write.as/jonbeckett

jonathan.beckett@gmail.com

Late yesterday evening, after floating the idea that I might go for a run in the morning, my other half hijacked the idea, and invited my daughters to go with me – to take them through the 'Couch to 5K' training programme while we're all self-isolating. She loves planning things for other people. Conversely, when she is busy you better be busy too, otherwise all sorts of displeased looks will be aimed in your general direction.

I woke with a start at 7am, when the bedside alarm-clock ripped me from a bizarre dream about the cats bringing a number of mice into the living room, and leaving them in a neat heap by my feet. I was about to stroke one of the mice when the alarm interrupted.

After gazing at the second hand sweeping around the alarm-clock face for a while, I eventually slid out of bed, pulled some shorts from a drawer, and stumbled downstairs. I met my younger daughters in the hallway, and enquired if we were still going for a run. Miss 16 immediately indicated that a second ice age might happen before she would 'go for a run', while Miss 15 shrugged, and murmured 'I suppose?'

While pulling my socks on, I asked 15 if she could ask 19 if she was coming too. Another immediate response. 'Not today'.

Five minutes later I found myself improvising a warm-up routine along the road outside the house, before setting off at a gentle jog. We did ten sets of two minutes running, one minute walking – half an hour of effort altogether. Along the way we saw the road to the nearby hotel closed off with police signs, and a remarkable lack of anybody anywhere. During the three or four kilometres we covered, we only saw three people – two elderly women out walking, and an overweight man walking his dog.

After getting home, showering, changing clothes, and feeding toast into my face, I sat down with a cup of tea to catch up on the various blogs I follow. Somehow it's lunchtime – the entire morning has vanished in a maelstrom of reading, liking, commenting, subscribing, friending, following, and all the other things you do when you fall down social internet rabbit holes.

I wonder if the inventers of the various social platforms ever imagined they would be used by so many to remain sane in such challenging times ?

Nothing spectacular happened today. The world turned once upon it's axis, it didn't rain, and I had cheese and pickle sandwiches for lunch.

Another day ticked off the calendar. Another day sitting in front of the computer. Another day answering emails. Another day gazing at code, trying to make head or tail of it.

I'm not working tomorrow, so was hoping to go out for a run first thing. I made the mistake of mentioning it at the dinner table tonight, so now I'm taking my daughters too. I have been instructed to put them through the 'Couch to 5K' programme – at least it will mean we get out of the house every few days.

I haven't done anything to do with fitness for weeks, so it will be interesting to see how I go. The first few weeks are pretty easy as far as I remember – running for two minutes, and walking for 1 minute – and repeating for half an hour. I guess I need to find the mobile app that does the timings.

Anyway. Time for an early night. I keep promising myself early nights, and then suddenly it's the early hours of the morning.

I stayed up late last night and watched TV with my eldest daughter – we watched several episodes in a row of 'Friday Night Dinner', drank tea, and ate chocolate. In a way it was a 'life hack' – my way of lifting her out of the funk she had been in throughout the day. Quite how I then managed to get up this morning is something of a mystery. I did though – I always do. Of course I have no commute to speak of at the moment.

Where a normal morning finds me rushing through a shower, a shave, and then making a packed lunch at several hundred miles an hour, recent weeks have been... different. My commute is about five steps from the bathroom to the study (or junk room). In the office, coffee is two floors away – at home, it's ten steps away.

I will admit to having a bit of a panic this morning – we had a Zoom meeting scheduled with a client, and the junk room isn't exactly photogenic. I managed to re-arrange the desk to avoid the worst of the mess behind me, and the meeting was fine – but I couldn't help gazing with some jealousy at the spartan, tidy rooms behind the others on the call. Yes, I know they probably have trashed rooms just out of camera shot, but it doesn't make me feel much better – there is no good angle in any room of our house. As I've written before – we live in a pretty good re-creation of 'The Burrow' from the Harry Potter books – with clutter, brick-a-brack, and books stacked up everywhere.

This afternoon my eldest daughter joined me, and continued on her path to learning HTML and CSS. Her eventual aim is to apply to be a 'Happiness Engineer' at Automattic, so we looked at the skills list, and she's been taking her first steps. She's building a 'Homepage', in much the same way that so many did in the late 1990s. Of course the huge advantage she has (other than a colossal book being delivered next weekend), is a Dad that has worked as a web developer for the last 25 years – I'm no teacher though, so I'm continually having to debate with myself about what I tell or show her. Hopefully the book will help.

I'm having to resist the temptation to show her my homepage – because I'll suddenly have to explain about Github, Markdown, and Jekyll. It's a bit of a nightmare really – kind of like saying to somebody that's learning French that in order to talk to the newspaper seller that they have to learn German too – and to read the newspaper, they then need to learn Spanish. At least if she DOES carry on down the Wordpress road, it restricts the things she'll need to learn – HTML, CSS, some Javascript, and a little PHP. I'm guessing installing her own Wordpress server won't hurt either – that won't be for some time yet though.

