write.as/jonbeckett

I’m not entirely sure why I missed a day on the blog yesterday. I suppose life happened. I’ll go with that. While I was at work, and the children were at a holiday club, my other half took a vast collection of old video games to the trade-in store, and gave them a very busy afternoon. She returned two hours later, children in tow, to exchange a mountain of in-store credit for three XBox 360 consoles.

Guess who spent the majority of last night wiring up games machines, televisions, connecting them to the internet, configuring online account sign-ins and so on. Afterwards I retreated to the junk room for an hour and nerded out spectacularly – playing chess against the computer, and falling down one internet rabbit hole after another. Eventually I found myself propped on the couch in the living room watching a horrific drama called “Hidden” about a hellish family in Wales that abducted young women. I remarked to my other half “I can’t watch this, because it will cause bad dreams”. I carried on watching anyway.

I fell asleep at about 4am.

At some point between 6am and 7am I had quite the most bizarre dream in some time. I don’t remember much about it now, other than it was ridiculous, and left me staring at the alarm clock in disbelief when I finally woke up.

I’m not sure how I made it through today. It turns out that it’s quite difficult to keep going on three hours of sleep – my appreciation and wonder of people that do shift work just went through the roof. All those nurses I know – how on earth do you do it ? Do you ever get used to it ?

How is tomorrow only Wednesday? It feels like it should be Thursday already. I’m sure after a decent night’s sleep I’ll feel differently, but really – can this week not just finish already? If there are any supernatural beings up there, pulling our strings – surely you can see that this week needs to be over already? I’ll take your abject failure to act as conclusive proof that you don’t exist (like I need any proof, given the total and utter lack of any evidence to the contrary in recorded history throughout any civilization that ever walked the earth).

Oops. Almost fell down a rabbit hole of my own making there.

Perhaps it’s time to go catch up on forty thousand winks.

Other people have relaxed weekends filled with rainbows, laughter, smiling faces, restaurants, sports, cakes, drinks, and all those other nice things. They post an endless stream of photos recording their lovely lives to Facebook and Instagram – like some sort of distorted advertising campaign for their life. When they do it, I start wondering what they are hiding.

Anyway. I think that’s vague enough.

I’ve been out all day. Now I am home. Sunday has almost gone. Tomorrow I’ll be back in the office, watching the clock, hoping the phone doesn’t ring, and wishing I had an endless supply of chocolate chip cookies to go with the coffee I’m drinking once again.

I can’t help feeling that most of my life has become a game of “the floor is lava”, where any interaction with others causes my trousers to set on fire. The only obvious solution seems to be avoiding everybody and everything for a while.

If you want me, you’ll find me sitting on my bed with the bedroom door closed, reading a book in splendid silence. No children arguing, nobody complaining I haven’t done something or other, and nobody asking anything of me. Of course before I can do that I’ll have to tidy the damn room up.

What’s that thing we tell ourselves when the level of the lava starts to raise? That tomorrow is another day? Maybe it is. But the lava will still be there, won’t it.

Do you ever have days when you wonder what you did – where the day went? I know I spent quite some time signing my younger daughters up for XBox Live accounts – and then trying to make head or tail of some sort of team building thing in FIFA 17 for them. I think they now understand it far better than me, but that might be because they spent all day taking turns to play it, while I washed up, did chores, and whatever other bullshit things filled my day.

Given the continual chorus of its my turn, we have decided to sell off a huge amount of old games (for the Wii, and the Gamecube), and trade them all in for three second hand XBox 360s – one for each of the children. It will stop the arguments dead, and force them to put up with their own hell-hole rooms while playing games.

You might wonder why we wouldnt go for one XBox One, or PS4 – theres an easy answer to that – you can buy any of the 360 games from discount stores for pocket-money now – meaning the children can afford them. They will never be able to afford first-party games for the latest generation of games machines.

I wonder what the staff of the local discount game store will think when my other half arrives next week with two huge bags full of games, and Skylander figurines ? I also wonder what they will say when she propositions them to do a straight swap for three XBox 360s ?

