write.as/jonbeckett

I began writing this post five hours ago. Somewhere along the way Sunday caught up with me, ran me over, and dragged me along the road for a bit before reversing back over me. Twice. Once again I find myself wondering where the weekend has gone.

If you're visiting this blog post outside of the sanitised confines of Wordpress Reader, you'll hopefully have noticed that I haven't so much “installed a new theme”, as totally and utterly capitulated to the blogging gods. The new theme sports all sorts of interesting idiocy in the sidebar such as social links, recent photos, and self-absorbed navel gazing. I would like to say that the new theme was planned, but that wouldn't be telling the truth. I actually meant to try out a completely different theme (which can be done by typing the name directly into the URL if you're nerdy enough to know how) – but got the name wrong. The new theme appeared, and I found myself thinking “actually, I don't know what the hell this theme is called, but it doesn't look half bad”.

A lot of my life seems to be based on chance events, utter chaos, and serendipity at the moment. Thankfully I tend not to look much further ahead than where my feet land next, so I don't get too stressed out about whatever mayhem might round the next bend – I do tend to freak out while looking around me though – and know not to even contemplate looking back at the trail of destruction behind. Not that I'm leaving the destruction – just that absorbing how messed up the rest of the world is tends to make you start questioning everything.

The world really IS becoming more and more messed up though, isn't it. You only have to look at the various governments around the world doing their level best to shaft a vast proportion of their own population. Perhaps more frustrating is the bellyaching and moaning that goes on as a result – with millions seemingly pouring their energy into complaining, fighting, trolling, and arguing at quite some length online, rather than doing anything at all to bring about any sort of change.

Anyway.

I didn't set out to bellyache about the world falling in on itself. I set out to write several hundred self-interested words about how pretty my blog looks. I guess that's a bit subjective though – you might hate it. Let me know.

I better go help in the garden, before I get executed by firing squad for daring to not be busy while my other half is busy.

I'm sitting in the dark of the junk room in front of the old PC, tapping away at the keyboard in a text editor. It's Friday night. While the imagined rest of the world are heading out for a night of drinks, food and fun, I haven't shaved since Wednesday. I don't even know where any clean clothes might be.

The all consuming project I have been working on in the daytime got it's first outing in front of the client today. Four hours in the conference room wincing at the appearance of each bug – each oversight – fighting to update the code while the demonstration continued. Standing up the first alpha of a project for scrutiny focuses the mind somewhat.

My thoughts are still tumbling end over end – I find it difficult to let go of things sometimes. At one point during the demonstration I held my head in my hands – fighting to concentrate on what had just caused an issue while everybody around me carried on conversations.

I think perhaps a good night's sleep will work wonders.

I should re-title this blog “every other day” given the frequency I seem to be posting at the moment. It's not a conscious decision to slow down either – just a lack of any time to write anything.

Take this evening for instance – I got in from work a little after 6pm, and was busy washing up when our eldest daughter walked in from a visit to the doctor (she was hoping for a complex illness involving blindness, dizziness, and various other maladies – the doctor prescribed less TV).

After catching up with her diagnosis and laughing, we walked into town together to get snacks and drinks while my other half started on dinner. It's worth noting that “town” is about 1.5 miles away – so somewhere in the region of 5000 steps. After returning, eating dinner, and washing up, I lifted myself back onto my feet and walked back into town to escort our younger daughters home from a youth club movie at the church in the centre of town. Another 5000 steps.

This of course all happened after yet another slog at work – stumbling towards the next deadline for the project I have been working on for the last three or four months.

It's now 10:30pm and I'm beginning to wonder if evenings even exist any more. Just before leaving the house this evening a wonderful friend knocked on the door and wandered in brandishing a bag of football boots her children had grown out of – for ours to try. I wished I could have stayed to catch up – or even to spend time with her – but no. Places to go – children to fetch.

While walking into town in the late evening, I only saw two other people out and about over the course of the mile and a half journey. I wondered what they might be missing while running their errands.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go take the rubbish out, and put a load in the washing machine. It never ends.

It's already Monday night. Whatever happened to the ENTIRE weekend? I seem to remember last posting a few words on Friday night, and not really having time to write anything of consequence – and now suddenly it's Monday night. I don't understand. Or maybe I do.

Early on Saturday morning I scraped Miss 18 out of bed, turned my cheerfulness up to 11, and escorted her to London for the day. She's been having a pretty tough time of it just recently, so I thought a day away from everything might help. When I suggested a trip to London on Friday night her eyebrows raised, and she murmured something about buying a second pair of Doc Martens boots.

