write.as/jonbeckett

It feels like I haven't found time to do much of anything recently – the huge project I've been battling with at work continues to grow – swallowing up developers, consultants, and conference call hours like some sort of creeping monster – devouring all in it's path. Tonight I have carved out an hour to write a few words, and perhaps redress the balance a little. I'm not sure I have much to share though.

While writing this the England football team are playing against Japan in the women's World Cup. I don't need to watch, because our younger children are providing a running commentary whether we like it or not. Miss 15 just shouted “Karen Carney is coming on!” to nobody in particular, followed a few moments later by “OFFSIDE!”. It's exciting stuff, if only because the children are so excited.

Our youngest daughter played cricket this evening at a local cricket club. It's funny really – when you have daughters, convention presumes that you might end up at dance shows, or perhaps athletics – not so much judo, rugby, football, and cricket. I love that our daughters defy convention at every turn – although I'm also annoyed on a regular basis that they face such uneven playing fields so regularly.

(several minutes pass while the children remark that there are no clean towels – and the entire family is drawn into an argument about the number of towels being used every day – I have put seven through the washing machine tonight)

Somehow it is already 10pm. How does that even happen? It feels like every evening is stolen from me at the moment. Mornings aren't much better – spent emptying the dishwasher, making lunches, washing up, and clearing up behind everybody else before leaving the house. I wonder if it gets easier as the children get older? We sometimes visit friends who's children have moved out, and their houses seem to be paragons of peace, quiet, and tranquility.

I might have an early night. Of course we all know I'm not going to – I'm going to scroll through Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit, Wordpress, Facebook, and who knows where else until 1am, just like every other night – then I'll wonder why I'm so tired in the morning.

p.s. I had a dream last night where I was queueing up to buy a drink in a cafe, and Donald Trump was in the queue, being his usual charming self to the staff behind the counter (read: being an objectionable, rude, aloof, ignorant arsehole). I don't remember anything about the dream now – but laughed to myself all day at the idea that Trump would ever set foot in a cafe. No doubt he has staff to go get him fizzy drinks and fast food while he sits festering over Twitter on his unsecured mobile phone in the Whitehouse. Idiot.

I woke with a start at 4am, and blundered my way through my phone while trying to find the radio app – to listen to the Tyson Fury boxing match. The fight finally began at 5am, and lasted approximately 5 minutes. It didn't go well for the other guy. I fell back asleep moments later, and woke up wondering if the headphones I had been wearing would have left huge ring patterns on the sides of my head.

I have a vague recollection of an incredibly odd dream – something to do with walking around a house I had been to before, and finding all manner of things that had to be collected. It just occurred to me – in the dream I knew I had visited the house before, and knew my way around it – but thinking back, I've NEVER seen the house before. How on earth does your brain even do that – create memories to play back into a fictional movie moments before you wake up? That's some spectacularly recursive craziness.

After finally scraping myself out of bed a little after 7am I wandered downstairs, had a shower, fed the cats, and cleared the kitchen. Our kitchen is something of a mystery to me – no matter how hard I work at clearing washing up before going to bed, the next morning there will be a sink full of washing up waiting for me. I suspect a traveling silent night circus has an extra set of keys to our house.

After firing two loads through the washing machine, and settling down to the second or third coffee of the day, the rest of the household crawled from their hiding places. My daughters appeared brandishing cards and a huge Toblerone chocolate bar just as I called my Dad to wish him a happy Father's Day. My Dad is like me in many ways – or I'm like him – happy in his own company, with a propensity to nerd out at whatever he's interested in this week. He also avoids the telephone if possible.

Miss 18 arrived in the lounge, with a question – “Are we doing anything today?”

My other half responded over her laptop screen while curled up on the sofa in her pajamas – “I thought we might go to the park this afternoon – the Regatta is on – there is a funfair”.