I’m not entirely sure where today went. A conference call with Germany first thing this morning uncovered some strange behaviour within the system I have been working on for the last several months.

After digging a rather impressive hole through the source code, the deployment scripts, and who knows what else, I gradually narrowed down and then pieced together what was wrong. I won’t bore you with it – suffice to say I ended the day having written code to correct a pretty serious bug in a very expensive commercial product.

I have been wondering about starting a technical blog again – to share some of the more interesting discoveries I make, and their various workarounds and fixes. I’m not sure how much of an audience there might be for it though – if any. I used to have a technical blog – filled with programming snippets – but ended up filtering the good stuff to such an extent that it caused it’s own demise. When you have worked for hours (or days) solving a problem that lots of other people have also experienced and not solved, you become reticent about giving the solution away.

I used to give everything away. I was the “open source guy” in the office. I remember visiting the Microsoft offices one day for a marketing presentation, and half expecting a klaxon to erupt as I entered the building. Now I run Windows 10 on my laptop at home, play games on an XBox 360, and smile at my formerly idealistic self.

I’ve always had a bit of an anarchic streak though. Some of you will remember the Tumblr alternative I built a few years back. If nothing else, the entire escapade served as a reminder that building things is fun, and running things is horrific. Having sixteen thousand users turn up on the night it went live didn’t really help.

Anyway. It’s Friday night, and the clock is ticking towards midnight. Time to sleep. Time to dream.

Welcome to the junk room. I’m one can of cider down, and have just closed the web browser in order to remove distractions. It’s just me, Scrivener, and the light from an angle-poise lamp standing guard on the corner of the desk.

I played chess today.

I haven’t played chess in a very long time. I suppose if I was going to more accurately describe my antics, I would say that I pushed some pieces around a board, and pretended that I used to know what I was doing. Let’s hope my co-worker never visits this room and looks on the shelf behind me. I’m not worried about the manga books, or questionable 1990s DVD box sets – it’s more the chess books I’m worried about.

I used to be quite good at chess. I studied it – read books about it – impressed people at dinner parties (or rather annoyed them, if the chess set belonged to them). I remember playing a friend in the early hours of the morning while both drunk, and losing a piece early on. He remarked afterward that my entire demeanor changed in that moment – apparently I shut out all conversation, and started frowning really rather a lot. He tipped his king over a few minutes later, and we both laughed.

In some ways I look back at chess a little wistfully. It’s the only board game I’ve ever been remotely good at, and yet I pretty-much discovered my limits. Without a lot more talent, or a lot more hard work, there was no way I was going to get any better at it.

The DVD box sets are probably far more interesting to most people. Let’s see – what do we have ? Three seasons of Melrose Place, the box set of the cartoon series Dungeons and Dragons, the first several seasons of Full Metal Alchemist, and a pretty much full set of Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex (amazing Anime series). Of course there are some more normal titles up there – Clerks, Firefly, Hackers, Akira, and most of the Studio Ghibli movies. I suppose within another few years DVDs will be completely and utterly obsolete, and I’ll either end up ripping them, or selling them all.

(half an hour passes)

Of course curiosity has got the better of me – Melrose Place is now playing on the corner of the desk on the old laptop. It’s like a slippery slope through time back to the early 1990s. It’s funny looking back – when I watched the show the first time around, I would have been younger than the characters – putting them on pedestals, and hoping to have a life like them one day. Of course now the roles are reversed, and the characters seem somehow laughable – chasing unrealistic dreams, and obsessing over unimportant problems.

Something else just occurred to me too – Melrose Place pre-dates mobile phones and the internet by a couple of years. A part of me envies that world – where people called each other, or met up with one another to catch up. Of course everybody’s circle was much smaller, but I think perhaps we knew each other better – certainly more than now, when so many hide behind carefully constructed online personas.

Maybe I’m recalling the past through rose tinted glasses. It wouldn’t be the first time.

