write.as/jonbeckett

After a long and rambling journey around the internet over the last few months, I think I might have found a home for my blog. Tumblr. Yes, Tumblr – the very same platform I left some months ago, swearing never to return. Except I did return, but didn't tell anybody. A couple of weeks ago I quietly re-appeared, and began migrating old blog posts in – mostly because I had just figured out that I could. Today I returned with a little more purpose, renamed the account, and connected my old domain name.

In a strange sort of way returning to Tumblr feels like returning home. For the last several months I've posted my writing to my own little blogging island via Evernote. Where you might think of Wordpress as a battleship, my little blog at postach.io was more a collection of rubber bands, beer mats, sticky tape, and scraps of paper. It worked though. Somewhat miraculously.

Anyway. Enough about blogging.

I should really go and get some sleep. Our eldest daughter has an early start in the morning – which really means that I have an early start in the morning to wake her up. I really don't mind that much because it's a good excuse to get up early and reclaim some of the morning for myself – an hour before the rest of the family arrive downstairs and start hunting for socks, ties, and shoes in the furious manner they typically seem to.

'Where's my PE kit?'

'Where you left it?'

(lots of cursing and crashing and banging around ensues)

'Thanks for NOT helping!'

'You're welcome – do you want a cup of tea?'

'NO, because I CAN'T FIND MY PE KIT!'

Today marks the beginning of my 46th lap around the yellow dwarf main sequence star we call 'The Sun'. I have somehow managed to wake up 16790 times in a row so far, and make it to the end of the day. Taking leap years into account I'm probably a couple of days short, but I can't be bothered to work it out that accurately.

Did you know that when the Gregorian calendar was drawn up they knew all about the procession of the earth (the slight wobble on it's axis), and wrote into the rules that every leap year divisible by 100 should NOT be a leap year? Yeah – that happened in the year 2000, but we had a leap year anyway because it would have cost a fortune to change all the computer software. Besides – the boffins that look after the time have been correcting by a second here and there for decades. This still doesn't account for Apple never quite getting a handle on the whole 'daylight savings' thing – the alarms on all their operating systems screw up each year like clockwork.

So. Anyway. Today was my birthday.

I've been a bit taken aback throughout the day by the messages pouring in from Facebook. While a part of me knows that Facebook hassles you into sending a word or two, another part of me feels bad that I've been out of the loop for so long. So many names and faces have appeared in my phone throughout the day that I once knew well, and that I've kept at arms length for perhaps too long.

You see, I used to be 'somebody'. Not a very big somebody, but perhaps a little bit more than a nobody. I used to take part in the whole 'social' thing on the internet, and share my life with countless others – many of whom became distant friends. The faces that appeared today reminded me of simpler times when so many of us would empty our heads into keyboards at Tumblr, Wordpress, Blogger, and LiveJournal, and share our victories, losses, adventures, hopes, and dreams. I'm left wondering if it's too late to reach out and build bridges – to re-discover old friendships.

It seems birthdays often cause us to reflect on the past, and wonder about the future. I'm not sure if either is a good thing, or a bad thing. Maybe it's best not to think too much, and just to try and 'be' whoever we are right now.

When I got up this morning I felt awful. Really, really awful. While it would be easy to write it off as caffeine withdrawal after stopping drinking coffee and tea yesterday, I've done the whole 'no caffeine' thing before, and apart from a few headaches, it's never really affected me. So this was something else. My other half came downstairs a little while later this morning, took one look at me, and more or less instructed me to go back to bed. So I did. And I slept.

I don't think I can ever remember having such involved, or vivid dreams. Thinking back through them, they made sense too – they were not completely outlandish, scattered, or illogical. One dream in particular – the one I had shortly before waking up – told of an alternate reality that could absolutely have happened based on a sliding doors moment in the distant past. Now I'm conflicted of course – do I tell the person involved (an old friend) about the dream, or will it sound like the ramblings of a crazy person?

'I had this dream where you and I ended up together, and it seemed so real – none of the last decade had happened – or at least, a very different version had happened'.

Here's the thing – although the person in the dream used to be a close friend, we drifted apart some years ago. Now I'm wondering if I should reach out at the very least. Was this the universe giving me a pretty major nudge, or the mangling of memories by a virus busy running my body at a ridiculous temperature ?

When I eventually woke, I slowly made my way downstairs and discovered I had slept through the entire day. It was now early evening and my other half was getting ready for a night out with friends – a fundraiser at the local junior school that I should have been attending.

'Don't worry – I've already told everybody that you won't be there. Oh, and you missed my Mum too'.

