write.as/jonbeckett

You know how you promise yourself an early night, but somehow one thing after another crops up, and before you know it the clock is ticking towards half past ten, and you've only just sat down ? It doesn't help that I'm my own worst enemy – walking from room to room picking things up, and putting things away. Then you start doing chores – putting washing in the machine – hanging more washing out to dry – folding dry clothes into hopefully correct piles on the dining table. It never ends.

Anyway. I really am going to stop writing now, and creep off to bed. If I don't, I'll still be here in two hours time, having fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, or become sucked into some Ted talk or other on YouTube.

p.s. it was parents evening at the school this evening. Miss 15 is doing fine.

The weather forecast over the last few days had been predicting a night of heavy snow. It's worth noting that anything more than about half an inch of snow tends to grind England to an absolute halt. I'm sure those living in the northerly reaches of Europe or North America will probably laugh – and so they should. It kind of makes sense though – we see snow perhaps once or twice a year, for no longer than a day or two at a time – therefore nobody bothers to provision for it. There was a period – during the late 1990s and early 2000s – when we saw no snow at all for perhaps a decade in the south of England.

While the children fell asleep this evening with hopes of a winter wonderland in the morning, I fear their hopes may be dashed. The 'heavy snow for many hours' has evolved into 'heavy rain for several hours, followed by a halfhearted attempt at some snow at the end'. I'm writing this at 11pm, and while the rain has stopped, there is no sign of the wished-for snow at all.

I brought my laptop home from work as a precaution – I imagine I'll be carrying it straight back to work in the morning.

Our children must wonder what happened to the snow they remember from years gone by. When they were little we had snow for several winters in a row – serious quantities of snow that stayed around for weeks at a time. There has been nothing like the winter when I was young though – perhaps 1981? We walked across the fields to visit my grandparents in the next village, and met my grandfather shoveling a path out of his driveway. There was no school for weeks.

I remember the winter of the Gulf War – 1990 – it snowed, and my Dad was called out with one of the loading shovels from the family business (a Quarry) – tasked with keeping the route from nearby RAF Brize Norton and the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford open in case any casualties were flown in. He told stories of idiots with stranded cars that had 'gone out to look at the snow' with their children, abandoned cars buried in the snow tumbling in front of the digger bucket, and numerous kerb stones being ripped up by accident.

I remember Mum worrying all night if he was ok – this was in the days before mobile phones – until we felt the earth moving under the house, and looked out (in a suburban street) to see a digger the size of the house illuminating the entire street with spotlights, and my Dad grinning from the heated cab high above. Curtains up and down the street opened, and were filled with faces full of wonder. Our entire street got cleared of snow that night in a matter of minutes as he made his way back out.

It's funny – when you're a child, you look out at snow coming down, and immediately look for your hat, scarf, and gloves. When you grow up, you look out at snow coming down, and think 'oh crap'.

It's heading towards midnight, and I find myself sitting in the junk room in the dark, emptying the remains of my thoughts into the keyboard. Claire de Lune is playing on an Amazon Prime playlist, and the house is largely quiet.

The week is only a day old, and yet somehow it feels like several days have passed. The first day back after traveling is always difficult – filling timesheets, filing expenses and so on – and then of course you find yourself playing catch-up with the work you should have been doing all along.

I'm frustrated with the book I started reading last week. It started really well, and I had high hopes for it, but then discovered a glaring hole in the plot that has unraveled the entire thing in my head. I'll persevere with it, but like I say – frustrating.

In other news, I have started watching Game of Thrones from the start again. I've seen each season in the past – when they first aired – but it's been interesting, watching again with the knowledge of what is to come. There are a LOT of hints early on that you would miss entirely on a first watch. I suppose in some ways it shows how good the early seasons were, while still following the plot of the books. Once a room full of script writers took over (yes, I'm looking at you, Season 7), the entire story turned into a medieval soap opera where nothing made sense any more.

Anyway – it's nearly midnight. If tomorrow is anything like today, I'll need some sleep. Time to turn in for the night.

Over the course of the last week we have begun decluttering around the house – digging out long forgotten things from the back of cupboards, and the attic – and putting them up for sale on E-Bay. Among the various items was an Apple iMac from the early 2000s. I'm not entirely sure of it's vintage – we bought it perhaps ten years ago on E-Bay from a school that had unearthed it from a long forgotten storage cupboard. It had almost certainly never been used.

