write.as/jonbeckett

It’s Saturday. The washing machine and tumble dryer are rumbling away in the background. I’ve just made lunch for everybody – I expect I’ll be washing up behind everybody in a few minutes. I’m finally getting the chance to sit down – at 1pm – to write something – to do something for myself. I wonder how many people that are thinking about starting a family would continue with the idea if somebody such as myself sat opposite them, and told the truth about how the life you know will be reduced to filling the gaps around everything and everybody else?

Anyway – back to the title of the post – making plans.

On Friday morning I will be heading to the railway station with my eldest daughter to start the epic journey to Cornwall – to visit my parents for a few days. We should arrive in the early afternoon – considerably faster, less tiring, and less stressful than driving the two hundred and fifty mile route.

We will spend next weekend (weather permitting) walking the coast path, visiting seaside villages, eating ice creams, reading books in front of roaring fires, and probably sitting in quite a few pubs. We’re nearing the age where our eldest can drink in bars now – and we’re trying to normalise alcohol as quickly as possible. She’s had something of a trial-by-fire so far.

I probably pack remarkably light compared to most people when travelling – one of the dubious benefits of having travelled so frequently with work over the last several years. I don’t take any of the ‘just in case’ things any more.

I wonder if our reserved train seats will be honoured? I have horrific memories of making the journey with our children when they were little, and finding other passengers in our seats – when I informed them, they told me there were people in their seats – and when I went to those people, there were people in their seats too. Madness.

The longest leg of the journey will take three hours, and wind its way along the south coast – hurtling over viaducts similar to those en-route to Hogwarts, and whistling past crashing waves, beaches, and piers as we draw closer to the south-west. In many ways you can feel the world slowing down as you become more distant from London, and the aptly named 'rat race’.

You would never guess I’m looking forward to it, would you.

I’m not sure that I have a blog post in me tonight – and yet here I am, sitting in the junk room, tapping away at the keyboard. I’m grinning – remembering a quote I once saw – ‘I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it’.

The weeks are blurring into one another at the moment. Every weekday has become the same – filled with a head-long sprint towards a deadline in the summer, only it’s not really 'the’ deadline – it’s 'a’ deadline. There will be more. While cycling to and from the office I turn things over in my head, and start drawing parallels with Don Quixote. Perhaps my windmills are built by my own imagination.

After hitting publish on this post I will go brush my teeth, grab the book I’ve been reading, and head to bed. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll find time to catch up with the blogs I follow, and the friends I have neglected recently.

I’m writing this from the junk room at home. I got back about an hour ago, and am still decompressing. My other half and the younger girls are at their dance class – they will be home soon – Miss 17 is watching some kind of Anime series on Netflix – I can hear excitable Japanese voices and thunderous sword clash noises every so often.

Today I completed two days worth of projected work in one day. Several thousand lines of programming, and countless flowcharts, form designs and other stuff – all of which means nothing to anybody except myself. I didn’t stop or get up from my chair from the moment I sat down this morning, until the moment I got up to leave. Not exactly a healthy way of life. The programming ran first time. Programming very rarely works first time.

Throughout the day I listened to dance music, because it has no lyrics. If I listen to songs I know, they distract me.

Before writing this, I had a quick look on the various stock photo places to see if there was a nice photo for ‘programming’. Why do stock photos of 'programming’ or 'software development’ always have photos of Apple Macs ? Anybody who works in the industry knows damn well that Macs are in the vast minority (unless you’re a hipster running Sublime Text or Leadpad while sitting in a coffee shop, trying to look intellectual).

Anyway. Family just got home. Time to go make dinner.

When I was young, I sometimes had a recurring nightmare about walking through the subway beneath the road behind our house. The subway lead to the nearest playpark. There was a huge steel door in the side of the tunnel. In the dream, as I entered the tunnel the door would burst open, and a giant crow – identical to a puppet in a children’s TV show I didn’t like – would burst out and attack me. I would wake up shaking, pouring with sweat.

One night, when I was about six or seven years old, a dream took me into the tunnel, and instead of running, I fought the bird. It’s one of the only times I can ever recall being conscious during a dream – making decisions, and acting on them.

I never had the dream again.

I suppose it says something about the power of dreams that I still recall it so clearly. I was perhaps six or seven years old, and nearly forty years later I can still remember every detail.

I realised today that the mountain I’m climbing at work is steeper than I thought. I’m tempted to dig in and work nights to get ahead of the game, but I’m not being paid to do that, and I doubt anybody will thank me for it. It’s a trap I’ve fallen into before, and I have no doubt I will again – busting my ass to meet other people’s requirements or expectations. We’ll ignore that those expectations were pulled out of thin air with no regard for reality, past experience, or any sort of judgement.

I’ll change the subject before I get myself in trouble.

I wrote in my old Moleskine notebook last night for the first time in four months. The moleskine is a hangover from when I worked in London over a decade ago – I started keeping a paper journal – a diary of sorts – filled with my thoughts each day. I was travelling on trains for four hours each day, and thought I might go mad unless I started recording my thoughts.

While writing in the notebook I realised I missed it, and it caused me to think about blogging – if it’s really worth it. Blogging seems to be a double edged sword – on one side, if you publish stuff out to the world, it gets discovered by wonderful people that become far flung friends – and yet on the other side you end up filtering the words you post to such a degree that they become a pale reflection of the stories they tell.

I wonder if I can do both? Would it be completely insane to write a regular blog, AND fill a page of the paper notebook each night?

It’s rare that I remember dreams. I sometimes wonder if we only remember them if they happen just before we wake up – that’s what happened this morning. Of course the dream makes little sense in retrospect, but at the time it seemed very real – so much so that I’m writing this.

