write.as/jonbeckett

This morning I have been going through the various blogs I follow on the internet – removing those that stopped posting some months ago. It feels strange, un-following, because those people are obviously still out there – their life carries on – you’re just no longer a part of it. Is reading a blog really being “a part” of somebody’s life though? You’re only really a part of the life they share through their writing – and that may differ enormously from their real life.

I have written in the past about filtering the stories I tell. I suppose it’s worth reminding myself that it’s not just the written word that gets filtered – it’s not just Facebook that gets a “highlight reel” – it’s real life too. How many times have we bumped into acquaintances in the street, and asked after each other? How many times have we replied “oh, I’m fine”. Do we filter our reply because we’re avoiding the truth, or because we just want to shut the conversation down?

I have noticed over time that while Facebook encourages boasting (“look at my perfect family on our perfect holiday”), Twitter seems to foster complaints, snark, and sarcasm – maybe because it’s open to the world. I’m always surprised at the amount of effort keyboard warriors put into their trolling expeditions.

Anyway!

This week I find myself with time to explore the internet a little – to search out a few new blogs to follow. I have no idea if I will find anybody, but I will try, and I think sometimes the trying is the most important thing. Reaching out is hard. Making new friends is hard. If nobody took chances – if nobody took that first step outside their front door – the world would be a very quiet, insular place. Sure, there is an army of “look at me/listen to me” arseholes out there, but they’re the same noise you encounter in all walks of life. If you can cut through the noise, occasionally you find a new friend, and that suddenly makes the search worth it.

Now all I need to do is choose some music to listen to while searching. “Are Friends Electric” by “Tubeway Army” is playing on Spotify at the moment – it seems appropriate somehow.

It’s a bank holiday in the UK today, so everybody is out in their gardens cutting hedges, moving lawns, and all those other things that are unofficially on the “things to do on a day off” list. Of course I’m already ahead of the game after yesterday’s burst of activity, so can gloat somewhat – or at least so I thought. My other half just appeared downstairs and immediately started talking about filling the car with stuff from the back garden, and taking it to the local rubbish tip.

Quite apart from the inevitable day spent following orders, you might notice that my blog has moved again. Back to postach.io. I’ve re-wired the RSS, email notifications, and comments – so nothing has been lost. I should never have moved it in the first place. The whole point of trying postach.io was to take away the tinkering – to make it simple, straightforward, and easy to post – to remove the baggage of adding photos, or playing the social media game. I’m just going to post my words, and not think about the rest of it.

(of course the guys at Postach.io may have had a fit this morning when they saw five hundred posts land in their server in a matter of seconds – I’m holding off firing the other four thousand at them)

I woke a little before 8 this morning, and stared at the bedroom ceiling for a while before a switch of some kind flicked in my head. I hate that switch. Before I knew it I was downstairs with a pair of shorts and a t-shirt in my hand, headed towards the shower. After exiting the shower and downing a coffee, I found myself stood in front of the house, garden shears in hand, contemplating the task ahead.

Two runs of privet hedge. 30ft long, 6ft high. Urgh.

You might think it some kind of madness – to trim such a ridiculously large privet hedge with garden shears, but if you just bought an electric hedge trimmer six months ago and only discovered last week that the previous owner had cut the cable in half by accident, you too would have been standing there with a pair of garden shears too (well, unless you’re independently wealthy). I try to convince myself – while half-killing myself doing manual work – that it’s good for me. I do a desk job, so pushing our manual lawnmower (yes, we have a push-along mower), or cutting the hedges with shears is probably good for me. I tell myself this to avoid giving up and getting ranted at for never doing anything.

I was doing SO Well. And then as the universe is so reliable about, while half-way through the first hedge, one of the handles came loose on the shears. That’s strange, I thought, pushing it back on – they’ve never done that before. Then the other handle fell off. Hmmm. I started thinking. We’ve had these shears perhaps twenty years. We have never looked after them particularly – they get slung in the shed after being used. I wonder if the wooden handles might be completely and utterly rotten ?

My suspicions were answered an hour later, while half-way through the second hedge. There was a splintering sound while slamming the blades together again, and again, and again, and one of the handles shattered in my hand. I still had perhaps fifteen feet of hedge to cut. Dammit!