Wednesday evening finds me sitting at a desk in the study, listening to Spotify, and wondering how much of today’s thoughts to empty into the keyboard. I’m accompanied by a can that was filled with cider until a few minutes ago, and a teddy bear propped on the corner of the desk, gazing into the room with the same silly grin he’s always had.

The teddy bear is called “Geek Boy”. He was purchased for one of my birthdays when the children were young. I think perhaps his arrival may have had more to do with the children visiting Build-a-Bear than getting a teddy bear for Dad. When you squeeze his stomach, three young children’s digitized voices shout “Happy Birthday” very cheerfully indeed. He’s wearing a star-wars t-shirt, blue jeans, and converse style sneakers. He used to have a mobile phone too – I’m not entirely sure what happened to it.

So. I’m home alone. Peter Gabriel is once more filling the room with music, turned up a notch past the level I’m normally allowed to get away with. I stopped at the supermarket on my way home from work and picked up a pizza and some snacks. I fear I may have had an “eyes bigger than belly” episode – the children are going to luck into all the snacks when they get home. The pizza vanished minutes after leaving the oven.

What is this “share pizza” concept? I don’t think I’ve ever heard it before.

My other half has taken the children to watch Chelsea Women’s football club play Juventus in a pre-season friendly. I would have gone with them, but the never ending development sprint at work consumed too much of my day. I imagine with the arrival of FIFA 17 in our house last weekend, the children will be up early tomorrow to re-enact the game. FIFA 17 has women’s teams.

It’s funny – when we adopted the children we went from zero to three children overnight – from a married couple, to a family of five. Everybody comments that it must have been difficult – adjusting to the daily grind – the endless chores. I wouldn’t say that was difficult at all, because we knew what was going to happen. The surprise has been the after school clubs, and sports – the hours standing on touchlines in the cold, celebrating the good times, and consoling on the way home during the bad times.

Who would have anticipated traveling half-way across the country to watch premiership rugby matches, WSL football teams, or the England Women’s football team? Who would have foreseen signed match balls, shirts, and famous player’s names becoming common knowledge throughout the household? We certainly didn’t.

It just occurred to me – here I am, on a night off from the children, and what am I doing? Writing about them. Ask any parent what they talk about on an all-too-rare date night, and they will all say the same thing – the children.

With that in mind, you’ll have to excuse me – there is a quiet cup of tea with my name on it waiting to be made in the kitchen – the kitchen that will have remained tidy since I cleared up after getting home from work.

It struck me late last night just how expert I have become at constructing walls around myself. Rather than expand upon my own thoughts and feelings, Im more likely to describe the world around me. The end result is often that I take the reader with me on adventures, but that I am largely absent.

Im not sure if Im making any sense. Maybe none of this is supposed to make any sense.

Im listening to Solsbury Hill by Peter Gabriel while writing this. Im not sure why Im telling you. Now Ive told you, Im reluctant to hold a finger down on the backspace key though. It turns out emptying my head directly into the keyboard is difficult. Weighing that which I might find interesting against what I think you might find interesting. Im grinning now – because I have no idea who you might be.

Perhaps I should imagine you – sitting next to me in a quiet pub. The rain might be falling outside, and we are holed up with a couple of old paperback books for the afternoon. Next to us there is a shelf filled with old board games – chess, draughts, snakes and ladders – each missing a few playing pieces, and their boxes taped together at the corners. Now and again locals wander in from the rain, and order a drink at the bar. The barman has grey hair, and a kind word for everybody.

Maybe I can do this after all. Maybe I can start loosening a few bricks from the walls.

I’ve owned a copy of Scrivener for years – since my first proper tilt at NaNoWriMo back in about 2007 if memory serves. If you’ve not heard of it, Scrivener is a word processor designed for writers, where you can organise your writing projects into binders with research, chapters, and so on. It’s all rather wonderful, and lovely.

So why haven’t I been using Scrivener all this time? Because I’m a software developer, and I’m so used to working in text editors. It’s really that simple. During my typical work day I live in text editors, so it seems only natural to use them while I’m writing blog posts too. There’s also the “lowest common denominator” argument too – you can always find a minimal text editor on any operating system. In Windows the app of choice tends to be “Notepad++”, on the Mac “Textmate”, and on Linux the Gnome Editor.

