Gloucestershire Police and Crime Panel

Panel Info: https://glostext.gloucestershire.gov.uk/mgCommitteeDetails.aspx?ID=650

Date of meeting: 11th September 2026

Summary of Meeting

The Panel received four substantive items: the Constabulary's Words Matter reporting guidelines, an update on the Combatting Drugs Partnership from Deputy PCC Nick Evans, the OPCC Community Engagement Strategy, and progress on the recruitment of a permanent Chief Constable. The Chief Executive's report covered the force financial position, Raneem's Law, the Sentencing Act 2026 and the Government's policing White Paper.
On Words Matter, the guidelines set reporting standards for police communicators on male violence against women and girls, requiring the active voice, precise naming of offences (for example “rape” rather than “serious sexual assault”), and language that does not shift responsibility onto victims. During question time I introduced the peer-led StopWatch study, Girls and Young Women's Research Project, which examined the experiences of young women and girls subjected to stop and search and strip search. I raised concern that many participants were not given records of the searches, were not told the reasons for the encounter, and in some cases experienced procedural failings apparently inconsistent with statutory requirements. I asked how local scrutiny arrangements, including stop and search scrutiny panels, legitimacy panels and the new Youth Advisory Group, would identify and respond to similar issues in Gloucestershire, referencing the former Community Complaints Trigger which referred matters for community scrutiny after a single complaint. Current arrangements differ from that policy. I asked for a considered response; this request does not appear in the draft minutes and I am querying it. The PCC responded on stop and search find rates, but the matter was not resolved at the meeting.

The Combatting Drugs Partnership was established in 2022 following Dame Carol Black's independent review. It brings together Public Health, the Constabulary, education, youth justice, treatment providers and people with lived experience, working to three national priorities: breaking drug supply chains, delivering a world class treatment and recovery system, and reducing demand. Since 2022 the county has moved to the provider Via, increased the number of adults and young people in treatment, and achieved retention rates in the top national quartile. Continuity of treatment for prison leavers remains difficult as the county has no prison within its borders; the rate of prison leavers entering community treatment within three weeks is 35%, meeting the current target, with an ambition of 44% in 2026/27. Ketamine use among young people was identified as a serious emerging concern and prompted a dedicated task and finish group. School-based prevention was acknowledged as the area of least progress, with a stronger focus planned in the 2026 to 2029 work programme.

The Community Engagement Strategy sets four priorities: increasing public understanding of the OPCC and Constabulary roles, building trust and confidence, ensuring diverse community voices are heard, and expanding engagement across all communities. The Trust and Confidence Survey identified women, people aged 16 to 35, and ethnic minority communities as underrepresented in current samples. Focus group work with the Gloucestershire Deaf Association is planned over coming months, and a Youth Advisory Group for ages 16 to 25 is being recruited through schools, colleges and community events. This discussion referenced work on strip search procedures where issues have been identified.

Recruitment of a permanent Chief Constable follows the retirement of the substantive post holder in July 2026. The timetable is: national advert live 3 September 2026; applications close 24 September 2026; shortlisting 28 September 2026; stage 3 interviews at the Sabrina Centre 12 October 2026; final interview panel 13 October 2026; Panel confirmation hearing 20 November 2026. A community consultation survey is being run for the first time, with responses themed to inform the first stage of interviews.

The Chief Executive's report noted a projected force overspend of £0.5m on a £185m budget to the end of July. Efficiency savings are forecast at £7.1m against £9.0m assumed in the budget, offset by £1.5m of savings in minimum revenue provision due to lower capital spend in 2025/26. On national developments: Raneem's Law will place domestic abuse specialists in force control rooms, with just over £100,000 secured for two specialists in the Force Control Room (domestic abuse is approximately 20% of recorded crime); key provisions of the Sentencing Act 2026 are implemented, including a presumption that custodial sentences of 12 months or less will normally be suspended and a Progression Model allowing release after roughly one third of sentence, with £195k offered to each PCC through a Surge Fund for victim support; and the White Paper, From Local to National: A New Model for Policing, remains under development. The PEEL inspection assessment is due to be published within weeks.

Key Issues for Members to Note

• Financial pressure: a £0.5m projected overspend and a £1.9m shortfall in efficiency savings against budget assumptions.
• Demand and vulnerability: domestic abuse at approximately 20% of recorded crime, and new funding for two control room specialists under Raneem's Law.
• Emerging risk: ketamine use among young people, with school-based prevention identified as the weakest area of the drugs programme.
• Scrutiny of police powers: identified failings in strip search procedure and the absence of a single complaint referral mechanism for community scrutiny.
• Legislative change: Sentencing Act 2026 provisions on suspended sentences and earlier release, with associated victim support funding.
• Governance: the policing White Paper may alter local governance and funding arrangements; the PEEL assessment is imminent.
• Leadership: appointment of a permanent Chief Constable, subject to Panel confirmation on 20 November 2026.

Future Meetings: 20th November 2026 Report Submitted By: Gareth Kitchen Date: 23rd October 2026

The chair that was eagerly awaited for so long remains underutilized, because we are back in the throes of the 1000mph club where I will likely stay until the end of the year.

Alas, settling into my old age will have to wait.

Chain used to hang my floorlamp has been replaced with a rope, which I think looks much nicer now.

Okay, back to work.

#journal

“Görünen bu, şimdilik: İki denizkestanesi; öyle yosunlu kayalara tutunmuş, suyun yüzeyine çok yakın. Tam böyle denilebilir mi acaba?” —Adalet Ağaoğlu, Ruh Üşümesi

“Kafasında binbir insan güzelliğiyle gezen birisi de agora arar, agora bulur. Aradığı agoraları bulabileceği sayılı kentlerden birisi İstanbul’dur. Sana doğup büyüdüğüm Kadıköy sokaklarından bahsedeceğim.” —Hulki Aktunç, İstanbul’u Bul Bana

“In this novel we are prompted to see how time works changes, transforming love into hate, beauty into ugliness, loyalty into treachery (…) ”

“Mahfouz gives us instead an evocation of what has happened to their features, their bodies, the looks in their eyes, the despair in their hearts.” —Naguib Mahfouz, Wedding Song, Tate

This is a journey, an expedition. I know the general direction but there is no destination yet. Maybe there never will be. Perhaps I will know when I arrive. I am not sure how long this expedition will take. Maybe just a few months but it could equally be a year or even years. I will keep adding and editing.