For those interested in such things, it's a Bondi Blue G3, with 500Mb of memory, a PowerPC processor, and has OS 10.4 installed – 'Tiger'. I had a Macbook years ago – one of the pretty white ones – and always maintained that Tiger was the best version of OS X that Apple ever made – it had none of the bloat of the versions that followed it.

After selling all manner of other memories from the loft – among them a Nintendo, a Super Nintendo, a Sega Dreamcast, a number of Nintendo hand-helds, and a Sega Saturn, I couldn't quite bring myself to sell the Mac. There's just something about it – something I can't seem to let go of. It got me through NaNoWriMo late last year. Hell – it's even got an old version of Scrivener installed on it. I suppose there's an eccentric hope that it might entice me to write something worth reading one day.

I remember reading about George R R Martin using an old DOS computer running Wordstar – I wonder if the Mac might provide a similar function for me? While I might not end up writing anything of worth on it, there's something romantic about writing on an old Apple Mac – a feeling. It's hard to describe. I suppose in some ways it's a little like using an old mechanical typewriter – although a more modern digital equivalent.

If you're wondering how I will backup anything I write on it, you might be surprised to learn that it connects to the internet just fine – OSX was based on BSD Unix, and the internet pretty much runs on Linux – a close relative. I'm not using the internet though – oh no – I'm using an Iomega ZIP drive – another eBay acquisition. It turns out twenty year old ZIP disks work just fine – they make a reassuring clunk sound as you push them in, and mechanical whirring sounds as data is read or written – none of that silent USB memory stick nonsense.

It's Sunday morning. Actually, it's nearer to Sunday lunchtime than Sunday morning, but we'll try not to think about that too much. The washing machine is rumbling away in the background, the clothes dryer thing (that looks like a giant cheeto) is filling the lounge with warm air, and I've spent the last half an hour reading blog posts, commenting, and remembering why I decided to leave Wordpress.

Here's the thing – Wordpress is ONE blogging platform, and it's very good. It's easy, comfortable, simple, and all those other words – all of thich distract those that use it from stepping outside of it's wonderfully maintained garden. There's a whole world out there though – filled with other blogging platforms – and if you stay in the Wordpress garden, you miss out on SO much. I'm guilty of it myself – I have lost touch with friends that post elsewhere purely because they were not at Wordpress, and it was just easier to only follow people at Wordpress.

Oh dear. I didn't set out to rant about Wordpress – all the social platforms suffer the same problem. I would point out though that blogging pre-dates any walled gardens (unless you count the World Wide Web as a walled garden) – RSS was invented to allow readers to find out about new posts regardless of the platform of origin. Standards are a GOOD thing.

So. This morning I have been catching up with old friends, drifting along, and trying to remember who wrote where, and under what usernames. It's kind of a struggle. I'm still mystified why so many people who actively comment on the more famous blogs haven't posted to their own in years. Or maybe I'm not mystified at all – I know several people that read every word I write (yes, I do know you're reading this – analytics is a bitch), and yet they never share anything of themselves on the internet at all.

Perhaps later this afternoon I'll find time to set out in search of some more bloggers to follow. It's difficult though – finding others telling their story – we have become a tiny minority of the 'blogosphere' (I hate that term, but can't think of anything better). The internet is slowly filling itself with marketing driven drivel – paid posts, advertorials, listicles and clickbait. We are still out here though – self propelled maniacs emptying our head into the keyboard almost every day – it's just that finding each other has become more difficult because of the army of idiots competing for space to sell their recycled garbage.

I'm not interested in a bag of clothes being tried on, or a restaurant meal being eaten, or an exclusive holiday, or a hundred other things – I'm interested in the person trying the clothes on – the person eating the meal – the person going on the holiday. I want to know what they think about during the quiet moments – what their hopes are – their fears – their dreams. I want to know what frustrates them, and what makes them laugh. I want to know them, and I can't do that if they are trying to sell me something.

I thought it might be a good time to re-visit progress with the rescue kitten we took delivery of a few weeks ago – that the children named Kaspar. I'm not sure 'kitten' is really an appropriate term – more 'young cat' – he's about a year old as far as we know.

Before we visited the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals), Kaspar had led a somewhat chequered life. He grew up wild as a kitten in somebody's back garden, and they informed the RSPCA that an entire family of cats had made their garden home. Kaspar was one of the more timid kittens, that would hang back while the other cats took most of the available food. The RSPCA took all of the cats and kittens and began looking after them at one of their many rescue facilities.