I had forgotten all about the regatta and funfair. The main day was yesterday – the park is closed to the public and becomes a ticketed rowing competition with dress code and free helpings of elitism. I know – I know – I'll shut up now. On Sunday the park is opened, and everybody can wander in for free – visiting the various stalls, eating street food, drinking overpriced drinks, and paying to shorten their lives on questionably engineered funfair rides.

The children talked me into going on two such rides with them. The first flung you forwards and backwards while jigging you up and down like a demented Iron Giant had grabbed hold of you – accompanied by pop music and carrot chunks. The second involved sitting on a bench seat and being twirled in circles until your stomach really didn't want to think about digesting anything for a good few hours.

The children were quite disappointed when I said I'd had enough – but then I noticed I had been among the very few parents going on rides with their children. I distracted them from being too downcast by paying for them to try and win some utter tat to take home with us. Miss 14 plucked a ball from a jet of air with a net – a feat of skill that took almost no skill at all. In return for tidying up said ball, she was offered any of the cheapest toys from the bottom row of a series of buckets of tat. She seemed pleased though.

I bought myself a cappuccino and a bag of freshly made donuts from a nearby stall while the kids tried unsuccessfully to win another goldfish. They have taken goldfish home from every regatta they have ever visited. I laughed as they failed, and considered setting fire to some more money just for fun.

Back near the river I got arm-twisted into having a go on a rowing machine. The children went first, and vaulted themselves to the head of the girls leader-board. I strapped myself onto the machine next, and wondered if I might do better than my attempt last year (my first ever go on a rowing machine) – where I had fallen off the machine mid-challenge. History very nearly repeated itself. I spent the last 100 metres of the pretend “race” trying to figure out how real rowers keep the seat underneath themselves. After filing a very average time indeed, the man running the tent made very complimentary comments about how well I had done, given that I hadn't rowed before, and that the top times had been recorded by professionals (the Olympic team live nearby, so probably pushed the times out of mere mortal's reach for fun). I think the man was just being kind because I was with the kids though. I did wonder though – how fast I could go, if I didn't try to row in sandles, and could somehow manage to stick myself to the seat.

No, I will not be buying myself a rowing machine. I might be buying some goats though.

There was a petting zoo in the park – a nearby farm that works with charities had brought along a number of animals – a pony, a donkey, some chickens, some rabbits, and some goats. Oh my word the goats. How cute could they possibly have been? They were only young, so tremendously playful, inquisitive, and nosy. On they way home we didn't just joke about getting some to avoid cutting the lawn ever again – we started to actually figure out what we might need to do in preparation.

I have achieved very little today. I'm almost proud that I've achieved so very little. While most people look forward to the weekend, kicking back, and resting from the world at large, I invariably see the weekend as an endless trudge through a wrecked house, a clothes washing mountain, and an endless succession of sibling disputes to be mediated. Quite often the commute to work on Monday morning feels like an exhale of sorts. We make it through the week, and then we make it through the weekend.

The clock just ticked past mid-day. I celebrated by visiting the kitchen – where Miss 15 is making an unholy mess in pursuit of some baking project or other – and making myself a round of cheese, pepperoni, and pickle sandwiches. I'm returning in a few minutes to see if I can get close enough to the kettle to make myself a cup of coffee.

I dug out my copy of “Catch 22” by Joseph Heller this morning – it's sitting on the corner of the desk, and may well vault to the top of the list of books I'm “reading”. I say “reading”, but in reality the book mountain on my bedside table is really just the product of an inability to walk past the bookshop in town without going in and buying something. It's a problem. A nice problem, but a problem none the less. Although I do generally make my way through books I buy, some of them fall through the cracks. There is a copy of “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin on the shelf behind me – bought ten years ago, along with “Stranger in a Strange Land”, and “Brave New World”. One day... one day.

There is a reason for digging out “Catch 22” – a television series has been made of the novel that will begin showing soon – and having heard so many good things about it over the years, I want to read it before I see it, if that makes any sense (not that I ever get to watch anything any more).