It is an exploration of coaching and spirituality where thoughts, ideas and a bit of reading will be gathered around themes and written-up as if it were a journal. I have a hunch that spirituality is already very important in my work as a mentor and coach and I am sure it will become more so in the years ahead. But I want the pathways to be clearer. On mountains, piles of stones are built to show the way. I might set metaphorical stones so I can travel these routes again. Initially there will be a setting down of some basic ideas, a rough direction which in time may be expanded.

The more worn footpaths of this journey have been made by some notable academics and senior coaches who are well ahead on this exploration of spirituality of coaching. For these, coaching is reimagined in the context of the inner life, the soul, the transpersonal, the ecological crisis, mindfulness and ancient wisdom. I will follow some of these footpaths but at other times I will head-off over rough ground and explore different ideas and approaches. I may arrive at a similar destination having taken a very different route.

Around these exciting discussions and emerging practices a wider change in the world of coaching is happening. There is the challenge of AI in the foreground and coaches now seem to be moving beyond the GROW model and narrow confines of ‘performance coaching’. We are no longer neutral and passive coaches to our client’s sharing, but rather very present, aware and engaged with the offerings of our client. We are rejoicing in the blossoming of diverse coaching practices and theories and together we try to discern the future. What is clear is the future will look very different and I feel sure spirituality will be front of centre of that future.

These pages will be the field notes of the journey, just a small contribution in the wider and exciting exploration of coaching and spirituality. I may take some paths which fade to nothing or leave me on a cliff edge. Sometimes I will need to retrace my steps but I shall not be afraid to make mistakes nor be diminished by my naivety and inexperience in coaching. It will be a joyful, playful journey and I will try to draw in as many friends as possible. The hope is that by writing, sharing, listening and adapting we/I may arrive at a deeper and richer place where spirituality is even more at the service of coaching and coaching even more at the service of spirituality.

I just saw a video of Nathan Fielder telling a girl that failed an audition for him about how she has the rare ability to have a dream, and go and try for it with the knowledge that she might fail. And he said that is the most important thing, and so I don’t know I guess I just stuck with me.

Hi blog friends!

Just a note to acknowledge that me, myself and I made it to the 3 month mile marker of this blog today. Yay!  :–)  Thank you so much to those who have read and supported our weekly updates along the way. 

In other news – if you’re looking to add a sweet SNAIL-TASTIC touch of whimsy, charm or cheer to your day or to your gifts, Cute Snail and I have some coloring pages, coloring books and postcards that you might appreciate. The fall collection is especially adorable.

And, The Guardian says that the kākāpō (an up to nine pound sweet musty smelling flightless parrot native to New Zealand) has surpassed 300 birds for the first time in 75 years. 🙌 

That’s it! Until next time!

❤️ Juliet

Chapter 1: The Prayer She Could Not Finish

A woman types, “Please keep praying for me,” into a message to her sister. Then she deletes it. Her sister has been kind. That is not the problem. She simply cannot face another conversation that begins with hope and ends with the same answer: nothing has changed. She puts the phone facedown on the arm of the couch. There is no crisis tonight, no terrible news to report. There is only the weariness of having to admit, once again, that she is still struggling.

I think about that kind of quiet when I read Luke 13:10–17, the account behind the video about Jesus and the woman who suffered for eighteen years. In Scripture, Jesus sees a woman in the synagogue who is bent over and cannot straighten herself. We are not told whether she had asked Him for help or whether she expected anything different that Sabbath. The passage leaves her words unrecorded until it tells us that, after she was healed, she glorified God. I find that silence worth noticing, especially when considering how to keep turning toward God when prayer feels difficult.

Some people can speak openly about their faith while they are hurting. Others grow quiet. They still believe, but every attempt to pray seems to bring them back to the same request. After enough months, they may begin to wonder whether saying it again will make any difference. I have come to believe we should be gentle with that feeling. It is not something a friend can solve by handing over a cheerful verse and asking for a smile.

The woman in Luke had lived with her condition for eighteen years. That number is not a lesson in how long we should be willing to wait. It is simply part of what makes her suffering so significant. We cannot know what she thought through those years, and we should not claim that we do. But we do know something about the encounter: Jesus noticed her before Luke records any appeal from her. He called her to Him, spoke words of release, laid His hands on her, and she was made straight.

That does not mean silence guarantees a miracle. Many faithful people have prayed for healing and remained ill, and they deserve care rather than an explanation that blames them. What stays with me is the freedom to come honestly before God, even when our words are few. A prayer can be as simple as telling Him that we are tired. We can ask someone we trust to pray beside us without having to supply a hopeful update.

The woman with the unsent message may eventually write her sister something smaller and truer: “I don't have much to say tonight. Could you just check in tomorrow?” She has not solved her problem. She has allowed herself to be known without making a performance of courage. And perhaps tonight that is enough space for a prayer to begin.

Chapter 2: When Other People Make Your Suffering Feel Like a Problem

A woman stands outside a small family gathering, trying to decide whether to go back inside. Earlier in the evening, she mentioned that she might need to leave before everyone else because her treatment has been making her tired. Nobody argued with her directly. But she overheard someone wondering why she had bothered coming if she couldn't stay. Now she is standing beside her car, feeling foolish for having tried. She knows the comment was probably made without much thought. That doesn't make it easier to forget.

There is a moment in Luke 13 that I find especially difficult to read. After Jesus heals the woman, the ruler of the synagogue objects because the healing happened on the Sabbath. He directs his complaint toward the people gathered there, explaining that healing should take place on one of the other six days. Imagine the contrast between what had happened and what was being discussed. A woman had been released from eighteen years of suffering, yet someone was concerned that her relief had arrived at an inconvenient time.

Scripture does not tell us how she felt when the objection was raised. We cannot know whether she was embarrassed, confused, or simply overwhelmed by what Jesus had done. But I recognize something painfully familiar in the situation. Sometimes the hardest part of needing help is discovering that someone else considers your need an interruption. You may already feel uncomfortable asking. When another person questions whether you should have received that kindness, the embarrassment can settle deep inside you.

What moves me is the way Jesus responds. He does not ask the woman to justify her condition or explain why she deserves compassion. He challenges the objection Himself. Speaking about the ordinary practice of untying an animal to give it water on the Sabbath, He asks why this woman should not be released from her bondage. And He calls her “a daughter of Abraham.”

Those words remind me that Jesus understood something the argument had overlooked. She was a person with dignity and a place among God's people. Her suffering had not taken that away. Other people could discuss the timing of her healing, but Jesus would not allow their objection to become the final word about her.