I KNEW she would end up buying a second pair. When she earned her first pay-packet, I took her to London on a pilgrimage of sorts – to buy a pair of Doc Martens boots. She bought a pair of decorative boots with red roses embroidered down the sides – flying in the face of my advice to get the classic boots. The result? She has rarely worn them because she doesn't want to ruin them (I wouldn't want to either, given how much they cost).

So – we made our way to the shop in Neal Street in the centre of London – just off Covent Garden – and she acquired some classic “DMs”. I was a little disappointed in the service this time – our first visit had been made pretty special by the girl that served us – who took time, was enthusiastic, humorous, and made the visit an experience of sorts. This time we got a disinterested guy in his mid twenties with greasy hair that did no more than fetch the shoes and then process the transaction at the counter.

We grabbed sushi for lunch, milkshakes from Leicester Square, visited M&Ms World, Forbidden Planet, and the British Museum. We hoped to make it to the Manga exhibition but it was fully booked. We did luck out at Forbidden Planet though – discovering a wonderful comic book artist called Sarah Graley signing books. I bought a printed book of her webcomic “Our Super Adventure”, and got it signed for my daughters – then read it cover to cover on the way home. You might know her from her work on Rick and Morty.

Sunday was an altogether different proposition. We live on the corner of a green – with houses surrounding it on all sides. For the last several years the residents have come together on a chosen Sunday and had a picnic together. You might call it a last gasp attempt at building some community spirit in the face of the internet. After a mad dash to the supermarket for snacks and drinks in the morning, and the construction of a coconut shy in the corner of the green (we borrowed it for a fundraiser, and still had 50 coconuts left), I was out there pretty much consistently from lunchtime, until midnight.

We played cricket, rounders (a mini version of baseball), drank cider, told stories, met new neighbors, drank more cider, told more stories... you get the idea. As the sky grew dark one of our neighbors brought out an old washing machine drum filled with wood – a wonderful down-cycled fire-pit of sorts. We gathered the assembled assortment of folding chairs around the fire, and put the world to rights for several hours.

I feel incredibly lucky to live near so many wonderful people. It's easy to miss each other – to not even know each other exist – until we all take the chance to put a day aside and spend time together. Suddenly there are names for faces, funny stories, and laughter. So much laughter.

I've been SO tired at work today, but strangely happy too. My world grew a little last night – and spending time with old friends served as a timely reminder that there is more to life than work, chores, and worrying about money. In a strange sort of way I remembered a little of who I am.

It's finally the weekend. After ordering Domino's as a special treat, watching a ridiculous movie, and drinking a can of beer, I'm starting to switch off.

The project I have been working on for the last several months – that I have woken up thinking about, stood in the shower thinking about, and cycled to work thinking about – will be shown to the client on Monday. It's been a journey. My absence from the internet at large for the last several months is mostly down to the gargantuan effort to heave this project over the finishing line.

Of course it's only the first finishing line. There will be more – many more.

Anyway. I don't have much left in me to conjur words this evening – perhaps more might be forthcoming over the weekend. There are plans afoot to visit London with Miss 18 – plans involving trains, Doctor Martens boots, comic books, and sushi.

I can't help feeling the title of this post is lifted from somewhere – perhaps Immortal Beloved? I'm not entirely sure. Anyway – just a few words this evening. No exciting adventures with gnashing lunatic dogs to relate.

I'm counting the days until I travel to the coast to visit my parents. Two weeks to go until two weeks off work – a week of which will be spent (hopefully) walking windswept hills, sitting on sandy beaches, reading long-forgotten books, eating terrible food, drinking wonderful drinks, and doing my level best to forget about work for a little while.

I should probably visit a clothes shop at some point before our journey south – and at least acquire a new shirt or two. The last clothes I bought were for our Majorca adventure last year. Oh – actually – that's a lie. I bought a shirt at HyperJapan in London with a mash-up print of Hokusai's “The Great Wave”, and Godzilla on it. Godzilla has snatched the boat from the wave and is busy smashing it to bits. I haven't worn it yet.

Anyway. Two more weeks. Counting the days.

Yet again I find myself asking the universe what it did with the greater part of my day. Each day seems to fall into the next at the moment – a bit like the man that nearly fell into the road right in front of me this evening. I should perhaps re-wind before getting to his near death experience though.

