write.as/jonbeckett

It’s heading towards midnight, the children are fast asleep in bed, and I’m sitting alone in the study typing up a blog post on the old desktop PC. I can hear the tumble dryer rumbling away in the background, and the occasional clunk of the cat-flap as the cats come and go. I’m listening to streaming radio, there’s an empty cup of coffee just out of reach, and a tub of ice cream the children knew nothing about hiding in the freezer.

My other half is nowhere to be found – I received a call from her mid-afternoon, letting me know that she would be taking her Mum home from hospital, and would stay the night with her in case anything was needed. She then reeled off the various things I would be expected to do in her absence – places children would need to be tomorrow morning, things they would need packed – that sort of thing. I know most of it already – no harm in being talked at for a few minutes just to make sure though, right?

I’m wondering if to put a movie on and fetch that ice cream. Or maybe search out any other bottles of this or that bought for Christmas. Perhaps catch up on a few blogs, or read a book. Of course we all know I’ll probably end up binge-watching something on Netflix while chatting with far flung friends via email – it’s kind of what I do.

On our way home from parents evening at our youngest’s school yesterday evening, the clock struck “can’t be bothered to cook anything” o'clock, so we stopped off at a supermarket en-route to buy ready meals.

After gathering together a selection of fine looking curries, and pasta meals, I wandered off towards the checkouts to pay. I was vaguely aware of an old woman walking in the same direction, and we dodged either way before passing each other. My other half then sidled up to me, and whispered in my ear.

“You just nearly walked into Mary Berry!”

We were all giggling quietly to ourselves while waiting in the queue, when I noticed that the person in front of us had left their food on the conveyor belt next to the checkout. Guess who’s food it was – go on – just guess.

While Mary Berry, cooking superstar off numerous BBC TV shows was busy purchasing all manner of lovely looking ingredients to no doubt cook something that would make your teeth fall out on-sight, we stood next to her, with a huge pile of ready meals. What’s more, we looked like parents do after being at work all day, and then sitting in front of school teachers for two hours – whereas Mary looked like she had just left a magazine photo shoot.

Just for the record, I thought I was going down with a cold, so bought a Vindaloo (to hopefully burn the virus out of me – there’s some sort of logic there, honest). My memories of curry from my teenage years are that vindaloo is hot enough to make you regret it afterwards (I’m being polite) – this was nothing of the sort. I’m now wondering if I’ve changed, or curry has changed.

Anyway. It turns out Mary Berry actually looks exactly like she does on TV. All the time it appears, which is exactly not like ex-chancellor of the exchequer Norman Lamont, who I once saw in airport arrivals looking like he had been sleeping rough for several days.

I walked away from Tumblr yesterday. Perhaps permanently this time. After posting to a Tumblr account more or less consistently since the platform launched back in 2007, I walked away for a while in the late summer of last year. Within days, a number of those I had become friends with expressed sadness at my departure, essentially leaving the door open for a return at some point. In the late autumn I returned, began posting again, and began following, reading, liking, and commenting on the posts published by the community I had known for years.

While tidying up my Twitter account last night (read: trying valiantly to remove spam from it), I found an online tool to help discover non-reciprocal follows – those you are following that are not following you back. It got me thinking, and I discovered a similar tool for Tumblr.

It turns out three quarters of the people I had known for years at Tumblr – who’s posts I had read, commented on, and liked – and who I had shared numerous private messaging conversations with in response to difficult times in their lives – were not following me. I’m not sure if I was stunned, surprised, shocked, or if I quietly expected so many people to be so self absorbed.

Within ten minutes I had written and published a “goodbye” post, then headed to Facebook and began un-friending people there too – whittling down the friends list to actual friends, rather than random acquaintances.

While it feels like I’m withdrawing, it also feels like a weight has been lifted. Social platforms have a weight associated with them – a weight of expectation to present yourself in a certain way, to appear popular, to take part in conversation – to be social, I guess.

Here’s the thing – I’m not a very social person in real life. I have one or two close friends on the internet that I try to keep in touch with regularly (and I often fail at that too), but beyond that I’m not really worried about cultivating some huge fake network of pretend friends.

I know posting a public blog flies in the face of that, but then you guys aren’t really friends, are you – you’re readers – just like I’m a reader of your blog. Sure, we might become friends at some point along the way, but at the moment we’re more like strangers on a train – where I nod “hello” to many of you each day, but there’s only really one or two that I choose to sit next to, and share my day with.