Maybe you have spent years explaining why you need extra time, assistance, understanding, or rest. Perhaps you have become so careful about inconveniencing others that you apologize before asking for anything. I want you to remember that the patience someone offers you is not something you must repay by feeling guilty.

You can be grateful for kindness without being ashamed that you needed it. You can respect other people's responsibilities without believing your own needs are unimportant. And when someone fails to understand, you can leave their judgment where it belongs instead of carrying it into every quiet moment afterward.

Chapter 3: The Kind of Praise That Can Begin in a Whisper

After the last student leaves, a teacher stays in her classroom to straighten the desks. One parent has complained about something she cannot fix. The school year has been harder than she expected, and she has begun driving home in silence because even her favorite music asks for more feeling than she has left. On the corner of her desk sits a drawing from a student who wrote, “Thank you for helping me.” She picks it up, reads it again, and lets herself be glad for one good thing without pretending the rest of the day was good.

Luke tells us that when Jesus laid His hands on the woman, “immediately she was made straight, and glorified God” (Luke 13:13, KJV). That response deserves to be heard in its own setting. She had truly been healed. Her praise was a response to something wonderful Jesus had done, not a requirement she met before receiving His compassion.

I think we sometimes turn praise into another burden. We worry that if we sound disappointed, our faith must be weak. So we say we are blessed when what we really mean is that we are frightened, or we tell people everything is fine because we do not want to explain why it isn't. Yet Scripture gives us prayers of sorrow as well as songs of thanksgiving. The Psalms make room for questions, tears, and trust in the same conversation with God.

If you cannot sing today, you can speak plainly. Tell God what remains unresolved. Name the person you miss, the decision you dread, or the treatment that has not helped. Then, if you notice something kind, you may thank Him for it without turning that small good thing into proof that every larger problem will disappear. There is room for both truths.

I would also encourage you to let somebody share the silence. Sit with a trusted friend after church. Ask someone to pray for you when your own words feel thin. It is all right if the only response you can manage is to listen. Christian community was never meant to depend on every person arriving cheerful and self-sufficient.

We never learn what the woman said after that Sabbath or how she remembered it years later. What we do know is that Jesus saw her, called her, and treated her life as worthy of His attention. When you cannot find the words for God, that story can help you remember something gentle and steady: you do not have to be eloquent to be loved.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

As I’ve learned about what big tech companies are doing with everyone’s data it really started to creep me out. I’ve heard about ex boyfriends/husbands and girlfriends/wives getting pretty creepy on the spying thing. Even when still together many couples have problems on that front. There was a show a long time back I saw on TV, when that was a part of my life, and a paranoid person would send out a private investigator to catch their partner cheating. The types of things that a paranoid partner does is pretty similar to what big tech does. They put bugs around to listen in, cameras around to watch, and spyware to see what online activity and communication is going on. At the end of some of the investigations there was nothing found and it played cute music and tried to show a happy ending. Some of them weren’t happy about their partner spying on them and it ended the relationship anyways. Which is understandable, it’s creepy stuff to have someone prying into your life and watching your every move to report back to your partner or anyone else for that matter.

Big tech is gathering metadata from all sources it can. This information is prime for surveillance. It might not have all of the specific content but it has a whole lot of the overall picture. Where you have been and for how long, patterns of travel, often your exact location at all times, where you spend money and often how much, who you talk to and for how long, what you search for on the internet, what websites you visit, and much more. With all of that they can put together a pretty comprehensive profile on an individual. I find all of this very creepy and over the top. In some countries they give a little more privacy protection and tools – which is nice.

Around the world and especially in the USA there is a lot of PPP’s or public-private partnerships. The government really does not want to limit corporate data mining (spying) all that much because it wants that data as well. Some countries limit their own spying so that they look good to their own people, but then get that data from allied nations. I’ve read that Israel does a whole lot of data mining around the globe and shares (maybe sells) that data to many nations. The majority of the planet is blackmailed at least a little bit. Even if it’s nothing illegal some personal information can be embarrassing, career ending, divorce enduing, and so on.

Recently I was given a package that was put together by the local government. They had detailed areal photos of our homestead. They want us to comply with some regulatory house stuff. We were out of compliance and now I’m fixing some things to help alleviate their worries. I’m not worried, my neighbors aren’t worried, the owner of the property we live on isn’t worried, no one is really worried except these weird people that call themselves government. But I was thinking about it and it really is an invasion on privacy and pretty creepy. Just like that whole spying on us that the corporations do is creepy. Bunch of creepers.

What if your neighbor put a GPS tracker on you and your car and logged everywhere you have been. What if they had spyware on your phone and computer to track everyone you communicated with and how long. What if they put together a list of everything you ever searched for and what websites you go to and what you watch. What if they also paid attention to how much you spend and where. What if one went so far as to fly a drone over your house looking for anything they didn’t like. Afterwards they put together a package telling you what they wanted to you fix. What if all of these neighbors shared that information with one another and even sold it. A little creepy? I think a lot creepy.

So if our neighbors really shouldn’t do any of this why do we turn a blind eye towards corporations and government enforcement agents doing invasive and creepy things? Maybe humanity should have a higher standard for what we passively and happily tolerate and even actively support. You know that overall Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple, and Verizon aren’t mandatory services? You can stop supporting their invasive actions by not using their services and products. Of course they are embedded in many 3rd party sites, services, and products (especially Google and Facebook) but much of that is optional and you can block a lot of that with VPN’s, solid browsers, anonymous search engines, and better operating systems. It’s true we may not be able to opt out of all government invasive creepy things at this stage of human development. But maybe if enough people started to see it for what it is, a creepy group of neighbors teaming up to sign bills that makes them think they have the authority to put together an extended creeper neighbor network to threaten the common man with fines, loss of property, to be put into little cages, or even killed if anyone resists. Maybe if people saw through all that humanity wouldn’t be so complacent and complicit.

I think the standard should be something like this. If you and I cannot do such a thing to our neighbor, then perhaps government cannot do such a thing to you and I. The act of neighbor/group/mob/government intervention should be used very lightly. Seems to me it’s used far too regularly and over far too many things. I also believe privacy should be taken more seriously. We ought to be able to opt out of corporate data-mining schemes and get profiles deleted if we don’t want these corporations to have them. There are many good books on this subject and smarter people than me have a lot to say on ideas for privacy laws in our current high tech low cost storage type of world.

Check out an older post linked below on solutions on the tech side of things if interested – some books are listed in there. New people see this blog often enough that it's worth reminding about that post in my view – solutions are important. I might update it some this winter, I’ve learned a lot since writing it but it’s still solid information.

