write.as/jonbeckett

While noodling around on the internet earlier this evening it occurred to me how many wonderfully distracting destinations there are. It also occurred to me that they are the reason I rarely read any more.

If not reading and commenting on posts at Wordpress, I can invariably be found looking at photos on Instagram, scrolling Facebook and Twitter, watching videos at YouTube, playing chess rather badly against random strangers at chess.com, or a hundred other things.

I need to stop. For my own sanity more than anything. It's too easy to dig holes in the floor of the internet and sit in them (as noted by Brooke the other day). That's not to say the friends we make on the internet aren't real – of course they are – it's just... it's all the other stuff. It's the mindless scrolling of curated highlight reels of other people's lives. It's the Facebook timeline, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and so many other slippery slopes.

When I met up in London last month with Dater Analysis, Back in Stilletos Again, and Autumn's Inner Thoughts, we got to sit around a table and not only share stories, but also share a little of each other. There's something about spending time with somebody in the real world that the written word or a filtered photo doesn't quite convey – the body language, the nervous laughter, leaning across a table to tell a conspiratorial story.

I suppose in some ways instant messaging replicates the real world to an extent – but it's a poor substitute for holding a hand when unsure, or an unspoken smile in a silent room.

The funny thing ? Despite my misgivings about spending time on the internet, here I am – sitting at the desk in the junk room, in the dark, a glass of red wine between my hands, emptying words into the keyboard – sitting in a freshly dug hole.

Old habits die hard.

While walking into town to get groceries this morning I forgot to take headphones with me so instead of filling my head with a podcast or music, I had only my thoughts for company. All manner of thoughts bounced around my head as I walked the mile or so in each direction. Now I'm home, I'm not so sure than any of it really stands up – or rather, the little that I can now recall.

I've been coming up blank a lot recently.

Having something to write about helps. Churning through one day after another at home doesn't really help. Every day becomes groundhog-day – filled with washing up, tidying up, grocery shopping, and so on.

Maybe I need to step up and take a few chances. Empty the darker corners of my brain. I wonder if it's a slippery slope though – a pandora's box.

I filter so much.

While walking home from town earlier, I started making a mental list of all the things I filter – everything from personal interactions to thoughts, opinions, hopes, dreams, annoyances. It seems that if anything is even vaguely controversial I stay far away from it. I have dug a hole for myself – a deep hole.

How is it already Wednesday? How are there only twenty minutes left until the end of Wednesday ? Where the hell has my week off gone ? So many questions. They all have perfectly logical answers of course, but I'll try and ignore that as best I can.

It's late on Wednesday night at the time of writing. I've just put the rubbish bins out, the dishwasher is running, there's an empty tea cup sitting next to the laptop, and a plate full of crumbs that used to be attached to a slice of my other half's birthday cake – a fruit cake that seems to be lasting forever. I'm sitting at the table in the lounge, because I've finally lost the junk room – something I predicted some time ago. The junk room is now festooned with old knitting projects, brick-a-brack, pattern books, and bags of material.

I don't really mind using this laptop. It was originally bought as a christmas present for our eldest daughter, but she never used it – she inherited my old Chromebook, and much prefers Chrome OS over Windows – not that it has Windows installed on it. It's currently running ElementaryOS – a Linux variant that seems to run well on old hardware, and looks and works wonderfully.

Oh – nearly forgot – I canned the second blog yesterday. I need to stop tinkering with things, and focus on doing one thing – if I'm going to get back into writing, surely it's better to have one place to share things (here) instead of several places. You may have noticed I changed my blog theme a few days ago too – this is where I hold my hands up, and admit to discovering a way of installing themes on wordpress.com that are no longer available through the design menus.

Anyway.

It's getting late, and I really don't have a lot to share – other than an endless churn of chores, and ferrying little people from this place to that. We spent much of this morning sitting in a trampoline park, watching our youngest and her friends bounce around like lunatics.

Maybe tomorrow morning I'll get a chance to sneak into town for a coffee, and an hour of peace and quiet. Maybe I'll take the laptop. Saying that, if I get up with our eldest, I know the first hour of the day will be my own anyway – and significantly cheaper than Starbucks. Sitting at home doesn't afford you passing strangers to describe though. Decisions, decisions.

Time to go to bed.

I have this week off work. I suppose in some ways today was the first “real” day off – because until now each day has been a bit manic – packing clothes, traveling, socialising, unpacking clothes, washing, grocery shopping, and so on. It probably seems a little strange, listing “socialising” as a chore, but in many ways that's exactly how I see the real world – hard work.

