write.as/jonbeckett

It's 7:30am on Tuesday morning, and I'm back in the hotel room after breakfast. I had been thinking of going for a walk along the river, but it's below zero outside, and still dark. Perhaps not. Oh – I'm in Frankfurt, Germany, by the way – it just occurred to me that if you had not read recent posts, you would have no idea.

The restaurant in the hotel has changed since my last visit – lots of small changes – just enough to catch you out, and make you wonder if you're going a bit mad. The coffee machine has been replaced – the crema on top of a cappuccino is now much thicker than previously – if not careful you really could create a very impressive moustache indeed. At breakfast, small trays used to be provided – these have gone – leaving you balancing a plate, cutlery, and coffee en-route to a dining table. Oh yes – the plastic pots of yoghurt have gone, replaced by a huge bowl with a spoon. I imagine this is in response to the single use plastics mania – and has resulted in nobody eating yoghurt at all. Thankfully all the ingredients to make bacon and egg rolls are still in abundance.

Given the cold, dark mornings at this time of year, I might not get up quite so early throughout the rest of the week – except of course that means fighting for a table – arriving early, I generally get the pick of the entire place. This morning I sat opposite a group of construction workers, and a Japanese gentleman that insisted on eating with his mouth open. All I could hear while flicking through the news on my phone was him chewing up whatever was probably falling out of his mouth, and all over the table. Why do people do that?

I nearly forgot – I almost flooded the bathroom this morning! I tend to turn the shower head towards the wall when I turn it on in hotels, because you never can tell what's going to happen next – a torrent of ice water, or the contents of a boiling kettle. After letting the shower run for a few seconds, I began wondering why a puddle was advancing across the floor. A deep puddle. That's when I discovered that the shower glass doesn't meet the wall – so I was spraying the shower directly at the gap – and the water was escaping at quite a rate. And that's why I no longer have any dry towels – I hope the housekeeping staff won't be too mad.

During check-in to the hotel yesterday I was given a voucher for a free drink at the bar – I gather this has something to do with staying at the hotel so often in the recent past. If you spend the GDP of a small African nation on hotel rooms over the course of a year, you get a free drink. I was going to save the voucher until later in the week, but temptation got the better of me last night – so armed with my paper journal and a pen, I wandered down to the bar.

I have bought a beer from the hotel bar a couple of times before. It comes in an impressively tall, graceful glass that makes your beer look very impressive indeed. No tall graceful glasses for the free beers though, it would appear – instead, you receive perhaps the smallest glass ever seen by the human eye. You know the Father Ted joke about 'this beer is far away, this beer is very small' ? I could have re-created it with a beer on the next table, and my beer – which in a photo at the right angle would have looked the same size.

It's finally getting light outside. I'm wondering about getting some fresh air – wandering along the edge of the river that runs through Frankfurt, and admiring the lunacy of those out running, cycling, or rowing. Wish me luck.

It's just gone 9am, and I'm sitting in the departure hall of Terminal 2 at London Heathrow. The gate has just been called for the flight, which is scheduled to leave in about an hour. I say 'scheduled' because I've never known it leave exactly on time – I can only imagine the fines that happen when aircraft arrive and depart airports outside of their originally scheduled slots.

Breakfast this morning was a 'meal deal' from WHSmiths. En-route to them, I passed an exclusive bar in the centre of the terminal selling caviar and sushi – I've never seen anybody buy anything from them during any of my visits to Heathrow over the last year. I've never seen anybody in the Gucci shop either – or the Rolex shop. I can't help wondering how many sales they need to make for the store to be viable – or perhaps they don't – perhaps they are there as a marketing exercise?

There is an expensive looking restaurant perched high above the terminal – the signage seems to imply Heston Blumenthal is somehow connected to it – he was a celebrity chef on TV over here a few years ago – famous for making bizarre meals with novel methods (I seem to remember a pudding prepared with liquid nitrogen). The restaurant is sparsely populated with the kind of people you might expect to be eating breakfast in a restaurant – I wonder how many of them are wealthy Americans here on business ?

I'm always fascinated by the people that pass through the departure hall – some in winter coats, some in shorts and t-shirts. A Japanese girl sits across from me with a long cashmere coat on, her long straight hair highlighted in dramatic stripes, her face hidden behind enormous shades. She seems to be consumed by her phone. A little further away a pretty blonde girl is fixing her makeup – concentrating on a small mirror while dragging a pencil beneath her eyes. To the other side of me a guy is slouched in a baggy tracksuit with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes – languidly flicking through something or other on his phone – Tinder, perhaps?

