write.as/jonbeckett

While a great many people both in England, and around the world watched Harry and Meghan tie the knot in St. George’s Chapel, we stood on the touchline of a rugby pitch in Aylesbury cheering on the Royal Air Force and Metropolitan Police rugby teams, and being hugely impressed by the air force police dog demonstrations.

We finally got home late in the afternoon, and re-wound the events of the day in Windsor on the BBC – skipping the three hours of interviews, fawning, bowing, and scraping, and hitting play as the cars approached the church.

Windsor is familiar to me. I’ve taken several friends to see the castle over the years, and sometimes walk along it’s edge in-between railway stations. Curiously, I’ve never been to the ‘Great Park’, but I imagine most people will have at least seen it previously via 'Fenton’ – the video of the dog chasing the deer that went viral a few years ago.

There were flashes of pride – of being English. Seeing the machinery of state kick in, and produce a spectacle that few countries can parallel was perhaps the most powerful. Hearing the trumpets announce the arrival of the royal wedding party at the church, and their departure. Seeing the immaculately presented mounted cavalry escorting the happy couple through the streets back towards Windsor castle.

Here’s the funny thing – I’m not a royalist at all. Not a staunch republican either. I tend to think people that stand atop soap-boxes ranting at the establishment, or waving national flags have a little bit too much time on their hands. There are far more important things to worry about than if a hereditary monarchy is a benefit or a burden.

I will admit to giggling a bit when the BBC rolled out their usual 'experts’ to talk about Meghan’s dress, or how sunny the day turned out to be, or what they might be having for dinner tonight. I will also admit to smiling to myself while wondering just how insanely jealous Trump might be – having the attention of the world taken from his poisonous, cretinous behaviour for a few hours. You can’t buy a thousand years of history, and we have no need for a ’@realElizabethII’ Twitter account either.

It’s just gone 9am, and I’m sitting at my desk in the office at work, still not really awake. I woke at 5 this morning, then fell back asleep for a couple of hours before scraping myself out of bed and getting on with the morning routine.

We are a chicken down. In the middle of a perfect storm of child-induced mayhem last night I didn’t get around to shutting the chicken in until the sky was already dark. That was all the opportunity a local fox needed. Yet another chicken we have lost to the local band of suburban foxes. Of course it had to be the school’s chicken, so we will now have to buy a similar looking one and replace it – a bit like the famous stories of hamsters that change colour during the summer holidays.

As you can tell, I’m procrastinating. Avoiding getting on with development work on the vertical cliff-face of a project I have been working on for the last several months. I fly back out to Germany at both the beginning, and end of next month. Another two weeks spent in Frankfurt, enjoying a tiny hotel room, a corporate conference room, and a selection of nearby restaurants and supermarkets each time. I think I’ve flown more in the last 12 months than the rest of my life added together.

It feels like Friday today. I’m not sure why. I’m already wondering how we are going to make it through the weekend at home – we are going to a wedding reception tomorrow night, then a football tournament on Saturday, and a rugby tournament on Sunday.

Never mind though – because I BOOKED A WEEK OFF WORK!

After making better progress than anybody expected over the last week, the chance appeared to book a few days off, and I grabbed it. I’ll just be knocking around at home (it’s half term week), but the break will be welcome. I’ll try and get the garden sorted out while I’m off – at least it will keep me busy.

Right. Sandwich guy just arrived, and I now have to avoid eating the food I bought. A piri piri chicken baguette is staring at me, along with a flapjack, and mars bar. There’s no way it’s all going to make it to lunchtime intact.

A few years ago I watched a wonderful movie called “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, about a young Indian man with a dream to run his own hotel. In the middle of juggling one disaster after another, he told a resident the following:

“Everything will be alright in the end. If it is not alright, it is not yet the end.”

What has this got to do with me? I’ll try to explain. I stopped writing a personal blog about two weeks ago now. After writing pretty consistently for the past fifteen years, something inside of me snapped. Sure, I’ve struggled with writing in the past – anybody that writes will tell you all about that – but this time it felt different.

Here’s the funny thing though – after a couple of weeks away from the routine of sitting at the keyboard and emptying my head, I’m wondering if I did the right thing. Wondering if there might be an “act two” in me after all. Hell fire though – if the first act lasted for fifteen years, the next act will take me through to retirement. I wonder what I’ll be writing about when I’m seventy years old? Probably a constrant stream of complaints about chocolate bars not being what they used to be, kids not knowing how good they have everything, and about the grandchildren muddling up the cutlery drawer.

I’ve missed this. I’ve missed emptying my head into the keyboard late on an evening. I’ve missed having these bizarre conversations with myself about nothing of consequence. I’m not sure publishing it all to the internet is a tremendously useful thing to do, but it has lead to some of my closest, most cherished friendships.

I suppose in a roundabout sort of way, this is me saying I might be back after all. Back to writing a little more regularly, a little more randomly, and a little more candidly.

