write.as/jonbeckett

I have been waiting most of the day for something sizeable to download from the internet. If our internet connection was behaving itself, I imagine it would have finished downloading quite some time ago (an engineer from the telephone company is visiting our house tomorrow morning to find out why).

I passed the time a little earlier by reading a graphic novel that's not even on my 'to read this year' list – 'Lumberjanes' – originally bought for our younger daughters a couple of years ago. They didn't show much interest in it, so it got subsumed into my own collection of books in the junk room – along with all the indie titles I have collected in recent years. It's funny – I started out only interested in comic book artwork, by the likes of Adam Hughes, Alex Ross, and Amanda Conner – but then started reading a few of them, and got sucked in. Until recent years the only graphic novels I had ever read were the Tank Girl books – probably 20 years ago now – before Jamie Hewlett went on to draw the graphics for Gorillaz, and the Winter Olympics.

I now find myself at a loose end – hence yet another blog post about nothing in particular. I should re-title the blog 'Nothing in Particular'. I could win awards for the most inconsequential content, or the least effort expended. Back in the day everybody and their dog had badges all over the blog, advertising the community awards that had been bestowed up on them. If memory serves, almost all awards were pyramid traffic schemes dressed up as awards.

While on the subject of pyramid traffic schemes, a 'hoo-haa' of sorts has been brewing on Twitter over the last few days, and it's quite entertaining in a 'can't stop watching' sort of way. I need to explain some things first though – bear with me.

On Twitter, a number of people have started including the hashtag '#WritingCommunity' in posts they want other writers to see, and perhaps comment on. This has created a belt-and-braces group functionality of sorts within the Twittersphere, with people watching search results related to the hashtag as a simple means of creating a 'channel'. Anyway. Within the group, there seems to be a mania among some to attract as many followers to themselves as possible – they dress this up as a thing called '#writerlift', and link a number of accounts to the post, with instructions to follow and/or re-share the list. There's only one problem with this idea – it's against the Twitter terms of service – terms as 'encouraging reciprocal following' (or words to that effect).

So – when the news broke that Twitter had started reprimanding people for their behaviour (spamming the crap out of the system while chasing higher and higher follower numbers), a small number of very vocal people became ever so slightly enraged that the FREE platform they were taking advantage of should be questioning their behaviour at all – and reacted really quite badly (read: amusingly, and somewhat predictably). I have therefore been sitting quietly on a nearby fence for the last few days, eating popcorn, and enjoying all the butt-hurt posts.

It's a storm in a tea-cup really, but an entertaining one. There are far more important things going on in the world right now – you know, like the US President almost declaring war on Iran. I saw a wonderful post on Facebook earlier – 'hang on while I go and catch up on the expert analysis of world events being published by the people Facebook knows I went to school with'...

I cycled to work this morning, and it was raining yet again. I can't help feeling that I'm living in some kind of Truman Show inspired hell, where rain clouds follow me around. It would also explain the bizarre phenomenon where I walk up to a road junction, and non player character cars appear from every direction to prevent me from crossing – even my daughters have started to notice it.

Just in case you're wondering, I have little of consequence to share today – but I'm certainly not going to let that stop me from posting something. It's strange really – after you've posted every day for a good number of consecutive days, it turns into a sort of mania. Of course nothing will happen if I don't post anything (apart from the world not being blessed with yet more pollution of the internet at my idiotic hands), but I'll know I haven't posted anything. I can almost hear the school teacher in my head castigating me – “you've let yourself down, you've let your blog down...”

Glancing at the clock, I have thirteen minutes until I need to hit the publish button. I'm not sure I have thirteen minutes worth of content hanging around in the darker corners of my absent mind.

Perhaps it might be wise to finish the post right here, and admit defeat for a change. These words still count though, right? This is still a post? I mean – it isn't about anything, but it's still a post. Granted – if this is the first post you've discovered by me, you're not likely to come back, but it still counts, right? (actually, thinking about it, the other four and a half thousand posts don't really elevate themselves much above this one either).