Throughout the last few months of last year I tried out using a Bullet Journal for day-to-day tasks, notes, and so on. By the end of the year I convinced myself that Bullet Journals were no better than Filofaxes (which I had been using for years), so switched back to a Filofax at the new year.

I’m switching back to the Bullet Journal, and here’s why – I have realised the repetitive nature of migrating tasks forward from the year, month, and week lists into each new week is perhaps the most important thing about the whole Bullet Journal thing. Other people probably have different opinions – different reasons – but this has turned out to be the most important one for me.

An old friend emailed me yesterday, and remarked that she missed the occasional emails we used to send back and forth. I stopped doing them because I stopped using the damn Bullet Journal. Yes, the Filofax keeps dates very neatly, but it’s nowhere near as good at goals and aspirations – all the non-essential stuff that you might like to do during a given week or month.

Anyway. I’m back using the Bullet Journal. This is where several of you comment that you knew this would happen, and smile broadly while typing out your response. I’ll cut myself a nice big slice of humble pie, and sit over here with a cup of tea while eating it.

The day started so well. Up early, showered, dressed, breakfast with the children, coffee. A few moments after our eldest left for college the wheels started to fall off the wagon. My other half shouted from the kitchen:

“She’s left her lunch on the kitchen counter”

Rather than chase after her, every fear she had about eating disorders came tumbling out, and I nodded while she continued on, wondering why I was being talked at, rather than Miss 17. As soon as she had gone I sent a text.

“You forgot the lunch that Mum spent ages making last night”

Immediate answer:

“Oh no! Can you bring it to me? I’m still waiting for the bus.”

Two minutes later I was heading up the road on my bike, full wet-weather kit on, puddles spraying in all directions, dodging the various headless-chicken parents driving their children to school, because of course they will dissolve if they stand in the rain for more than a few moments. I was nearly run over three times inside a minute – and of course I didn’t have the helmet camera on. The final time – after delivering lunch to Miss 17 – was a classic – a woman unwilling to wait for me to pull out of a junction while another driver waved me out accelerated directly at me, causing me to lift my bike physically into the middle of the traffic. She missed me by inches, her stare directly ahead – not daring to look at me as she hurtled past. I swore loudly and shook my head.

The morning at work passed relatively quietly – until the phone rang at lunchtime. Miss 17 had called my other half from college in tears. She was going to fetch her immediately, and would drop her at home. Could I go home and try to find out what was going on? Also – because my other half’s Mum is in hospital (an accident – she will be ok), could I also make dinner for the kids, and do the usual 10,000 step trudge around town to ferry Miss 12 between dance and football? I went home and cooked dinner, but scratched all plans to take anybody anywhere – there was no way I was going to leave Miss 17 alone.

Just to cap the day off, while sitting with Miss 17 in the study earlier, a flea appeared out of nowhere and landed on her hand. Within minutes I had cleared the room and set off a fogging spray-can, to fill the room with pesticide. I’ll leave the room closed until tomorrow morning. I also got the children to clear their bedrooms – they will receive the same treatment first thing in the morning. I imagine the cats have brought fleas back into the house again, but I’m still furious – we spent a fortune last year waging war with fleas – fogging rooms, and treating the cats repeatedly.

Maybe tomorrow will be a better day ?

Today feels like it has slipped through my fingers. I rolled out of bed a minute or so after the radio alarm clock erupted into life at 7am, and stomped off towards the shower. A few minutes later I arrived in the kitchen to discover a washing up mountain from the night before. My other half wandered into the kitchen – rubbing her eyes – and apologised. She had made lunches for everybody late the night before, and didn’t get as far as drying anything, or putting anything away. By the time I finished, the children had gone to school, and I had little or no time to get my own things together.

Fast forward through a long and frustrating day, and you discover me in the kitchen again, spending the majority of the evening washing up after a marathon cooking session. My other half has been on a self-sufficiency drive recently, and part of that currently involves making meals for lunches from scratch, rather than buying anything ready-made. The food is great, and it’s fantastic to have lunches ready made, but I’m dealing with the bit you never see on TV cooking shows – the wreckage and washing up just out of sight of the TV cameras.

I finished washing up just after 10pm. That’s all I have to say about that.

I’m sitting in the study now – writing this, listening to music, and wondering about fetching the left-over bottle of sherry from Christmas before reading the various blogs I try to follow. I could do with a rabbit hole to jump down for a while.

