write.as/jonbeckett

The clock is ticking towards midnight, and you find me sitting at the dinner table in the lounge with the laptop. I started writing this post fifteen minutes ago, but somehow found it much more important to first finish my cup of tea, then copy some music over from the networked hard-drive in the other room – to listen to while writing this. Of course that didn't quite go to plan – I had to tinker with Windows 10, and then install a half-decent music player app. None of this got me any closer to writing anything. It never does. I think I know why too.

I don't actually have anything to share today. Well... nothing of consequence. Not that I'm letting that stop me. I've written far more about far less in the past, and I imagine I will in the future too. It's a particular skill – filling a screen with text that serves nobody, goes nowhere, and achieves nothing. If procrastination had an awards system, I imagine it would involve some sort of ceremonial sash that could be worn to literary events, and admired by fellow procrastinators.

Anyway. Enough of this nonsense. It's almost half-past my bedtime. Time to go sit in bed and noodle around with the Amazon tablet for a while – studiously avoiding reading any of the books stacked on the bedside table. Making any actual progress at anything would seem quite ridiculous, all things considered.

After writing off much of yesterday, I finally got to the cinema with my eldest daughter on Sunday afternoon – a promised trip to watch “Rocketman”. A second visit for myself, and a first exposure for her to both the man and his music. Sure, she's heard one or two of Elton's songs on the radio over the years, but the movie tied them to a living, breathing, walking disaster, fully aware of his vices, gremlins, and fallibilities.

I just about made it through the movie without falling apart. I'm not quite sure what it is about my make-up – if it's about escapism, or empathy – but I tend to get affected really easily by emotional scenes in movies. Don't even talk to me about the grave scene in Forrest Gump. So yes, ahem, anyway. I made it through the movie with only a few tears, and then as the lights came up we wandered back out into the lobby. I didn't have to ask her what she thought.

“That was so much better than I thought it was going to be.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everything really. The music. Mostly the music.” (she hates musicals)

We spent the next few minutes walking towards a coffee shop – our bus home wouldn't depart for another three quarters of an hour – exchanging favorite moments. I'm not sure I can remember her being as excited following a movie in the past.

It feels like I'm passing something on to her when she discovers music. I guess a part of it is to do with growing up – getting older – and seeing beyond the latest bands, fashions, and so on – realising that the whole circus has come this way before. Some songs are timeless – the struggles singer-songwriters sang about forty years ago have remained much the same. The movie of course binds the music and words to a relateable person struggling with sexuality, relationships, love, notoriety, fame, and everything in-between.

While eating dinner this evening – a collection of leftovers from the freezer – my other half delved into the random collection of vinyl albums that have sat unplayed for the last however many years, and came up with a yellow vinyl gate-fold album.

“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

Our fifteen year old daughter laughed as the album was unfurled across the now empty plates on the dinner table.

“Why would you even keep this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well... it's old.”

She left moments later to watch YouTube, while her older sister quietly picked at leftover salad, and the title track began to play.

After sitting on the green outside our house last night with friends drinking wine, and talking rubbish for several hours, I essentially lost the greater part of Saturday. I didn't really drink that much, and the virus I've been struggling with probably had quite a bit to do with it, but I've pretty much decided that enough is enough. I'm going to stop drinking for a while. Maybe forever. We'll see.

It's not the feeling crappy the next day after having one too many drinks that has annoyed me – it's losing a day of the weekend. I can't remember feeling this bad in quite some time – since I was single probably. The odd thing was I felt fine when I woke up this morning, and then got steadily worse. I finally started to sort myself out late this afternoon – washed up everything in the kitchen, sorted dinner out for the kids – the usual routine.

I suppose it's pretty funny in it's own way – I've proven that I really can't drink more than one or two drinks any more. I've never been much of a drinker – on nights out I'm invariably the one that stops after two or three drinks, aware that I need to be somewhat useful the next day. I think a part of that comes with being a parent – knowing there is nobody to catch you.

Throughout the evening I've been turning this whole “decision” over and over in my head. A friend of a friend recently wrote on the internet about her decision to stop drinking – for similar reasons. A glass of wine after a stressful day had become a crutch, and she knew it. While I don't typically drink during the week, there's an insane school of thought that if I drank more regularly I would be able to survive more than a drink or two more easily when I do – which is utter, utter madness.

Anyway.

Don't worry – I'm not about to turn into some sort of temperance zealot – I firmly believe people should be able to do whatever they like (as long as it doesn't harm others, break the law, and so on, and so on). I'll just have to get brave about saying “no thankyou” when offered drinks.

Yesterday lunchtime I discovered quite by chance that the latest beta of Scrivener for Windows doesn't crash in quite the same way the old version used to – which means I'll be going back on last week's dramatic pronouncement that “Scrivener is dead to me”, and trying to convince everybody that I never said it in the first place.