There’s also the whole debate about where to save the things you write – I’ve tried Dropbox, OneDrive, Github, Google Drive – pretty much everywhere. I’ve also tried writing posts directly into Wordpress, and kind of hated it.

My “master-plan” (or rather “randomly chosen plan”) is to try using Scrivener for a while, and let it save everything into OneDrive. I’m running Windows 10 on both the old home computer, and the old laptop I inherited from the kids – so it kind of makes sense. OneDrive is free, after all.

Of course using Scrivener will not improve my writing – far from it. Look at this post, for example – an endless dirge of waffle about word processors and free online backups.

It begs the question though – do you write your posts directly into Wordpress, or Tumblr, or wherever? Do you write them on the computer? On your phone? On a tablet? Do you have a preferred word processor when writing anything of consequence? Enquiring minds would like to know.

I sat down at the desk in the junk room to write a blog post an hour ago. All I have done so far is listen to music on Spotify. Music from my distant past. While writing this, Wilson Phillips are singing “Hold On”, and I’m remembering drawing a picture of them in the back of my college art sketchbook.

It’s funny how music has the keys to every door we might lock – how it can take us back to moments in the past so directly. There’s something wrong about streaming the likes of Wilson Phillips via the Internet though – they should really be played from a cheap CD player, propped on the edge of the desk, with the crystal case left open in front of it – the lyrics to the songs printed over shots of the band in the sleeve notes.

There was something about the order of tracks on an album – we would remember which track came next – waiting for it’s opening bars during the silence.

Music used to be more important than it is now. I’m sure of it. I invested a LOT of money in my first music system – a “mini” system which I still own – still propped in the the corner of the lounge nearly thirty years and three house moves after it’s original purchase. I walked into the local Hi-Fi shop with my Dad, with a firm maximum figure in mind (basically everything I had in the bank). I spent almost double what I had, and paid my Dad back over several months.

Before relationships, children, house ownership, and all the other out-goings that come with “being a grown-up”, I used to buy a lot of music. My older brother called me “Mr Expendable Income”. When I first started going out with the girl I would one day marry, she laughed at the number of books and CDs in my apartment – she also took me shopping to buy house plants, and a rug for the living room.

“Eyes Like Twins” just started playing. I remember playing this track late at night in the summer with the sliding doors onto my balcony wide open – the curtains billowing in the night breeze. So many memories.

I mentioned that I’m sitting in the junk room. I should probably start calling it “the study”, on account of tidying it up this afternoon. It now looks fairly presentable – and the bin outside is full. While sorting through ten years worth of ephemera, I turned up three CDs burned by a close friend from the past. Armed with a modern smartphone I photographed them, and sent her a message on WhatsApp.

“Remember these?”.

She responded a few moments later with hearts. I remember opening the post the day they arrived years ago, and listening to them on my music system – the music system I had bought with my Dad, that still sits in our lounge.

It’s funny how everything goes in circles, isn’t it. Life, music, stories, crossed paths, emotions, experiences, adventures. We all somehow end up where we started, over and over again.

The day began with the clock radio bursting into life, and filling utter dross. I squinted my eyes open and watched the seconds and minutes pass on the bedside clock, wondering how long I might lay there before somebody might consider there was something wrong with me. Minutes? Hours? I’m guessing we’ll never find out, because the curious instinct to “not waste the weekend” kicked in, and carried me downstairs for a shower.

After having a shower, and accidentally drowning quite possibly the biggest garden spider in the known universe, I woke Miss 17, and opened her curtains – flooding the room in light as Dr Van Helsing might to kill a vampire. She squinted at me, and rolled away to face the wall.

“You need to get up and take your tablets”

“Hrrmmmff” (she probably said something, it was hard to tell)

I almost fell over when she emerged from her room a few minutes later, looking not entirely unlike Hella – Thor’s sister. I made mention of this, and she grinned perhaps the most mischeivous grin I’ve ever seen.