I just got sucked into watching a YouTuber who's entire career seems to consist of bashing anything and everything anybody does – and they have somehow become internet-famous through doing it (although “famous” is of course a relative term). I can imagine when they started out it was the typical reactionary bullshit that most kids spout in their mid-to-late teens. Now they are in their mid-to-late 20s? Not so much.

How can I get the last half hour of my life back?

In other news, I returned to work today. I sometimes wish I could tell you about some of the projects I work on, because they're sometimes interesting (yes, I know – “for a given value of interesting”). My family never ask what I have been up to during the day – not because they wouldn't understand – more because they are not interested. At all. As far as they are concerned, I dick around with computers all day. And that's why I got a phone call at 5pm, asking why the internet might not be working.

“Oh, hang on – I'll just wave my Doctor Strange ring at the wall, and step into our back room”.

And no, I didn't say that. I actually said:

“Is the phone line crackling?”

“Yes”

“Then the cat has probably peed on the broadband socket again.”

Yes – our entire online existence has been reduced to a dependency on an incontinent cat. Actually, that's unfair. He's a cat, and we all know cats are assholes, don't we. He probably followed cat logic, which determined something like “oh, that guy that feeds us EVERY MORNING also looks after the computers in the house – you know – like the Chromebook the female one uses all evening instead of letting us sit on her lap. WE MUST STOP THE CHROMEBOOK”. The cat then spent several years studying our behaviour, and determined that the source of the Chromebook's unbending power comes from the plugsocket by the front-door. What better way to disable the internet than pee on it.

It would be funny if it wasn't true.

Now we have a telephone engineer coming out on Monday (I'll have to work from home AGAIN), and I'll have to try and clean the hallway sufficiently that he doesn't discover our CAT PEED ON THE WALL SOCKET, and charge us for it.

Being fair, the nice Indian man on the telephone support line did explain that most broadband faults occur between the house and the exchange. I didn't tell him about the cat though.

Now if you'll excuse me, there's a TV programme I've been waiting to watch all evening – a new BBC adaptation of Dracula. I'll be the one hiding behind a cushion in the corner of the lounge.

It's the first day of a new year. The first day of a new decade. You might think I would have invested some considerable effort in a thought provoking stream of consciousness about the direction my life has taken over the past twelve months, and the direction it might take in the future.

You want the truth? I can't be bothered.

Maybe I'm a bit frustrated that I sat down to write a few thoughts several times throughout the day, and didn't do anything of the sort. It's almost like distractions surround me when I try to do anything worthy – lining up, grinning at my pathetic efforts to ignore them. You end up getting this scribbled commentary written late in the evening to avoid nothing getting posted today – because of course the world will stop turning if I miss a day – a lynch mob will form outside the front door – chanting something literary towards the house to raise the spirits of writers who actually wrote something of consequence.

Ok. I'll stop it now. There's only so much sarcasm you can fill into a paragraph worth of ranting.

It's been a good new year. We visited friends yesterday evening to see the new year in together, and then invited quite a few more over to our house this evening for a drink, and to help up finish the various food we have had stacked in the cupboards.

My liver is not thanking me.

While making a coffee this afternoon, our eldest daughter asked if I had any new year's resolutions. I didn't have to think:

“None”

“What do you mean? None? There's nothing you want to do?”

“I don't really DO resolutions – but maybe I have some hopes. Maybe I hope to just get through the next year without too much drama.”

It's not too much to hope for, is it?

Tomorrow morning I'm back in the office. I imagine most of the day will be filled with preparing everything for the coming months – arranging schedules, putting plans in place – that sort of thing. In a strange sort of way I'm glad to be getting out of the house.

Anyway. Happy New Year to you and yours. Let's hope we are all headed into a future filled with as little drama as possible, and let's hope I manage to walk past a few more bookshops without buying anything.

It's the final day of the year. The final day of the decade. I'm not sure if the sentiment is shared by others, but I can't help feeling a little bemused by the fuss people make about milestone dates – particularly when the milestones are invented.

