write.as/jonbeckett

We finally made it to the cinema this afternoon to watch the final Star Wars movie (except of course it's NOT the final Star Wars movie, because the Obiwan movie is in production right now). I'm wondering – beyond the Mandalorian TV show – how Disney will milk the franchise until everybody is sick of it? I mean – it's not like they have turned a huge area of their amusement park into a Star Wars fantasy land for the incredibly wealthy, is it – oh... wait...

I loved the final Star Wars movie, if you're at all interested. I don't tend to read “reviews” any more, because they are often being paid to be controversial just to attract attention (or rather, traffic). I'm not going to say anything more than that about it, because I would hate to spoil the story for anybody. I'm not really sure how I made it to today without accidentally reading or seeing a plot spoiler.

It's probably worth mentioning at this point that I might vanish off the internet for the next couple of days. Our eldest daughter is having a really tough time at the moment, and could do with us being more present than usual. I foresee a few days of bacon for breakfast, walks to Starbucks, and whatever else might lift her spirits.

So. If I don't write anything in the meantime – have a wonderful Christmas, and I'll no doubt be here emptying my head in the days afterwards.

p.s. I helped Miss 15 paint a load of her miniature soldiers earlier. I think I'll like the painting more than the wargaming, but you never know. I need to read the rules first.

I think it's fairly safe to say that our youngest daughter is winding herself ever tighter at the moment, in anticipation of the arrival of a certain visitor from the North Pole.

We went to a pop-up cinema in the center of town this evening to watch the movie “Elf”. The children had no idea what we were going into town for – they have never been to the pop-up cinema before – neither have we, for that matter.

It turns out the pop-up cinema is organised in what used to be a function room above a building that used to be a huge townhouse in the high-street. Several shops have setup in the building over the years, and eventually failed – victims of the extortionate leaseholds the owners charge in town. And people wonder why all the town has left is coffee shops, restaurants, and clothes shops for women of a certain age.

The cavernous room – which lent itself to perhaps the worst acoustics imaginable – was bedecked with line upon line of sofas and low tables – allowing perhaps fifty people to watch a movie together. At the back of the room a bar serves drinks and snacks for those present, and for the Christmas performances, hot chocolate, popcorn, and mince pies were delivered to your seats too.

It was a fun evening out. I'm not a huge fan of Will Ferrell, but could quite happily watch Zooey Deschanel until the cows come home.

Of course I found something to annoy me intensely during the evening, but kept quiet about it. I bought my other half and eldest daughter a drink from the bar – and having three drinks and only two hands, had to make two trips to carry them back to our seats. When I returned to the bar, a seemingly wealthy guy in his early sixties, full of his own importance, had taken up station in front of the drink I had left, and wasn't about to move when I returned – despite me gesticulating, and saying “excuse me” with a smile. He completely blanked me. I ended up leaning over him very obviously to retrieve the drink, and he STILL ignored me. I so wanted to whisper a collection of four letter words in his ear, but of course couldn't think of anything at the time.

Why are some people like that? What did the world do to them? Are they born ignorant, obnoxious, and rude, or do they have to work at it?

Anyway. We are home now. The oven just announced that a pizza that has been cooking for the last half hour is finished cooking. I better go retrieve it before Miss 14 eats it all (we're supposed to be sharing it).

Today was the first day of my Christmas holiday. I had daydreamed about spending the day holed up in the warm, reading the book I bought last week, and doing as little as possible. Rather predictably, life had other plans.

I woke at 7am, because apparently my body clock doesn't understand holidays. After falling asleep for a little while longer, and then staring at the ceiling for a while, I eventually got up, had a shower, got dressed, cleared the washing up, tidied up downstairs, swept the lounge, put some washing in the machine, folded dry washing, fed the cats, fed the fish (this list could go on for quite some time), and eventually made a cup of coffee – which seemed to coincide with my other half eventually getting up.

Minutes later I found myself accompanying her into town – a last minute mission to buy groceries to help us survive the next few days. By “groceries”, I actually mean a huge bag of vegetables, and a colossal quantity of drink – well, colossal in our house. A box of coca cola, and a box of cider.

After returning home and making soup for lunch, comment was made about leaving at 3pm for the “Christmas Surprise”.

“3pm?”

She looked at me like I was some kind of brainless moron.

“You really never pay any attention to anything at all, do you – or look at Google Calendar, or email, or anything else.”