For a long time, the rescue facility staff wondered if Kaspar might ever be re-homed. He had never been socialised with humans at all and tended to hide whenever anybody or anything came anywhere near. One of the girls that regularly cleaned and fed him started to discover another cat though – a cat that would run to greet her, tangle himself around her legs, and meow for attention. Only with her though. Perhaps there was hope after all then.

Apparently being a small black cat is a huge disadvantage if you're looking for a new home. Kaspar spent eight months at the rescue facility – his photo posted on the website – and during that time nobody even enquired about meeting him. And then, of course, we turned up. I've always joked that given the option, we will always go for the saddest story or the most difficult challenge. Our history with adopting cats has been one of disaster survivors, or accidental litters of unwanted kittens. When we began looking, I fully expected to come home from work to face a three-legged cat with one eye and personality issues.

The first few weeks with Kaspar have been hard. He was scared of his own shadow – he still is – but each day has grown a little in confidence. He has slowly progressed from hiding under the dinner table to investigating the house. If you meet him during one of his secret investigations he invariably jumps out of his own skin, and bolts past you – in search of a known safe spot. If you sit quietly on an evening though, he will gradually summon the courage to find you, and curl around your legs – a stroke or two causes perhaps the loudest purring I've ever heard from such a small cat.

He really is small – compared to our other cat. If you've seen 'Kiki's Delivery Service', you've seen Kaspar – a tiny black cat with enormous green eyes. His diminutive size is contrasted by George – our many storied giant ginger tom that seems to sleep all day and sleep all night. They are still very wary of each other but have come to some sort of understanding – passing like silent ships in the night when they meet around the house. We have heard them playing in the dead of night – chasing each other around the house, but they never let you see this happen – it's always done in secret.

Kaspar is still using a litter tray and is really great about using it rather than leaving us anything to discover around the house, but we are slowly introducing him to the cat flap. He has watched George go through the cat flap many times and has recently begun headbutting it and pulling at it with his claws. This morning, we switched the chip detection off on the cat flap for the first time (it detects the cats, to avoid letting other neighbourhood cats into the house), and let both cats freely use it. After a little coaxing, Kaspar hopped through the open hole in the back door and went for a first proper exploration of the garden – accompanied by George, who obviously wondered what the hell was going on ('What? you mean I have to share the garden with him too!?').

Watching them this morning was pretty funny – George went on his usual perimeter check of the garden – sniffing various bushes, and climbing through various bits of hedgerow, and Kaspar followed along behind. It almost seemed like he was being taken for a guided tour. After a few minutes, Kaspar got spooked by something, ran back to the house, and straight to the top of the stairs before looking back. Quite enough adventuring for one day, perhaps.

It was all going SO well. Until it wasn't any more.

He re-appeared in the kitchen a few minutes later and approached the cat-flap again. I cracked it open, and he hopped straight through. By the time I got my shoes back on and grabbed my coat, there was no sign of him. There was however another neighbourhood cat sitting right in the middle of the garden, staring at our house, puffed up to look twice it's usual size. Oh crap – what on earth had happened?

I spent the next half an hour wandering around the garden, looking for any sign of Kaspar, thinking we might have seen the last of him. There was literally no sign at all – not behind anything, not under anything – where the hell had he gone? And then – while peering through the back window of the house, wondering if he had already made his way back while I was elsewhere in the garden, he literally materialised out of nowhere and walked between my legs.

How ?!

So anyway – that's where we are right now. Kaspar is tentatively exploring the garden for the first time. He's jumped through the cat-flap in both directions, while we have been there, but hasn't done it on his own just yet. I'm guessing once he's comfortable with it, we'll turn the security back on, and he'll have to get used to it whirring and clunking when he gets near it (it detects the cat, and unlocks itself). Until then though, it's all a bit nervy at the moment. Lots of new smells, new sounds, new sights, and of course lots of neighbourhood cats, dogs, and whatever else to stay the hell away from.

One step at a time, but we're getting there.