While playing with the new version of Scrivener – which is quite lovely – I lucked into a quite accidental procrastination black hole. Fonts.

Who knew that choosing a font to use while writing would be so important? I certainly didn't – until I started changing the font, typing a few words, changing it again, and so on. I even did a Google search for “font recommendations for writing”, and ended up reading countless discussions in forums about which fonts people like to use while writing, and why. It turns out lots of people have given this lots of thought in the past.

This is all a tactic of course. If I tinker with the font, it looks like I'm getting ready to write something. Just like I bought the laptop, installed it with this operating system, that software, and the other backup strategy – it all avoided me actually writing anything.

Do blog posts count as “anything”? I think they do. Of course I'm telling myself that so I don't have to confront the slightly guilty fact that I haven't really written anything of consequence for the better part of fifteen years – just like I haven't really drawn anybody or anything since leaving art college twenty eight years ago.

I'm good at procrastinating. I wish it was a valid skill to list on a CV. If you were hiring somebody to make sure your department achieved very little – a problem I'm sure most politicians face on a regular basis – it would be really useful if you could more easily find the most useless people.

Even though every logical part of my being tends to support the idea that the world is random, chaotic, and therefore the product of our interactions with it, I'm beginning to suspect there might be an insidious plot going on at a much higher level.

No, I'm not about to split my personality in two and arrive at a foreign embassy trying to renounce my British citizenship. We'll reserve that for John Forbes Nash Jr and the bit they left out of “A Beautiful Mind”.

I'm talking about hints being dropped.

While emptying my head into the blog over the last several years I've become friends with a number of people around the world – all of them wonderful in their own way. I've tried to follow a diverse cross-section of people, and it's inevitable that their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and background broadly echo my own – it's funny really – while we all rant about Facebook second guessing the things we are interested in, it turns out we do that with the real world anyway.

Over time, I've discovered that a number of the circle I follow are writers. Some of them are published, but the majority not. They write everything from novels, to short stories, essays, articles, poetry, prose – all sorts of things. Occasionally they comment on my brain-dump blog posts, and speculate that I might be quite good at this proper writing lark too if I set my mind to it.

I suppose the only “proper” writing I have done in the last few years has been NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) – which after numerous failed attempts throughout the last decade, I cantered through in 13 days this year. Don't ask me how.

Then about a month ago I discovered that somebody I've known and respected for years – a friend of a friend – had started writing a personal blog, and that it was all sorts of wonderful. Her words were unexpectedly honest, engaging, interesting, brave even.

Fast forward to last night, and I discover that a wonderful friend that lives nearby has been quietly writing too. In secret, I suppose. She writes everything from short stories to screenplays, and keeps them under lock and key. Nobody has seen them. I understand that. When I began using the old iMac during NaNoWriMo last year, the difficulty of getting anything onto or off it appealed to me. The words I wrote within it were “mine”.

Where was I going with this?

Oh yes. The universe. Yes. So I'm surrounded by writers – both known, and unknown – and here I am, emptying my head into this blog almost every day, not really shaping or polishing the words I share at all. It's still writing, I suppose, but only in the same way that both a bag of flour, and a victoria sponge cake are both food. My writing only tends to get as far as words and thoughts – rarely stories.

Is this really the universe stacking the cards – placing all these wonderful people around me – to convince me that I really should start writing something worth reading? Or has it just taken me an inordinately long time to finally realise how many awesome, creative, and inspirational people I'm surrounded by ?

While cycling home from work this evening through steady rain, I started thinking about this blog – that after months of posting nearly every day, I seem to be sliding towards a post every few days. It's not something I consciously thought about or decided – it's just sort of happened.

I've been head down on development work recently – programming. If you didn't know, I'm a software developer – one of the silent priesthood that makes computer systems do useful things like remind you about that invoice that needs paying, or chases you for that budget approval. I use the term “priesthood” because most of my work involves trying my best and then praying it works – which is ironic, given that I don't believe in any form of god or gods.

The girls are out playing “touch rugby” tonight – in the rain. My other half will be holed up in the clubhouse sipping hot tea while they run their sodden socks off. I imagine the washing machine will be forced into action minutes after they return – proving (if proof were needed) that washing powder is rubbish at getting grass stains and mud out of anything.

I'm listening to a Elton John inspired playlist while writing this – put together by the mighty Amazon. Many of Eltons albums are among the free ones you get with Prime. I've stopped using Spotify until they sort out their volume issues – do you use the Spotify web interface? Have you noticed the volume abruptly change recently? It seems to have happened following a Windows 10 update.