One step at a time.

After Miss 19 asked if I would be using the study/junk room to work in this week, I ran around the house like a madman this morning, making way to use the living room as temporary office. It didn't help that the kitchen, lounge, and hallway were trashed, but I somehow managed to clear everything before collapsing at the table and switching on my webcam in time for the daily company-wide catch-up session.

I'm wearing a shirt today. I've decided to actually put some effort in while working from home – to make it feel more like I'm at work – if that makes any sense. I always have a shower and brush my teeth when I get up, but I've been sitting in the study on work days in t-shirts and cargo pants. Granted, that's what I usually wear to work, but I don't know – if I do nothing different at all on work days, every day feels like the last. The only reason I usually put a shirt on is if I'm going on-site, or if a client is visiting the office.

I do wonder how many businesses will change the way they work after this self-isolation adventure – how many will realise they don't need an office, and they don't need to travel for meetings. I remember back when I used to do freelance web development work, I hardly ever met the client – they just sent me a brief, we might have a chat about it, and then I would just get on with it.

The youger girls arrived in the lounge late this morning – I asked if they might tidy their rooms up today – to cheer their Mum up when she returns later (she's at work). They're getting on with something upstairs – I'm not entirely sure what they are getting on with. Let's keep our fingers crossed, and hope they are not just jamming everything into the back of their wardrobes.

You're probably wondering why I have titled today's post 'Surrounded' – that will be because I am surrounded with bunting and inflatable messages from my youngest daughter's birthday yesterday. I still can't believe she's 15.

Today Miss Fourteen became Miss Fifteen. After wandering downstairs at about half past seven this morning, I found the younger children sitting on the couch, waiting for my arrival. After cups of tea had been made, and my other half arrived, presents and cards were opened, and we all settled into the day.

Plans had been made some days ago to have a “posh” tea party, given that we couldn't go anywhere or do anything. This roughly translated into everybody makes things, and I wash up – again, and again, and again. Afternoon tea was fun though – with sandwiches, cakes, and various teas spread across the table.

This evening I hired out the new Trolls movie, and we sat as a family and watched it together. Well – I say “we” – all of us except Miss 16, who generally makes it five minutes into any movie before retreating to her room to watch and endless stream of YouTube videos. I really can't remember the last time she sat through anything.

I do wonder about the current YouTube watching generation – their attention span appears to be shot to pieces. They don't read books, and they don't watch movies – they just watch hours of self-recorded videos of self-obsessed idiots showing off like spoiled children – apparently “famous” for behaving in such a way.

Maybe I'm just getting old. Maybe the world is changing.

Thankfully the newly crowned Miss Fifteen is made from a very different cloth than her sister – a cloth I can at least identify with.

p.s. the new Trolls movie was very good, but perhaps not as good as the first. I did laugh out loud a number of times at easter-egg jokes that flew straight over the kids heads.

I suppose there's quite a bit to unpack today – quite apart from it being 'Easter Sunday'. As an aside, if you were wondering why I have referenced 'Easter Sunday' with quote marks, it might have something to do with my lack of belief or faith in anything to do with it. It's a good excuse to buy chocolate though, so it's good in my book.

I was up fairly early this morning, and got through several coffees and a round of chocolate spread on toast before my other half arrived downstairs. The kids were of course up at the crack of dawn. I got out of the shower, wandered into the lounge, and discovered them all. Even Miss 19 was up and dressed.

'We've been waiting for you!'

Miss 16 was sitting in a nightie, holding a bag full of Easter Eggs. A selection of eggs were also standing on the dining room table with hand-written labels attached to each box. It turns out the Easter Bunny's handwriting is remarkably similar to my other half's handwriting.

Easter is remarkably calm when the kids have grown up. I still remember then running around the house doing Easter Egg hunts when they were little – excitedly gathering all manner of penny sweets into buckets, sharing them out afterwards, and then spending the rest of the day gorging on them while watching truly awful movies on TV. This year it was all over in a few minutes – Miss 16 handed out her eggs (her sisters didn't get any for anybody), and I handed out the eggs from the table.

So what else has been going on?

I was banned from the computer yesterday. Apparently I have been spending far too much time in front of the computer, so was banned from it all for the day and instructed to spend time with the kids. We ended up having a picnic outside, which really translated to half an hour sitting on a blanket, and then an hour washing up. It's funny how that happens.

Yesterday evening I hired out the movie 'Lemans 66' – the story about Ford going after Ferrari at Lemans during the mid 1960s. The movie was great, but is incredibly selective with the story it chooses to tell – erasing or revising huge swathes of history along the way. It was still good though – with Matt Damon and Christian Bale towering over the rest of the cast.