I said nothing, and waited for the rant to finish, and the explanation to begin.

Apparently we were leaving the house at 3pm. An hour and a half drive would be required to reach our destination. I smiled, and quietly thought “there goes my quiet day reading my book”.

We nearly didn't leave. In a fit of guilt – looking out of the window at the driving rain, and wondering quite how cold it was outside, she fessed up to where we were going. Westonbirt Arboretum. A huge managed forest the other side of Swindow – half way across the country. Apparently they had constructed a winter wonderland among trees – a path to walk and discover untold wonders. In the cold and rain.

We also nearly didn't leave because I emptied the clothes dryer, and folded up Miss 19's clothes. This caused a nuclear eruption. Apparently her clothes should never be touched by any human hand except her own – which means the rest of the house can't touch the washing machine or dryer until she has seen fit to (a) get out of bed, or (b) get on with any of her washing. Her damp clothes had been in the air dryer for an entire day already – she apparently thinks it switches itself on by magic.

Anyway.

We DID get to Westonbirt eventually – wrapped up like Inuit explorers, and still frozen to our core. We arrived an hour early, with promises of a Christmas market, a food hall, and all sorts of other things that sounded rather wonderful. The Christmas market turned out to be three stalls in a tent, and the food turned out to be a number of carnival style trailers selling massively overpriced burgers and hotdogs. In the rain. Don't forget the rain.

We eventually made our way out to the woodland walk, and I think it's fair to say the evening saved itself. If an enchanted forest could be made real, this was probably the closest you could probably get – with lasers, smoke machines, triggered animations beamed onto trees, and endless characters in costume along the way. Hundred of trees throughout the forest were floodlit from below, casting an eery light wherever you walked.

I think perhaps the most impressive part – for me – was the characters dressed as elves, faeries, and various woodland creatures along the way. The actors must have been frozen solid, but gamely kept up their pretence and wonder for the legions of children walking the various footpaths. Santa's helpers were especially good.

The drive home was an altogether quieter affair – with the children fighting to stay awake, the rain continuing to thunder down, and the radio playing a succession of 1990s dance tracks. Every time we changed channel, another 90s dance hit burst out. We gave up in the end and listened to “You Sure Do” for the third time in the last hour.

I'm now holed up in the junk room, trying to regain feeling in my fingers and toes. There are photos on Instagram of the woods – a little grainy, because I only had my mobile phone with me.

We are off to the cinema in town tomorrow to watch a matinee showing of a ridiculous Christmas movie. I haven't told the children yet. Then on Monday we are going to see Star Wars. I'm keeping most of the internet at the end of a very long stick until then.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go sit in the lounge with a drink, and watch rubbish on the television for an hour.

The clock just ticked past 3pm – in a couple of hours I will finish work for Christmas – cycle home through the rain that has been falling for the last several weeks, and collapse in a heap for a day or two before starting to tidy the house like a maniac before the big day arrives.

Of course when I say “collapse in a heap”, I really mean “do all the same chores as normal”, because life doesn't stop, does it. The kids won't stop getting cups, plates, glasses, and cutlery out before leaving it everywhere. The rest of the family won't get the world and it's dog out without leaving it wherever they last used it. I won't trip over shoes, bags, coats or whatever the hell else while trying to... you know... make a cup of tea.

If you were wondering about my temporary absence from the internet yesterday, real life kind of landed on me in the same manner that grand pianos tend to in cartoons. I worked from home to keep my eldest daughter company. She's been on something of a rollercoaster this year, and it seems to be finishing it's run in concert with the falling grand piano.

To take her mind of her troubles yesterday I took the kids out after work to a nearby town for a race around the shops that were open late, and dinner at a sushi restaurant called “Yo Sushi”. One of our kids hates sushi, but she settled for sriracha fries – the others tried to eat their own body weight in tiny pieces of fish, and nearly set fire to the bank account in the process.

It's funny how fate comes calling sometimes. While out last night I gave the kids a certain amount of pocket money each – proceeds from an unexpected Christmas bonus I received – and I allowed them to spend it on whatever they wanted within reason. Miss 19 bought some Studio Ghibli anime DVDs she has never seen, and Miss 14 headed straight for “Poundland” (a dollar store). I pointed out several shops she might visit instead, but she shrugged, and informed me that Poundland was cheap, and she could get loads of snacks. I love her simple view of the world sometimes.