There was a night – during the rugby tour – when many of the other parents wandered down to the bar together, and I stayed behind with a few of the Mums. For some reason I find their conversations about life, parenting, and personal struggles far more interesting than typical male conversations about work, cars, beer, sport, or past exploits involving work, cars, beer and sport. I've always been the same – at any party you'll usually find me in the kitchen with a glass of wine, listening to the conversations around me. I'm never “that guy” that's been more places than anybody else, done more things than anybody else, and delights in telling everybody about their adventures. If anything I spend most of my time trying to include everybody.

Anyway. Got a bit distracted there. I'm off work this week.

I had vague plans of visiting the coffee shop in town each morning this week to spend some time writing, but given the cost of coffee, and the distinct lack of funds in our bank account at the moment, you're far more likely to find me sitting in the junk room at home with an instant coffee and a supermarket-own-brand chocolate cookie.

While away I started reading “The Summer Book”, by Tove Jansson. I only got a chance to read a few chapters, and then while folding it up to wander down to the bar for a meal one of the other Dads remarked on it:

“Is it any good?”

“Yes actually – it's wonderfully written – which is amazing really, because it's obviously translated from the original language” (Swedish, I have discovered – Tove Jansson was Finnish, but spoke Swedish).

“She wrote another book, didn't she – The Winter Book – I've got both, and haven't read either yet”.

I admitted I had no idea, and we fell into a conversation about reading the more unusual books – I recounted the time I spent working in the city years ago, and worked my way through various “banned” books – among them Lolita, and Tropic of Cancer.

It's funny really – just like that I discovered another parent like myself – a quiet guy that reads, and tends to watch the room going on around him. It felt good to know that I wasn't alone.

After filling the car with bags of clothes, kit, and birthday cake on Friday, we set off late in the morning for a park just outside of Tewkesbury, in Gloucestershire. The girls rugby team our middle daughter plays for were staging their first ever tour – taking the team away for a weekend of rugby, bonding, and any other idiocy that could be summoned at a reasonable price in the middle of nowhere.

The journey took us through Oxfordshire – past signs for the town I grew up. It seemed strange, seeing local place-names I haven't seen for the better part of twenty years. We were also reminded of something we didn't miss about Oxford itself as we inched past the city in heavy traffic for an hour and a half.

After finally leaving Oxford behind, Tewkesbury appeared on road signs, and phones throughout the car got switched to various map applications to help us to the destination – like countless times before we had programmed the sat-nav in the car with the postcode – not the actual address. You only have to get that wrong a couple of times before you begin checking en-route.

We found our destination for the weekend, checked in, and then found the team members and their families that had already arrived – settling into two facing rows of wooden chalets. I say “chalets”, but they were more “wooden sheds with bunk beds and heaters”. Basic, but comfortable, great value, and perfect for our purposes.

Not long after arriving a coaching session was held on a nearby field with several visiting coaches putting the girls through their paces. Both of our girls kitted up – to my surprise – marking the first time our youngest had taken any part in rugby for at least six months. The way the rest of the girls took her under their wing (she was by far the youngest – turning 14 on Saturday – was wonderful to see) – they wrote her a birthday card, signed by the entire team, and also voted her “player of the tour”.

After the coaching session, we all headed back to clean ourselves up, and then set off in search of the main camp restaurant and entertainment building – a huge wooden cabin alongside a lake. The food was hearty, and tasted wonderful – being served to the queue of children and parents like a field kitchen of sorts.

After eating we shuffled through to the adjoining bar, and discovered we were not the only rugby team on-site – two other boys teams were present – one of which had arrived earlier in the day, and the parents and coaches were already the worse for wear. I get it – it's a holiday for the parents and coaches too, but there's a line you don't cross while you're in charge of children, and they crossed it mid-afternoon. By the late evening they were at risk of being reported by just about everybody in the room.

There was one moment where things might have escalated, but we (wisely I think) decided not to start anything. One of the drunk coaches fell towards our youngest daughter, who was sitting on the outside of her team-mates – causing her to recoil and scream out – which of course caused every parent in the room to stop what they were doing and watch. Thankfully nothing did happen – we spirited Miss 14 away, and she sat with us for the remainder of the evening.

Anyway! Enough about them – I'm not going to name the team because they've almost certainly had a written report from the bar staff filed against them – if not their own parents, who staged some kind of confrontation with their own coaches outside their chalets in the early hours – we didn't hear it because we all fell straight asleep.