The only reason we mark years, months, and days is because somebody thought the sun went round the earth – put up there to amuse us by our creator. Because OF COURSE a supernatural creator figure created us in his own image on this ball of mud, and hung all the dangly lights in the sky around us purely to entertain us. Just like he left stone carvings of bones half-way up cliffs so winter storms would make them fall out, and encourage us to gaze in wonder at the magic of his cleverness.

Yeah. Right. Anyway. Got a bit sidetracked there.

The only reason I can find that we mark the endings of years is because we do. The point at which we mark the year is hilariously arbitrary – given that each continent experiences what we call the seasons at different times than each other.

I wonder how flat-earthers explain the seasons ?

Anyway.

Tonight is the last night of the past decade – also known as Tuesday. Tomorrow is the first day of the next decade – also known as Wednesday. It's all a bit mad, isn't it.

While preparing to bring my Christmas vacation to a screeching halt last night, and thinking through what I might need to prepare in terms of bike helmet, waterproofs, backpack, and so on, a thought occurred to me. After logging into my work email account, and working backwards through the last two weeks, I found the spreadsheet that had been copied around detailing who was working on which days. The notes accompanying the table of days and names made me smile – “the office will be closed until the 2nd January”. So here I am – working from home.

I'm holed up in the junk room – sometimes referred to as “the study” when I want to feel better about it. I'm listening to Spotify, sipping coffee, and doing some housekeeping of email, time-sheets, and outstanding research projects. Evernote may even see a spring cleaning of the technical notes that have hidden within it's bowels for the last several years.

It always feels a little strange – working from home. Even though my co-workers are similarly holed up in their own houses, and only a voice chat away, it's not the same as sitting across the room from them. I guess some might see that as a good thing.

The new bullet journal is sitting on the desk next to me – waiting to be filled with all manner of lists. I kept the bullet journal pretty strictly targeted at work last year, and only ended up filling half of it's pages – this year I'm going to try using it for more things. I'm not entirely sure what those things might be yet – I guess the secret will be to remain open to how I might use it, rather than plan anything too much.

Anyway. It's nearly lunchtime. How did that happen ?

Did I mention that the record player arrived yesterday? The speakers for it arrived today – I re-arranged the lounge slightly, and wired it up before my other half appeared downstairs. While I was busy helping the kids with something, she took a photo of the record player and posted it to Facebook – “look what I got for Christmas!”.

It was supposed to be for everybody.

The speakers are wonderful – the record player not so much. I'm probably going to have to buy a little graphic equaliser to balance the sound from it – I suppose you get what you pay for when it comes to turntables and styluses.

A little later in the day a second parcel arrived from Amazon – an “Echo Dot”. After dinner this evening I set about figuring it out, and was surprised to discover it was already configured for our house. I don't know what kind of insane networking lunacy Amazon pull to allow that, but it made my job very straightforward. After a few moments searching the internet, I set it up with the job it will have forever:

“Alexa – set an alarm for 7am every weekday playing the local radio station”

Amazon are crafty – when I bought the Dot, they offered to sell me some lightbulbs that work with it. How lazy can you get – “Alexa – turn the lights off”... I didn't buy them (mainly because they cost five times as much as a normal lightbulb).

What else has been going on today? Board games. Lots of board games.

I got sucked into playing several rounds of “7 Wonders” earlier – the game I bought the family for Christmas. It's pretty good – it takes perhaps half an hour to play a game with the five of us. I can see it getting repetitive though – you wouldn't play it every day.

Late last night I fell down an internet rabbit hole and ended up looking at a board game called “Gloomhaven” – or rather, a YouTube review of it. I really shouldn't have looked. It costs a fortune, is gigantic, but is widely regarded as one of the best boardgames ever made. Also – if I end up playing boardgames all the time, I'll never get through the books I'm hoping to read over the coming year.