Luckily, a lady that lives several houses along wandered past with her dog, and distracted me from the temper tantrum before I could have it. While passing the time of day with her, I forgot all about the broken shears in my hand, and stood for quite some time making conversation. Normally I’m terrible at making conversation, but given the opportunity to avoid getting on with the hedge for a while, I became the most affable, interested, invested conversationalist I’ve ever known. Her husband wandered out after a while, remarking that he wondered why taking the dog for a walk had taken so long.

I finally made my excuses to exit the conversation, and wandered back to the half-cut hedge. It turns out if you’re really determined, you can cut a hedge with broken shears – I know, because I did it. It was kind of precarious at times – with further bits of wood splintering from the handle as I valiantly tried to hold the pieces in my fist, but I got there in the end.

After another ten minutes with the broom, sweeping up the off-cuts and lifting them into the recycling bin, the drive looked almost as good as the gardening nazi’s that live up and down the road from us. I tend to think they must spend every waking hour pruning their gardens with a magnifying glass. Our garden is more a case of “if you look from a distance, it’s kind of ok!” – and that’s good enough for me.

I did wonder why I bothered with a shower though, as I stood in the kitchen with a pint of blackcurrant squash, draped in a sweat-drenched t-shirt, picking bits of leaf from my hair.

After scraping myself out of bed a little after 9am this morning – perhaps the latest I have been up in many months – I busied myself with the usual round of chores for the first few hours of the day – washing up, tidying up, cutting the grass, and so on. I even cleaned the fridge out (read: threw almost it’s entire contents into the wheelie bin outside). Beyond that, I really haven’t done much at all – I’m struggling to think what I spent the rest of the day doing.

Tinkering. There was quite a bit of tinkering.

Both the old computer in the study, and the laptop I inherited from the children are running “Elementary OS” now – a distribution of Linux that promises to make an old computer fairly useable. After monkeying with it throughout the afternoon, I would have to agree. I’ll also admit to messing around with the Amiga emulator again – I really do need to try it out as a distraction-free writing platform at some point. There’s something about running a program on a computer that can do nothing but write words onto the screen – no tabbing to a web browser, and no endless scrolling of music tracks.

I fell into the vast spotify black hole for a time late this afternoon. It all started with the soundtrack from the movie “Country Strong”, which I have never seen. Within minutes I had stumbled from Garret Hedlund, through to Garth Brooks, Keith Urban, and on to innumerable singers and songwriters I had not heard before. Somewhere along the way I spotted Bethany Joy Lenz, and spent a few minutes listening to “Leaving Town Alive”. Go search for it – you’ll like it. It’s on Soundcloud.

I love songs that tell a story I can identify with – particularly when there are parallels with my own life. Songs like “Gravity Happens”, by Kate Voegele, and “Human”, by Christina Perri.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a musical rabbit hole to go jump down.

It’s Friday night, I’m on my second glass of wine, and I have the prospect of a week off stretched ahead of me like a glorious savannah full of possibilities. Of course we know that by Tuesday I’ll be writing a bitter account of cutting the lawn, the privet hedge, and making numerous trips to the rubbish dump, but that’s not the point. At the moment, the immediate future involves wine, and unfounded optimism. Surely the best foundations for a few days off work.

I often see other people posting reviews of their week – looking back over the past several days, and re-telling the stories of note. I really only have one story of note worth telling (well, aside from a snore-inducing solution to a technical problem that had my trousers on fire this morning), but at least it’s a happy story.

I made a friend.

I suppose in reality we’ve been friends for a while – commenting on each other’s blogs, and firing the odd email back and forth. This last few weeks though, we have became more than strangers that occasionally comments on each other’s blog posts.

I have very few “real” friends on the internet. I suspect the same is true of anybody else too. Interacting with people you don’t really know involves the building of walls, and the imposition of filters. Some have higher walls, and some have more filters. Some seem to have none at all – oh how I wish I could do that.

It’s odd though – making friends across the vast reaches of the internet. While you never make eye contact, and never get to wander into town for coffee together, you share thoughts that you might not otherwise. Silly ideas, hopeless dreams, and petty annoyances. It turns out distance is useful sometimes.