Miss 15 wanted to get a new board game to play, so headed for the sole remaining toy shop in the town. After realising that we already have all the “good” games – Catan, Carcassonne, etc – she looked a bit glum.

“How about we go and look next door?”

“What's there?”

“Follow me...”

There was a “Games Workshop” next door – one of a chain of stores that sell table-top miniature wargames, and various card games – Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer, Magic the Gathering – that kind of thing. I have never seen a reaction by anybody to something new quite like it.

Ten minutes later – after fearing our bank account might start flashing warning signals to everybody within a ten mile radius, I talked my daughter down from a hugely expensive “Starter Set” to a very much smaller “Beginner Set”, and a set of paints. I didn't know if it might go anywhere until I saw a post from my other half on Facebook at lunchtime:

“Heaven help us – Miss 15 has discovered Warhammer. Spent the morning putting the pieces together, has read the entire instruction book and is now painting her armies whilst trying to explain the rules to her older sister.”

I have never played a tabletop wargame before – I wouldn't know where to start. No doubt this evening I will be taken through the intricacies of armed conflict between Orcs and Wood Elves by my daughters – while painting new infantry soldiers for their horde.

Over the past few days – since discovering a community of writers within Twitter – I have been putting aside a few minutes each day to respond to questions, follow fellow writers, and to contribute to the community in a small way.

Something has been bothering me.

It appears the vast majority of those taking part in the “community” are only there to acquire new followers. Almost all of their interactions – their tweets – are to coordinate mass spamming of usernames that indirectly benefits themselves. It's easy to be impressed – your name is mentioned in one of the chain-letters that sweep the system, and suddenly you attract the attention of strangers – follows, likes, re-tweets and comments flood in. You feel like you're somebody for a while – at least until you realise that everybody interacting with you is playing the same game.

I asked a question of the community earlier today, and got no responses. I was mentioned in a “following” drive, and got deluged. I'm sorry – but that's not a community – that's a pyramid scheme. Kind of a “Fight Club”, where you're only allowed to talk about “Fight Club” while you're at “Fight Club”.

I'm not surprised at my own reaction really – the reflex to push everybody away, and do my own thing – because it's kind of the way I'm built. I have my own voice, my own thoughts, and I don't really mind if five people or five hundred people see the posts I publish. I love the idea of serendipity – that people might chance upon my blog while surfing the web. I hate the idea that they have visited through any sort of obligation, or oblique attempt to enlist me in any sort of scheme.

Anyway. That's my two penneth. I'm not playing other people's games for them.

Lunchtime is the new evening – or at least it seems to be when it comes to me writing blog posts. I guess this is a life-hack of sorts – forcing myself to have a lunch break at work, and emptying my head into the keyboard, instead of trying to find time in the evening to do it. Of course this begs the question “why do it in the first place”, but I think we decided quite some time ago that I write a blog because I do – there is no inspirational or logical reason behind it. I just do.

I wonder – if you asked writers why they write – what they might come back with as answers ? I have sometimes qualified the time I put into blogging as an attempt to keep myself sane. I'm not entirely sure I would go mad if I didn't write, but these words don't really do any harm, sitting out here on the internet, do they ?

While writing this, I'm watching the clock. I forgot to buy a sandwich from the van at work this morning (we ran out of bread at home), so I'm waiting for the second visit. For some reason the sandwich van we use makes two visits – one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. Generally those buying food in the afternoon just go for chocolate and fizzy drinks – unless like me they missed the morning visit. I wonder what will be left on the van to choose from?

It's raining outside. Again. It's been raining for about five weeks now – on and off. A gentle mist, just heavy enough to see. I've almost forgotten what it's like to cycle to work without wearing full waterproofs (not that they are in any way waterproof, but still...).

WHERE THE HELL IS THE SANDWICH VAN ? I'M STARVING!

After posting quite the most forgettable collection of words to the blog earlier today, I found myself with a few minutes to spare this lunchtime. Rather than mindlessly scroll Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, for some reason I ended up looking at the backup of my blog posts, and wondering how I might get them back into the published blog on the internet.

A little backstory would probably help.

For the last several years I have written nearly all of my blog posts in a simple text editor. I own a copy of Scrivener, but rarely use it – I'm not really sure why. The blog posts are written in markdown format, and saved in a year/month folder structure. I suppose half of the thinking behind it is that the archive is portable – I can load the posts into any text editor on any computer system that understands text files.