The hall is dominated by a marketing installation for 'Jo Malone' – I imagine a perfume brand. It's difficult to tell from where I'm sitting – the installation seems to be no more than an enormous pile of presentation boxes, wrapped with ribbon, and stacked on end. A girl in a black skirt and blazer paces slowly around, waiting for anybody to show any interest at all – nobody has so far.

Looking around the hundred or so people nearby, nobody seems to be in a hurry – countless faces are lit by mobile phone screens, while one lady some distance away gazes into the middle distance, slowly feeding a snack into her mouth, piece by piece. It's all strangely calm. An elderly couple just walked past – wearing sensible coats, and looking very smart. I wonder if they are visiting family somewhere ?

Time is ticking on. I should go find my gate.

Throughout the day I have been quietly getting ready to travel to Germany again. A taxi will arrive early tomorrow morning and spirit me to London Heathrow, where I will make the familiar journey through check-in, security, and the departure hall before boarding an aircraft bound for Frankfurt. It's all seems so very routine, and yet when you stop to think about the thousands of cogs that need to turn in unison to get a person from one country to another, it's pretty miraculous really.

I've turned into SUCH a creature of habit when traveling. I always reserve the same seat on the aircraft. I'm not entirely sure why. I always pre-book breakfast in the hotel too, and get there early to avoid the rest of the hotel guests. The hotel I usually stay at does great bacon, eggs, and rolls, so I make my own bacon and egg rolls at the breakfast buffet. I can still remember the time a Japanese tourist saw me do it, and copied me before sitting down to eat with the best smile on their face. Getting up early also affords me an hour to go for a walk along the river to clear my head.

I'm not sure what I'll do about evening meals this time. During the last several visits I have alternated between a nearby Japanese restaurant, and a faux Americana diner about fifteen minutes walk away. Sometimes I just get food from the supermarket and take it back to the hotel with me – 'dinner for one' in front of a movie, or TV show. That reminds me – I need to fill the tablet with a few movies and TV shows this evening. I wonder what Amazon Prime has available ?

While away I'm also going to make a start on the un-read books on the bookshelf behind me – the first may well be 'Otherworld' by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller. I bought it about six months ago from the bookshop in town, read the first chapter, and then life happened. Life always seems to happen to me, rather than meet me half way – I'm wondering if I can do something about that this year.

I imagine the next post will arrive from the departure hall at Heathrow Airport at some point tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed all the cogs turn smoothly.

If you just wandered into this post, and know my recent history on the internet, you're probably thinking 'not again, surely?'. Erm. Well. Yes actually. Again. I've always liked what the guys at Postach.io did with their blog hosting platform – if you've never heard of it, it links to Evernote, and turns the various notes you post into Evernote into a nicely formatted blog. It divorces you from worrying about anything to do with the blog – you can just think about the words, and the system takes care of everything else for you.

You see, I know that I'm my own worst enemy. Given anything to tinker with, I will tinker with it. If I remove any and all methods of tinkering from my grasp, I'm forced to just get on with writing words, instead of wondering about this font, or that font – or choosing a stock photo to go with the words today (there are only so many coffee cup photos you can find for free online, before having to clean the kitchen and start taking your own).

There's a bit of a story to tell about this blog platform too though – about how I used it once before, and how a spammer stole my username. I was re-organising my notebooks in Evernote, and deleted the blog, with all the intentions in the world of re-creating it. Only that's not quite what happened. I had to step away for a while inbetween tearing the blog down, and recreating it, and in that time window a spammer stole my username. Without dressing up my thoughts too much, I lost my shit. I deleted everything, and walked away – back to Wordpress. I think the thing that annoyed me the most is that the spammer somehow saved my posts, and re-published them as their own writing – I'm guessing they used the cache feature at Google to see what used to be there, before re-publishing it all.

Fast forward to the last couple of weeks, and I found myself looking at Evernote again, and reminding myself how much I liked it. I then looked at postach.io, and decided to do something about the spammer (who by now had started ripping off other people's posts too). Cutting a long story very short indeed, the guys at postach.io came out to bat for me – shutting down the spammer, and returning the account name to me. I finally regained control of it on Friday, and started pushing posts back into Evernote ready to re-publish earlier this evening. Four and a half thousand posts. Thankfully I had a python script lying around that did it all for me – you didn't think I uploaded them by hand, did you??

I can only imagine what the spike must have looked like in the server farm when the tidal wave of posts arrived earlier this evening.

ANYWAY!