I was in America – visiting a store that sold lots of different things. My youngest daughter was with me, and the store was very busy. The store consisted of lots of small rooms, each filled with various things – it might have been several houses knocked into one. Not long after making my way in the door, I lost my daughter in the crowd, and spent ages looking for her.

In the middle of the crowd, I saw a friend from the internet. She appeared to work in the store – she was wearing the store uniform, and waved at me through the sea of people. Her smile lit the room as we slowly made our way through the crowd towards each other. I’m not sure how long the hug went on for – it seemed like there was more to it than just a hug – ‘Thunderbolt City’ from Four Weddings comes to mind.

We stood and held each other for some time in the middle of the crowd – I can’t remember what we talked about – it almost seemed like everybody and everything else dropped out of focus.

Suddenly I was awake, squinting at the clock radio, which burst into life a few moments later with the local radio station. I rolled towards my other half, who was rubbing her eyes, and murmured 'I’ve just had the strangest dream’

I left work early today, after fighting a headache that kept getting worse. It got to the point where I was squinting at the computer screen in front of me, fighting to think straight. After finally giving in I slowly cycled home, took some ibuprofen, drank a pint of water, and am now sitting in the junk room with a cup of tea. Let’s hope tomorrow is better.

Being home mid-afternoon means I get to see the children come home from school. If there is a positive to take from being sick and getting home early, it’s seeing the surprise on their face when you open the door, and hearing the story of their day tumble from them as they follow you back into the house.

Miss 17 started her second work placement today – working on a day release from college as a teaching assistant at the local infant school. Previously she had been working with pre-school children, and has come home after one day with year one asking what the future path might look like to become a teacher.

While writing this Miss 14 is singing (incredibly badly) in her bedroom, Miss 13 is badgering my other half with question after question in the kitchen, and Miss 17 is chilling out with Netflix in her room (or at least, that’s what it sounds like). This is life for us at the moment – a perpetually noisy house, filled with chaos, questions, unintentionally hilarious singing, and music and television pumping out of several rooms simultaneously.

I just gave the children all of my remaining loose change to go and buy themselves ice creams. You would have thought they had won the lottery.

If you see a friend request on Facebook from me, I decided to give up on the whole ‘cut Facebook back to close family and friends’ thing, because I ended up adding a few of you back anyway – which made it all kind of pointless.

I also read a great post on Facebook by a far flung friend that made a lot of sense about the platform not being the problem at all – it’s all the insane family members that turn everything to hell.

I’m thinking that if I connect with enough people from here on Facebook, I can drown out the minority with you guys, who will of course become the majority, and transform Facebook into a more bearable place to hang out. Maybe.

It’s worth a shot, isn’t it ?

If you haven’t had a friend request from me yet, it’s most likely because I haven’t found you – visit my Facebook Profile, and click add if you would like to add me.

After scraping ourselves out of bed this morning, we all set about filling the car with boot-bags, mouth-guards, and collosal quantities of food before setting off towards a rugby tournament in London.

What can I say? The sun shone, the girls worked their backsides off, and more importantly they had fun. I’ve never seen their respective teams laugh so much. Sure, they didn’t reach the knockout stages of the the pools they played in, but they showed huge amounts of spirit.

The difference between our team and ‘the others’, for want of a better term, was best illustrated at lunchtime, when they congregated together under the posts of one of the pitches, and put on a dance routine to a bluetooth speaker one of them had brought along. While other teams frowned, and practiced passing, our girls sang, danced, and laughed until they could no longer move. They might have lost on the field, but I can’t help feeling they won by every other measure.

This evening we are all tired. After arriving home I walked into town with Miss 13 to get groceries, then set about making dinner. A brief consultation with my other half earlier in the evening had suggested 'anything that doesn’t require my involvement’ (she does most of the cooking), so we very quickly decided on baked potatoes.

I’ll keep quiet about the bottle of wine that vanished while cooking dinner. Of course now all I want to do is fall asleep, but I’ve not posted to the blog yet, and not caught up with Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, or anything else.

It’s funny – I often think about days like today as 'having no weekend’, but it’s not really true. If 'having a weekend’ means sitting around and doing nothing, I would have no stories to tell.

Last night we were invited to spend the evening having a barbecue with old friends. It was needed. If you’ve been reading these posts for the last few weeks, you’ll know how distracted, stressed, tired, and irritable I have been. I don’t think I’ve ever filtered quite so much from the blog.

As evening turned to night, and stars swept overhead, we sat in the garden, drank too much, ate wonderful food, and talked about everything and anything – from terrible movies to favorite books, and of course local gossip. Some people seem to know a little of everything that’s going on around them – I typically know nothing, or at least like others to think that. I’m more of a listener, and keeper of secrets – I always have been.

I’m not sure what time we got home – it must have been the early hours.

Today began with chores. Weekend chores. Washing clothes, drying clothes – the usual. It then found me standing on the touchline of a football pitch for a couple of hours. While wandering towards the ground I noticed a helicopter circle the pitches before lowering down out-of-sight. At first I thought it might be the police, but then turned the final corner towards Miss 13’s impending game, and saw the air ambulance landed in the centre circle of one of the pitches.

The rumor mill spoke of a terrible leg break. I watched for a few minutes as the pilots stood in front of the helicopter, visors still down, communicating with paramedics. Somebody’s summer has probably been wrecked.

This afternoon has been a lot slower. We are all tired. It turns out burning the candle at both ends – trying to work, do chores, ferry children around, and trying to be sociable – takes it out of you. Who knew ?

Here’s hoping the evening holds nothing more than Netflix, food, and perhaps a book. Who am I kidding? I’ll be up until the early hours reading blog posts, commenting, liking, and vanishing down rabbit holes. It’s what the internet was designed for.