I filled out a page in the new bullet journal earlier – with a list of all the books I own but have not finished reading. I've started a few of them, but there are several I've not even opened. I need to knuckle down this year – I've been promising myself to read more for the last several years, but something always ends up stomping on my free time (often of my own invention).

The first book on the list is a graphic novel called “This One Summer” – which I could probably read in an afternoon.

Talking of afternoons, some friends are coming over tomorrow to play boardgames with us, to eat rubbish, and to drink too much. You start to see why I never get around to reading anything, don't you...

It's the day after Boxing Day, the clock is ticking towards 10am, and I was supposed to be going out for a run this morning with my eldest daughter. She is still asleep in bed.

I have busied myself with chores for the last hour – taking rubbish out, washing up, feeding animals. I was planning on quietly sitting and emptying my head into a long and meandering blog post, but of course life happened – as it always does. My other half arrived downstairs, cups of tea were made, lectures about strategies to get through the next few days unfolded, and now the ideas that might have been poured into the keyboard have gone.

Life often feels like the enemy of creativity. Not the exciting side of life – the adventures and discoveries – more the humdrum side of life – chores, parenting, worrying, and so on. If you play “back-stop” for long enough with your family, it becomes all you do, all you think about, and all you know. While walking into town with the children (even though they are all teenagers now), I find myself naturally falling to the back – both to make sure I don't wander off ahead, and to make sure we haven't lost anybody along the way.

“I've got your back” becomes something you do, rather than a mantra, or a goal. Others see it as worthy, you see it as your job.

Anyway.

Today is an exciting day. We have bought a record player! With a little luck it will arrive during the day. In the corner of our lounge, we still have the “Hi-Fi” that I bought when I was about twenty years old. It has twin tape decks, a CD player, a radio tuner, and a turntable added to it. After buying my other half a vinyl record for Christmas, we were somewhat dismayed to discover that the turntable plays songs about 5% too fast – just enough to make your favourite recording artist sound like a smurf. There is also the observation that we have not owned any CDs for the last several years (we sold them all), and have not even seen a cassette tape since we last cleared the loft out, and found a few mix tapes from the mid 1980s in the bottom of a box.

There is something about vinyl records. When you buy one, it really feels like you have bought “something”. Take the album I bought my other half for Christmas – it's a gate-fold album, with two discs, covered in artwork, photos, and of course the sleeves around the discs have the lyrics to all the songs printed on them. You get none of this with a downloaded song from Spotify or Amazon Music – you get nothing to sit and hold in your lap while listening (although I guess you can hold your phone while listening to Spotify, but that just leads to falling down Twitter rabbit holes, and starting arguments with strangers, rather than concentrating on what you're listening to).

The record player is one of these modern portable ones, that looks like a wooden packing case. A modern take on a “Dansette”. I imagine anybody born after the mid 1970s won't have a clue what a Dansette is. My parents generation (the mighty 1960s teenagers) all had variations on a particular design of self-contained record player that typically got handed down to their children after spending twenty years in the attic. I inherited my Uncle's when my Nan had a clear-out, along with a collection of novelty records that my Uncles and Aunts had left behind when they left home. Memories abound of Alvin and the Chipmunks, Harry Belafonte, Bernard Breslaw, and numerous songs from musicals.

Tomorrow the postman will hopefully deliver a set of speakers to go with the record player – which apparently will play Bluetooth as well as wired sources. Rather than tuck the record player away in the corner of the room, we are going to move it next to the television, in the hope that music will be played in the house once more, rather than leaving the television on all evening. My other half still has her collection of vinyl albums from her teenage years – covering everything from Queen, to the Smiths, the Stone Roses, Wham, Adam and the Ants, and more. No doubt the kids will eye-roll spectacularly when “Prince Charming” comes belting out (on purpose) when they have friends round.

Oh – one more thing – we also bought an Echo Dot in the sales. Our radio alarm cock has been failing for the last year, but it never seemed important enough to replace. We will now be able to rant at Alexa when we wake up – “Alexa, shut the f*ck up”, or “Alexa, what rubbish do I have to do today”...