Anyway.

In the daytime I'm a “professional software developer”. While this sounds lofty and grand, it really just means I work on programming projects for companies that pay us to make their systems do things they want. This story is going somewhere, I promise.

How do you get four thousand text files – all formatted identically – into a blog? It required a bit of lateral thinking, but I got there in the end. Blogger has it's own import and export format – you can dump the entire contents of your blog to a single XML file, and them import that into another blog. It occurred to me that if I exported what I already had, I could probably make some sense of the XML, and make my own XML file, with the four thousand missing posts in it.

And that's exactly what I did – it took about half an hour. In the grand tradition of hacking, I took some old code I wrote to migrate posts out of Wordpress, and modified it to create the mother of all Blogger import files.

You know the funny thing though? My blog has over four thousand posts in it now, but you would never know – because I have no archive page. The only way to get to them (easily) is to add the year and/or month onto the URL – something nobody will ever try. I'm loath to add an archive page to the blog, because it seems a bit “boasty” – “look all the crap I've written!” – which ends up questioning why I bothered importing the posts in the first place.

p.s. I wrote this instead of getting on with a sort-of-secret creative writing project. After an endless round of chores this evening (part of which included drilling holes in walls, and hanging new coat hooks), all the clever literary had gone for a metaphorical walk. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

After not taking a break at lunchtime, I'm forcing myself to down tools now, and invest the remaining 44 minutes of the day in myself. Of course “down tools” is something of an exaggeration – I was sitting in front of the laptop at my desk at lunchtime, and I'm still sitting in front of my laptop at my desk – very little has changed.

The only time I have left my desk today has been to make coffee, or to visit the bathroom. Quite how I've managed to make my desk so spectacularly untidy is something of a mystery.

Ah – this isn't a visual medium, is it – here I am telling you about my desk, and you have no idea about it. Perhaps a tour of my working environment might be of interest (and an excellent way to procrastinate through the remaining minutes).

I sit in the corner of the first office on the second floor of the building. The ground floor is taken up with a kitchen, bathrooms, a meeting room, and a couple of offices occupied by lonely developers that only sit down there because they never moved desks. The first floor is where most of the official work goes on – with directors, project managers, customer services, and finance all having offices stretched along a corridor, adjacent to one-another.

On the third floor, as mentioned, I am in the first of three offices. I suppose technically we are in the attic – the roof slopes on one side. If you think of the room a little like a longboat, desks stretch along either side of the room, with myself and my fellow developers facing outwards. I have a desk facing a window, so can watch the goings-on outside – not that I can really see anything, being on the third floor. I sometimes hear comotions unfolding below, and lean over my desk to peer down into the atrium below.

Several years ago I worked in one of the ground floor offices for a while, and got to watch the goings-on in the buildings opposite all summer. I think I wrote at the time about the sixty something wealthy guy trying to impress his next door neighbour. She moved away. I couldn't possibly presume that her sudden departure was anything to do with his advances.

So. My desk. There's not much on it really. An IP based telephone that I have not taken advantage of at all – I generally only use it to call home – very few clients have my desk phone number. Over in the corner there is a photo of my family – taken during one of the typical family photo-shoots you do when the kids are small – all sitting in their best clothes on roll of white paper, smiling fake smiles. Over in the far corner there are two desk tidies, full of paperwork and notebooks that should have been thrown away years ago. I have no idea why I keep the notebooks – I never refer to them.

There's an empty sandwich box to my left – used to transport the lunch I hastily prepared this morning before leaving the house. I had cheddar cheese sandwiches on olive bread with some onion chutney in them today. There's also a set of headphones, unplugged because I had to take part in a conferencce call on the internet early – which meant pulling out a USB headset with a microphone on it. There's also a pencil case – the one I carry around with me everywhere – filled with pens, pencils, USB sticks, and a calculator. I don't know why I bother carrying a calculator round, when I have a computer.

Next to the laptop sits my bullet journal. I leave it open pretty much all day every day, and rapid-log the events of the day as they unfold. It's contents get used to help fill out timesheets at the end of the week, and to look back from day-to-day at things that should have got done but have not (yet). I've dithered about using Evernote instead of the Bullet Journal in recent months, but am still going with it – I tend to remember things better if I write them down.

Over on a chest of drawers alongside my desk, I have folded up a set of waterproofs and balanced a bike helmet. I cycle to work every day – three miles each way. It's not far, and doesn't take long, but keeps me fit.