While all the mayhem was going on in the bar, a peculiar 60-something-year-old-man was running a Karaoke evening on the main stage – with various rugby players taking to the stage and singing hilariously badly. Our entire team took to the stage at one point and sang something entirely forgettable particularly badly too. When a Dad from one of the other teams took to the stage and actually COULD sing, it kind of ruined it for everybody else.

The next morning – having all drunk a little bit too much the night before, we all got back up for a cooked breakfast at 7:30am, and then a trip to Cinderford rugby club – a few miles down the road. I had a shower before breakfast, and got my first experience of the communal shower block, and the spectacularly cold initial jets of water. I hid in the corner of my stall while waiting for the water to not cause hypothermia, then quickly washed my hair before pulling my t-shirt and underwear back on, and running back to the chalet. My other half looked at me in disbelief as I burst through the door in my underwear, accompanied by an icy blast of air. The skies were blue all weekend, but the temperature regularly dropped to freezing.

We arrived at Cinderford a little after 10am, with a game scheduled for 11. Our girls team would be playing theirs, and then we were invited to stay and watch their first team play later in the afternoon.

Quite apart from the biting cold, perhaps the highlight of the first part of the day was watching the lone under-18 player on our squad face-off against one of the Cinderford girls that had been repeatedly warned for bad sportsmanship. Fingers were pointed at faces – words were exchanged – and the opposition player got sent off.

We lost the game, but the girls didn't seem to mind – the under-18 that had stood her ground had attained hero status throughout the squad, and had really shown them the way in terms of standing up for their team. It was impressive stuff – I'm never getting into an argument with her.

In the afternoon we all huddled in the stands and watched the local first 15 play against Darlington. While most of the adults were busy watching a very entertaining rugby match, we kept hearing snippets of the under-15s conversations. Lets just say they were watching something, but it wasn't the game. It put to bed – no pun intended – the myth that teenage boys are the only ones with sex on the brain.

After getting home, washing, changing clothes, doing makeup, and whatever else a group of teenage girls do, we all headed back to the camp restaurant for dinner, and started on the beer again. It's going to take my liver some time to recover – I'm really not used to drinking any more. The “entertainment” was a guy playing guitar and singing all manner of hits very badly, and another guy sitting on a wooden packing crate equipped with microphones, hitting it to make a rhythm. I didn't really mind their “every song sounds the same” drawl until they completely murdered “Free Fallin'” – the Tom Petty classic that was also recorded by John Mayer in possibly the best acoustic cover of anything ever. Their version sounded more like an angry tramp kicking a box in a mental asylum while ranting in a monotone drawl.

Thankfully the boys team coaches seemed much quieter than they had been the previous night – perhaps already aware that their club was in rather a lot of trouble.

On Sunday we had no games planned, but did have a mysteriously titled “Kangaroo Court” pencilled in for 10am. Following another cooked breakfast we all gathered between the chalets and the coaches appeared wearing judges wigs, with clipboards. One at a time the players were summoned to hear charges brought against them – everything from “being injured”, to “dancing on the pitch” were reprimanded. Our middle girl was accused of being a card shark in the bar (which she was). The girls were given the choice of eating a number of dry crackers in a minute, eating neat tabasco sauce, or eating a spoon full of dog food. Our girl – who normally plays front-row in the scrum – held up decades of tradition of front row players by choosing the dog food – then threw it up spectacularly, to cheers from all the players and parents (she was fine, and was laughing herself, inbetween spitting, and coughing).

Only afterwards did the coaches reveal that the dog food had actually been a disguised tin of beef stew.

Following all of the players being found guilty, a spirited game of rounders took place on the training field with both players and parents – for those elsewhere in the world, rounders is kind of a simplified version of baseball. Never has so little talent been shown by so many in such a short space of time.

Afterwards we found ourselves at a loose end for several hours, so we wandered into nearby Tewkesbury and explored the Abbey – a huge church that dates back about 800 years. It always amuses me when churches claim such heritage – invariably one small corner of their construction goes back that far, and the rest has been built no later than two to three hundred years ago – sometimes much more recently.

We wandered into the Abbey tea shop, and were quietly eating cakes and drinking tea when one of the elderly waitresses couldn't help asking about our clothing. We had completely forgotten – while on-tour, all of the parents and children at the rugby club had been given green hoodies with the club badge on the chest, and a tour acronym stamped across the back. We were all sitting around the table in our bright green hoodies – we must have looked very odd indeed.