DIY Tech Privacy

On a summer afternoon in August 2026, families at the Frog Pond on Boston Common were doing what families do at a spray pool. Children ran through the water. Parents held up towels so that small bodies could be changed out of wet swimwear. And according to witnesses who later spoke to police, a man in sunglasses was watching them through a camera.

The witnesses said he had been recording children on the playground, both with a phone and with a pair of camera-equipped sunglasses. Some said he followed a family who had been changing their children behind towels, scanning the children up and down with the glasses. When people confronted him, he took the glasses off and tried to snap them with his hands. Police seized the glasses and the phone. The man, a 60-year-old from Brockton, is a registered sex offender. In September he was arraigned on 69 further charges relating to photographing the intimate parts of children, and he pleaded not guilty. Nothing has been proved in court.

What makes the case so unsettling is not that a predator found a new tool. Predators have always found new tools. It is that the tool looked like nothing at all. A camera held up to a changing child is an obvious threat that any parent can see and act on. A pair of sunglasses is not. The incident, as Joy Buolamwini wrote in Nature in October, illustrates how such devices can subject bystanders to “intrusive surveillance without their knowledge or consent.” On this occasion, other people at the pool saw what was happening and stepped in.

That is the problem in miniature. Most of us move through public space on an unspoken assumption: we can see who is looking at us and roughly how. Smart glasses quietly break that assumption, and they are doing it at a scale, and with a degree of artificial intelligence, that the people who wrote our privacy laws never imagined. On 13 October 2026, Europe's data protection regulators finally put on paper what that means for the people on the other side of the lens.

Eight Pages From Brussels

The European Data Protection Board (EDPB), the body that brings together the European Union's national data protection authorities, adopted Statement 1/2026 on smart glasses at its October plenary. It is short: eight pages, 36 numbered paragraphs, signed by the board's chair, Anu Talus. It is described as preliminary. It is also, read carefully, one of the bluntest documents a European regulator has produced about a consumer product category.

Start with the controller question, which is the legal way of asking who is responsible. The board accepts that a wearer filming a friend for a private family chat may fall under the GDPR's household exemption. But it insists that exemption “must, however, be narrowly construed,” and that it vanishes when footage goes to a public social media account or the glasses are used for professional or political purposes. More importantly, it states that the GDPR still applies to the companies that supply the means of processing, even when the wearer is exempt. When a manufacturer or AI provider analyses an image from the glasses' camera “in which other persons appear,” it can be a controller in its own right. And controllers, the statement says, “should not rely on the users' actions to meet their own GDPR obligations, such as transparency toward other individuals whose data might be processed.”

The press release put it more plainly: neither the producer nor the provider of a linked service “can transfer their obligations to users.”

Then comes transparency, and here the board is almost confessional. “The current state of the art with regards to indicators on smart glasses leave many non-users unaware that their data is being processed,” it says. Privacy notices, the standard legal fix, “do not seem sufficient or appropriate to inform non-users,” because a manufacturer has no relationship with the stranger on the pavement and no way to contact them.

Consent fares no better. Where a manufacturer or AI provider processes data about non-users with whom it has no relationship, the board says it “would be difficult to obtain their freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous consent.” It closes an obvious loophole too: “Consent obtained after collection, for example following the recording, would not be valid.” You cannot film first and ask later.

That leaves legitimate interest, the flexible legal basis on which much of the data economy runs. The board does not rule it out. It does say that, given “the current insufficient transparency,” the balancing test “would be particularly difficult to demonstrate for further processing for commercial purposes that go beyond providing the service explicitly requested by the end-user, or for AI training, which bystanders wouldn't expect, especially if they are not aware of the initial data collection.”

Read that sentence again and notice what it targets. Not the snapshot of a sunset. Not the translation of a menu. It targets the business model: the reuse of what the glasses see to improve products and train models.

And then, in paragraph 8, the board steps outside the usual vocabulary of data protection altogether. Even when a device can be identified as smart glasses, it says, people may object simply because they are uncomfortable with the possibility of being recorded. “This could also result in a subtle social effect, where individuals alter their behaviour, suppress spontaneity, and conform to social norms perceived to be more socially acceptable due to their perceived threat of unvetted surveillance.”

That is not a sentence about data. It is a sentence about what public life feels like.

Who Notices the Little White Light

The industry's answer to the bystander problem has, for five years, been a light. Ray-Ban Meta glasses carry a small LED on the front of the frame that glows when the camera is capturing. Meta designed the glasses so that they stop recording if the light is covered with tape. The EDPB now wants considerably more: indicators “visible in many lighting conditions,” audio cues such as a shutter click, voice activation so that commands are spoken aloud, opt-in smartphone alerts, and frame designs that make smart glasses easier to tell apart from ordinary ones. It says these measures should be “impossible or difficult to disable (taking into account the state of the art)” and adds, pointedly, that “it should not be possible to record information when the indicator is covered.”

The footnotes are where the board's scepticism shows. Producers, it notes, should consider that LEDs may be invisible to people with visual impairments, and “that a white LED generally could be mistaken for a reflection or solar glare.” On a bright day, in other words, the main safeguard can look exactly like sunshine.

The light can also simply be removed. In October 2025, 404 Media reported that a hobbyist named Bong Kim was charging $60 to modify Ray-Ban Meta glasses so that the recording LED no longer lit up, while the glasses otherwise worked normally. The modification got around the tape-detection safeguard by changing the hardware rather than covering the light. Meta has since said it is cracking down on tampering services, and in July 2026 The Next Web reported that the company was patching its glasses to disable the camera if the light was tampered with. When Paris prosecutors announced in September 2026 that they had opened several investigations into women being filmed on the street without consent, Agence France-Presse reported Meta's response: that it had taken multiple steps to prevent tampering with the light.

Even an untampered light runs into a deeper limit, one that no firmware update can fix. A light only works if the person who sees it knows what it means. Researchers at Tsinghua University put that to the test.

Wearers and Bystanders Want Different Things

Their study was presented at CHI 2026, the leading academic conference on human-computer interaction, held in Barcelona in April. Its title is “Mind the Gap: Mapping Wearer-Bystander Privacy Tensions and Context-Adaptive Pathways for Camera Glasses,” and its authors are Xueyang Wang, Xin Yi and Hewu Li of Tsinghua University, with Kewen Peng of the University of Utah.