And yes, the reason for the Elton kick recently is the “Rocketman” movie. I might try and take our eldest to see it this weekend, if she's up for it. I would love to see it again – although it's RARE for me to watch a movie twice at the cinema. I had to laugh earlier this week when I saw the Mark Kermode review of the movie from BBC Radio 2 – he's typically the most down-beat, unimpressed movie critic, and yet he freely admitted that he struggled to put any objective words together for Rocketman, because in his own words, he just wanted to tell everybody how brilliant it was.

Right. Time to go put the kettle on, and do nothing on purpose for a couple of hours. Maybe a movie with Miss 18, if I can find anything interesting.

p.s. I've been wondering about turning this blog into an email newsletter again. Given that blogs are changing, and that email newsletters seem to be on the rise, perhaps I can be a unicorn in that world, instead of a unicorn in this? Or maybe in both? I'll think about it.

The rest of the family are out for the day – leaving me here to wallow in my own silence, and hopefully get a bit better. My body still hasn't got the note about stopping the epic snot drive that's been going on for several weeks now. I took some pretty powerful medication last night, which allowed me to sleep, but also resulted in some of the most impressive snoring in recorded history. I woke up at 5am to the rather guilty discovery that my other half had retreated to the sofa at some point in the night.

So here I am – nursing a cup of coffee, listening to Spotify, and quietly tinkering with this and that.

I decided not to stop using the bullet journal after all. I'm not sure if I wrote about that or not. After emptying my head onto the printed page for the last couple of years, it's a hard habit to break. Sure, mobile apps are very clever, and they can remind you of all sorts of things you might have forgotten, but in a strange sort of way setting aside the time to check what you might be doing over the coming days, weeks, or months has become the most important part of the whole thing. I suppose some people call it “being mindful” – I call it “reminding myself continually”.

I suppose I should really go read “The Bullet Journey Method” now – the book by Ryder Carroll about the various ways you can integrate a Bullet Journal into your life. I've fallen into using mine only to record what I have done – not so much to plan out what I have to get done. I tend to shy away from planning too much because my life doesn't tend to follow any sort of prescribed path. Most people's “total chaos” seems quite orderly compared to my own experiences.

In other news, I wiped Linux from the old desktop computer at home. I got fed up with the computer running so slowly, but forgot that Linux tends to cause the temperature of the motherboard to erupt (don't ask me why) – which in turns causes the fans in the case to turn themselves up to eleven. It sounded like a box full of cheap hairdryers all turned on at once – not that I've ever heard that, but I have a good imagination.

We voted in the European elections at the end of last week – deliberately voting against the wave of nationalism that seems to be sweeping the nation. Apparently 40% of the electorate bothered to vote, and of those, 30% voted to burn our bridges. I guess all it takes is apathy, time, and a general lack of education to cause the events that led to the second world war to happen all over again. It's quite dispiriting really – the very same people that grew up in the shadow of Nazism and Fascism in the decades following the war are now playing to the same songbook. There's a stunning level of hypocrisy going on.

It seems to me that we are surrounded by hypocrisy most of the time. People are all for socialism while they have nothing – and then as soon as they have something, they don't want to share it any more. People are also all for reading books about benevolent creators in the sky – until they need hospital treatment, and then the typical rubbish they spout flies straight out of the window as they grasp at anything the last few hundred years of scientific research might offer to help them – you know – the same research that got people burned, or locked up. Don't even get me started about the growing army of rich old white men writing laws in the US to dictate what woman can and cannot do to their own body. I guess we also learned last month that being seen to help re-build an old church is far more important to billionaires than feeding anybody.

I'll stop there. I could go on. Ranting about the state of the world makes me no better than the army of idiots that post all over social media complaining about their lot instead of doing something about it. I'm going to go fuss the cat, and hang some washing out.

I'm sitting in front of the keyboard at fifteen minutes to midnight, racing to empty my head. I guess this is one of those times where you realise you really are a writer of sorts – or a diarist, or a journaller, or whatever other label you might attach. We just got back from the cinema, and I want to get these words down before everything fades.

So yes. We went to the cinema tonight. A couple of hours without the children, in a wonderfully quirky cinema in a nearby town. A few of our friends gathered on the green outside our house earlier, and we wandered over for a drink with them before leaving. While walking across in the early evening sunshine, cat-calls were made at my embroidered shirt, jeans, and boots. It's rare that I ever dress up.

“Look! He's got his date clothes on!”

I grinned, and sat down among a group of the best neighbours you could wish to have – sitting in the grass and laughing, drinking, and sharing stories with one another. We could have stayed with them all night, but like I mentioned – we had tickets for a movie.

Rocketman. The biographical movie about Elton John. I don't really remember the first time I heard Elton John's music – but I suppose that's the thing – for my generation his songs have become a part of our lives. I love that music connects with memory in such a visceral way. When I hear “Your Song”, I think of somebody. When I hear “I'm Still Standing”, I think of difficult times in my life. When I hear “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” I think about the endless nights spent in foreign cities, burning the midnight oil. “Candle in the Wind” always takes me back to my final year of college, and the discovery of Marilyn Monroe while working on an art project.