I left work a little early today – with pre-arranged plans to meet my oldest daughter in a coffee shop in town. She was visiting a friend of a friend, who works as a therapist – to hopefully help with the creeping return of her anxiety. It seems anxiety works much like a whack-a-mole game, where you think you're getting on top of it, and then it re-appears quite randomly to wreck a hitherto unchecked part of your life.

I'm not going to delve too deeply into my daughter's adventures with anxiety – suffice to say it's her story to tell, and it all seems terrifically unfair.

Of course the weather couldn't cooperate with our plans at all – it's been raining non-stop all day. ALL DAY. By the time I squelched into the coffee shop after work, I probably looked like I had been sleeping rough in a waterlogged ditch somewhere. While the pretty girl that served me a cup of cappuccino took no notice, the slightly rotund man trying to look busy at the other end of the counter seemed quite annoyed. Maybe he wasn't annoyed with me – maybe it was more about life, the universe, and everything – maybe particularly that guy “Gary” that he went to college with that already retired after shorting the housing market, while he's trying to teach college-leaver baristas how to make a cup of coffee that won't kill somebody.

Miss 18 arrived a few minutes after my arrival, and discovered me tinkering with the bullet journal – writing out the pages for August, and doing a pretty good impersonation of a hipster. A hipster that just climbed out of a water-logged ditch, but a hipster no less.

After buying her a coffee, and watching in wonder as she pretty-much downed it on the spot, we set off across town in search of the place the therapist works. Here's the thing about being a Dad – you march all over town delivering your children to places – even when they are 18 years old – and you always end up standing in the street, wondering what you're going to do with yourself for the next hour (or however long) until you need to pick them up again.

I went home.

It turns out going home when your other half has been out for much of the day, leaving your 15 year old in charge, is a mistake. I spent my “spare” three quarters of an hour washing up, putting things away, and generally contemplating if burning the house down and re-building it might be quicker than even attempting to establish any kind of order.

And finally we get to the near death experience. I bet you had forgotten all about it, hadn't you – I had. Imagine if I had finished the post here, and you said “hang on a minute – you said there was going to be some story about somebody nearly getting killed”. I better get on with telling you then, hadn't I.

While cycling back across town, I was busy daydreaming – as you do – and was about to pass a quite jovial man talking to a friend while walking his dog. He was perhaps in his mid 40s, a little overweight, and dressed really quite smartly. I imagine they might have been going to the pub for a drink together – you know, to sit in the garden with the dog in the rain. The dog was a medium sized dog. I wish I had paid a little more attention to it – but all I really remember was it's pathological hate of bicycles (or maybe it was me – I'm really not sure, and it all happened so quickly).

As I approached the dog and it's owner, the dog suddenly clocked me, and turned from a happy-go-lucky waggy dog, into a rabid “I'll fuck you up” lunatic. I'm no dog psychiatrist, but I tend to think all small dogs have this fault in their programming – they all have something that turns them into a nasty, shitty, snarling, snapping, spitting, rabid hooligan.

Here's where it got good.

The dog LAUNCHED itself at me, catching it's owner COMPLETELY off guard. He made a desperate grab for it's lead, which unfortunately passed behind his legs – pulling them out from under him, and landing him in the grass verge next to the road – rapidly skidding towards the road (and heavy traffic). He continued to cling to the dog's lead, his hand now pinned underneath his own backside, as the dog wrestled to take a chunk out of me – dragging the hapless owner through the mud on his arse – all the while cursing in quite the most eye-bulging, horror stricken way.

I considered stopping for a few moments, but glancing down at wild eyes and gnashing teeth of the dog, thought better of it – so stood up on the pedals, and exited stage left. A few hundred yards further on I looked back, and saw the dog happily trotting next to it's rather dishevelled owner, as if nothing had happened. I can only guess the owner turned the dog off and on again.

I bet the dog has NEVER done anything like that before. Dog owners always say things like that when their dog has either just sunk their teeth into somebody's arse, peed up somebody's leg, or chewed up a family member's Star Wars toy on Christmas Day. I would love to meet the postman that delivers mail to their house though – my opening remark might well be “show me your fingers”.

I started writing this post an hour ago. Somewhere along the way I ended up playing two games of chess, made a cup of coffee, and ate a load of rubbish – all before writing a word. If procrastination was an Olympic sport, I would be a legend in my own lunchtime.

It's already 10:30pm. How did that happen? I'm asking myself that a lot recently. I get up, have a shower, make a truly terribly lunch, cycle to work, swear profusely at the computer for eight hours or so, then come home, fight the good fight against the house, the garden, and my family for several hours, write a few words on the internet, and then collapse into bed. Repeat five times and you have my typical week. Add on a couple of weekend days washing clothes like a madman, and you have my entire week.