I nearly forgot – the computer. All of my work happens on a laptop. Years ago we used to have desktop PCs and laptops, but now just the laptop. I don't tend to carry the laptop around if I can help it – I just take the paper notebook to meetings.

Finally, my trusty coffee mug sits on the other side of the computer. My other half bought it for me for Christmas a couple of years ago – it has the message “Leave me alone, I'm pretending to work” written on it. I keep seeing adverts for much more offensive mugs on the internet, and wishing I was brave enough to buy them.

So there you have it. I still have 23 minutes until I leave the building. Time for one more coffee!

While my other half stands on the touchline of a rugby field many miles from home watching our middle daughter's latest attempt to injure herself before school on Monday, I'm sitting in the warmth of the junk room at home, waiting for files to download, and wondering where the day went.

I haven't wasted the ENTIRE day – just most of it.

This morning I was up at a reasonable time, fulfilling a promise to our eldest to take her out for breakfast. There is a cafe about half a mile away that we have walked to several times recently – they cook basic food, and make wonderful coffee. There is a reason for going out for breakfast, rather than buying some bacon from the supermarket – it's an excuse to get Miss 19 to leave the house. I'll chalk up the expense of breakfast out as “investment in mental health”.

The cafe is a converted industrial unit – nestled beneath a martial arts gym, and a next door to a car servicing place. Long wooden tables stretch throughout, with a mixture of chair designs dotted around. It has been surprisingly busy during the times we have visited – filled with people from all walks of life – although thankfully few are similar to the man that sat opposite myself and Miss 14 in Starbucks yesterday.

He strode through the doors, looked at the empty side of the table opposite us, and asked if he might share the table – I smiled, and said “of course”. He hung his waxed jacket on the chair, dropped copies of the Times, the Telegraph, and the Financial Times on the table, and then placed his flat cap and reading glasses on top before joining the queue for coffee. I smiled, and wondered if anybody could appear more like a wealthy conservative if they tried – I wondered if his wife might be in a nearby clothes shop for women of a certain age, then castigated myself for making presumptions. He might be a batchelor, or a widower. He might have even bought all the right wing newspapers in order to use them for firelighters. You never know...

We got home from the cafe just in time to wave goodbye to the rest of the family as they headed to Rugby – not before my other half could give me another errand though – to pay the outstanding balance on a Christmas lunch reservation. We are going “out out” for Christmas lunch this year – to a pub in town. It costs quite a lot, but we have realised over the years that spending time together is far more important than turning our kitchen upside down for the entire day, and spending hours cooking, peeling vegetables, washing up, and so on. We put the money aside months in advance, and then look forward to getting up late, and walking into town on Christmas morning.

(Who am I kidding – the kids will be up at ridiculous o'clock – they always are)

So anyway. I walked the mile into town, paid the balance, and then walked home again. Now I'm sitting in the junk room, typing this, and figuring I should really go and draw the curtains, switch lights on, and warm the house up. It's only 4pm and it's almost dark outside.

p.s. other than this, I still haven't written anything remotely “creative”. I need an intervention.

This evening somehow turned into just the sort of recursive rabbit hole I seem to specialise in. It started out on a Linux laptop late in the evening, with all the good intentions of writing something interesting, insightful, and worthy. It ended three hours later having written nothing at all.

In order to prevent myself from getting distracted, I thought “I know, I'll use a text editor from the 1980s – because then I can't keep getting sidetracked by the temptation to check on Twitter, Email, or to start dicking around with playlists on Spotify. A few minutes later my trusty old laptop had transformed itself into a pretend Commodore Amiga – a 16 bit computer from the late 1980s – running a word processor called “Protext”. Perfect.

Of course this is me though – and I started wondering “I wonder how well this might work on the other laptop? The one running the new build of Elementary OS...”. Minutes later I had fired the other laptop up, and was busily copying files across – so it too could take part in the evening-busting adventure with me.

Somewhere along the line I thought it might be fun to make it emulate MS-DOS too – to turn it into an early 1990s PC, so i might run an old character based version of Microsoft Word. And that's when the wheels fell off my wagon. Without boring you with the black-hole that is Flatpak, Linux, and all manner of unfolding idiocy, I couldn't figure out how to find a configuration file that should have been there.

The next time I looked up, two hours had passed, and I had written nothing.