. She weaves left and right, now skimming across the grass, now sliding over the gravel path. I’m fascinated by my projected self, encountering the future ahead of me, but keeping me company on this cold, dark night.

Eventually, the rider passes me. My shadow sister slows then disappears, and I feel a sudden ridiculous pang of loss for something which was just a trick of the light. Despite knowing how she was born, I find myself looking for her for the rest of the journey, wondering if she’s around the next corner, or waiting for me in the trees.

I’ve come to the conclusion that owning a cat makes you change your stair-descending technique. As all cat owners know, cats appear from nowhere when you start to walk down the stairs. You set off with a clear run, then almost as soon as you’ve started, your cat flashes past you in a blur of fur. This wouldn’t be so bad, but the cat then immediately comes to a dead halt on the step immediately in front of you. Our cat, Cleo, adds a particular twist to this manoeuvre by turning sideways and having a big, arching — and apparently urgent — stretch, thus maximising the surface area available for human-tripping. As soon as you screech to a halt yourself, grabbing the bannister for support to avoid plummeting to a messy death, she trots happily in front of you down the remaining stairs.

Every. Time.

So I now automatically take one step then stop — waiting for the cat to zoom past, stretch and carry on — before I start walking again. Apparently, I also do this when at work, causing a human pile-up behind me as I inexplicably come to a dead stop for a few seconds. Oops.

You might wonder — in this age of free email accounts with gigabytes of storage — why anyone would pay money for an email account. Well, I’ve just done exactly that.

For a while, I’ve been consolidating numerous email accounts into one account using Gmail, so I can receive email at my usual range of email addresses, but check, search and send my email within one account. It worked fairly well, but Gmail’s quirky implementation of the IMAP protocol has its own irritations, and I experienced a few reliability problems. The reliability issue is especially difficult when you’re forwarding all your email to an account. Also, while Gmail allows you to send email from your Gmail account as if it comes from another account that you control, it sets one of the headers (I can’t remember which one offhand) as “From [my own address] on behalf of [gmail address]”, which isn’t what I wanted at all. That meant I had to set up send-only accounts in Apple’s Mail, which was an unwanted complication.

So I began looking around for another email provider, and came across Fastmail.fm. It had some very good reviews from happy users and seemed to have all the features I needed and more, so I bit the bullet and paid for an account.

I’m really happy with Fastmail. It certainly lives up to its name, and while some of the features can be replicated (with some effort) using Gmail, the level of polish and sophistication is wonderful. It’s ideal for consolidating accounts, because you can set up “Personalities” which specify not just which “From” address to use, but which signature to use, an address to “BCC” to and a sent folder to store the mail in, among other things. So you have a great deal of control of how you send mail. The magic thing is that when you send email from a desktop client with a particular from address, it sets up the rest of the rules for that Personality automatically.

The spam handling is also very sophisticated (with much more control than Gmail gives you), and if you want them, there are flexible rules for filtering incoming mail. I mostly use my desktop email client (Apple’s Mail), but the web interface is also quite powerful and very fast. It doesn’t have all the visual polish of Gmail, but it’s very functional.

I’m not abandoning Gmail entirely: I still use my incoming Gmail address (forwarded to Fastmail automatically, of course), and then I automatically BCC all my incoming and outgoing mail to another secret Gmail account for backup and emergency access if Fastmail should ever go down. I may have to pay for Fastmail, but if feels as if it’s worth every penny. My one and only minor quibble is that it only checks external POP accounts every hour at a maximum. That’s not a problem for most of my accounts (which I just forward directly to the account), but I have frustratingly little control over my work email account and can only pull it into Fastmail using the POP checker. That’s not really Fastmail’s fault though, as it would be unreasonable to check POP mail much more frequently than that. In practice, if I’m expecting some urgent work email, I can log into the web interface and trigger the checking manually. If there was a way to do that with a script, I’d be a very content bunny indeed.

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Perhaps I’m a bit of a killjoy, but I’ve never quite seen the point of Halloween. It’s a fairly recently imported tradition in the UK, so there’s not really any consensus about how to celebrate it, or indeed whether it should be celebrated at all. I wouldn’t mind so much if we got adorable little kids dressed up as ghosts or witches coming round. However, in our neighbourhood, we get 16 year olds who haven’t even bothered to dress up (unless you count hoodies as fancy dress), who just hammer indiscriminately on doors. Without some kind of long-standing tradition of everyone providing ‘treats’, or a pre-arrangement between neighbours with kids, I think that this amounts to a protection racket: give us sweets or your front door gets egged!

This year, I just pretended to be out when the trick-or-treaters came round. I was working in the office upstairs, but Cleo threatened to blow my ploy to lie low by miaowing loudly at the kids when they rattled the letterbox and shouted through it. She was getting quite agitated, so I was trying to stage-whisper reassurance to her from upstairs to calm her down and draw her away from the door, without being seen or heard by the kids. In the end, we all survived, and the house remained unmolested by eggs.