What a movie though. Emotional, gripping, exciting, enthralling – kind of like being hit by the kitchen sink at times. By the time the lights came up at the end I had tear stained cheeks, and a new appreciation for the darker side of fame. I remember hearing Duran Duran being interviewed years ago – about why they broke up while at the top – and them saying they realised how far down the ground had become, and that they were petrified. Elton didn't stop though – he rode a fiery comet of his own making straight into the ground, and is pretty lucky to still be here. The movie doesn't glamorise, or pull any punches.

The music though – and the arrangements – and the performances. Just wow. I want to write so much about it, but I don't want to ruin the movie for you if you've not seen it yet.

If you'll excuse me I have to go and find my copy of “Madman Across the Water”, switch the record player on, and go sit with a beer or two for a couple of hours.

After a seemingly never ending week filled with stress and drama I can't write anything about, the weekend has finally arrived – and not just any weekend – a long weekend.

While most people will be lazing around reading the newspaper, drinking tea, and making plans to visit friends to do fun things together, we will be working on a hell-scape of a garden again – mostly because it doesn't cost anything to hack the jungle down. “Most people” is of course an invention of my own mind – a wonderland that everybody else lives in, while I grumble and look on bitterly at the much more better lives everybody else must have.

None of this is true by the way. I rarely think about anything while working on the garden, other than “die you f*cking nasty stinging nettle bastards”.

I'm writing this in “FocusWriter” on the old desktop computer, for what it's worth. I had something of a fit of temper late the other night when Windows wanted to do an update. It rebooted in the middle of me doing something, and took ten years to restart. I got my own back on it by installing Linux on it, and setting it to boot into Linux by default. I guess a good analogy would be shutting somebody you don't like in a cupboard while somebody you do like comes to visit.

Oh dear. I'm starting to sound like a maniac.

I have a confession to make. I nearly broke up with my bullet journal this week. It's all been a bit dramatic really. I started playing with a to-do list app on my phone, and then realised that I could use Evernote for 90% of what I use the bullet journal for. But then I kind of realised that I would need three apps and a paper notebook to replace what I use the bullet journal for. So I'm keeping at it. For now. It's funny really – when I started using a bullet journal I tried to make the pages look interesting, but as time has gone on I have become very boring indeed – each page is filled with lists of either things to do, or things that have been completed. No doodles, and very few diagrams.

My nose is still producing snot for England, if you're interested. And my chest is still sneaking up on me with coughing fits from time to time – but it IS getting better. My other half has been trying to talk me into taking paracetamol every four hours over the weekend to give my body a fighting chance. We'll see.

Isn't this post wonderfully random and disjointed. Perhaps it's the start of some thing new? Or the beginning of a slide into mediocrity – why have big thoughts about important things when you can have little thoughts about nothing in particular. Maybe I should change the tagline to reflect that.

We're heading towards a month since I was last “well”, and I'm only too aware that I'm starting to sound like a scratched record. I'm certain my co-workers are already fed up of the guy sitting in the corner of the office coughing, sneezing, and blowing his nose all day, every day.

You know the crazy thing? I don't think I've really caught anything of consequence for the last couple of years – so I'm guessing this is the universe's way of saying “time's up – it's your turn at last”.

In the middle of all of this idiocy, I feel like I've not so much fallen off the blogging horse, as lost the horse completely – some time ago.

Maybe this is a common thing – this mailaise. Is that even how you spell mailaise ? Looking around at the tidal wave of selfies that lands on Instagram each day, I've slowly realised how rare a photo of my own face has become. I'm not sure why. I get it – people take selfies because they feel proud of how they look in a given moment – or want to share where they are. I just wonder if anybody is remotely interested in seeing my unshaven face arrive in their phone. Surely a photo of something I saw is more interesting than a photo of me? You probably KNOW what I look like – another photo of me really isn't going to fire any insightful thoughts. Where I am, or what I'm doing might though.

It's been a long week.

While cycling home from work today I got cut up by several cars, and started to wonder if I'm invisible or unworthy in some way. Surely the rest of the world can't be THAT self interested? Maybe they are. My mistake.

Do you ever have the feeling that you've misjudged the entire world? That “thinking the best of people” was a mistake? I sometimes think that.

And before you express concern in a comment – I'm fine. Absolutely fine. Apart from the snot and coughing. No, really. I might go to bed in a minute though. Like I said – it's been a long week, and it's not quite over yet.

Thank the maker we have a three day weekend coming in the UK. And the Monaco Grand Prix – not that anybody will be watching it of course, because F1 is now pay-per-view, and Mercedes have become so good that nobody is interested in watching them win any more.

I'll cheer up tomorrow, I promise.