The first part of the research was a survey of 525 people in China: 232 current or potential wearers and 293 people who might find themselves on the other side of the lens. Each participant was given a short primer on how the devices work, including where the LED sits, and then shown six everyday scenarios. A travel vlog on a street. Shopping in a mall. A meeting with colleagues. A hospital consultation. A private party. A workout at a gym.

The pattern is stark. Wearers rated recording as reasonable in every scenario, including the gym among strangers. Bystanders reported significantly more privacy concern than wearers overall. When the researchers asked what bystanders expected and what wearers were willing to give, two gaps were statistically significant: bystanders wanted tighter control over how footage is shared, and they expected prior consent far more than wearers were prepared to seek it. The gym produced the widest gaps of all, and the hospital was not far behind. As the authors put it, the disparity grows in sensitive contexts “where bystanders' vulnerability peaks while wearers' willingness plateaus.”

Then there is what bystanders said they would actually do. Across the scenarios, between 65 and 90 per cent said they would take some form of defensive action. Camera avoidance was the most common response, chosen by between 52 and 80 per cent, peaking at 80 per cent in the mall. Nonverbal protest came next, at 31 to 51 per cent. Direct intervention, asking the wearer to stop recording or delete footage, was chosen by roughly a quarter to a half of participants depending on the setting. Passive acceptance was rare, at 10 to 15 per cent, except in the workplace meeting, where it rose to 35 per cent.

The LED did not reassure anyone. Only 41.3 per cent of bystanders and 35.3 per cent of wearers thought it was sufficient, and just 6.1 per cent of bystanders believed an LED alone was enough. Participants said it was too small, invisible in bright light, meaningless to people unfamiliar with the devices, and easy to block. One researcher interviewed for the study summed it up: the light “deters the honest but not the malicious.”

The finding that matters most for the burden question is about familiarity. You might assume the gap is just novelty, and that bystanders will relax once smart glasses become as normal as phones. The data says otherwise. Bystanders' concern stayed high at every level of familiarity, while wearers grew less concerned the more they used the devices. Experience widened the gap rather than closing it. The authors conclude that the gaps “reflect structural incompatibilities rather than inadequate goodwill.”

The study was conducted in China, and the authors are careful to say privacy norms differ between cultures. But the structure of the finding is not culturally specific. The person wearing a camera and the person in front of it are in different positions, and those positions produce different interests. Etiquette campaigns will not bridge that.

How Private Glasses Feed a Public Market

None of this would matter much if smart glasses were a niche toy. They are not. Buolamwini's Nature piece, published on 6 October 2026, reports that more than eight million smart glasses were shipped in 2025 and that by June 2026, sales of AI-equipped models had “reportedly risen by more than 700%” on the previous year. The first figure is well supported: the analyst firm Omdia counted 8.7 million AI glasses shipped globally in 2025, a 322 per cent increase, with Meta taking 85.2 per cent of the market. The second figure is harder to trace. Nature gives no primary source, and the growth figures published by market trackers vary widely with what they measure. Counterpoint Research, for instance, reported that global AI glasses shipments rose 263 per cent year on year in the first half of 2026. Whichever number you prefer, the curve is steep, and Omdia expects shipments to pass 15 million in 2026.

Scale matters because of what sits behind the lens. In April 2025, Meta told Ray-Ban Meta owners that AI features with camera use would be enabled by default unless they switched off the “Hey Meta” wake word, and that voice recordings would be stored to improve its products without an option to opt out, according to reporting by TechCrunch and others. Transcripts and recordings could be kept for up to a year, and owners who did not want their voice used for training had to delete recordings one by one. Those changes concern the wearer's data. But a camera pointed at a street does not capture only the wearer.

Then there is identification. In 2024, two Harvard students, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, built a demonstration system called I-XRAY. It streamed video from Ray-Ban Meta glasses to Instagram, used software to detect faces, ran them through the face search engine PimEyes, and pulled names, addresses and other details from people-search sites. The students said they would not release the code; the point was to show how easily off-the-shelf tools combine. In February 2026, The New York Times reported that Meta was planning a facial recognition feature for its glasses, known internally as “Name Tag,” which would let wearers identify people through Meta's AI assistant. According to the Times, an internal memo suggested launching “during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.” Meta's plans, the reports noted, could change.

The EDPB saw this coming. Pairing smart glasses with facial or voice recognition, it wrote, “raises unprecedented questions regarding societal choices and poses a high risk to the rights and freedoms in public spaces.”

Put these pieces together and the idea of ordinary eyewear that can silently record, analyse and identify every person in the wearer's field of view stops sounding like hyperbole. Not every pair does all three today. The direction of travel is clear, though, and the hardware already in circulation is what tomorrow's software will run on.

What Happens to a Street That Might Be Recording

Which brings us to the first big question. What does all this do to the texture of public life when ordinary eyewear can record, analyse and potentially identify everyone in view, and nobody can tell whether it is doing so?

The sociologist Erving Goffman gave us the vocabulary in 1963. In his study of how strangers conduct themselves in public places, he described “civil inattention,” the small ritual by which strangers acknowledge each other with a glance and then look away. It is how a crowded street stays bearable. I see you; I am not going to examine you. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, writing two years earlier in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, made a related point about “eyes on the street”: the informal, mutual watching of neighbours and passers-by that keeps a city safe. Both describe a kind of looking that is reciprocal, fleeting and, crucially, visible. You can see the eyes that are on the street. They are attached to people you could look back at.

Camera glasses change both halves of that bargain. The glance that used to end in looking away can now be stored, replayed, shared and searched. And the eyes on the street are no longer necessarily attached to a person who is present. They might belong to an AI model on a server, a TikTok audience, or a face-search engine. Civil inattention depends on the other person choosing not to keep what they see. A device that keeps everything by default removes that choice from the encounter entirely.

We already know what this does to behaviour, because we have seen it online. In a 2016 study in the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Jon Penney found a statistically significant drop in traffic to Wikipedia articles on privacy-sensitive topics after the 2013 revelations about NSA surveillance. The articles themselves had not changed. People's sense of being watched had. That is the chilling effect: not punishment, but the quiet edit people make to their own behaviour when they suspect an audience.

The EDPB's paragraph 8 is the physical-world version of that finding, and the evidence that it is already happening is accumulating. In August 2026, researchers at the University of Sydney published early findings from an analysis of 350 publicly available Instagram videos, posted between 2023 and 2026 and linked to pick-up artist communities. In a subset of covert point-of-view videos, around 60 per cent of interactions were classified as potential harassment, and in about 43 per cent of the videos women were exposed to abusive comments, some of which revealed personal details. The researchers found covert filming in workplaces, gyms and beaches. “Smart glasses have given pickup artists a new tool to further exploit women,” said Milica Stilinovic, a postdoctoral research associate on the project.