It's just gone 9am, and you find me sitting at a cafe in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. My flight isn't for another couple of hours, but the rules say you need to arrive two hours before – so I arrive two hours before. Invariably you pass through check-in and security without incident, but I have been caught out in the past. Through a stunning lack of foresight, I tried to leave Germany once on the same day that every family in the surrounding area left for their easter holidays – you can only imagine the mayhem at the airport. I think I made it to the aircraft a minute before they closed the gate.

You never can tell if you're going to set off the airport security scanners or not – it's become an odd sort of a game in a way – wondering how many layers you might have to remove before the scanner will say you're good to go. Today I was lucky – after standing in the glass tube and having the robot sweep around me, the screen came up with a big 'OK' – in the past it has detected all manner of anomolies – lighting up my armpits, and my ankles. The staff are quite amusing when the machine throws an OK – I doubt it happens very often – today the woman checking the results shouted 'WUNDERBAR!', and waved me straight past the staff waiting to frisk the less fortunate.

In Europe we have automated border controls with biometric passports – instead of having officials inspect your passport, you hold it over a scanner that reads who you are through both OCR and RFID (a chip is hidden in the passport), and then walk through a gate that compares your face with the face held on record. It's much faster and probably more consistent than a human, but if you've not done it before, it's a little bit unsettling. The lady ahead of me in the queue obviously had never done it before, so was nervously watching everybody else.

I wonder what will happen when the UK leaves Europe ? (if we leave Europe – har har) – I imagine I'll have to join the queue of international travellers at the airport, and have a conversation with an aloof official that will see 'British' on the passport, and roll his or her eyes.

I have another hour until boarding starts for my flight. Perhaps I'll go look around the ridiculous shops in the airport, and wonder why anybody buys anything beyond electrical adapters. You never knew you needed a small bottle of whisky, brandy, or vodka emblazoned with an international label until you have perused the various displays in the duty free shops. I've never quite figured out why you can buy knives in the gift shops – presumably they post them to you? This is where somebody in the US tells me they have gun shops in regional airports.

Time is ticking. I have lots more nothing to get on with – so if you'll excuse me, the next post will almost certainly originate from the junk room at home – hours or even days from now.

As hinted at in the title of the post, I'm not going out tonight. The temperature on the streets of Frankfurt hasn't got above zero all day. A few hours this afternoon were accompanied by worried glances from the windows of the office I have been working from – watching snow fall on the surrounding streets. Thoughts of my flight home in the morning started to pull at loose threads in the back of my mind – or rather, thoughts of a cancelled or re-scheduled flight.

Thankfully the snow seems to have abated, but it's dipping far below zero outside. I trudged though the cold to the nearest supermarket after work, and returned with a bag of supplies to keep me going until the morning.

The supermarket checkout queue was something of an adventure this evening – a guy in front of me twice fiddled with the card reading machine while paying – voiding the transaction each time. The lady on the checkout almost exploded in temper the second time – raising her not inconsiderable body onto it's feet, ranting something high pitched in German at him, and gesticulating wildly. He eventually threw a soggy ten Euro note onto the counter before storming from the store. As I walked back, I tried to figure out what scam he was trying to pull – was the card genuine? I passed him outside the supermarket, getting into a pimped-out Volkswagen Golf, laughing with a friend.

I still haven't read any of the book I brought with me. As soon as this is posted to the internet, I'll do my best to disconnect from everything and read for a while. I think that's probably half the reason I so rarely read any more – I'm surrounded by distractions, and have little or no defence against them. When anybody messages me on my phone, I feel guilty if I don't respond quickly – especially if I hear their message arrive. The pressure only increases if the messaging services indicates that I have read their message – I almost always presume they will think badly of me if they know I have read their message, but not responded.

How do some people do it? How do they switch off? How do they walk away without thinking of others? Maybe being a parent pre-disposes you to put others ahead of yourself, and eventually it turns into a really difficult habit to break?

In other news, I started teaching myself how to play 'Go' at breakfast time this morning. If you've not heard of it before, it's an ancient Chinese board game. You might have seen the recent news story about Google creating an artificially intelligent machine that plays Go – called 'AlphaGo' – that defeated the best player in the world. Google then went on to build a more general self-learning machine called 'AlphaZero' that taught itself Chess beyond the level of any other computer or human inside 4 hours – but we'll keep quiet about that, because it tends to induce nightmares about the not so distant future.

