write.as/jonbeckett

It’s late on Friday evening, and I’m racing to write a blog post before Friday becomes Saturday. It’s not so much a case of wondering where the evening went, or where the day went – more a case of where on earth the entire week went. I realised earlier that I haven’t even written this week into the Bullet Journal.

This is what happens when I’m given a single project at work – I hit the ground running, and submerge into it – often at the expense of everything else. I obviously can’t say a lot about it, other than things are going well. I keep forgetting to eat lunch.

Thankfully home life has calmed down this week. I can’t remember how much I wrote about the drama at home, and can’t be bothered to read back through the recent past. I will admit there were a few moments where I began wondering where we might be headed, but thankfully they were short lived.

I’ve never been more thankful of my ability to ignore drama surrounding me, and continue putting one foot in front of the other.

Tomorrow we visit the in-laws for lunch. My mother-in-law is laid up with a running injury at the moment, so has invited us over to cause her son’s quiet Saturday to descend into mayhem. I may buy him some beer in way of apology.

I’ve been reading various news stories today, following the mass shooting in Florida that happened yesterday. In the hours afterwards, all the usual suspects tweeted out their “thoughts and prayers”. I think everybody has realised that when people say “thoughts and prayers” they actually mean “doing nothing”.

Yet again, everybody is talking about gun control in America. Yet again. Nothing will happen – and I’m beginning to wonder if a huge part of the blame should be leveled at everybody – not just at the NRA, or the Government, or the perpetrators. Everybody.

Just because there is no law to stop you owning and carrying a firearm, does that mean you should own and carry one? “Oh, I’m just going to the corner shop to get some milk – better take a loaded handgun with me”. The obvious answer is of course that you might get mugged – but then you might argue that you could also get run over – so better to go to the shop in an armoured car, or even better, fortify your home and never leave it, leaving the minimum wage delivery guy on a zero-hour contract to get shot or run over en-route.

It’s madness. I’m reminded of the argument about smaller or larger cars, that comes from a similar mind-set. Apparently the best way to protect your children if venturing onto the road is to buy the biggest, strongest car you can – then in the event of an accident, you have a better chance of survival – you know, as against the people you hit and kill.

Why should it take a government to ban ridiculous things? If not for laws, would people do everything available to them up to the limit that law allows? You would think not – and you would be wrong.

If the marketing people would have you believe it, millions of people will be making all sorts of extra effort to woo, appease, or apologise to their existing or soon-to-be significant others today. All because convention and expectation pressures them into it. If they don’t do something, they will be seen as lazy – if they do, they may even be seen as wasting money.

As ever, I’m going to sit on the fence about it. I don’t have faith in any religion, but I buy my children Christmas presents. The reason? It’s as good excuse as any. Valentines Day is slightly different though – because buying presents for people as you might at Christmas is not (and should not be) an every-day activity, but showing affection for others really should be.

It’s worth pointing out that the Christian church tried to outlaw Valentine’s Day in the 5th Century. It’s an age old tactic that organised religion has played repeatedly throughout history. There was a pre-existing pagan festival (Lupercalia), which the Church tried to erase by promoting something else at the same time. The same thing happened with Easter, and Christmas. If you don’t believe me, go pick up any history book that doesn’t come from the religion section.

ANYWAY!

It’s a fairly normal night in our household. I got in from work after cycling home through persistent rain (cycling one-handed with a bunch of flowers – quite a feat when your brakes are wet), immediately started washing up around my other half who was cooking dinner, and made conversation with our house guest for the night – a friend of our youngest who is staying for a sleepover. Our eldest is at a sleepover out of town – I’m deliberately not commenting about that.

After suggesting that I might have a surprise in my work backpack, the children all ate their dinner – rather miraculous, given that it was a vegetable pasta bake. When I retrieved a box of chocolates from my bag, their efforts at “eating their greens” were paid off. I have never seen a box of chocolates vanish so quickly.

Fast forward a couple of hours and all the children are now in bed. I have no doubt they are all still wide awake, and will be squinting their eyes shut when I go up shortly.

It’s just another day really, isn’t it. Don’t listen to the marketing morons. All that really happened between yesterday and today is the ball of mud we’re all standing on travelled a little bit further around the fairly ordinary star it orbits.

I missed another day on the blog. You might think I would therefore have an entire extra day of adventures to impart, but sadly not. Nothing I want to share anyway. Does this mean there is stuff going on? Perhaps. Does this mean I’m closing the door on it and pretending that everything is fine? Definitely.