Enough with the nerdy stuff. I'll work on migrating comments over in the coming days from the last couple of years at Wordpress, and then get back to posts about life, family, travel, chores, train platforms, coffee shops, people watching, and all the other rubbish you expect me to write about.

I'm contemplating submerging my blog once again – disassociating it with the 'real world' me – disconnecting my name from it. I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not.

There's a part of me that likes being transparent. I'm a pretty open book – those that find me on the internet can easily connect the dots between the various versions of me on social platforms – I have the same name everywhere – my real name.

There's another part of me that wishes I could share more though – to tell stories about daily life, and complain bitterly and endlessly about everything and everybody. It would serve no useful purpose of course – but the idea of doing it is somehow attractive.

What if I became famous for the assumed identity though, rather than the real me? (har har – like this blog will ever become famous?!) – and what if I was outed by the press? There is a part of me that wonders if some of the people I know on the internet might be much closer friends if I wasn't here as 'me' – if I had at least the vestiges of anonymity surrounding my online existence.

I often read stories written by others – people I may never come to know in the real world – who's name I may never know – and am jealous of the freedom anonymity affords them – but at the same time worry I might make a mistake should I attempt anything similar.

Being 'me' is easy. Being somebody else would probably be incredibly difficult.

It seems only natural that a blog should begin with a post called 'Hello World'. This isn't really a beginning at all though – it's the result of an endless trudge around the internet looking for a suitable place to publish all manner of forgettable rubbish.

This is where I admit to having somewhere in the region of four and a half thousand posts quietly stored away, written over the last 16 years. A veritable Aladdin's cave filled with posts about the inconsequential and mundane experiences of every day life that nobody in their right mind would ever want to read. If you happen to find yourself reading this post on the evening of the 19th January 2019, somewhere deep in a server farm somewhere, a database cluster is having a bit of a nightmare as millions of words come tumbling towards it – an avalanche of apathy, procrastination, and idiocy. If you happen upon this page in the days afterwards, you will discover an endless stream of posts that should you print out, would probably waste an awful lot of printer paper and ink.

You see – I've been writing a blog since the beginning.

Oh dear – that makes me sound like some kind of Old Testament Methuselah type character.

I have though – been writing since the beginning. I started writing posts before 'blogging' became a thing, and once upon a time wrote my own blogging script, and released it as open source. I was somewhat famous for a few minutes. Thankfully a nice chap called Matt Mullenweg appeared, and Wordpress happened – meaning I could ditch my code and use his. Along the way I also played with LiveJournal, Vox, Blogger, TypePad, Yahoo 360, MySpace, and all the other platforms that rose and fell.

These days I sit on an imaginary fence, high above the internet – watching, reading, smiling, frowning – and trying not to react to the hoards of trolls that crawl from their holes from time to time spouting political hyperbole and inflammatory idiocy. Instead of engaging, I quietly write my words, and publish them into quiet corners of the internet without telling anybody. This sounds a bit mad in these times of self promotion and marketing mania, but I tend to think there is something tremendously serendipitous about discovering things while not looking for them.

Is this a mission? I suppose you might say it is. I never set out to tell the story of my life, but I appear to be doing so – one post at a time.

I'm home alone this evening while the rest of the family travel a hundred miles or so to watch our youngest daughter in a music concert that her school are taking part in. Given deadlines and timescales at work, I couldn't realistically ask for time off.

So – here I am, sitting in the junk room on my own, with the music turned up to eleven – mostly to drown out next door's dog. An old lady lives next door that has home help visit every evening – when the help arrives, her dog goes absolutely nuts for about an hour – barking continuously. You would think a dog would get used to the same nurse visiting the house over and over – but no. It's a dalmation, famous for being mentally challenged, and idiotically defensive.

I might have to make a playlist called 'Music that drowns out a dog barking'.

I'm returning to Frankfurt in Germany with work next week. The taxi to the airport will arrive outside our house at breakfast time on Monday. Another week holed up in a hotel room, and eating dinner in restaurants alone. The days will fly by – the evenings will crawl. During past visits I have occupied myself with walking the city streets, taking in life happening around me. Perhaps this time I will summon the courage to visit the enormous sex shop in the centre of the city – more out of curiosity than anything. If you didn't already know, prostitution is legal in Germany.

Guess who stayed in a hotel near the red light district during a visit last year, without realising there even WAS a red light district. When I discovered how close I had been, it made me realise not so much how little I had noticed, but how little I judge others – if I discovered somebody that struck up conversation with me in a bar was a sex worker, I would end up asking them a hundred and one questions about their life, their experiences, their hopes, and so on.