A friend on the internet is an escape too. While writing an email to share the occasional day you can let go of the obligations and expectations you drag behind you for a little while, and remind yourself that somewhere in the middle of parenting, working, cleaning up, washing up, and so on, you’re still there – still putting one foot in front of the other – and so are they.

I can’t help thinking about Dumbledore’s words though – that it doesn’t do to dream and forget to live. Of course when you have a family surrounding you it’s difficult to avoid living. My youngest daughter came running in earlier, breathlessly relating a complicated tale of woe at great speed, regardless of what I might have been doing before she turned the corner to prop herself at my shoulder.

Anyway. Regardless of what else has happened over the last few weeks, the most important thing is that I made a friend – and I’ve been sitting out here on my batman perch above the internet city long enough to know how rare and precious a thing that is.

I was going to write a long, meandering, nerdy post about my writing process – about markdown formatting, and version control, and compiling blog posts into e-books, but then realised I had a much better story to tell. You see – just as I was leaving the office to cycle home, I felt a drop of rain.

My journey home takes me through the depths of a country estate for the first mile – weaving through tree lined avenues. While turning the pedals, and growing more bitter with every passing moment about the gusting headwind, I squinted up at the sky overhead. The clouds were either about to empty themselves spectacularly, or the spaceship from Close Encounters of the Third Kind was about to land.

It didn’t take long to find out what might happen next. An almighty crack of thunder rang out, and tumbled down the valley, bouncing off the river as it went, followed by the entire sky lighting up. I wondered if a giant Monty Python hand was up there somewhere, playing with the light-switch. Then came the rain. Lots of rain.

The rain arrived so quicky, so ferociously, and accompanied by such spectacular thunder, that I started looking at the trees as I passed beneath, wondering what the chances were of being hit by lightning. I know you’re not supposed to stand under trees during lightning storms – and my rational thought processes were being turned inside out by the gala performance of “God Emptying his Wheelbarrow” going on right above my head.

I soon forgot about the music and light show of course – because within another minute or so I had been hit by so much rain I could have done a pretty good impersonation of Aquaman. Not quite Jason Momoa of course, and not feeling great about the feeling of rain running through my collar, down my back, and into my underwear. It occurred to me not long after that my feet felt heavy too. Of course my feet were heavy – my shoes were now full of water too (I tipped them out at the back door when I got home – pouring them like little watering cans onto nearby plants).

I think perhaps the worst part of cycling in torrential rain isn’t the water falling from the sky, or the soaking underwear, or the squelching socks. It’s the water the bike lifts off the tarmac, that flies through the air, and sprays you like a spray-tan booth – only in this one the spray tan is made of mud, tar, oil, and exhaust fumes, and some of it ends up in your mouth, in your eyes, and up your nose. It’s quite difficult to describe the taste. Let’s just say it’s not something you would order off a menu.

So. I got home. As is usual, I walked into a scene of mayhem where dinner was half cooked, and I received telephone instructions – not unlike Charlie’s Angels – of what to do next. Before setting about the half-prepared meal strewn across the kitchen worktops, I stripped off my sodden clothes, and threw them in the dirty washing.

Perhaps it says something about our family that nobody found it odd at all when they arrived home that Dad was standing in the kitchen in a soaked t-shirt and boxer shorts, pan-frying chicken to make fajitas.

Two more days in the office, and then a week off. A week of working in the garden, tidying the hell hole of a house up, cleaning bathrooms, cutting trees down, and pretending to have a break. Because we all know it’s not going to be a break. It’s just an excuse to use up some of my leave really.

Because I have worked here longer than Methuselah, I have accrued holiday days year on year. I think I may have reached the maximum amount now – something like 25 days to be taken during the year, resetting at the end of September (don’t ask me why).

Even taking into account an already booked summer holiday, and next week off, I will still have 8 days left to take. I’m thinking that as soon as another hole opens in the schedule, I should reserve another week off. I have no idea what I might do though. I can’t afford to do anything expensive. No doubt I’ll end up either decorating, hacking the garden to pieces, or travelling back and forth to the rubbish tip – because that’s what everybody does on days off, right ?

