write.as/jonbeckett

Somehow there is only an hour of the working day left, and I find myself in the curious position of not having stopped at all yet. You might think – working from home – that I would be afforded all the opportunities in the world to procrastinate, but no. I'm not that clever.

After throwing a sandwich together at lunchtime, I joined a call with a colleague ahead of a stream of meetings, and ate while talking. He laughed as I ate as quickly as possible in order to talk while walking him through things on my screen.

The entire day has been a bit like that, as was yesterday.

I filed a leave request earlier for next week – meaning I'm officially “not working” while visiting my parents. Get ready for a deluge of blog posts the like of which this blog has not seen for quite some time.

I'll take the little laptop with me, and write while travelling. I have no idea how long it's battery lasts – I suppose I should check that.

(Five minutes pass while I pull the laptop out of my bag and give it a drink of electricity – it's battery is very, very flat).

The kindle is also on charge.

Guess who will begin searching out clean clothes this evening, before running the washing machine to destruction when he discovers a distinct lack of anything vaguely presentable that might have made it through the wash recently.

Oh.

In other news, I took my youngest daughter to the doctor this morning. After sleeping for two days and looking like a Dementor had paid her a visit, we decided to get her checked out. Tonsilitis. Wonderful. She's now on even more antibiotics. It's been a pretty rubbish few months for her – fingers crossed she's better soon.

It transpires that re-arranging your work schedule to fit around an unexpected visit to the coast is more possible than one might have expected. After endless meetings, discussions, and handing off of work it would appear a path has been cleared for me to board a train next weekend and disappear for a few days.

I'll need to retrieve the trusty travel case from the loft that accompanied me to Germany and back so many times. It might be an idea to purchase some train tickets too.

(Five minutes pass while I acquire said tickets via the magic of the internet)

Hopefully travelling outside the school holidays means the trains will be quieter than normal – by that I mean perhaps the chance of a seat, rather than sitting on my own luggage in the doorway of a carriage, as I have so many times in the past.

I still remember the time I took the children to visit on the train when they were young. We booked a table with four seats. When we got on the train we discovered somebody else in our seats – I showed them my ticket. Somebody else was sitting in their seats. I found them and explained. Somebody else was sitting in their seats. This went on for some time. I gave up in the end, and a kind gentleman volunteered his seat so I might sit with one of my daughters, while the other two sat on their own a short distance away.

Anyway.

Time to go make a coffee, sit down, and catch up with friends. It's been too long.

It's funny how life throws curve-balls at you from time to time, isn't it. Just as everything seems to be plodding along in a fairly straight line for a while, wallop – a pizza delivery truck slams into your daily routine.

My Dad has been in hospital for the last several days. Nothing life threatening, but enough to cause my parents to start thinking about the wisdom of living several hundred miles away from us all – or even several miles from the nearest town or village.

They live on the south coast – near a place we spent many summers when I was young. Two hundred and fifty miles away. Five hours in a car, four hours in a train and a taxi.

Given that my Dad will need time to recover, and my Mum isn't strong enough to help him around the house, my brother has travelled down today and will work from their house this week. I will travel down at the end of the week, and spend the next week with them. I'll be ordering groceries, cooking meals, tidying up – just helping really. Being there.

I've offered to take our eldest daughter with me – she's a pretty good cook, and is great at getting chores done. She hasn't made her mind up yet.

I'm not sure if it will be a holiday yet – I may well take my work laptop with me, and continue with several ongoing projects while I'm there. Plans may have to change. We'll see.

Fingers crossed the next week goes well, and he at least returns home from hospital.

I thought it might interest others to learn how I go about this whole blogging escapade. How I write, what I use, how I post – that kind of thing.

I suppose we start with an admission of sorts – I don't write in the Wordpress interface, and never have. I don't like the way web interfaces work while writing, so tend to stay away from them.

Over the past year I've flip-flopped between a number of online solutions like Evernote, Notion, and Google Docs – but invariably return to using a text editor on whichever computer I'm using and copying the text into a blog post at the last minute.