I have never started a conversation with anybody in a restaurant or bar while traveling with work. I tend to keep myself to myself – usually armed either with a book, or a phone. I can't imagine how difficult it is for girls going out to eat alone, with the continual prospect of having to avoid unwanted attention.

Here's a question though – if you were sitting in a bar after eating a bar meal, reading a well known novel, and somebody happened to sit nearby and comment on the book, does that qualify as ok? Are some interactions allowed? Or would you immediately suspect the book was being used as an excuse to engage you in conversation? I think I might.

My hosting plan at Wordpress runs out in four months. Being completely truthful, I don't know if I'm going to carry on – or even if I want to carry on. I know I've wobbled quite a bit in recent months, and you're probably bored of reading about it, but I'm wondering if maybe it's time – time to take a break – to step away for a while.

I've been doing this since 2003 – writing almost every day about whatever has been on my mind. It's almost always been heavily filtered, and increasingly selective.

Over the years I've crossed paths with some wonderful people through the blog. Some of them are still writing, some stopped many years ago, and some are no longer with us. I think of them often.

On balance, my experience of blogging has been incredibly positive. I've never had to deal with trouble-makers, idiots, trolls, manipulators, or scam artists, but then I've never courted the controversy that might attract them.

Maybe it's time though. Time to step away for a while, and perhaps focus a little more on the little paper notebook nestled in the bottom of my bag. I've found myself writing in it a little more often just recently, and unexpectedly enjoying the freedom it affords.

You know how everybody seems to be going on and on and on and on and on and on about Bullet Journals at the moment? I have a cunning tip to aid you in your procrastinatory productivity efforts.

You know people write little lists of things to do, and tick them off, draw some stupid thing next to them, photograph them, then share them all over the internet so everybody can go 'OH LOOK – YOU'RE WRITING IS SO CUTE!!' – well here's what to do.

Make the following to-do list:

• Wake up (if it's a week day – if weekend, all bets are off)
• Try to go back to sleep for a bit (if weekend, question if you need to get up at all before lunchtime)
• Stare at the ceiling until you absolutely have to get up (again – weekend rule may apply)
• Stagger to the bathroom, trying not to trip over the cat
• Turn on shower, and wait for the cold water to go back to whichever part of hell it came from
• Get in shower
• Wash hair with randomly chosen shampoo
• Get out of shower, leaving as big a puddle as possible on the floor
• Dry yourself off
• Brush your teeth, using the last bit of toothpaste out of a curled up tube
• Get dressed (choose hopefully clean clothes – base this decision on how many people you will need to interract with).
• Stumble towards the kitchen
• Make a coffee
• Turn on the radio
• Make another coffee

• Embark on 'the great sock hunt' You see how easy it is !? We've already filled an ENTIRE PAGE of a bullet journal, and you can tick each thing off after you've done it. Hell – nobody would really know if you had done any of it anyway, so you might as well tick the lot off – you know, just like the works of fiction you see all over Pinterest...

• Yoga with BFFs

• Get Eyebrows Done at Salon

• Vegan shopping at Deli

• Watch daytime TV while trophy husband magics money into bank Maybe I'm just getting cynical about the whole bullet journal thing. Maybe not. I say maybe a lot. I've just noticed this.

I started watching an unexpectedly wonderful movie last night. Everybody else had gone to bed fairly early, and I found myself sitting in the lounge on my own, flicking through movies on the TV. It's called 'The Brand New Testament'. I'm not entirely sure how to describe it.

Imagine there is a god, and he's a real person, living in a city with a family. Imagine he's also a colossal arsehole. There's a wonderful scene where he sits in his home office, inventing new laws – governing everything from queues you are not in moving faster, to dropped toast always landing the wrong side up – laughing at his own invention as the minor additions to the world get more and more twisted and nasty. Also imagine Jesus has left home, and is never talked about – and that he has a younger sister that has never been allowed out – except of course she does escape, and hacks her Dad's computer before leaving – texting everybody in the world with the exact date and time of their death. Predictable mayhem ensues.

It's perhaps the most inventive, clever, funny movie I've seen in some time. There are shades of the Stephen Fry interview in Ireland, where he bases his atheism on the cruel, vindictive, capriciousness of the god so many choose to believe in. There is so much dark humor in the objectionable, temper tantrum riddled monster portrayed in the movie – and an otherworldliness in the little girl that runs away – and the stories of the people she plucks at random to become apostles.

If you get the chance to watch it, do so – no matter your religious beliefs, or lack thereof. It will make you think not so much about gods, so much as the nature of religion, free will, causality, fate, and the way we interract with the world that surrounds us.