The BBC reported in 2026 on a woman in London who discovered that a stranger who had chatted to her near a shopping centre had filmed the whole encounter through smart glasses and posted it online, where it drew tens of thousands of views. In Paris, prosecutors described a “growing trend on social media involving women being filmed on the street.”

The CHI survey shows what the defensive response looks like in aggregate: most bystanders say they would avoid the camera, a third to a half would protest without words, and a substantial share would confront the wearer. Those are the behaviours of people who no longer trust the encounter. And the EDPB's list of sensitive settings, from medical facilities to swimming pools, is a list of exactly the places where people most need to be unguarded. Public space does not empty. It flattens. People become slightly more guarded, slightly more performative, slightly less willing to do the unplanned thing. That is what “suppress spontaneity” means in practice.

The cruellest part is that the effect does not require anyone to be recording. It only requires that recording be possible and impossible to detect. A street where one person in a hundred wears camera glasses is, from the bystander's point of view, a street where anyone might be. The chilling effect is a product of uncertainty, not of footage. You cannot opt out of uncertainty by checking for a light that may not be there.

There is a fairness issue, too. Smart glasses have genuine benefits, and the EDPB lists some of them, including audio assistance and hazard awareness for people with disabilities. Hamburg's proposed restrictions on wearing them in pools and public transport have reportedly included exemptions for people who rely on them for medical or accessibility reasons. Those uses deserve protection. But the benefits go to the wearer, while the costs of uncertainty fall on everybody else in the room. That asymmetry is the root of the burden problem.

Why Neither Wearer Nor Bystander Can Carry It

The second big question starts from a premise: that the burden of informing bystanders cannot realistically fall on either the wearer or the bystander. Is that premise right? The evidence says yes, for different reasons in each case.

Start with the wearer. The EDPB does say that users “should always ensure that they respect the privacy and dignity of other individuals,” and that explicitly telling people you are using smart glasses is relevant. That is good manners. As a system for protecting the public, it fails three times over. It fails on scale: you cannot announce yourself to every passer-by in a station. It fails on incentive: the CHI data shows wearers consistently willing to give less than bystanders want, and growing less concerned with use. And it fails catastrophically on bad actors. The man at the Frog Pond did not intend to tell anybody anything. Any safeguard that depends on the wearer's goodwill protects people only from wearers who were never the danger.

Now the bystander. The research community has proposed plenty of tools to help people defend themselves: gestures that signal “do not record me,” wearable markers that ask cameras to blur you, apps that negotiate consent. The CHI team had experts and experienced users evaluate twelve such privacy-enhancing technologies and found what they called a “fundamental paradox”: empowering bystanders “requires burdening them with responsibilities that should belong to those creating privacy risks.” Participants were blunter. One described gesture-based refusal as “transferring the burden to the victim.” Another asked, of awareness tools in general: “What's the point of awareness? I know, but can I stop it?”

The EDPB reaches the same conclusion from the legal side. Smartphone alerts that detect nearby glasses, it says, “should not be the sole method of providing transparency,” because that would exclude anyone without the app running and would make a stranger's privacy depend on their own technical diligence. Children, it adds, “may be less aware of the presence or implications of smart glasses and therefore more vulnerable.” A toddler at a spray pool cannot install an app.

So the premise holds. If the burden of informing bystanders cannot sit with the wearer or the bystander, it has to sit somewhere else. The EDPB's answer is the manufacturer and the AI service provider. The question is whether that answer actually solves the problem.

Does Moving the Burden to Manufacturers Fix Anything

Here is my position. Placing the burden on manufacturers is the right move and an incomplete one. As the EDPB has framed it, an obligation of transparency, it mostly identifies who is accountable for a harm that will keep happening. It becomes a real solution only to the extent that accountability is turned into hard constraints on what the product can do, and even then a residue of harm is unavoidable for as long as a camera can look like a pair of glasses.

Begin with what the shift does achieve, because it is not nothing. The manufacturer is the only party that can change the product. It decides whether the LED is bright or faint, whether the camera works when the light is broken, whether bystanders' faces are blurred on the device before anything reaches a server, whether footage is stored by default, whether face matching exists at all. The EDPB's recommendations are a menu of exactly those choices: on-device processing, blurring or avoiding processing of bystanders' identities, persistent storage disabled by default for real-time assistance, geofencing in sensitive places, and “privacy frictions” that slow down sharing. Every one of those is a design decision only a manufacturer can make. Assigning the obligation to the company that controls the design is not a technicality. It is the only assignment that matches responsibility to power.

The legitimate interest paragraph may matter even more. If commercial reuse and AI training on bystander data are “particularly difficult to demonstrate” as lawful, then the most valuable part of the footage, its afterlife as training material, becomes the most legally exposed. That attacks the incentive that makes always-on capture attractive in the first place. A company that cannot monetise the street has less reason to see it all.

Now the limits, and they are serious.

First, transparency is not protection. The EDPB's main ask is that bystanders be told. But telling someone they are being recorded does not stop them being recorded, which is precisely the point the CHI participant made. A brighter light turns covert surveillance into overt surveillance, which is an improvement, and then hands the bystander the same impossible choice: confront a stranger, leave, or put up with it. The CHI data suggests most people will avoid the camera, which is the chilling effect in a different form. Perfect transparency would make it clear who is watching. It would not make the street feel unwatched.

Second, manufacturer accountability does not reach the people causing the worst harm. The tampering market shows how quickly a hardware safeguard becomes a $60 problem. And a design rule binds only the companies a regulator can actually reach, which is not the same as every company whose products end up on European faces. The person who films children at a pool is not going to be deterred by a design standard. What the manufacturer framework catches is the mainstream product used by mainstream people, which is valuable but is not where the most serious incidents begin.