This morning, I've been tinkering.

I've more or less come up with a half-decent way forward with this whole blogging thing – at least until I think of a better way. You see – I've kind of dug an enormous hole for myself in the last however-many years – I've ended up with friends at most of the major blogging platforms. The problem with that is most people don't venture outside of the platform they are on – so unless you visit each platform, you lose touch with lots of people – and I kind of hate that. The only sensible solution is for me to be everywhere. It will require a little bit of work from me – cross-posting entries – but in reality it only takes a minute or two for each post.

I was going to title this post “Saturday Morning, 9am” – like the Simon and Garfunkel song – but that was already an hour and a half ago, so it seems a little disingenuous. After finishing the morning round of chores, I'm sitting at the dining table at the end of the lounge with my trusty laptop, listening to Scala radio drifting into the room from the Amazon Echo in the kitchen.

The sun is shining outside. I would normally cut the grass, but my other half has informed me that the bees need dandelions at the moment – so all grass cutting is banned for a few days. I read the other day that asian hornets are sweeping the country – and they prey on bees, so we need to do all we can to help them – and if that's as easy as leaving the dandelions alone, so be it.

The kids are up and about, but I've hardly seen them yet. Miss 16 appeared momentarily to fill a bowl with cereal, and I met our eldest in the kitchen while making a coffee half an hour ago. I woke fairly early this morning, checked the clock, and then fell fast asleep again – having a really bizarre dream in the process. I've had a succession of weird dreams recently. I can never quite figure out if dreams mean anything or not – I know some people attach great importance to them – I tend to view them as bits of broken memory, glued together by a mis-firing brain.

Somebody in a garden nearby is bashing something with a hammer, and it's driving me slowly insane. I have the patio doors open, so can hear every staccato smash. I wonder what they are doing, and why they are doing it ?

wp:jetpack/markdown {“source”:“This week on the podcast I talk to Stacey about blogging, writing, diaries, life, adventures, disasters, and of course her blogging journey at LiveJournal.\n\nYou can find Stacey at the following URL:\n\n* the-sharess.livejournal.com\n\nClick the link below to listen to the episode:\n\n* #14 – Stacey – The Sharess\n”} This week on the podcast I talk to Stacey about blogging, writing, diaries, life, adventures, disasters, and of course her blogging journey at LiveJournal.

You can find Stacey at the following URL:

Two factors have contributed to my recent disappearance from the internet at large. The first was the rather foolish decision to celebrate the bank holiday weekend by buying a new game for myself and my eldest daughter to play – an endlessly deep, absorbing game called “No Man's Sky”.

The second factor – this evening at least – was the sudden realisation late in the evening that I had not recorded a podcast this week.

If you were not aware, I've been recording a regular podcast for the last several months, talking to bloggers all over the world about their blogging journey – how they got started, what they write about – that kind of thing. It's really just a relaxed conversation for anwhere from half an hour to an hour, where they get to tell their story.

So yes. Tonight I figured out that it takes about two hours from end-to-end. I called up a friend via voice-chat on Facebook, and we started recording straight away.

Note to self – don't use Facebook voice chat again – it blew up on us twice – “cylon-ing” (where the latency or whatever starts to make everybody sound like robots).

Anyway. I need to get some sleep. I promise to write a half-decent blog post tomorrow – a catch up on daily life, if you will.

It's just gone 1am in the morning. I'm sitting in the junk room, and was about to go to bed, but then thought 'I haven't posted to the blog yet!', so here are some words.

The company I work for attempted to stage a pub quiz on the internet this evening – using Microsoft Teams (we use it to communicate in the office – it's rapidly taking the place of email and meetings). I'm almost sorry to say this, but Microsoft Teams is nowhere near as good as Zoom at group chats. It turns out there are good reasons why Zoom has taken the world by storm. I say 'almost sorry', but I'm not really – because we're talking about Microsoft. Oops. Did my anarchist open-source undergarments show there for a moment?

A little later in the evening – bitten by the quiz bug – I offered to play a game of Trivial Pursuit with my other half. More by luck than judgement I raced into the lead – winning five of the requisite 'cheesey bits' in short order (what DO you call the bits that go in the Trivial Pursuit counters?). Unfortunately my other half then wandered into the kitchen to make a cup of tea and a hot-cross-bun for herself – which appeared to turn the entire tide of the game.

She went from trailing by four 'cheesey bits' to almost winning in the space of twenty minutes – answering question after question correctly. In the end the effect wore off, and I stumbled over the finish line first. I honestly think it might be the first time I have beaten her in about 10 years.

I went a bit mad and had a celebratory cup of tea.