It turned out the in-laws had visited during the afternoon, and left a birthday present for me. I slept straight through their entire visit.

I've never slept through an entire day before. I'm wondering if it was like some sort of giant reset button being pressed in my brain – a re-boot of sorts? I still feel pretty awful this evening, and am kind of kicking myself, because I lost half the weekend. Maybe I need it though – need this – down time.

Two of my family informed me this morning that they are going 'sugar free' for March, so I thought I might join them on their crusade. By 'sugar free' they just mean processed sugar – so we will still be allowed to eat fruit, and drink wine, for example. There will also be several days where sugar is allowed – owing to a couple of birthdays, and a dinner party we have been invited to.

Being honest, I don't think I'm going to miss processed sugar at all. I only tend to eat chocolate when we have it in the house, and I haven't had sugar in hot drinks for years.

Just to mix things up, I'm also stopping caffeine for the month too – no tea or coffee. I've done it before, and didn't find it difficult at all. Sure, I'll have a headache for a day or two while my body gets back to normal, but after that it just means I'll be tired in the afternoon (I'm tired right now – writing this in the last hour of the work day while waiting for files to backup). Instead of drinking coffee or black tea I'll just switch to water, orange juice, or redbush tea.

At the end of the month I'll write another post with any thoughts about how it went. I can't imagine it's going to be that difficult (he says, daydreaming about a bar of chocolate).

I've always been pretty good at getting up early. If I set an alarm, invariably I wake up a few minutes before it's due to go off, and usually disable it before it wakes anybody else up. By disable, I mean fumble around with it in the manner of the most clumsy person in the known universe for a few moments.

This morning the alarm was set for 6am. An hour earlier than normal, on account of a rather special day in the life of Miss 18 – her first day of work in her first 'proper' job (not counting working as a helper at summer activity clubs over the last several years). If you can say a career begins on a particular day, then this was day one – morning one – of her first career after school.

I looked in on her bedroom on my way to the shower, and discovered she was already up – sitting at her desk reading an email in her pajamas. A few minutes later she emerged from her room fully dressed in new clothes to find me cooking bacon in the kitchen. An 80s radio station recounted idiotic stories that made us laugh while we made coffee and bacon sandwiches together – they asked people to phone in with the most unlikely stories that had actually happened.

After a few minutes the rest of the family emerged from their various hiding places – no doubt summoned by the smell of bacon wafting through the house. Even the younger children appeared without the need for shouted threats, confiscations, or warnings of being blocked from the internet (the nuclear option, it seems).

While waving goodbye to Miss 18 a little while later, I wondered if she realises how momentous today really is. Of course we can look back with the benefit of hindsight, but in my mind you really don't make your first 'proper' friends until you get your first job. People you cross paths with while operating completely independently – away from your family and school friends. People you choose to become friends with.

There's the whole money thing too – suddenly having disposable income – this will be Miss 18's first job with a salary. We have already told her to blow her first few salary payments – to go mad with them, because she won't be able to do that forever.

I remember disposable income. Oh, for the days when I could go into Oxford on a weekend and waste inordinate amounts of money on things I didn't really need. Thirty years later and I find myself questioning absolutely everything – Do I need this? How much does it cost? Why do I need it?

The real world has a habit of bringing daydreams to a screeching halt. It happened this morning after waving goodbye to the rest of the family as they left for school and work, and then retrieved my bicycle from the shed to begin my journey to work. After leaving our road-end I approached a crossing where several school children were waiting on foot. I slowed to a halt in the middle of the road to both block cars behind me, and to let them cross. As I did so I heard the roar of engines behind me, and two cars sped past – accelerating past the waiting children on the wrong side of the road. Ten seconds. They couldn't wait ten seconds, and were willing to make themselves look like thoughtless, selfish assholes in the process.

At least it's Friday, hey. I wonder how Miss 18 is getting on? (I'm writing this at lunchtime)

My bullet journal tells a story this week. Of course I can't show you it, because the pages are filled with details about commercial projects that I'm not supposed to share (you know, unlike the photos of bullet journals you see on Instagram and Pinterest, filled with yoga sessions, nail painting, makeup, doing good deeds, and all the rest of the bollocks people invent for contrived pictures to hopefully attract clicks). Let's just say the pages look remarkably full.