Third, the framework is preliminary guidance, not law. The statement interprets the GDPR; enforcement depends on national regulators bringing cases. And where legislators have tried to write hard rules, they have struggled. In California, State Senator Eloise Gómez Reyes's SB 1130 would have required wearable recording devices sold in the state to carry a prominent recording indicator from 2028, banned technology designed to conceal it, and penalised covert recording in private areas of businesses. It passed both chambers comfortably. On 30 September 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it, saying its definition of a wearable recording device was too broad and noting that existing law already covers recording in private spaces. TechNet, a trade group whose members include Meta, Google and Amazon, had opposed it. When the EDPB adopted its statement two weeks later, it pointed to the bill in a footnote as an example of legislation under discussion elsewhere.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, there is the residue. Even a perfect manufacturer regime, with unmissable indicators, no tampering, no default storage, no face matching and no training on bystanders, still leaves a world in which some people wear cameras on their faces and everyone else has to think about it. The EDPB's paragraph 8 concedes this directly: people may object “even if the device could be identifiable as smart glasses,” simply because the possibility makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is not a compliance failure. It is the cost of the capability existing in that form at all. No allocation of legal duties can remove it. It can only decide who answers for it.

So does placing the burden on the manufacturer merely identify who is accountable for an unavoidable harm? Partly, yes. Part of the harm is unavoidable, and we should stop pretending otherwise. But identifying the accountable party is how the avoidable part gets avoided. The honest framing is that the manufacturer burden is necessary but not sufficient, and its value depends entirely on whether regulators treat transparency as the end of the obligation or the beginning.

What would make it sufficient, or close to it? Two things the EDPB gestures at but does not yet demand. The first is substantive limits rather than just disclosure: no identification of strangers, no training on bystander footage without a lawful basis that genuinely exists, cameras that fail closed when tampered with. The second is protection that attaches to places rather than people. Buolamwini's proposal in Nature, “consent-conscious spaces” such as schools, hospitals, courts and swimming pools “in which covert recording is prohibited by law,” is one version. The EDPB's own list of sensitive contexts (medical facilities, schools, changing rooms, swimming pools, beaches, toilets) is another. Hamburg's proposals for pools and public transport are a third. Norway's is a fourth, and the broadest yet. On 5 October 2026 its government said it would ask parliament for a temporary ban on smart glasses in certain public places, starting with spaces where children gather, such as schools, kindergartens, playgrounds and youth clubs, and possibly extending to parks, beaches, museums, shopping centres, concerts and sports events. It is not a blanket ban: private use would still be allowed, and exemptions for vulnerable groups and “socially beneficial uses” are being considered. It is also, for now, only a proposal. But it is a government choosing to protect places rather than waiting for people to protect themselves. The CHI researchers reached the same place from the design side, recommending “automatic protection in sensitive contexts” rather than case-by-case negotiation.

Some of this is already happening without waiting for Brussels. In August 2026, HM Courts and Tribunals Service confirmed that people bringing Meta smart glasses into courts and tribunals in England and Wales “will have them confiscated on entry,” following a High Court case in which a litigant was found to have been coached through his glasses during cross-examination. New York's court system had already taken similar action. Spaces are starting to defend themselves, one door at a time.

The Street Worth Keeping

Go back to the Frog Pond. What protected the children there, to the extent anything did, was not an LED, a privacy notice or a design standard. It was other adults who noticed something wrong and said so. That is Jacobs's “eyes on the street” working as she described. It is also a reminder of how fragile it is. Nothing in the reports suggests his glasses announced anything; witnesses noticed what he was doing. Next time, the device will be smaller, the behaviour more careful, and the footage uploaded before anyone has time to object.

The EDPB statement is important because it refuses the comfortable fiction that the wearer can be trusted to manage this, or that the bystander can be expected to. It points to the only party with the power to change the product. Anu Talus put the principle simply in the board's announcement: “individuals deserve clear warnings, not hidden surprises.” That is right as far as it goes. But a warning is not a refusal, and a street full of clear warnings is still a street where people check themselves before they laugh too loudly or speak too freely.

The real question smart glasses put to us is not who should fill in the paperwork. It is which parts of public life we are willing to let become permanently recordable, and which we intend to keep for the glance that ends in looking away. Manufacturers can be made to answer for the first. The second is a choice for the rest of us, and it is one we are making right now, mostly by not making it.