Finally – last night – after a roast dinner in the camp restaurant, we headed off for the final group activity of the tour – a game of crazy golf at a nearby shopping mall. It was a great way of relaxing after several days away with the team, and as I noted to one of the other parents while doing hilariously badly – not something that anybody could take too seriously without making a total idiot of themselves.

This morning – while eating yet another cooked breakfast (the third in a row) – I looked around the restaurant at a very tired group of parents and children. We were all ready to head home – and after half an hour re-packing the contents of the chalets back into cases, loading them into cars, and saying our goodbyes, that's exactly what we did.

We're home now. I hit the ground running when I got home – unloaded the car, cut the grass, and started the washing machine. My other half is uploading many hundreds of photos to the internet while I write this on the old iMac. I imagine these words will become a post at some point later this evening.

I think I can hear that the washing machine has finished.

We leave in a few hours, and won't be back until Monday afternoon. After posting so frequently to the blog for so long, it's going to feel strange storing the thoughts and memories away for a few days instead of posting them to the internet.

I just picked up a book from the shelf and threw it in my bag – “The Summer Book”, by Tove Jansson. I've been meaning to read it for a LONG time, and being away from everything for a few days seems like the perfect opportunity.

We don't know if there will be a mobile signal on-site, let alone WiFi. When the children discovered there would be no television, there was a moment of silent shock – they seem to be acclimatising well though, sitting around the kitchen table at the moment with their noses in puzzle books.

After cycling home from work this evening, buying pizzas for everybody from the supermarket and cooking them, I opened a bottle of fizzy wine and downed two glasses back-to-back. I'm off work now for 10 days. I don't return until after the Easter bank holiday. I haven't really had any serious time off since the end of last summer.

Although this weekend is spoken for, I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with the rest of the time off. I expect most of it will be spent hiding at home – cutting the grass, helping re-arrange rooms, and so on. A part of me is tempted to go to Starbucks every morning and quietly empty my head into the blog – but that would also involve paying exorbitant prices for coffee.

Before any of that happens I have to survive a weekend away with our middle daughter's rugby team – staying in a chalet (read: shed with bunk beds), washing in a communal toilet block, and and stamping my feet at the side of rugby pitches while trying to make conversation with fellow parents.

I'm not good at social events – I never have been. Of course you would never know, because I'm good at faking it. An old friend figured me out some time ago – realising that if I start a conversation, it's typically engineered in such a way that everybody tells me their life story, and I get to listen. Either that or I start a conversation about a contentious topic, then sit back to admire my own handiwork as everybody else start to raise their voices.

Something else I've noticed recently – that I've become increasingly aware of – is general knowledge. I'm not sure if I know more useless rubbish than most, or if people generally know less than they used to. I guess we all think of certain stories or subjects as being “common knowledge”, and presume other people know about them too.

While out with friends in London a couple of weeks ago the story behind Gin being such a popular drink in London came up, and I was the only one that knew the back-story. It's a good story too – about the laws being relaxed on Gin production because of a monopoly, meaning everybody that had previously been making beer switched over to making Gin – with predictable results. The drunken “gin riots” were the one and only time the “riot act” has ever been read. I remember when I was young there was a common phrase indicating that a final warning was being give – “they read them the riot act” – in real terms, it means the police and/or the army can be called to prevent a group of people from causing trouble by any punitive means available.

I sometimes wonder what other people have in their heads instead of the useless trivia I seem to have filled mine with. They probably have sensible knowledge, wisdom, and thoughts about everyday things that are actually useful to know – like how to set the clock on the microwave, or how on earth Snapchat works (what do you mean, you swipe left on this screen, up on that screen, and right on that screen?).

Anyway. Time is marching on. I'm heading to bed – I have a bag to pack in the morning, and an inevitable panic shopping trip to buy supplies for the weekend away (wine! lots of wine!).

I'm not sure I'll have the opportunity to write anything over the weekend, so this might be the last post until late on Sunday night. I guess we'll see.

Tomorrow will be my last day in the office for a week or so. We're headed away on Friday for a “rugby tour” with our middle daughter's rugby team, and then next week I have the week off – the first holiday days I have used in some time.