Where was I? Oh yes – 'Go'. I really need to watch some videos, read some books, or spend some time with somebody that knows how to play Go – because I'm RUBBISH at it. I learned the rules very quickly, and then realised how deep the game is – and just why it has taken so long to teach computers to play the game (in the end we didn't teach them – we taught a computer how to learn, and let it play Go against itself a few hundred million times – learning more every time it played). It seems Go is a similar mental problem to 'Does this face look friendly?', followed by 'Why?'.

Anyway – the book sitting on the bedside table isn't going to read itself. Time to log off.

Oh how the mighty fall. After a wonderful evening out last night, this evening saw me braving sub-zero temperatures as I determinedly strode the – oh – two hundred yards to the nearest restaurant to the hotel. Asking for a table for one always seems uncomfortable – I'm not sure why. I'm sure the waiting staff in a restaurant would rather see a single person arrive than a family with several young children that are going to talk, shout, go to the toilet fifteen times, and destroy any and all table decorations within their grasp.

I've been to this Japanese restaurant many times before. It has become my default option, after the supermarket, for an evening meal. Something hot, and freshly cooked – rather negated by the sub-zero walk, but it smelled and tasted wonderful, and was delivered to my table by a toothy young Japanese woman who spoke wonderfully correct English. I can't complain about her language course diction, because the only Japanese I know has been learned from classic second world war movies.

I chose 'Yakitori', followed by some kind of stir fry, and a glass of house wine. I always wonder if I should really be ordering Saki in the Japanese restaurant, but suspect they would rip people off spectacularly for it. I bought two bottles of Saki at HyperJapan last year – for myself and my eldest daughter – and decided it was far too easy to drink (and therefore an expensive slippery slope) – I haven't touched it since.

I noticed the menus proudly proclaim that all meals are glutemate free – I have still to look up what this actually means. I know most takeaway food is loaded with monosodiumglutemate, so I'm guessing they mean that. I wonder what it is, and what it does?

So. It's not even 7pm yet, and I'm back in the hotel room, listening to music on a satellite TV channel, and sitting at the desk typing this into the Amazon Fire tablet via a Bluetooth keyboard. There is a book propped on the bedside table that I've been promising myself to read for quite some time. Maybe I'll do that.

p.s. if this post automagically re-posts itself from Evernote, to Postach.io, and on to Wordpress, I'll be seriously impressed with my own nerd credentials.

While packing my bag before leaving work this evening, the guy I have been working with over the last several months invited both myself and another contractor to his house for drinks and something to eat. A night out! A night away from the horrors of standing at the lectern at the entrance of a restaurant, asking for a 'table for one'.

On the way back to the hotel room I ran to the local supermarket and grabbed something small to eat, knowing that we would be drinking – I'm terrible at drinking. It turns out life as a parent surrounded by chores and after school clubs somewhat lowers your alcohol tolerance levels. I also picked up a bottle of wine for our host's other half – and smiled at my own idiocy as I tried to pick something suitable. I generally pick wine based on the best looking label, but know that my other half is far more discerning. I ended up picking her favourite wine, and tucking it into my coat pocket before heading out into the cold night air.

After meeting up with the other co-worker along the way, we tip-toed across frozen footpaths, and took photos of the river that had frozen alongside the apartments.

The evening that followed was really quite wonderful. I sat in awe for a huge amount of the evening – marvelling at the ability of the entire group to switch between two, or three languages at times. At school I learned a little french, but they all spoke wonderful English, very good German, quite a bit of French, and of course also their mother tongues.

Conversation flowed so easily throughout the evening – laughing, joking, telling stories – and of course diving down cultural rabbit holes to find out where the differences lie between our various worlds. It was wonderful to reaffirm that no matter where we come from, we can always find common interests, humor, stories, ideas, and so on. We talked about legends, the different versions of history told in each country, conspiracy theories – you name it. I can't remember having such a wonderful evening in quite some time.

There was a moment – late in the evening, while everybody was engaged in spirited conversation and laughter, that the scene from A Christmas Carol came to mind – where Scrooge is confronted by the ghost of Christmas past about the success of Fezziwig's party – 'but he has only spent a few pounds of your money?' – Scrooge replies that 'it is not about money – it is about the power of the host to make their lives a pleasure or a burden – it is nothing to do with money'. And such was the story tonight. By extending the hand of friendship, a disparate group of people came together, laughed, told stories, and shared each other's experiences of a world that became a little smaller for a few hours.

All I can do is express gratitude, smile at new friendships forged, and cherish memories made.