For the past several weeks and months I have been perched atop a precarious knife edge – on the one hand deleting, cancelling, and purging huge swathes of my involvement in social networks, and on the other clinging to that which I have chosen to persist.

Persist. It’s a strange word – and yet it describes my interaction with the online world quite well. Some are absorbed by the web, some are seduced – I persist. I was here before, I am here now, and I will likely be here when most have gone. I’m not sure if that is a good, or a bad thing.

Among the varius conflicting thoughts that often churn within me, one question arises again and again – ‘why?’. Why take part? Why contribute? Why share? While thinking about this in the past, I have always come to the conclusion that writing about life, thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams is a form of investment in ourselves – and that giving others the opportunity to comment provides balance.

You may not like what I write, and that’s fine – if we were all the same, the world would be a tremendously boring place. We are free to ignore the rubbish we each pollute the internet with, but it seems some are less able to do this than others. Although we don’t set out to be the square peg when we hit publish, we inevitably find ourselves taking on that role from time to time – discovering that the world doesn’t share our views – and that’s fine too.

Concordant feedback is the good stuff though. Discovery of like minds leads to the affirmation that we are a part of something bigger than ourselves. That we are not alone. That we are not quite as weird as we perhaps imagined.

We are people. While those pulling the strings of the great machinery of the internet might wish to shape us to their will, the one thing they cannot control is the source of the content their platforms carry – us. It’s an oddly reciprocal relationship.

It’s worth remembering that the “social internet” is just the messenger. We are more valuable than the wizards behind the curtains would have you believe.

After a day or two turning the idea over and over in my head, and an afternoon spent figuring out what needed to be done, I have migrated this blog over from Evernote and Postach.io to Blogger. After the wave of a magic wand, I migrated the comments over via Disqus, hooked a subdomain up to the blog with the help of CloudFlare, connected Google Analytics, re-wired Mailchimp, and setup Feedburner.

I think we’re good to go.

So – I’m back at Blogger again – after a journey around the internet that took me through just about every blogging platform you might shake a many-pronged stick at. I still won’t be writing a daily journal of mundane and forgettable thoughts – but I will try to post something insightful, thoughtful, or amusing (to me) at least once a week. The primary reasons for using Blogger are that it is free, and it is free. Did I mention that it is free? Good. Sure, the writing interface is like something from a museum, and Google might pull the plug on it at any moment, but for my purposes (writing forgettable nonsense now and again) it’s plenty good enough.

If you saw the email notification of a new blog post from me, and wondered what arcane subject has caused me to bash out a thousand words this weekend, I can only apologise. In between work, chores, child wrangling, and unexpectedly buying pet hamsters, I haven’t had a great deal of time to contemplate anything deeper than what we might be having for the next meal. The next post will be better. I hope.

Yesterday (after going for a madcap ride in Dad’s new car – a Jaguar XF), I walked down to Talland with Laura, and then over to Polperro. We both got sunburned, but it was a fun day. Ice creams at Talland, followed by a cheese ploughmans at the Blue Peter in the middle of Polperro. We had a look around all of the gift shops, but didn’t find anything – Mum and Dad are on about taking Laura over to a department store to go shopping today.

On the way back from Polperro we stopped at Talland again, and had a drink in the beach cafe – and laughed at a guy trying to impress his girlfriend on the sand – playing catch with a ball, and diving around theatrically, catching the ball. She kept throwing the ball into the rockpools on purpose – or at least, it looked like she was doing it on purpose.

My feet were dead last night – I haven’t walked that far, and in that kind of heat for a long time. I think Laura was knackered too. I ran “View Ranger” on my phone while we were walking – I think the walk had something like 750m of climbing and descent throughout the day. No wonder my legs were aching.

Last night I sat and watched “The Last Jedi” with Dad – I signed into Amazon on his TV to watch it. I was surprised he hadn’t seen it.

I asked a friend recently if they could recall any “sliding door” moments during their life – moments where a decision was made that took them in one direction rather than another.

The question of self determination has been on my mind a lot recently. It strikes me that the more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes – because life isn’t just about decisions we make in the moment – it’s about the obligations and expectations we carry with us, and the legacy our actions create.

In many ways expectation can be associated with the various roles we are handed during our lifetime. If you are a homeowner, you are expected to look after the property – marketing, fashion, and peer pressure all conspire to encourage improvement of that property – it quickly becomes a burden we inflict upon ourselves.

The same could be said of relationships – common expectations dictate that once in a relationship with somebody we should no longer look at, or think about anybody except our chosen partner. This is of course nonsense, and yet we all play along with the expectation to an extent.

In reality we are all individuals, and will remain so throughout our lives. Sure, we may embellish our association with others – with legal agreements, shared assets, and so on – but we still have our own ideas, thoughts dreams, hopes, fears, and so on. We may share them with those close to us – but they are our own.