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References and Sources

1. European Data Protection Board. “Statement 1/2026 on Smart Glasses.” Adopted 13 October 2026. Signed by Anu Talus, Chair. 8 pp. https://www.edpb.europa.eu/system/files/2026-10/20261310_edpb_statement_smart-glasses_en.pdf
2. European Data Protection Board. “EDPB publishes statement on the data protection challenges of smart glasses.” Press release, Brussels, 13 October 2026. https://www.edpb.europa.eu/news/edpb-publishes-statement-on-the-data-protection-challenges-of-smart-glasses_en
3. Wang, Xueyang; Peng, Kewen; Yi, Xin; Li, Hewu. “Mind the Gap: Mapping Wearer-Bystander Privacy Tensions and Context-Adaptive Pathways for Camera Glasses.” Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, 13 to 17 April 2026. ACM. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791848. Preprint: arXiv:2603.04930, 5 March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04930
4. Buolamwini, Joy. “Why smart glasses are about to create a major privacy crisis.” Nature 658, 296 (2026), published 6 October 2026. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-03131-x. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03131-x
5. Fortier, Marc; Klein, Asher. “Sex offender recorded kids with camera sunglasses at Boston's Frog Pond, police say.” NBC Boston, 18 August 2026. https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/sex-offender-secretly-recorded-kids-with-camera-sunglasses-at-bostons-frog-pond-police-say/3999571/
6. McKinley Becker, Kaitlin; Kwangwari, Munashe. “Sex offender who recorded kids at Boston's Frog Pond faces additional charges.” NBC Boston, 15 September 2026 (updated 18 September 2026). https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/boston-frog-pond-sex-offender-mark-sullivan-court-appearance/4014933/
7. Boston.com. “Sex offender allegedly uses camera sunglasses to record children at Boston Common's Frog Pond.” 18 August 2026. https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2026/08/18/sex-offender-allegedly-uses-camera-sunglasses-to-record-children-at-boston-commons-frog-pond/
8. Omdia. “Global AI glasses shipments reach 8.7 million units with Mainland China emerging as the fastest-growing market.” Press release, 5 March 2026. https://omdia.tech.informa.com/pr/2026/mar/global-ai-glasses-shipments-reach-8point7-million-units-with-mainland-china-emerging-as-the-fastest-growing-market
9. Counterpoint Research. “Global AI Glasses Shipments Surge 263% YoY in H1 2026, with Display-less AI Glasses Accounting for 96% of Total.” 21 September 2026. https://counterpointresearch.com/en/insights/global-ai-glasses-shipments-surge-263-percent-yoy-with-display-less-ai-glasses
10. Cox, Joseph; Koebler, Jason. “A $60 Mod to Meta's Ray-Bans Disables Its Privacy-Protecting Recording Light.” 404 Media, 23 October 2025. https://www.404media.co/how-to-disable-meta-rayban-led-light/
11. Agence France-Presse. “French prosecutors probe secret filming of women with smart glasses.” The Star (Malaysia), 24 September 2026. https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/09/24/french-prosecutors-probe-secret-filming-of-women-with-smart-glasses (see also South China Morning Post, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3368459/france-prosecutors-probe-secret-filming-women-smart-glasses)
12. Silberling, Amanda. “If you own Ray-Ban Meta glasses, you should double-check your privacy settings.” TechCrunch, 30 April 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/30/if-you-own-ray-ban-meta-glasses-you-should-double-check-your-privacy-settings
13. Malik, Aisha. “Meta plans to add facial recognition to its smart glasses, report claims.” TechCrunch, 13 February 2026 (reporting The New York Times). https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/13/meta-plans-to-add-facial-recognition-to-its-smart-glasses-report-claims/
14. The Boston Globe. “AI and Meta smart glasses can turn a person's photo into personal info, Harvard students find.” 4 October 2024. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/10/04/business/harvard-students-ai-meta-glasses/
15. University of Sydney. “Smart glasses pose new harassment risks for women, researchers find.” News release, 11 August 2026. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2026/08/11/smart-glasses-pose-new-harassment-risks-for-women-research-meta.html
16. Futurism. “Man Wearing Smart Glasses Secretly Records Woman, Demands Money to Delete Video From His Socials” (reporting a BBC investigation). 9 May 2026. https://futurism.com/future-society/man-smart-glasses-records-woman-demands-money
17. Austin, Sophie (Associated Press). “Newsom vetoes measure that would have penalized the use of smart glasses to secretly record people.” LAist, 1 October 2026. https://laist.com/news/politics/newsom-vetoes-measure-that-would-have-penalized-the-use-of-smart-glasses-to-secretly-record-people
18. Kuo, Jordan. “California's Capture-Indicator Mandate Died on the Governor's Desk, Weeks Before Samsung's Glasses Are Due.” VR.org, 1 October 2026. https://vr.org/articles/california-sb-1130-veto-capture-indicator-mandate-2026
19. Legal Cheek. “Courts ban Meta glasses.” 13 August 2026. https://www.legalcheek.com/2026/08/courts-ban-meta-glasses/
20. The Next Web. “Meta patches the mod that turned its Ray-Ban glasses into secret spy cams.” 9 July 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-ray-ban-privacy-light-fix-cameraless
21. TechCentral.ie. “Hamburg wants to ban smart glasses in swimming pools and public transport.” 2026. https://www.techcentral.ie/hamburg-wants-to-ban-smart-glasses-in-swimming-pools-and-public-transport/
22. Penney, Jonathon. “Chilling Effects: Online Surveillance and Wikipedia Use.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2016). SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2769645
23. Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings. New York: The Free Press, 1963.
24. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1961. See also NPR, “'Eyes On The Street' Details Jane Jacobs' Efforts To Put Cities First,” 28 September 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/09/28/495615064/eyes-on-the-street-details-jane-jacobs-efforts-to-put-cities-first
25. Keaten, Jamey (Associated Press). “Norway seeks temporary ban on smart glasses as privacy concerns rise.” News4JAX, 5 October 2026. https://www.news4jax.com/tech/2026/10/05/norway-seeks-temporary-ban-on-smart-glasses-as-privacy-concerns-rise/ (see also TechSpot, https://www.techspot.com/news/114109-norway-wants-temporarily-ban-smart-glasses-parks-beaches.html)

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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It's not a comfort zone if it's not comfortable.

I think I slept around 17 of the last 24 hours, and I'm still tired though it was definitely a restful, deep sleep. I should have seen it coming. I do this every year when my UV intake goes up. Yet every year it takes me by surprise.

I have vague in and out impressions. There were dreams and there was hives. There was trying to do some paperwork and reading, but I just kept waking up hoping I didn't hit the wrong button. Inevitably, I gave up.

I've been awake constantly for around six hours now, and I can feel myself beginning to get pulled back under. I really need to do some more research as the sun did not always kick my ass so badly. Then again, I've always been more of the nocturnal persuasion.

I should probably just allow my body to sleep and do its healing thing before I break out into hives again. I have placed myself on a UV acclimation schedule. I am determined not to get annoyed with myself if this means much more sleeping for the next few weeks. I jokingly say that it's just balancing out all the insomnia, but I know that isn't the case. Luckily, anyone I normally communicate with knows that if I'm having sun time to expect me to crash out for a while. The burning/itching is no joke. If I have to cut my nails off again I will get annoyed.

I think that's all I have for the day. Let's see... Politics = grrrrrrr! “Humanitarian” is on equal grounds with “humane”. As in, “Look at all the thoughtless humans creating egocentric words to make themselves feel better about what rotten creatures they are.” Please stop showing MAGA thoughts on the news. They make my brain hurt. Literally. That's really all I have off the top of my head.

Nope. Must end on a positive. Let's see... I've been enjoying learning about the variety of planets being discovered. There's a “True Facts” episode out that I've not watched yet. And I'm proud of myself for...for...for...hehehe for remembering to put clothes on before opening the door to get my package in my sleepy stupor. I almost didn't. My hand was on the doorknob when I remembered my neighbor's doorcam and decided to finger-comb my hair. One point for vanity keeping my nudes from going wherever such photos go.😸

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Too tired to proof.

In Summary: * “Congratulations on winning the 1st place in the mini-tournament: for jane,” was the message waiting for me when I checked into one of my CC clubs today. That was a nice surprise. There were 11 of us of roughly equal strength playing in the “for jane” mini-tournament which started on 10 Jan. of this year and ended yesterday. We were playing with a comfortable time control of 9 days allowed per move.

I was almost as happy at that as I was when the a/c in this trailer was fixed this morning at ~11:00. Almost. The tech guy who fixed it said that they like to keep the units here running year round at a “normal” temperature of 70 degrees. I think can live with that quite happily. We'll see how my energy bill likes it.

Now I've got meds to take, prayers to do, and a college football game to listen to, and an early bedtime after that.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 212.31 lbs. * bp= 130/79 (61)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 07:40 – beef chop suey, fried rice * 11:45 – 1 peanut butter sandwich, * 12:00 – biscuits & gravy, fried chicken, apple pie

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:40 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:10 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:20 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 12:00 – lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Show, and briefly napping * 17:00 – unpacking, sorting, praying, thinking...

Chess: * 13:31 – moved in all pending CC games