In a few weeks time the children will break up for summer in the UK. I think their school year ends towards the end of July – returning in early September. I’m always surprised when I talk to friends in the United States, and discover their children get almost a month longer off in the summer. I’ve never quite understood how anybody can afford to send their children to summer camp each year – or college for that matter. Is everybody in collosal amounts of debt?

Anyway. A week off. A few days of waking up in the morning and panicking about the day ahead before realising that no, I don’t have to get up immediately, and yes, I can make some toast and a cup of coffee, and yes, the kids have trashed the house, but no, they don’t have to get ready for school.

Here’s the bit where I wonder about reading a book or two. We know it’s not going to happen, don’t we. When was the last time I sat and read a book recently? There is always something else to do – somewhere to be, or something to fetch for somebody. I can’t imagine the next week will be any different.

We also know that if I don’t have to get up during the next week, not only will I stay up until all hours jumping down internet rabbit holes, I will also getup even earlier than on working days – because who’s going to waste their day off, particularly if everybody else is still asleep and therefore not asking for help, giving orders, or complaining about anything for an hour or so.

When I was young, I always wondered why my grandfather got up so early in the morning. Now I get it. He could potter about during those first hours of the day and do whatever the hell he wanted, without having to explain himself. He could just be.

I have spent the greater part of this evening tinkering with a pretend computer that hasn’t existed for thirty years. That’s right – not even the real thing. I discovered a project some time ago on the internet called “Amibian”, that turns a Raspberry Pi into a Commodore Amiga – a computer that went out of production over twenty years ago, and out of favour a good few years before that.

I’m not sure if you might describe these late night tinkering escapades as “counter culture”, “anachic”, or “idiotic”. The knowledge I’m amassing about how the Amiga works is completely and utterly useless in the modern world. Nobody will ever use one again, and if you try to resurrect a real machine, you have to spend hours replacing capacitors on it’s motherboard. Given my spectacular skills with a soldering iron (read:none at all), that’s not going to be happening.

Here’s the odd thing though – old computers have become collectors items, and most of the software for them has entered the public domain. So you can either buy an old machine, or emulate it – and then download all the software that was ever made for it for free. Sure, some odd bits and pieces are owned by various rights holders, but the majority of it is free.

I have a memory card for the Pi that turns it into every console I’ve ever owned, and then some. At the flick of the switch it becomes a Nintendo, a Sega, or even a coin-operated arcade machine. It begs the question of why I bother keeping a collection of old machines in the attic. I could sell them all, because they have been replaced by one computer the size of a box of matches that cost a fifth the amount of any of the original systems. To prove the point, I took the Raspberry Pi to work last week, and after half an hour playing Mario Kart, Sonic, Excitebike, Zelda, Asteroids, Pacman, Phoenix, Galaxians, Gradius, and Defender, several of the developers started making plans to buy their own.

So what am I going to do with the pretend Amiga sitting quietly on the desk across the junk room from me? I really have no idea. I’ve installed a few programs on it, and played a few games – but beyond that, there’s really no reason for it to exist . I tried to talk myself into using it for writing earlier – a distraction free writing environment similar to that described by George R R Martin a few years ago (the author of Game of Thrones – he still writes in Wordstar on a DOS PC). I’m not sure. I suppose it might be a good idea – a computer that does one thing, instead of a thousand things. I know myself too well – if I can be playing music, checking the news, writing emails, blogging, and talking to far flung friends, I will always choose those activities over anything vaguely proactive.

So if I do vanish from the internet from time to time over the next however long, at least you’ll know where I am – very probably sitting in the junk room, typing away at a pretend computer that has no business existing thirty years after it’s time in the sun.

I’ve been home alone today for the most part – plodding on with the endless routine of chores and tasks that come with a family and a house. I was supposed to attend a football tournament with the rest of the family, but given yesterday’s drama (including a midnight visit to the railway station to escort Miss 17 home that won’t be mentioned again), I thought it best to stay home.

I wondered how ‘the talk’ with Miss 17 might go throughout the morning – caught between a rock and a hard place in my mind. On one hand I wanted to come down on her like a ton of bricks for her recent behaviour, but on the other I didn’t want to risk going to war over the next few days. She has her first exam on Thursday.