I'm too tired to think of anything exciting to write about. There are quiet goings on in my head – perhaps plans to prepare for an eventual path out of Wordpress Valley – but I'm loath to talk about it, because it means blogging about blogging – and that's got to be the most insufferable blogging rabbit hole there ever was.

I've already decided what the first post of the new blog will be called – “Brave New World”. Let's hope the estate of Aldous Huxley don't start a lawsuit. Can you even imagine the court case?

“On the left we have the defendant – the copyright holders of Aldous Huxley – beloved author of perhaps the most famous dystopian novel in the English language – and on the right, we have the accused – an internet nobody that likes to empty his head into a blog about nothing in particular, but that could also be described as dystopian in it's own depressing way”.

I wonder what they would fine me? A packet of chocolate buttons ?

I wish I knew where the weekend went. There seems to be some sort of anomaly in the space time continuum – specifically located at the cross section of me, and weekends in general. If I had done physics at college, I might be able to investigate – unfortunately the closest I ever got was learning the formulas for particle dynamics while pretending I could do applied maths.

As far as I recall, particle dynamics is kind of simpleton physics – where questions take the form “a ball is thrown in a vacuum” – because accounting for aerodynamics would require a proof of the Yang Mills equations, which nobody has figured out yet – which is also why all aeroplanes, cars, and whatever else are different shapes than each other.

Incidentally, the only reason I know about the Yang Mills equations is because I read a book several years ago about the “Millennium Prize” – a huge amount of money thrown at the mathematics community to hopefully encourage some brainiac or other to solve a few of the most eye-catching unsolved numerical mysteries.

Although I was never particularly good at mathematics at school, I've become more interested over the years. I suppose in some ways it's related to software development – to programming. The whole “problem solving” thing is perhaps what appeals to me most – finding elegant, efficient ways of doing things.

The year before we adopted children – nearly twelve years ago now! – I had a prospectus for a mathematics night course – a refresher ahead of a degree. It was crazy really, and highlights the difference between life before and after children. Where we indulged interests previously, we suddenly weighed any and all investments in ourselves against possible investments in the children – and of course we always chose the children. I think most parents do the same (or at least, I hope they do).

Anyway. How on earth have I written a post about math, when all I'm really wondering is where the hell the weekend went? Perhaps I should fund a Millennium prize of my own to find out. I'm just wondering what I can offer as a prize – given that all we have in the world is a house that needs work, a second hand car, a few debatably serviceable bicycles, and a number of obsolete computers... Time. I could give somebody my time. People don't seem to give each other their time any more.

In something of an experiment this evening, I'm writing this post on the old Apple iMac perched on the spare desk in the junk room at home. The last time it was used “in anger” was for NaNoWriMo last year. Following in the footsteps of several notable writers, writing on the iMac divorces me from the distractions of the internet, on account of it not supporting the newer SSL protocols (the magic that causes the padlock to appear in your web browser).

Granted, this isn't quite as extreme as George R R Martin writing Game of Thrones in Wordstar on a DOS PC entirely disconnected from anything and everything, but it's pretty close.

Did I mention that the iMac uses ZIP disks to save backups ? I had a look through the collection of ZIP disks earlier, and came across a backup of the writing site I started in the autumn of 2000 – 19 years ago. After grinning at my own writing (some of which I may re-surface here at some point), I found a number of posts by my future wife – we would have been going out for about five months at the date of the backup. I wonder what has happened to the other writers? I'm tempted to search their names on the internet, and see what I turn up.

The method by which this post will make it from the Mac to the internet is perhaps worth a few words. I'll save the text file to the Mac, then scoot across to the PC (running Linux), open a command line, and connect to it via SSH – which will give me access to the text file. After retrieving the file, I'll open Firefox, past the words into Wordpress, and voila – you're reading them now.

In other news, I shuttered Substack this morning – the email subscription thing I have been playing with for a while. I figure it makes sense to have one version of my words in existence, rather than many. I've also stopped cross-posting these long, rambling posts to Tumblr too. If nothing else, it means I only have one version of a post to fix when I notice a typo, or grammatical error (usually immediately after posting, then again a few minutes later, then again a day or so later). I really should try to get into the habit of proof-reading posts before dumping them onto the internet.

Anyway. I'm tired. I always seem to be tired at the moment. I'm not sure why. Another early night beckons, and a few minutes reading before I inevitably conk out, and wake up in the early hours with my face in the pages of a book.