The children woke up on Christmas morning a little after 7am. After past performances, we considered this somewhat of a let-off. I got up with them, and wandered downstairs to make a coffee and wake myself up ahead of the mayhem to come. Within half an hour everybody else had gathered in the lounge for the annual mayhem.

It was a good day. After opening our presents, the in-laws arrived mid morning, and we wandered into town to eat lunch at one of the bigger pubs. We started going out for lunch on Christmas Day several years ago, and thought ourselves tremendously extravagant in doing so – but then after adding up the cost of doing dinner for several families, and the time involved in preparation and washing up, the pub won every time. We now put money aside months in advance.

After dinner we were all stunned by the weather – following weeks of rain, the sun finally made an appearance – so we walked down to the river and stood on the bridge. It was all a little unsettling – normally you would take your life in your hands crossing the bridge, but there were no cars, and very few people on foot. We spent quite some time taking photos, and watching water crash over the nearby wier.

After saying goodbye to family early in the evening we unwrapped this year's family board game – “7 Wonders”, and sat down to play it together. I somewhat miraculously lucked into the winning strategy during our first run-through of the game, and cantered to a win. I will freely admit to far more luck than judgement.

We were all in bed far earlier than recently – well – all except Miss 19, who I left cuddled with her Mum in the lounge. She's been struggling quite a bit recently, and I think just needed some quiet time. I have no idea what time they finally got to bed.

Today (Boxing Day) has been altogether more quiet. I was up at a fairly normal time once again, and set about washing up, tidying up, and trying to pull the house back towards normality just a little bit. I might as well not have bothered to be honest – there are boxes everywhere, bags of wrapping everywhere, and piles of things for each child littered throughout the house.

I suppose the strange thing about this Christmas is how it has changed. As the children have grown up, the toys have made way to clothes, makeup, music, books, and jewellery. And chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

Anyway – I promise to write something a little more interesting over the coming days – perhaps an account of the dream I had last night, involving an old friend from the internet who informed me that her entire identity was false, and that her real name was different than anybody knew. I was filling out an insurance form for her at the time – while running around outside in swimming shorts, firing a hose pipe at each other – because of course dreams make sense.

We eventually rolled into bed at about 3am last night. Somehow my other half turned our eldest daughter around, got her talking, and ate an entire box of chocolates with her while watching TV. Sometimes you just go with whatever works.

Today has been all about getting the house somewhere near straight – not helped by our younger daughters not bringing any washing out of their rooms until the 11th hour (they saw things going south with their older sister, and I guess guilt and shame kicked in). We now have perhaps six or eight loads of washing to do – there's no WAY it's going to get done in time for tomorrow, so our washing machine will be running as per normal ALL the way through Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Go us.

Why is it you have to threaten teenage girls all the time to get anything done? The other evening I took our middle girl's phone away at bedtime (you know, so she might sleep), and you would have thought I had become Satan or something.

(An hour passes after I wander into the kitchen to get a drink, and notice Miss 15 hasn't washed up after herself – she was baking this morning. While doing that I hear silence and realise the washing machine has finished. While refilling it, I notice one of the clothes airers is empty – so go fill it with the clothes that just came from the washing machine. Then I remember I haven't wrapped my other half's presents – she is out of the house for a couple of hours...)

Welcome to my life.

I'm now sitting in the junk room with a can of cider from the fridge. I bought a box of 18 cans last week, and have drunk two cans so far – the last few days have just been brutal – no chance to relax – always doing something, going somewhere, or fetching something.

My other half and eldest are getting their nails done. I don't think they've ever had their nails done before, apart from while on holiday. I'm wondering what sort of crazy talons they will return with – and what sort of glittery covering they will choose.

The two younger girls are upstairs somewhere – no doubt either talking to friends on the internet, or watching YouTube (which appears to have replaced television almost entirely for them).

Anyway. I wonder what's on Netflix – I haven't binge-watched anything in months.