The younger children were already in the lounge watching a children’s TV drama called “The Dumping Ground” – about a care home for troubled children. While half watching, I propositioned Miss 17;

“If you go and have a shower, I’ll take you to Starbucks for a late breakfast.”

She looked at the ceiling, and came out with this monologue, which is accurate as far as I can remember…

“When are you going to stop! You march into my room every bloody morning, like it’s the happiest day ever, you throw my curtains open, and you say ‘Time to get up! It’s a wonderful day outside’ – and then you ask me if I’ve brushed my sodding teeth, ask me if I’ve had a shower… you just don’t bloody stop!”

I stood for a moment, kind of stunned.

“It’s my job. I’m Dad.”

She didn’t seem to have an answer. Miss 13 did though.

“Are we going to Starbucks?!”

Miss 13 loves Starbucks. Actually – I’ll correct that – she loves going anywhere with anybody, as long as she can come along.

Two hours later (TWO SODDING HOURS!), we were ready to leave the house. I took a photo as we wandered towards town – recording that this had actually happened, lest I convince myself that it had all been a dream. After two weeks spent indoors on a cocktails of drugs, we had managed to extract Miss 17 from the house, and – surprise surprise – the fresh air appeared to be doing her wonders. Until Miss 13 held her arm out and started comparing her suntan with her sister.

“I’m more tan than you, because you never go out.”

I didn’t listen to the rest of the slanging match between them. I suppose it was all good natured really – throwing horrific barbed comments at each other in only the way that sisters can. I was eventually roused from my daydream state by Miss 17 asking a question.

“Are we going to Costa, or Starbucks?”

“I don’t mind – but you have to make your mind up in the next thirty seconds, because we either turn left to Starbucks, or right to Costa”.

After a high speed deliberation between 13 and 17, involving a run-down of menu choices, and it being a hot day, and not having been there for a while, they chose Costa. Imagine my delight and dread two minutes later when we crossed the high-street in the direction of Costa Coffee, only to discover that it no longer existed. A group of workmen were busy re-painting the facade, and hanging signs labelled “Horizon Books”.

Starbucks it was then.

While walking down the road, a silent anger grew inside me. After not having a bookstore for ten years, a couple of years ago a new independent bookstore had opened – fifty yards from the new(er) one. The people of the town had really taken the new bookstore to their heart, and so had I – often forgoing the Kindle option to support their existence, and buy paper books. The children had also figured out my blind-spot, and will often raid the “bank of Dad” if they manage to arm-twist me in the direction of the store. Being entirely honest, it’s usually me that “thinks of going to the bookshop” (har har).

I was angry. Knowing the way this town works, and how incestuous and corrupt it has been in the past, I can almost guarantee that the new bookshop is the result of rich spouses running a hobby shop at a colossal loss. As soon as I saw it, I suggested to the kids “let’s go to the bookshop – the PROPER bookshop”.

After stopping at Starbucks, we wandered back along the high street, and spent perhaps half an hour quietly looking at books. While I perused the neat tables festooned with the latest paperback fiction, and the rabbit-warren shelves of neatly ordered classics, the kids vanished silently from sight – following their noses to that which might interest them.

Diclaimer – I love books – and I love bookshops. Particularly second hand bookshops, because the smell of old books is indescribable. There’s something eccentric, even romantic, about a second hand bookshop.

Anyway.

Both Miss 13 and 17 appeared as I went looking for them, wielding books – one about a naughty school girl, and the other about a troubled teen. While waiting to pay Miss 17 breathlessly volunteered the story of the first few pages she had read, and I grinned – doing an imaginary fist-pump. It’s amazing how the kids will often choose a movie over a book, but when a book really grabs them, my word does it.

We eventually got home – via the supermarket – because who can walk into town without visiting the supermarket – and I found myself making lunch for everybody. By now my other half and Miss 14 had returned from their morning adventures too. While buttering bread, cutting up fruit, and doing whatever else, I listened to Miss 13 telling her Mum about the book she had chosen, and smiled.