It has become interesting – after reaching the point in life where I own a house, and have several children – that younger people often remark that I seem to have my life “together”. This is of course predicated on expectations of where somebody should be at a given point in their life. I wonder if they ever stop to think that those weighed down with a mortgage, children, parenting, grocery shopping, cleaning toilets, cutting grass, and so on might look back at their single friends through rose tinted glasses ?

From time to time, everybody will admit to wishing they had something they do not.

Expectations can be seen as an enormous burden – of doing that which is expected of you. Towing the line. Helping, giving, supporting, sharing, teaching, providing. The list goes on and on. The strange thing – if you think about it – is that all of these behaviors are taught. They are often bundled in with “morality”, and taught to young children through religious stories. If you look back far enough, you discover that religion may well have been invented as a tool to move a developing populance from a fuedal society to one with a heirarchy, rules, laws, and expectations.

It’s that word “expectations” again, isn’t it.

If expectations can become such a burden, then what alternative is there? A selfish life spent creating wreckage in it’s wake? A life with no legacy to share with future generations ? This of course raises the question of what legacy really is – if legacy is “being remembered”, what purpose does it serve to be remembered ? If we live a “good” life, giving our time and effort to others, is that a life wasted, or a life invested? In the wider scheme of things, do the actions of a single person really make a difference?

I have no answers to any of this. I don’t think anybody else does either.

Perhaps J. K. Rowling got it right when she wrote Dumbledore’s line “it doesn’t do to dwell on dreams and forget to live” – but what if living means defying the expectations that surround us ? What if living means finding an escape to make the weight on our shoulders more bearable from time to time ?

Laura and I travelled down on the train yesterday – leaving Marlow just after 9 in the morning, changing at Maidenhead and Reading en-route. The train journey was pretty uneventful – although the train from Reading down to Liskeard was packed with people. I thought for a moment we might face the familiar nightmare of finding other people in our seats, but thankfully they were being respected for a change.

At some point on the journey a couple got into the seats behind us on the train, and started complaining – the train was “awful”, “far too busy”, there were “bags everywhere”. It finally dawned on them that it was a bank holiday weekend. Of course a few minutes later the woman went to find a toilet, and came back saying there was no way she could use it – it was “completely unuseable” – they kept up this ridiculous conversation with exactly the kind of spoon-in-the-mouth, aloof voices that really annoy me.

Laura slept for the final hour of the three hour leg between Reading and Liskeard. When we finally arrived, Dad met us on the railway platform, with Mum waving from the car park above the station. It was great to see them – I think this time it’s been about 18 months since we last visited. After hugs and smiles, we headed off to a pub for lunch – “The Copley Arms” in Hessenford. Laura tried out nachos with chilli for the first time, and I had a pint of “Tribute” – the brewery over at St Austell.

Once we got back to the house and dropped out bags off, the rest of the evening was pretty quiet – apart from the visitors that dropped in with a Newfoundland in the evening. Her name was “Pippa” – she lives in the next village along apparently. It brought back so many memories of having a dog around the place.

This morning I was up a little before 8, had a shower, and wandered through to discover Mum and Dad were already up, sitting in the living room. I sat down to write this, and Laura appeared a little later – rubbing her eyes after sleeping like a log all night. Before we knew it, Mum was up and making eggs on toast for everybody.

It’s now 10am, and I’m about to go put a rocket under Laura – to walk down to Talland, and then over to Polperro for a pub lunch a bit later.

p.s. I just went out for a ride in Dad’s new car. Ridiculous. Jaguar XF.

Over the weekend I found myself repeatedly turning a thought over in my head. Why do I write a blog? What’s the point of it all? I suppose the seed of the thought grew from an evening last week when I wrote in a paper journal for the first time in months. I found myself writing without filters, without expectations, and it felt good – like a weight had been lifted.

Last night I joined the staff table for a fund-raising quiz-night at the local infant school – the one my other half works at. I’ve been to countless similar functions in the past, but never as part of the staff team.

Did you know how many timezones there are in China? Or which family of animals Ladybirds belong to? I got them both wrong – as did the teachers. Phones were consulted at the end by people who cared more than me – I had drunk rather a lot by the time the scores were tallied.

I joked with those sat near me that the staff table needed to come second – that in a perfect world we should be narrowly beaten by at least one table of parents. It turns out we must live in a perfect world – because that’s exactly what happened.

After a quiet walk through rain soaked streets towards home, our eldest daughter greeted us at the door. She had been at a party all evening – a party with no alcohol apparently. My fears of spending the night alongside her bed once again were allayed.

This morning I am on my second cup of coffee, and looking ahead to an end-of-season awards evening at the rugby club. Everything is slowly winding down – including dance classes, which are preparing for their end-of-year show. My other half is making costumes once again, so our house is festooned with pieces of painted foam, cardboard, and ribbon that will become props, costumes, and so on for a variety of quick-change performances. She’s at a technical rehearsal this morning, tape measure in hand.

I am doing chores again. Washing clothes. Drying clothes. Drinking coffee – lots of coffee.