I've used Notion to help writing longer-form pieces in the past, mainly because it can be used much like Scrivener from a project management perspective (and is free!). Oh yes – I once drank the Scrivener cool-aid too. I still have a license around here somewhere.

I guess because of my software development background, I keep the text in an online repository called Github. It's really designed to store programming, but works well for writing too (software source code is just text really). Everything I have written since 2003 is stored in a series of year and month subfolders.

After writing a post I copy and paste it into Wordpress, and add a suitable photo from one of the many royalty free online respositories such as Unsplash, or Pexels.

After clicking the publish button the post appears on Wordpress, and a final piece of magic happens – I have a Zapier automation job (Zapier is free too) that notices the post arrive at Wordpress, and creates the same post at Tumblr for me. I also use Zapier to replicate Instagram photos into Twitter. It's very good.

Oh – I nearly forgot. I post a link to whatever I've just written to Twitter (when I remember). I don't think it really does any good, but at least it keeps the Twitter account ticking over, and continues to pollute the twittersphere with my idiocy.

So there you go. I write in a text editor. I almost always have done. I just find it easier. I suppose living outside of the browser has advantages too – you have less distrations, and can just get on with writing.

It's all about writing really, isn't it. And reading.

I'm grabbing a few minutes from my day to empty my head into the keyboard. If I don't do it now, something will crop up, and it won't happen.

Work has been busy this week – and while it helps to make the working day fly past, it's also pretty draining. Thinking on your feet all day writing source code, responding to emails, and having endless technical conversations leaves very little of you by the end of the day.

I can't remember the last time I talked to any friends – either online, or otherwise.

It's funny – while I might occasionally think of myself as a boat of sorts – floating along and bumping into other boats along the way, sometimes I notice other people living their life – getting on – making their way in the world – and kind of feel a bit left out. I guess everybody feels it from time to time.

Maybe it's the time of year. Maybe when the sun comes out, and I wander down to the park in the centre of town for a coffee my thoughts will turn around. For the moment though, life seems tremendously narrow.

Maybe I just need to get out there running again.

After consistently responding to writing prompts for twenty two days, I'm stepping away from the Bloganuary writing challenge today. Life and other commitments are stacking up around me – it's becoming increasingly difficult to find time for it.

I also miss writing about life in general. This blog has always been the story of “me” – the daily hum-drum thoughts, stories, ideas and happenings. Responding to writing prompts makes it all a little bit abstract and detached.

Anyway.

It's Monday morning, heading towards lunchtime at the time of writing, and you find me sitting in the dark of the junk room in front of my work computer, having a coffee break. A jazz cafe playlist is playing on the big speaker in the window via the wonders of Bluetooth. The bullet journal sits alongside me, scribbled with the morning's meetings.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned recently – I've been plugging away at building a presence on Youtube in recent months – recording videos late at night with a flight simulator to help others. It's become popular enough to qualify for monetisation, and proven to be more profitable than writing – which I suppose is no surprise, given the ease of watching a Youtube video versus reading a lengthy article at the likes of Medium. The revenue generating tail of videos also appears to be enormously long. Who knew?

I have another meeting in a few minutes – time to draw this post to a close. I'll try to catch up with the blogs I (try to) follow in the coming days.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “What is your favourite quote and why?”

---

My favourite quote of all time is the tagline of my blog – “it's turtles, all the way down”.

It supposedly comes from an audience member of a lecture given by William James – which the quote almost certainly pre-dates, but it's a nice story, so I'll repeat it here:

After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.

“Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory,” said the little old lady.

“And what is that, madam?” inquired James politely.

“That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle.”

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

“If your theory is correct, madam,” he asked, “what does this turtle stand on?”

“You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question,” replied the little old lady, “but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him.”

“But what does this second turtle stand on?” persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,

“It's no use, Mr. James—it's turtles all the way down.”

If you read a little further about the history of the quote, it's obviously a re-framed version of an ancient question about the origin of things – that you can always argue that something came before. Even those with a religious bent struggle to explain what created god – and divorce themselves of all logic in event attempting to do so.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “If you could, what year would you time travel to, and why?”

