write.as/jonbeckett

You might wonder, after posting somewhere in the region of five thousand times to this blog over the last seventeen years, if I might ever run out of things to write about. I wonder about the same thing – more regularly than you might imagine.

I suppose somewhere along the way I realised that while we have so much in common with each other, we also differ in countless ways – and those differences are endlessly fascinating. Here's the thing though – sometimes we cross paths with people we share so much in common with, we begin wondering about causality – about fate.

Do we subconsciously seek each other out among the crowd, or do the cogs of the universe turn us inexorably towards each other?

I feel lucky to count one or two chance encounters over the years where the whimsical part of my brain has begun to suspect involvement from the universe – but then the rational part lurches into action, and reminds me that we are all making it up as we go along – and that we are all experts at interpreting meaning from chaos. We're built that way, whether we like it or not.

It's worth reminding ourselves that the same specialisations that afford us the ability to recognise a friend at a distance by their walk, or by the way shadows fall across their face are also responsible for seeing monsters in shadows.

How can we be so similar? How can it be chance? This must have been predetermined.

Where am I going with this? Maybe towards pragmatism of a sort. While we can chase down blind alleyways in attempts to pick apart the workings of the universe in pursuit of the “how” and “why”, it sometimes feels like doing so might cause us to forget to live.

While listening to the radio in the kitchen last night, “Sitting Down Here” by Lene Marlin began playing, and I've been humming it ever since. I remember the album being released – in the autumn of 1999. I'm fairly sure I ripped the album to MP3 files, and played it via a wonderful piece of software called WinAmp.

Anyway.

While making a coffee earlier, I began humming it again – and thinking about this blog – and something occurred to me. I'm sitting down here, on my own, away from most of the “social internet”. My writing has lived at Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr over the last few years – for a long time I played the game – unwittingly chasing follows, likes, and comments – just like everybody else. Until I didn't any more, and I'm not really sure why.

I suppose in some ways I'm just happy to sit here now, and post my words. Yes, it's nice if a few people read them from time to time, but the words are not here for others – they are here because I want them to be. I'm not saying that the big social platforms are bad – just that I feel no need to use them any more.

Maybe it's connected to age. When you're younger there's often a desire to fit in – or at least there was for me. As I've gotten older I've cared less about what other people think of me. You might call it confidence I suppose. I have nothing to prove to anybody any more – I am quite happy being me.

It's a funny thing though – accepting yourself, or others. I would be the first to hold my hands up and admit to doing stupid things in the past – to doing things I'm not proud of – but I also think too many people get hung up on “being a saint”, and judging others against unrealistic expectations. We're all human. As much as we might not want to be at times, we are all square pegs – some of us are just better at pretending to be round pegs for the majority of the time.

I'm not sure this post is really going anywhere in particular. It's going somewhere. Perhaps that's enough. One footstep at a time.

I worked from home today. I didn't set out to work from home. After cycling to work, a call from my eldest daughter mid-morning about the internet connection dropping out at home resulted in an about turn, packing my laptop into my backpack, and cycling home again.

I found the problem, and fixed it. I've tried to prevent it from happening again in the near future, but we'll see how it goes. At some point I have to call the internet service provider and tell them that the master socket into the house is dead. Again.

It feels like my entire life is going sideways at the moment. I'm not sure why. Not forwards, not backwards – just sideways. Maybe going sideways from time to time helps – it often seems to me that people become obsessed with either falling behind, or making progress – somewhere along the way they forget to live.

This morning I got up bright and early, woke our eldest daughter with a bacon sandwich, and then set off for the railway station with her to spend the day wandering around London together. We had no particular reason to go – no plan as such – just a day out exploring, and following our noses.

We left on an early train, and arrived in London a little under an hour later. Instead of diving straight into the Underground for the city as we normally might, we left Paddington for the bustling streets outside, and picked our way through to the corner of Hyde Park, which seemed to be swarming with groups of runners.

A few minutes later – after wandering around the fountains in the corner of the park, we started along the side of the Serpentine, in search of the statue of Peter Pan, commissioned by J M Barrie. It's one of my favorite sculptures – there's just something about it.

Over the course of the next hour we made our way across Hyde Park – stopping for a coffee near the Princess Diana memorial, and then finally exiting at the huge statue of Achilles at Hyde Park Corner. I have to admit I had never noticed the statue before – and yet it's been there since 1822 – and is absolutely gigantic. I think that says something about my powers of observation.

Throughout the day we wandered all over the place – along Piccadilly, through Leicester Square, then Shaftesbury Avenue and “Forbidden Planet” – the biggest comic book shop in the country – and finally to South Kensington and the Victoria and Albert Museum, before heading home. We might have visited M&M World at Leicester Square – I shared mine with the younger children when we got home.

I was a little annoyed that the Mary Quant exhibition at the V&A was private (ticketed – costing quite a bit each – we couldn't afford it) – but we didn't really set out to visit it, so didn't get too disappointed. I told Miss 19 a little bit about the impact Mary Quant had on fashion, but shut up pretty quickly. I'm becoming ever more aware of when I'm “Dadsplaining”...