I did watch one series recently – “Chernobyl” – the Hulu series recounting the nuclear accident in the 1980s. It became compulsive viewing – in a grotesque sort of way – because obviously we all know what happened. I found the closing titles interesting – that the official Soviet death toll was 31, whereas the independently estimated death tolls range from the thousands, to the tens of thousands – and growing, because people are still dying from radiation related illnesses 30 years on.

I wonder if I'll be able to get to the kettle yet ?

(a couple of minutes pass while I wander into the kitchen, almost dreading the battlefield scene I will walk into)

The kitchen wasn't too bad. Everything has been left out, so we'll see which battles I might pick when pointing out to Miss 15 that she didn't find the stand-mixer in the middle of the kitchen counter, or the baking trays all over the worktops, or any of the ingredients outside of the cupboards. It doesn't take much to trip her volcanic temper – typically any request to do anything at all is “going on at her”.

While taking recycling out – because of course the corner of the kitchen is a recycling bin, hadn't you figured that out? – I felt drops of rain. Moments later the rest of the family saw me run back through the kitchen, clothes basket in hand, shouting for help. I have a theory that rain only falls on washing when you don't notice it starting – we caught it early this time, and the rain stuttered to a halt while we pulled clothes from the line.

Right. Time to drink that coffee before it goes cold.

A long time reader of my blog has asked if I might describe how I make a cup of tea. Apparently being English introduces some kind of hoodoo into the process – some magic or other that the wider world think they might be missing. It's probably worth pointing out immediately that tea originates in China – not England. We have numerous sayings that reference it's heritage – perhaps the most famous of which is “for all the tea in china” (invariably used when describing your opposition to something – 'you wouldn't get me to do that for all the tea in china').

I'm going to describe several methods of making a cup of tea, and dispell some myths along the way. I suppose this might be interesting for some people, and no doubt some tea snobs will crawl out of the woodwork and proclaim their version of “you know nothing John Snow” in my general direction.

So. First method. You put a number of teabags in a teapot, and pour boiling water onto them. The number of teabags is generally less than the number of cups you're making. Growing up, we would always make a pot for four of us – and would put three teabags in. The tea is supposed to brew for a few minutes before being poured – you can accelerate this process by either moving the teapot in a circular motion, or stick spoon inside it and give the teabags a stir. After a minute or two, you can pour the tea into a cup and add milk, sugar, or whatever else.

Here's the first myth. Tea snobs will tell you that the milk has to be poured into the cup first, before the tea. This is utter rubbish – it doesn't affect the taste. There is a historical reason for it though – for many years the ceramics used to make teacups was not stable enough to survive the temperature change when boiling water was poured into them – they can and did crack on a regular basis – therefore if you added milk first, it prevented the shock to the cup.

Second method – the tea snob method. You buy loose leaf tea, and put it in the teapot. You add boiling water – exactly as you might with teabags – and then pour the brewed tea into a cup through a tea strainer – a small sieve that prevents tea leaves from reaching the cup. Your average tea snob will swear blind that tea made from loose leaf tea tastes better. It doesn't. I've tested this in a blind test with friends in the past – nobody could tell which was which.

Third method – my method. You put a teabag in your cup, pour boiling water into the cup, give it a stir for a few seconds, then add milk to make it the right sort of colour, then fish the teabag out with the same spoon you stirred it with. At this point your average tea snob is recoiling in horror, and making disparaging comments about your upbringing. Here's the thing though – I used to work with somebody that always insisted on making tea in a teapot – who swore that the difference was obvious, and that tea made in a cup was almost undrinkable. I humored him for a while, and used a teapot, but then gave up and made him tea in the cup. I even asked him once or twice if his tea was ok – and received glowing feedback.

So there you have it – the “English” way of making tea – which I suspect is exactly the same as everybody elses way. It's probably worth mentioning that nearly all tea consumed over here is “black” tea – or “builders tea”. You can of course get hold of lots of other blends of tea – among them Earl Grey, Darjeeling, Green tea, Oolong tea, Redbush tea, and so on.