---

I imagine we have to ignore the conservation of mass law if we're going to consider time-travel as a valid possibility? Have you ever thought about it? If you go back in time, you are potentially there in parallel with yourself – so the mass of atoms you comprise of just got multiplied – how did that happen? It's not you plus the version of you from the future, because the version of you from the future IS you.

I suppose we're also going to ignore the butterfly effect – the combinatorial explosion that happens in response to even the tiniest things we might do to affect the past while there. I remember reading a wonderful book called “Golden Apples of the Sun” by Ray Bradbury years ago – that gave rise to the term “Butterfly Effect”. A man goes on a time travel journey into the distant past� and is warned to stay on the path, lest the future be altered. Quite how they built the path is another thing, but of course he strays from the path and steps on a butterfly. When he returns to the present, the first thing he notices is some of the letters of the alphabet are now reversed on signs.

Anyway.

I guess we're going to pick something that happened in popular culture, and go into the past to watch it happen. Something significant. That turns us into Sam Beckett in a strange sort of way, doesn't it.

Let's go with the first person that springs to mind – the first celebrity I wish I could have met. It's got to be Marilyn Monroe. I'm not quite sure when I would have liked to meet her though – before she was famous, during her fame, or towards the end?

Wouldn't it be fascinating to be at the scene of a significant event unfolding, with full knowledge of what was about to happen, and to redirect history in the most subtle of ways. Perhaps to be wandering on the beach on the same night Marilyn took photos with George Barris – to make friends, go for a coffee, and just be there at the same time everybody else was trying to take a piece of her. To support her. To look over our shoulder at the future with a raised eyebrow, and say “not this time”.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “What is your favourite photo you've ever taken?”

---

About fourteen years ago now our long journey towards adoption was completed, and we went from a family of two to a family of five overnight.

In the weeks and months that followed we were repeatedly asked by family and friends for photos. One day – in-between watching Dora the Explorer, doing jigsaws, running around the garden, and completing the endless chores that children bring about, I managed to sit the children down for long enough to take a half-decent photo.

It's always been a favourite.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “Write about something mysterious.”

---

Many years ago – back when I was an impressionable young man, and the internet was still in it's youth, there was a thing called “Usenet”, that latterly became known as “Newsgroups”. Although they still exist, most people forgot about them long ago – they were the predecessor of the social communities we now find on the world wide web (and far better in many respects).

If you started digging through the posts in particular usenet discussion groups, you would turn up all sorts of outlandish tales about lizard men, caves connecting various countries, the Vernian “Hollow Earth” concept, and even the “Flat Earth Society”. You would also read about crashed flying saucers, secret government projects, and encounters with the little grey men with almond shape eyes that have entered modern folklore.

Here's the thing – there's no smoke without fire.

In the years since reading the almost certainly fabricated usenet hyperbole, bits and pieces of it have become factual. Townsend Brown really did work on magnetic propulsion, and his work really was classified above top secret – as was much of the work of Nicola Tesla. Jessie Marcel really did talk about the child sized coffins at Roswell when he was terminally ill with cancer. Why did a weather balloon need coffins?

Perhaps the most amusing story in recent times surrounds the moment when Jessie Marcel was thrown under the bus by his superiors at Roswell – forced to show newspaper reporters the remains of a weather balloon. His superior officer sits in the background of the photograph with a folded teletypewriter printout in his hand. In the same way that government ministers are often caught with paperwork by long lenses, the tin-hat brigade of conspiracy theorists have had a good go at figuring out what was written on the piece of paper in his hand. It makes very interesting reading.

I've probably forgotten more than I ever knew about this whole subject. I guess like most people, I got older, and more cynical about everything. Given that a huge proportion of the planet now have mobile phones with excellent cameras, you might imagine something would have been recorded by now – and yet the more surveillance technology we have, the more scarce stories become of lights in the sky.

I'll end this post with an entirely coincidental story – did you know the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was given a private screening at the White House ?