It was a long and tiring day, but it was good.

Oh – I nearly lost my bag at lunchtime after leaving it on the back of a chair in a cafe, but luckily the staff found it and kept it behind the counter. Their smiles at my relief when I described it to them, and they lifted it into view was really quite wonderful.

I think I've earned a lie-in tomorrow morning.

p.s. there are lots of photos taken throughout the day at Instagram [https://instagram.com/jonbeckett].

wp:heading Blogging

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/wp:heading I'm still out here. For those that thought I had vanished entirely from the internet maelstrom, for the last several weeks I have been quietly posting to jonbeckett.com – links below:

wp:rss {“feedURL”:“https:\/\/jonbeckett.com\/rss\/“,“displayDate”:true} / You can subscribe to the blog via email.

wp:heading Podcasting

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/wp:heading I have also started recording a podcast – where I talk to bloggers each week about their journey on the internet. It is posted to anchor.fm every Friday, and then shared out across Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, and even Facebook. Here are some recent episodes:

wp:rss {“feedURL”:“https:\/\/anchor.fm\/s\/141c870c\/podcast\/rss”,“displayDate”:true} /

While recording conversations with bloggers for the podcast, a common theme in the hours or minutes before we get started always seems to be:

“I'm really nervous – I hope I don't mess this up”

Followed a little while later by:

“I really enjoyed that – I was nervous at the start, but then forgot all about it”.

Here's the thing – although the people I'm recording with think they are nervous, I have news for them – I'm nervous too. Although it might not come across in blog posts, or in the talky bits at the beginning and end of the podcast episodes, I was cripplingly shy when I was little, and a part of that has never left me.

I guess – like most other people – I figured out how to pretend – how to fool myself into sounding confident. I talked to a rugby referee recently, about our middle daughter's journey as a referee, and he said something that stuck in my head:

“It really doesn't matter if you're not sure about something – as long as it sounds like you're sure about it, and you remain consistent”.

Thankfully I seem to have cracked the whole “sounding like I know what I'm doing” thing. Of course I really have no clue, but the listener or reader doesn't know that. If I ever face a moment of self doubt these days, I remind myself that everybody else is making it up as they go along too.

After spending the greater part of the day working through changes to the leviathan I have been working on for the last several years, I cycled home through the bitter cold just in time to cross paths with my younger daughters who were heading out to rugby practice with their Mum.

After cooking some pasta, and adding it to the sausage casserole waiting on top of the cooker, I ate with my eldest daughter and looked for something easy going to watch on the television. We ended up watching the first episode of “Gavin and Stacey” – a comedy series that I somehow missed when first broadcast.

I'm not quite sure how that works – how if you miss a few episodes of something, you somehow fall out of it's sphere of influence, and then find yourself on a parallel track compared to the rest of the world. Of course it's not really “the rest of the world”, but it feels like it sometimes.

Afterwards I sat down at the computer in the junk room, plugged in the new microphone, and got ready to record a new episode for the podcast. It will go out on Friday evening, if you're looking for something interesting to listen to. I'm starting to wonder if podcasting might be my “thing”, and that blogging was the thing that takes me to the thing. I'm probably making no sense at all. Maybe recording the podcast just feels exciting because it's new. I was probably excited about posting to a blog when I first started – after five thousand posts, it's become a little more like exhaling, rather than inhaling.

I'm sure Nora Ephron would approve.

I went for a run this evening with Miss 19. Actually, “run” is something of an exaggeration. It was more of a slow jog – or a fast amble perhaps. While it would be nice to think it had anything to do with fitness, it probably had more to do with mental health. At least we got out of the house though, right?

The stock photo accompanying this post isn't entirely accurate either – but I couldn't find one of a hassled father with his daughter running in rain sodden streets, in the dark, while trying not to get run over by lunatics racing home from work.

Within seconds of leaving the house I stood in a ginormous puddle – which made one foot weigh twice as much as the other. Miss 19 cackled uproariously at me. She's so supportive.

To celebrate “doing something”, I came home, ate a pizza, and poured myself a glass of cider – more than obliterating any good done by running/jogging/ambling in a hurry.

And now somehow it's 11pm. How does that happen ?

We are now a little way into the podcasting adventure, and I thought it might be interesting to expand a little on the learning curve I have mentioned a few times. Although I knew how to plug a microphone into the computer, I really had no clue about anything beyond that. It turns out there was quite a lot to learn.

My first purchase was a condenser microphone on an arm that could be bolted to the desk, and swung into position as you often see in radio studios. It turns out this was a mistake – but it took me a week to figure out why. I'll explain why later. The microphone does look very lovely though – and was very inexpensive.

After plugging in the microphone, I realised I would need some software to record my inane babble, and turn it into something people could download. I installed “Audacity”, a program my children had used at school to mess around with sound. After tinkering for a little while I figured out how to record, and how to wield an imaginary pair of scissors to cut out coughs, “urrrs”, and “ummms”.

While Audacity was great, and just about worked for the first episode (ridiculously titled “Episode Zero”), I knew there had to be a better way of editing, and fiddling with the sound – partly because I grew up in a house filled with music keyboards and sequencing software, and partly because one of my friends composes and records his own digital music, and often shows me the latest production software.