Final piece of trivia – once upon a time I worked on a big project for Twinings, designing and building their new product development system. I learned nothing about tea while working for them.

After a quite beautiful weekend, the sky decided that enough was enough today, and not content with rolling dark clouds across the hereabouts, it dumped several billion gallons of water across the country. Obviously unconvinced that we might get the message (if there is one), the sky is apparently going to repeat the deluge throughout the week.

I wore full waterproofs to work today. The journey typically takes about fifteen minutes – in that time the rain got through the waterproofs, filled my shoes, and soaked my clothes through to my underwear. I spent the majority of the day barefoot at my desk, with my shoes and socks hanging on a radiator in an unused office next door.

Returning home this evening was worse – much worse. I stopped at the grocery store a mile from home to get food for dinner, and worried that my shoes had filled with water – each step towards the doors of the supermarket spurted water through the shoelace holes. After squelching my way around the store, I slithered back onto my bike, and carried on home – stripping off inside the back door while Miss 14 presented me with a present from her trip to France.

I love that our children don't worry about how people look – their entire focus is usually on what they are doing, or what they have for you. I stood dripping in my t-shirt and underwear in the kitchen, clutching everything I had been wearing, and tried to sound interested in her very important obvervations about the chocolates she had bought me from the airport in France.

The chocolates are now hidden behind the tea in the kitchen cupboard. Even though I'm sharing them, if I leave them out Miss 18 will claim them as her own in the early hours of the morning. This kind of behaviour has slowly reduced the entire house to a strange sort of police state – with each of us jealously guarding chocolate like demented dragons.

In other news, I still haven't drunk any alcohol. It's been 10 days now. It would be wrong to say I don't miss it – but I'm not sure if that's just habit. There is a bottle of wine in the fridge right now – I thought about pouring myself a glass earlier, but then chose orange juice instead. The only reason I didn't is because I'm on this damn fool crusade to try not drinking for a while – to see how much difference it makes. Remember the time I stopped drinking coffee ? I suppose I'm lucky really – to not have the addictive thing in my make-up.

While unwell recently – well... the entire month of May really, wasn't it – I drank colossal quantities of tea. For some reason I go off coffee from time to time. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's that trick your body does – where if it doesn't want something, it will trick you into not liking it. Tea seems to be the cure-all for me – but then I wonder if that's a genetic thing with English people – we solve everthing with a cup of tea, and have a huge amount of confidence in tea solving pretty much everything too.

While walking back from town earlier with groceries I turned a corner and came across a man in his mid-thirties walking his dog. The dog was attached to him via an extending lead. Both he and the dog were causing people to scatter in all directions to avoid becoming ensnared in the lead. The dog owner had no idea of any of this, because his gaze was fixed on his phone throughout. Two of us stopped, looked at him, and then at each other, shaking our heads.

When we walk into town, we take a “back route” that leads through a number of footpaths behind the high-street. While roads take you to perhaps the last 100 yards, the final part is on foot. Not that the family that passed me yesterday would have any clue about that. While walking along the footpath minding my own business, a teenager swept past me on his mountain bike. No helmet. I was mildly annoyed that he was cycling on the path, but let it go. Then his parents came past – cycling on the footpath – together causing all pedestrians to take to the grass. No apologies, no realisation about what they were doing, and no attempt to give way or get off their damn bikes.

While cycling to work on Friday morning, I approached a junction not far from our house where I would need to take up station in the middle of the road, and signal before turning across the opposite lane. As I did so, the car behind me decided that the two seconds it was going to take me to turn was far too long, and over-took me – I had to retract my hand signal to avoid it hitting their windscreen. I couldn't quite believe it had happened. Had I been half a second closer to the junction, I would have gone under the off-side corner of their car.