While on the subject of social media attention seekers, I have just remembered a YouTube video I saw a few days ago – where a twenty-something hipster in America went through a method in quite some detail about how to gain followers online. I will admit I had my 'lets see what complete and utter rubbish you're going to spout' hat on, and I wasn't disappointed. He essentially spent ten minutes elaborately disguising an advert for a paid mobile app that deliberately lets you like and follow people on the various social networks without tripping the safeguards that detect 'bot-like' behaviour. He then had the cheek to claim that using the app wasn't playing the system. Right.

So following thousands of people, and liking their posts with no intention at all of ever even looking at their profiles or their posts is not playing the system ? Idiots. The internet is slowly filling with idiots.

It doesn't help that I'm fully aware that I'm turning into the complaining old man that I despaired of in my youth – grumbling about behavior, respect, and civic responsibility.

Is there such a thing as civic responsibility on the internet though? We've all encountered keyboard warriors. It seems that when given anonymity and a public platform to espouse their wisdom, far more people than we like to admit become complete and utter assholes. I can't help feeling that anybody claiming knowledge or expertise in 'Search Engine Optimisation' is essentially a snake-oil-salesman.

Anyway. Enough angry ranting. I didn't mean to go off on one. I meant to complain about my week being so busy that I haven't found anything interesting to tell stories about – and ended up venting all sorts of fury for a few minutes about the first petty thing that fell from my head.

I'll do better tomorrow. Maybe. Stop laughing.

I've been sitting in the junk room, procrastinating for the last half an hour. It's been a day. A long day. A good day in parts. The fiery exploits of yesterday continued into this morning when I discovered my entire development environment was still pretty spectacularly buggered – most of the fire was out by late morning, and I started cranking code out once again.

It's odd – I've been using the same development environment for the last year, and trusting it implicitly. That trust has now gone – every time I save anything I wonder if the file I have saved is intact – not corrupted in some strange and inventive way. That being said, this afternoon I made huge progress and pulled the project back on course – or at least a little closer to the course I wanted to be on.

Enough about work. I try not to talk too much about work, because I can't share enough to make it interesting. I work with some wonderful characters, and wish I could tell the stories that involve them. And yes, I am pulling my 'professional' hat on. Professional can be tremendously boring sometimes.

Perhaps it's time to go read a book and close the phone, tablet, laptop, or whatever else for an hour. It's difficult though – most of my friends live inside the phone, tablet, laptop or whatever else.

Today started badly and got worse. I'm not going to go into what went wrong, why, who caused it, or anything like that. It was more a case of dancing among the flames, trying to decide where to stack the heaps of fire that kept breaking out around the project I have been working on for the last year. This is all symbolic by the way – there was no real fire – just lots and lots of broken programming, accompanied by gnashing of teeth, swearing quite a lot, and discussing the drama with anybody that might be listening without actually checking to see if they were listening (they were not).

It's all going to be fine. By the time I left the office, the fires were out, and unanticipated lessons had been learned about fire fighting techniques for the weary software developer.

While cycling home from work I remembered there was one beer left in the fridge from the weekend, which brightened my mood considerably.

After stepping through the back door this evening, the cares of the day vanished quickly. Listening to my children tell the story of their day tends defeat stress pretty quickly – hearing that two class mates have fallen out and are now not talking to one another is far more exciting than thinking about seventy thousand lines of code crashing into a pretend city like a fiery comet.

It's 7pm on Sunday evening. The weekend is almost over. I'm just trying to take stock – trying to fit together where the day went. One of our friend's children stayed over last night, so the morning was spent trying to keep on top of where the kids were – what they were doing – who's house they were visiting, and so on. With my own children I'm a bit more relaxed, but when somebody else's child is involved I start to worry. I can pretty much predict where my kids will go, and what they might do in a given situation – I can't really say that for anybody else's children.

I had a bit of a falling down moment at lunchtime. My other half was over an hour away, standing on the touchline of a rugby match that didn't happen (another story for another day), leaving me to try to keep tabs on Miss 13, the younger house guest, and to spend time with Miss 18 too. I had agreed to walk into town with our eldest – to get some nice food for dinner. Going grocery shopping might not sound very exciting, but it means we spend some time together – besides, it was a sunny day, so the mile-or-so walk to the grocery store became a good excuse to go get some fresh air.

Just as we were preparing to leave, our youngest showed up and asked if she could go to somebody elses house. Kids do this, don't they – where you need some kind of block-chain level audit trail to find out where they are, and what they are doing. I had a lightbulb moment.

'Take your phone with you.'

'It's flat.'

'Well in that case you're not going anywhere until it's charged up.'

'But that's not fair!'

'Life's not fair.'