The rugby tour will take us to a holiday park near Tewkesbury – between Worcester and Gloucester (pronounced “wooster”, and “gloster” for friends elsewhere in the world – don't ask me why they are spelled the way they are). My Dad is originally from Gloucester – or rather, from a small village just outside Gloucester called Hucclecoat. If you look on a map, Hucclecoat has now been swallowed up by the city.

The last time I visited Gloucester was some years ago now – we had a project at work with a company near Hucclecoat working on future nuclear power development in the UK. I think the government has now pulled the plug on the entire project (or rather, the ministers that would need to sign the cheques didn't dare, because of public perception of nuclear power). In some ways I'm glad the project never went anywhere, because surely the world has seen it's fair share of nuclear disasters already ?

Anyway. I'm not going to launch into a thousand words about the short-sightedness of the capitalists that think nuclear power is a great idea. It's tempting, believe me.

We leave for the rugby tour on Friday lunchtime. We're leaving our eldest daughter to fend for herself for the weekend – for the first time. I'm sure she'll be absolutely fine – we're going to stock the fridge with ready meals, and the cupboard with snacks. I'm sure a weekend eating rubbish and watching Netflix uninterrupted is some sort of bliss for a teenage girl.

Anyway. It's getting late, and I haven't put the garbage out for collection yet. We don't want a repeat of me running down the road after the refuse collection lorry in my boxer shorts tomorrow morning – and yes, that really has happened in the past – more than once.

I've just moved the junk room around – giving up the desk the old iMac used to sit on so my other half can take it over with her sewing machine, in preparation for the local dance company show.

For the last several years she has made costumes for the shows – everything from fifty penguin hats, to a room full of flowing dresses. For the better part of a month our house turns into a production line – with patterns spread across floors, rolls of material here there and everywhere, and a sewing machine propped in the middle of it all.

At the moment the lounge is filled with decorative hair bands, and the clothes dryer is being used as a temporary hanger for autumn inspired shirts.

One of the biggest problems of having sewing projects all over the lounge and dining table is mealtimes – where we either have to move everything, or work around everything – sitting in various chairs around the room with meals on our laps.

So. My quiet bolt-hole in the corner of the house is no longer going to be my own. To be honest I'm not too fussed – I'll just grab the old laptop and sit in the lounge. I bet the sewing projects still end up all over the lounge – AND the junk room – AND the kitchen.

I'm not getting rid of the iMac. Back at the start of the year when we ran out of money spectacularly, I thought about selling it – but it ended up being one of the few things I hung on to. Now I'm kind of glad I did. Maybe if I win the lottery I'll build a shed in the garden, and turn it into a writing den. I bet the shed would eventually get taken from me too.

I'm starting to understand why some people sit in coffee shops to write. They obviously live a similar life to me – where no one corner of the house is their own – where no single hour is really truly their own. I'm not complaining – just making the observation.

There is a tub of caramel ice cream sitting in the freezer – waiting for me to finish writing this blog post, stream a movie from the internet, and hole myself up in the junk room while I eat it.

My brain is running on empty. I've been learning something new at work, and while it's interesting, exciting, and all those other words, it's also incredibly draining. Actually – let's scratch that – I'm not so much learning something new, as learning an entirely new way to look at the world – a new way to think about things – a new frame through which everything will need to be seen over the coming months and years.

It crossed my mind more than once today – while doing mental gymnastics – that I'm getting too old for all this idiocy. I've seen the studies on YouTube – I've seen how much more quickly young people pick up new things. Whereas I was once the swift sailing boat, I have become the lumbering supertanker. Sure, I carry decades of experience, stories, and whatever else, but I also take quite some time and distance to change direction.

I saw a supertanker once.

When I was young my uncle worked in the merchant navy, and would tell stories about the size of the ships he worked on. He circumnavigated the globe several times during his career – sending momentos back to his family from the most distant corners of the globe. Although I didn't think twice about it when I was young, we had a coffee table from Fiji. Go figure. A few years later my Dad built a boat, and we would spend weekends going sailing off the south west coast of England. During one of those vomit inducing trips, I remember fingers being pointed to the horizon, and a vast slab of steel just being visible in the far distance. It was a supertanker. Several football pitches long, lumbering across the ocean. We saw coastal freighters pass in front of it during the day – many miles in front of it, and still dwarved by it.

Anyway.

Ice cream.

This is where I publish the blog post and then set off in search of something interesting to watch – which could take some time. The rest of my family castigate me for flicking endlessly through movies before choosing anything. I wonder how long tonight's selection might take ?

p.s. I'm working from home tomorrow.