What on earth is happening to the world? Is it just me, or are many, many more people becoming entirely self interested, entitled, aloof, and ignorant of anything and anybody around them? You start to wonder if it's just you – but then you start making lists of things that are happening around the world – like Trump somehow getting elected with an endless track-record of lies, misogyny, hate, division, exploitation, privilege, and... everybody knows about him anyway. Australia has somehow elected a new Prime Minister that wants to build coal mines. How does that even happen? The UK is mired in a huge mess caused almost exclusively by people who have been elected to serve doing anything and everything they can to cling onto power – and if that means disagreeing with each other about everything in order to make sure nothing ever happens – well that's a pretty good game to play. It's not helped by an older generation that want to cut ties because they have some idiot romantic dream of Oliver Cromwell's England.

I watched the TV series “Chernobyl” during the evenings this week. The reaction to it has been predictably polarized – with the Russian state media claiming it is an elaborate attempt to undermine their proud history, achievements, and so on – and all independent and/or free journalists with knowledge or experience of the story saying “yes – that's pretty much what happened – and is still happening”.

I kind of got lost in the middle of this post. I did have a point, but it kind of got bulldozed by complaining about everything. I don't really like complaining, so I'll shut up. While catching up with a friend late last night I made a remark about somebody we both know being an inveterate gossip – and realised as I said it that I was no better – because I was talking about them, just as they talk about everybody else.

Maybe if I can be a bit more mindful of others, others might be in return? I'm not holding out much hope, but if nobody does anything, nothing changes.

I woke up with a start at 4:30am this morning to an empty bed and a silent house. After a few moments scrabbling around to find my phone, squinting at the screen and ham-fistedly navigating it's user interface, I found my way to “Where's my iPhone”, and discovered my other half about five miles away – headed towards the airport.

I finally got up at about 7am, made my way downstairs, had a shower, put the kettle on, and woke our eldest. She's working today – the pre-school she works at has a “fun day” – I believe she will be either selling cakes, or attaching transfers to young children's arms. The weather is not co-operating at all – it's blowing a gale, and raining in fits and starts. I made her a bacon sandwich to start the day, and took orders for dinner tonight.

“Can we have potato waffles, baked beans with sausages, and chicken nuggets?”

“What are you – seven years old?”

“I know, right?!”

She grinned at me, and I rolled my eyes.

Over the next hour or so I wandered around the house picking things up, putting things away, and preparing the first of many loads of washing. Quite how I'm going to get anything dry is a mystery at the moment – given the apocalypse happening outside. I'm tempted to say “thoughts and prayers” might work, but you know my thoughts about that kind of thing (just in case you don't – “thoughts and prayers” absolutely means you're not going to do anything at all – because thinking something and saying a few words doesn't actually achieve anything other than making you feel better about yourself – of course you can't tell people that when they say they will pray about something, because they'll get butt-hurt about it).

Anyway.

It's still only 11am. I've already put two loads through the washing machine, tidied the house up, and done the grocery shopping. When I returned home from the shops I will admit to being caught out – everything was where I had left it – the house was STILL tidy. It's kind of like Wonderland.

Anybody that lives in a house as chaotic and busy as ours will know that this situation is NOT normal. Things are never where you left them. Other people's things aren't either. That space you were going to put something down while moving something else will not be there when you get back – somebody else will have dumped something there. That bin that's just been emptied at the front of the house will be full again by lunchtime. The grass you cut yesterday will be long again tomorrow because OF COURSE it's raining cats and dogs now. The washing bin you just emptied is now full again, with at least five loads because you threatened your 15 year old daughter that if she didn't pick clothes up off her bedroom floor, you would cut the internet off. Most of the clothes were last week's clean washing that didn't get put away when you gave it to her – they have been walked on for several days.

I could go on.

So yes, it's kind of like wonderland at the moment. The house is quiet, calm, and relatively tidy for a change. I bought some donuts from the grocery store – they are still on the kitchen counter, and only the one I ate is missing. On a normal day, the bag wouldn't have reached the kitchen counter with anything left in it – children would have appeared from all corners of the house. The only things that summons children faster than junk food is a dead internet connection.