Being somewhat truthful, I’ve just been really busy – and of course I can’t really write anything about it, because it’s work, and there are lots of reasons not to write anything about work – quite apart from causing you a sudden attack of narcolepsy.

I filter more than most. I didn’t used to. I used to empty my head into the keyboard, and record the mundane – all of the mundane. I would argue that there was value in the everyday stories of ordinary folk, and perhaps I still think that – but given the extraordinary stories posted by so many these days, it causes me to pause for thought. Does my story really have any value?

Of course I won’t stop writing. I know with some degree of confidence that I won’t stop, because I’ve tried to stop in the past – spectacularly unsuccessfully.

(a few moments pass while I contemplate finishing the post here, but then I spy my mobile phone on the corner of the desk, and realise I might have something to write about after all)

I’m still carrying the little Nokia 3310 around with me. If nothing else, it has illustrated just how little interaction I have with anybody any more. I receive perhaps one text message every few days, and perhaps one phone call a week – usually from my children. I don’t really miss having a smartphone at all, and wonder if carrying one was a kind of crutch – something to fiddle with during the quiet moments. I’m not sure if I’ve become more aware of the world around me as a result of ditching the smartphone, but I’m certainly less distracted. Actually – let’s revise that – I’m distracted by different things.

I’m spending far more time writing emails than I have in the last few years. Rather than send instant messages to friends, I’m writing emails comprised of more than a pithy sentence or two – it feels good. I’ve hardly set foot in Instagram, or Tumblr for the last six weeks, and the lack of interest in my disappearance has underlined just how insular those communities are (or just how forgettable I am). I’m not criticising – I’m just stating facts – I have not missed those communities, and they have not missed me.

Maybe NOW is the time to stop writing this post, because I’m rambling on about a load of inconsequential rubbish, as per usual. If you managed to get this far, you probably deserve a medal. I think I’ve written words to this effect in the past.

Yesterday morning our eldest daughter got herself up, dressed, washed, brushed her hair, then announced that she was going into town. We raised eyebrows at each other, and thought no more of it.

She re-appeared shortly after lunch, soaked from the persistant rain that had been falling, complained about having wet hair, then headed back into town.

“Again?”

“Yes – just hanging out in the coffee shop”

Again, we let her get on with it. The younger children were going to meet up with friends, and my other half was going grocery shopping. I got on with chores for the afternoon, and occasionally looked in on Google Maps (we use location sharing with the kids phones). From 4pm onwards Miss 17’s location showed as the middle of the river on the way our of town. I figured her phone must have gone flat, or the battery had gone low enough that the GPS had stopped reporting – using cell towers instead.

Time ticked on, and suddenly it was 7pm, raining, dark outside, and still no sign of her. Her phone was going straight to the answering machine, as was the phone of her closest friend (who we suspected she was with).

Instead of sitting down to eat the spaghetti bolognese we had just finished making for dinner, I pulled my coat on and headed out into the rain. I walked first to the railway station, then towards the centre of town, and along all the main roads. At one point I walked out to the bridge, where Google Maps said she had been earlier in the day. I saw nobody, anywhere. Looping back through town for a second time my other half called me.

“No – no sign of her anywhere.”

When I got home – soaked to the skin – we logged into her email and Facebook accounts, found the parents of her friend, and they tried to call their daughter too. Nothing. At that point we called the police and reported her missing. It was now nearly 9pm, almost below zero outside, and had been dark for a couple of hours. She had now been out of the house for eight hours, and in truth we had no idea if she was even in town any more.

Fifteen minutes later she walked in the front door.

Half an hour after that the police arrived – a stereotypical towering male police officer, and a trainee female officer. The trainee sat with us at the dinner table filling out paperwork, while the senior officer went in her room and “had a chat”.

Their story? They had been sitting under the bridge out of town all afternoon and evening, to keep out of the rain. Suddenly the “just going out for coffee” made sense – and all the secrecy made sense. The person she had met up with is not welcome in our house, after a sustained campaign of manipulation, bullying, and emotional blackmail. Of course she threw this in our face immediately – if we hadn’t banned the friend (that she hadn’t gone to meet) from the house, she would not have been sitting under the bridge with them all night.

This morning she got up, dressed, and stood in the doorway.

“I’m going out”

“Where?”

“To their house”

“That’s fine – all we need to know is where you are. Is your phone charged?”

“YES!”

Why is none of this in the parenting instruction book ?