She emerged from her pit in the middle of the afternoon, and asked if I would re-enable the internet connection on her computer. I forced her to sit and talk with me first. 'The talk’. Rather that go off on one, I talked about always having her back, and always looking out for her – even if she disagreed with my judgement from time to time. After a few minutes talking about recent events, and how disappointed I was, I agreed to switch the internet connection back on. I’m not really sure how I kept a lid on everything, but I did.

Today hasn’t all been doom and gloom though. A good friend interrupted the endless re-filling of the washing machine with a perfectly dug escape tunnel into the internet, and reminded me that I’m more than just 'Dad’, 'husband’, 'cleaner’, 'washer’, or 'tidy upper’. It’s easy to forget who you used to be when you’re staggering from one spinning plate to the next. It turns out having a friend out there somewhere or other is pretty damn useful sometimes. Who knew?

After the family returned this evening, I began making dinner, and realised we didn’t have a particular ingredient, so nipped out to the corner shop with a pocket full of loose change. While walking across the green outside the house somewhat absent mindedly, a familiar voice called out.

'Mr Beckett!’

I squinted across the green, through the late afternoon sunshine, and spotted a group of neighbours having a picnic – among them a wonderful friend that lives across the way – waving her arm above her head, and grinning mischievously.

I couldn’t stop, but oh how I wanted to. I passed the time of day with the group, before explaining my important mission, and turned back towards the local shop. After dinner – while taking rubbish out to the bins – I peered around the edge of our driveway, half hoping they might still be there. They were not.

So. It’s Sunday evening. I’m weighing what I might do with the rest of my evening. I’ve spent the greater part of the day doing things for others – it feels like I should try and do something for myself. Perhaps catch up on a TV show? Or read a book? Of course we all know I’ll fall down an internet rabbit hole after publishing this, and not be seen again until the early hours of tomorrow morning – probably spouting some unintelligible jibberish about a conspiracy theory or ridiculous wikipedia page I discovered along the way.

Wish me luck.

How do I describe the events of yesterday ?

The Charles Dickens line ‘it was the best of times, and the worst of times’ comes to mind.

We attended the wedding of a co-worker yesterday evening – joining him for the evening celebration. Along with some good friends, we put our glad-rags on, hired a taxi, and arrived just as the formal part of the wedding was coming to an end. I gather the toasts were still ongoing as we were greeted in the courtyard of the venue by a waiter brandishing champagne flutes.

The evening was wonderful, and flew by. We danced, we laughed, and we managed to get a couple of minutes with both the bride and groom – reminiscing about our own weddings. The common recollection seemed to be that none of us could remember the evening of our own wedding day that clearly – it’s almost like a conveyor belt lifts you on the morning of the ceremony, and doesn’t let you get off until the early hours of the next morning, after smiling and laughing with endless relatives, friends, and acquaintances. After the months of preparations and planning, it is over so quickly.

We talked about how weddings are really for the previous generation – not for the bride, groom, and their friends at all. As each generation gets older, weddings, anniversaries, birthdays and funerals are the only times many of the wider family may see each other. In a strange sort of way, each event becomes a reunion – with a few new faces, and a few missing faces each time.

We arrived home a little before midnight. And that’s when the evening turned rather dramatically. Looking back now, it’s funny how stories unravel so quickly once a single thread is pulled.

As we walked into the house, our eldest daughter appeared, with a friend stood in her bedroom doorway – the same friend that has led her on an abusive journey over the last year – so not really a friend at all. She had been here all day – hiding either within the house, or in town while we ate dinner. Something inside me snapped.

I wasn’t nasty, and I didn’t send her home (I thought about paying for a taxi there and then, but then thought better of it, given the thought of a teenager in a taxi alone late at night). I did tell her she wasn’t welcome in the house though, and unloaded the catalogue of behaviour that had been quietly building up in a mental strike-list. She said sorry repeatedly.

I shook my head at both of them, expressed my disappointment in both my own daughter’s judgement, and her friend’s catalogue of horrific behaviour, and went to bed.

This morning I felt a bit guilty about being so hard on them – right up until I discovered they had tried to bribe our younger daughters to keep quiet about the events of the day before. I also discovered a text message sent at 11pm last night – as we were leaving the party, and after the last train – asking if her friend could stay. An expertly timed request to avoid being turned down.

So yes – the best of times, and the worst of times.