I'm sailing the ship single handed this weekend – my other half is taking our youngest daughter to France to watch the England ladies football team play in the World Cup. They will be up at 4am tomorrow for a 7am flight. I'm going to try and have a quiet weekend for a change.

I still haven't touched any alcohol since last Friday evening. To be honest, I hadn't really thought of it until just now. A part of me thinks that sitting with a glass of wine might be nice, but the dogmatic, stubborn so and so inside me is busy shouting “don't you dare – you've done a week – lets see if we can do a month”. It will surprise nobody that my other half won a box of wine on a raffle – because of course she did.

Rain is falling steadily outside in the darkness (it just turned midnight) – I suppose at least the grass will be nice and green. I should really go and look for our little black cat to see if he wants to come in. He's too scared to use the cat-flap unless cornered into doing so.

(5 minutes pass)

I just stood in the back doorway looking out into the darkness for him – no sign at all. It's no real surprise that he keeps himself to himself – he grew up wild, and then spent the better part of a year in a cat rescue facility. Sometimes he lets you stroke him while eating, but rarely if ever approaches you for a fuss. I suppose you could say he tolerates you when he feels so inclined.

Anyway... it's getting late. I'll probably get up with the rest of the lunatics in the morning and stay up after they have left for the airport. You never know – having some time to myself might actually result in some half decent blog posts for a change.

After a number of questionable corporate decisions recently, I've decided to quietly untangle myself from Google. This has meant walking away from their mail, calendar, and photo storage, and finding alternatives. It has also meant visiting the various places I frequent online, and changing my email address.

I must be mad. Or brave. I'm not sure which.

I'm sitting in the darkness of the junk room, listening to an internet radio station, and pretending I'm a writer. Of course we all know I'm really a software developer that just spent all day running around in circles, re-designing something I won't be able to tell you about – which beggars why I mentioned it in the first place. I can pretend to be a writer though.

I'm writing these words though, right? That means I'm writing. Ergo, I'm a writer.

Miss 15 sat her first exam today – an English Language exam. Her school takes the English Language exam a year ahead of the Literature exam – reasoning that allowing the students to focus on one thing or the other is more fruitful than learning both at the same time. Apparently the results bear this out.

I don't really remember my English exam at the end of secondary school. I don't really remember any of my exams, truth be told. I remember sitting in the school gymnasium and being watched by invigilators for hours on end. Maybe I can remember a mathematics exam, but that's about it. I got lots of C grades, I seem to remember – then went onto further education, and started to care a bit more. Not enough to go to University though.

People are invariably surprised when they find out I didn't go to University – I'm not really sure why. I'm not really sure why I didn't go either – I had the chance. I wonder if I would have turned out any differently had I gone? It's a “sliding doors” question, isn't it.

Imagine if you could go back in time and re-visit a scene from your own past. Would you be able to help yourself from somehow influencing unfolding events ? I remember reading a book of short stories called “Golden Apples of the Sun” by Ray Bradbury many years ago – I believe it's one of the books that gave rise to the “Butterfly Effect”. In one of the short stories a time traveller visits pre-historic times on a tour, and is instructed never to leave the designated path under any circumstances. Of course they do, and accidentally kill a butterfly. When they return to the present, the world is very subtly different.

It's the whole “Chaos” thing, isn't it.

I read a book by James Gleick about Chaos Theory years ago. It described the combinatorial explosion that goes on in the world all the time – meaning that even with identical starting conditions (as far as we can tell), the future always remains unknowable. We might have a good idea of how things will unfold, but we can never know exactly – because even inspecting what is going on changes what's going on – I believe that's what “Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle” is partly about.

Fun piece of trivia – the writers of Star Trek knew about the ramifications of the uncertainty principle – that it dooms the entire idea of “transporters” to science fiction – so they wrote a device called a “Heisenberg Compensator” into their scripts to deal with it.

How on earth did I get from and English Language exam to Heisenberg Compensators?

Maybe it's time to go to bed, and to stop thinking so much.