It’s heading towards 3pm on Saturday afternoon, and I’m holed up in the junk room, listening to Spotify, writing this while the rain falls outside. In the spirit of “finding something to do”, I thought it might be interesting to record the story of how my posts get from the keyboard to the internet – because it’s probably fairly unique. Quite why it’s unique is open to interpretation, and a fair bit of ridicule I imagine.

Here comes the nerdy stuff…

I write my posts in a text editor. I almost always have. Yes, I’ve tried word processors – both offline and online – but invariably return to text editors. If I’m writing on Windows I’ll use Notepad++ – if on Linux I’ll use whatever is installed. I save the posts in markdown format, but it really makes no difference, because I never use any formatting – no italics or bolds in my writing.

I save the posts in year and month sub-folders, and always save the files with a common naming scheme – “{year}–{month}–{day} {Post Title}.md”. It might seem incredibly regimented, and it probably is – but it means I don’t have to think at all. Within each file the first line is always the title, and the second line is always the longhand version of the date – e.g. “Saturday 10th February 2018”.

After finishing writing, I copy the body text into Wordpress, add a photo (usually from Pexels, sometimes from my own photos at Flickr), add a few tags, and click publish. Invariably I then read through what I just posted, and discover all manner of typing, or grammar mistakes. I try to update the text version too.

When I finish writing, I run a few commands in a terminal window to check the text in with “git”. Git is a version control system I’m used to using for work, and really just provides a nice backup – it also means you can see changes you might have made to writing over time (not that I ever do change anything – what you read is typically whatever fell out of my head at the time). After saving what I’ve written, I run one more command to push the changes up to GitHub on the internet – which provides a free online backup of the whole lot. I’ve played around with using Google Docs in the past, but given what I’ve learned about the architecture of Google Docs and Photos just recently (it’s not good), I very much doubt I’ll use it in the future.

Anyway – enough of the nerdy stuff.

While sort-of writing this post, I’m being distracted by the Winter Olympics highlights from South Korea, and the England rugby match against Wales. This is where I’m incredibly smug about living in the UK – the BBC are showing live coverage of all the Olympic events simultaneously, with no advertising at all. They are also making all events available to watch after-the-fact online. It’s pretty amazing to be honest.

I’m also working my way through adding contacts to Zoho Mail. I’m forwarding email on from GMail for the moment, giving Zoho a chance. Taking my time to setup contacts properly with photos is making new emails from people look a little more tidy than previously. If you get an email from me asking for a selfie – now you’ll know why.

Right. I can hear that the washing machine has stopped. Silence in this house generally means there’s something to do. I’ll try and start wading through the colossal backlog of blog posts by friends that I haven’t read for the last few days in a bit. Again – if you suddenly see comments from me this evening, you’ll know why.

Postscript – this post took two hours to write, in-between walking away to do other things. That pretty much sums up the last few days for me.

If I didn’t know better, I would say the old desktop computer in the study has got it in for me tonight. In the last ten minutes it has crashed twice. Perhaps the computer is trying to drop hints about the wisdom of posting to the blog when I have very little to share. Obviously the computer has no idea how adept I am at continuing to write when I have nothing to write about. Some might call it a skill. Maybe.

The weekend has somewhat miraculously opened up before us. Various children’s activities have been cancelled, leaving us wondering what to do with ourselves. I’m sure the universe will invent something to keep us busy – it usually does a marvellous job of pulling the rug out from beneath us.

I can’t help feeling the blog posts have been rather pedestrian this week. I guess that’s what comes of working, doing chores, and pedalling your bike between here and there all week. If you have no real life as such, it’s difficult to tell any stories about strangers you sat near in a coffee shop, or quiet back streets you happened upon while hopelessly lost in a far-flung city.

I’ll try and think of something entertain, insightful, or idiotic to fill a blog post with tomorrow, I promise.

I suppose technically this is being written on Friday morning. I thought I should write something, given that I didn’t post anything yesterday – breaking a streak that probably goes back to some point in November or December last year. I’m absolutely fine – just busy, and distracted by the ongoing backup saga at home.

One of my co-workers had a brain-wave at lunchtime today – we get credit with Microsoft through our developer licenses – meaning we can spin up hardware “in the cloud”. I’ve done exactly that – for the last few hours a pretend computer sitting somewhere in a server rack has been downloading all of my photos from Google Photos, ready for me to re-organise them, and upload them all to Flickr. The huge benefit of running the job in the cloud is the bandwidth – the entire download (over 110 gigabytes) will be complete within half a day – versus several days at home.