I needed a “DAW” – or rather, a “Digital Audio Workstation”. It's a piece of software that lets you mix together multiple recorded tracks of audio into a complete whole – with a virtual mixing desk stretching across the screen, replete with dials, knobs, sliders, and various needles bobbing around in meters. You go from “Billy No Mates sitting in the junk room” to “Benny Andersson sitting in the studio”.

I found a wonderful free piece of software called “Cakewalk” that ticked every box, and then some. There was only one problem – I had no idea how it worked, or how you were supposed to use such a leviathan. Enter my friend from work from stage left again. One lunchtime he sat with me, and showed me just enough to get me from “clueless knob twiddling” to “more by luck than judgement”.

So – now I could record myself, and make myself sound vaguely human in a recording. Given that I wanted to record a podcast, the next problem was how to record somebody else at the same time. After a little googling, I came up with another free (and really quite wonderful) piece of software called “VoiceMeeter”. It's officially designated as “donation-ware”, so I will be donating soon. It's worth it. It took me hours and hours to figure out.

There are three versions of VoiceMeeter available – the most capable is called “Potato”. Don't ask me why – the previous version was called “Banana”. It probably makes sense to somebody. VoiceMeeter lets you do all sorts of things – such as grabbing the sound from the microphone, and mixing it with the sound coming from Skype. You can then fiddle with the volume levels of the various sources, and route the result into your recording software.

So. I had seemingly figured everything out – and recorded the first two “real” episodes over the course of the next week – the first with my eldest daughter, and the second with a blogging friend on the other side of the world.

There was a problem though. Hiss.

I had bought an analogue microphone. I couldn't understand why the microphone was very quiet, no matter what I did in terms of recording volume levels. It took an age to realise that “real” microphones – such as the one I had bought – are expected to be plugged into a “pre-amplifier” before being routed into the device that records them. They are quiet by design. Not long afterwards I found a setting in the sound card of the computer to boost the volume of the microphone significantly – and unfortunately this brought hiss with it. I'm guessing most of the hiss is being caused by the sound-hardware in the computer itself – being interfered with by the rest of the hardware inside the box.

Over the course of several nights, I experimented with all manner of methods to remove the hiss – mostly revolving around “noise reduction” effects in the recording software. While I could get rid of the hiss, it also affected the recorded voices quite significantly – introducing phasing effects on the sound, and occasional digital artifacts.

After describing the problem to my all-knowing co-worker, he suggested I buy a pre-amp for the microphone. I could pick one up for 50 second-hand on E-Bay. If I had 50 spare, I might have followed his advice. Instead, I decided to go another route.

Last night I ordered a USB microphone from Amazon. Had I known what I needed at the beginning, I would have saved myself some money. For 20, I have solved all of my recording issues. It records voices perfectly within perhaps a meter before the levels start to drop, and at rest records silence. I can now sit at my desk, and relax into the conversations with those I'm talking to around the world – secure in the knowledge that what's being recorded is about as good as it will get without spending an exponentially larger amount of money on hardware, and soundproofing the room.

The new microphone is a “Yanmai SF-777”, if you're looking to solve the same problem as me on a tight budget. It came with a good quality tripod stand, and a pop filter – to stop breathy noises being recorded (“plosives” – see, I'm learning!).

It's worth noting that I already had some USB microphones. When the girls were younger, they had a number of singing video games – where you follow along with a variety of pop-songs on the TV, and get scored on how well you followed along. I thought those microphones might work as a good fall-back, but it turned out to be a false hope – they are designed to be held against your mouth – or at least held in a microphone stand. If you move your hands at all while talking into them, you can hear the clunking and crunching sounds moving through their body.

I have no excuses any more – and the focus is rapidly turning towards who to record conversations with, and when. I'm also thinking about perhaps expanding the podcast a little – to do more than just conversations with bloggers. I'm thinking a few episodes about the history of blogging might be fun too – to talk about the various platforms – their history, how they work, how much they cost, and where they are headed. I need to get talking first though.

I watched the movie “Fisherman's Friends” this evening – about the group of Cornish fisherman that recorded an album of sea shanties a few years ago, that unexpectedly stormed the charts.

I'm not ashamed to admit there were more than a few tears. I swear – as I get older, movies have found out all of my keys. It can be the smallest of human interactions within a story – and yet I find myself quietly falling apart.

From the “Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society”, to “This Beautiful Fantastic”, and now “Fisherman's Friends” – movies seem to have found all the keys to undo me.

I'm not listening to the fishermen singing now – honest – I might have been a few minutes earlier though. At the moment, while sitting in the dark of the junk room, Don Henley is singing “In a New York Minute”.

I'm writing this after jumping down an internet rabbit hole with my eldest daughter – telling her the story of Blondie forming a punk band in New York, and being picked up by a record label without knowing how to sing a note or play an instrument. I played her “Union City Blue” as an example of the “finished product”, and got told off for turning the volume up too loud.

Yes, my 19 year old daughter told me off for playing Blondie too loud.