In the end I agreed they could go play at a neighbour's house while I went grocery shopping. You're probably wondering why I stress so much about our youngest – she's 13 after all. She finds all sorts of things that many other children take for granted quite a bit more difficult. Don't get me wrong – she's as crafty as a box of frogs, but in lots of ways she's more vulnerable than most. So we worry.

While turning the corner towards town I looked back at the playpark across the green from our house, and saw Miss 13 – minus the bag she had left the house with holding her mobile phone and house keys. Thirty seconds later I quietly summoned her to the railings of the playpark.

'Where is your bag?'

'Oh!' (she runs across the park to a climbing frame, and retrieves the bag)

I try not to have a fit, and start talking quietly, and seriously.

'Your phone cost several hundred pounds. There is a three year contract attached to the phone that will keep taking money out of our bank account every month. The house keys will let anybody into our house at any time of the day or night.'

She looked at the floor, and I felt a bit guilty.

'Keep the bag with you – sling it over your shoulder – as long as you don't let it out of your site, you'll be fine.'

'Ok'

None of this is in the non-existant 'how to be a parent' instruction book, is it – or perhaps it's our own fault for presuming that because the kids make more and more sensible decisions, that they will continue to make sensible decisions. Maybe half the problem is that we have brought our children up to be honest, and to always presume the best from others.

It's the quote from 'The OA', isn't it – 'The biggest mistake I made was believing that if I cast a beautiful net, I would catch only beautiful things.'

I wonder why we don't all become disillusioned with the world as we grow up and learn so many unexpected and unwanted truths?

I had the day off work yesterday – a day away from the office, programming, computers – a day away from everything. The children have been on half-term this week, so I thought it might be an idea to try and spend the day with them – to do something together. This plan was of course doomed to failure, because our house has served as nothing more than a temporary boarding house for our children's friends throughout half-term, with sleepover after sleepover.

We ended up going for our walk – but left two of our children behind – keeping a friend company that had invited herself for a sleepover the night before. We don't mind children staying over at all – but do like our own house back from time to time. Almost unbelievably, five minutes after telling the kids 'NO MORE SLEEPOVERS FOR ONE NIGHT PLEASE', she walked back into the lounge, phone in hand, and asked if one of her friends could stay. She prefaced it with 'I know this is short notice, but...'.

So anyway – yes – we went for a walk along the river to the next village along with our eldest daughter. We put on our walking boots, wrapped up warm, and set off. The route out of town takes you past the rugby club where our middle girl played for several years, and then out to the bank of the River Thames – the river that eventally arrives in London and snakes to the sea – the river the Oxford and Cambridge rowing boats race on each spring.

Along the way we saw endless ducks, swans, geese, and people walking barely controlled dogs. One highlight was a particularly spirited terrier of some kind trying desperately to rip a river-bank nest to pieces while it's owners stood helplessly shouting some ridiculous name at it (that it took no notice of).

We had hoped to stop at a riverside pub for a drink before walking back, but discovered it was OF COURSE shut. It's a rule of the universe, isn't it – wherever you are going will be shut if it can be. We ended up sitting in a coffee shop in the town centre, rather than in a pub on the riverside. Hardly the same thing.

While walking we took photos, told stories, laughed, joked, and then tried to ignore Miss 18 complaining about her legs acheing for the last couple of miles. I forgot how good teenagers are at complaining – or how little logic any conversation around complaints tends to involve:

'My legs ache'

'That's because you're unfit – if you do this more, they won't'

'By my legs ache though'

We arrived home late in the afternoon – just in time to start saying no to any more kids arriving (one arrived minutes after our return). I guess I shouldn't complain too much – I always think it's kind of nice that there is always something going on at home – it's just a shame that we rarely get the chance to slow down and switch off though.

While so many other families seem to have everything together, with 'just so' houses, our house always looks like it's just been robbed. The hallway is always festooned with sports kit bags in varying states of readiness. The coat pegs in the hallway are waiting to bury some poor hapless idiot that dares touch them under a mountain of waterproofs and winter coats – some of which none of us can ever recall buying or wearing. The washing machine is always on. The clothes dryer is always on. Every radiator downstairs is always covered in drying towels, and the washing line in the garden is always groaning under the weight of several loads of washing.

I'm not complaining by the way – I'm just describing 'the way it is'. For the most part life is good. We somehow manage to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep making each other laugh, and not get too angry with one another. That's not too bad, is it ?

Of course going for an 8 mile route march helps a lot with preventing anybody from being angry about anything. Especially if you eat an entire packet of welsh cakes, and drink several cup of tea back-to-back when you get home.