Enough nerdy stuff.

Some major news tonight – we have booked a summer holiday. The children will get their first flight in a plane, and their first experience of staying for any length of time in a foreign country. We’re going “all inclusive” to a huge hotel complex though, so there’s every chance all they will see is british families on holiday.

Oh – one more thing – after discovering just how badly engineered Google Drive and Google Photos are, I’ve started looking around at other solutions for email and file storage – and started looking at Zoho. Quite surprised to find out how much better than Google Mail it is, but then reminded myself that Google only do email so they can read it in order to serve adverts to you. Zoho’s core business is running businesses – so their email is very much more business class than Google’s. I might give it a try for a while.

Anyway – it’s gone 1am. I have work in the morning.

It all started at breakfast time this morning. After sliding out of bed, waking the children up, having a shower, brushing my teeth, getting dressed, feeding the cats – who were trying to trip me up at every turn – and feeding the fish, I found myself standing in the middle of the kitchen trying to decide what to do next.

By now Miss 14 had arrived downstairs, and confidently informed me that both she and her younger sister would be eating school lunches today. Great, I thought – two less lunches to make. I made Miss 17 a gluten free roll filled with ham and american mustard, wrapped it up, and handed it to her.

Twenty minutes later, after the children had all departed for school, my other half shouted from the kitchen.

“OH NO! She forgot her lunch!”

“No she didn’t. I made her a roll.”

“But I made her pasta salad last night – and you – you saw me making it!”

I re-wound everything in my head. She was right. I had even washed the pots up before heading to bed. Crap.

My other half handed me my lunch – a tupperware tub also filled with pasta salad. I put it in my lunch bag, and set off for work a few minutes later – locking the house behind me.

Here’s the thing – at some point during the morning I obviously got the idea in my head that we had no bread in the house, so myself and my other half would have to buy something for lunch. It’s rare, but it happens. So even though I had just put lunch in my work backpack, by the time I got the bike out and began cycling down the road, I had forgotten all about it.

I remembered the food my other half made me as I left the supermarket in the high street, having just bought a filled baguette, a drink, and a chocolate bar. I think I actually said “oh crap” out loud – I have no idea what passers must have thought of the strange man talking to himself outside the supermarket.

At some point mid-morning in the office an email went round – titled “Don’t forget we’re all going out for lunch to the pub today!”. I looked at the ceiling, and once again said “AH CRAP!” – even louder this time. So far I had two lunches in my bag, and was about to go to a third lunch.

After returning from the pub after lunch, I checked my email, and saw that Google had replied about the helpdesk call regarding my other half’s Google Drive account (the 170 gigabyte backup disaster). Dammit – they wanted screenshots. I got on my bike and raced home, taking my work computer with me so I could carry on at home.

Twenty minutes later – rather rubber legged after fighing against the wind all the way – I arrived at the back door of our house, and searched my pockets for the house keys – the house keys I vaguely remembered putting down on my desk at work earlier in the day. There was nothing else for it.

Fifteen minutes later my other half peered from the window of the infant school where she works, and said to one of her co-workers “that looks like my husband cycling towards the school!? Hang on a minute – that IS my husband cycling towards the school.”

She could barely disguise her laughter as I stood at the hatch where all the parents usually stand, asking if I could borrow her house keys.

Fifteen minutes later I arrived home. Let’s try and forget about all of it.

I have nothing earth shattering to report. I’m not going to let that stop me filling a blog post with very little though. If nothing else, writing this post proves that nothing might be something – which pleases the anarchic part of my brain no end.

I’m trying to relax into the week. I quietly stressed all weekend about a conference call this morning, without telling anybody about it. Nobody noticed that I was distracted, which either means I’m a very good actor, or very few people really care about anybody other than themselves around here.

Life has been a continual slog recently. Weekdays filled with stress, and weekends filled with chores. I did manage to escape to watch our middle girl play rugby this past Sunday, but I often find myself wondering about life in general – if this is “it”. I know it’s ridiculous, because I’m very fortunate compared to most. I just feel a little bit lost sometimes. Maybe we all do from time to time.

There’s an old saying, isn’t there – something along the lines of “too much work, and too little play makes Jonathan a dull boy”.

It’s kind of difficult when you can’t remember the last time you had a night out, and when you do have a quiet moment, you think about work, or the latest struggle with the children.

Chocolate. Maybe chocolate is the answer. I don’t think we have any though, and the corner shop closed over an hour ago. Dammit. I wonder if sleep works like chocolate ?