After playing a spirited game of “Settlers of Catan” with the children last night, I sat down late in the evening with my other half and said “shall we watch a movie?”. We rarely sit and watch movies together at home – either the children are wandering in and out of the room, we are running around town fetching and delivering them from clubs, we are doing chores, or we are too tired to even bother.

I skimmed through the movies listed on Amazon Prime, and picked “The Invention of Lying” – the Ricky Gervais comedy. I had heard of it when it came out at the cinema, but never got around to watching it. I suppose for most people it’s “old news” now, but for us it was new.

Here’s the trailer :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vn71hYvyqCA

I thought the idea behind the movie was wonderful – and we laughed out loud during the first half. If you’ve not seen it, the protagonist lives in a world where nobody lies about anything – the entire concept has never occurred to anybody. The lack of any kind of deceit leads to some brutally frank, and often hilariously cringeworthy conversations – I won’t ruin them for you if you haven’t seen it.

I second guessed where the movie would go pretty quickly after the idea of lying was discovered – but found myself frustrated that it never really got into the more interesting conversations around iconography, faith, belief, and free will. Don’t get me wrong – there were some wonderful moments – like the realisation that first impressions are often wrong, or the spur-of-the-moment invention of a heaven to help somebody deal with death. I just feel the movie could have done a lot more with the ideas it touched on – it could have confronted the audience with far more home truths.

After the movie finished I looked at reviews of the movie online, and found a predictable tidle-wave of negative reviews from church websites – which is only natural, given that the central character of the movie invents a “man in the sky that nobody can see that decides if you go to a wonderful place, or the worst imaginable place when you die”. I guess exposing a pragmatic, logical description of the faiths that something like 80% of the world follow as an invented fallacy was always going to cause trouble among the more forthright, soap-box wielding brigade.

I noticed something else while looking at the reviews – while the critics hated the movie, the audience liked it. I found myself wondering if the normal cinema going audience is far more open minded and self deprecating than many self-ordained authority figures would like them to be.

I’m not sure when this feeling started – maybe a few days ago, or a few weeks, or even a few months ago. It feels like I’m slowly disconnecting from the social internet. I read a piece by a journalist earlier, where she made a forthright speech about not installing Instagram on her new mobile phone, and I rather sanctimoniously found myself thinking “told you so”.

It’s jarring in a way, because I used to share so much. I have been a member of Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, and Wordpress for as long as I can remember. On occasion I’ve also been a member of some of the more “fringe” social networks, such as Blogger, LiveJournal, Reddit, Ello, Posterous, Vox, Yahoo 360, and so on. Until quite recently I would wander taking photos each day, and share cropped, filtered versions of them to whoever might discover them. It never occurred to me to wonder why I was doing it. I still don’t know why.

And yet I’m still writing – still recording the mundane happenings of my fairly ordinary life, and posting them out in public. Sure, I don’t attach my name directly to them (actually that’s a lie – if you know where to look, you can connect the dots), but I’m still posting these words. I don’t know why I keep writing either.

During a quiet moment this afternoon I looked around at the people I follow on Tumblr and Wordpress, and couldn’t help thinking their lives are far more interesting than my own. Perhaps that’s why I follow them – to vicariously live through their posts. I’ve written about it before. It’s the old “grass is greener” thing, isn’t it.

This evening an email arrived from a distant friend. The email signed off with “Your biggest fan”. I felt both like a fraud, and like I might do cartwheels up and down the hallway. I never think about people actually reading the stuff I post – I never consider that somebody might actually enjoy reading any of it. Perhaps it’s best that I don’t.

I’m smiling while writing this though. Because as much as I have distanced myself from the social internet in recent months, the thought that somebody out there likes these idiotic ramblings has kind of made my day. While sitting with my cousin in a bar once, she scoffed at the thought that I had any defences against her – I’ve never forgotten her words:

“Your walls are made of mud, and I am the rain.”

I’m starting to suspect that anybody that takes an interest in me is a rainstorm of a sort.

The day began at 7am when the radio alarm clock burst into life, filling the bedroom with the local radio station. Nobody actually staffs the radio station at the weekend, so a playlist continues throughout the day, interspersed with national news stories.

Our youngest daughter was supposed to be taking part in a football (soccer) match this morning. We would need to leave a little after 8am in order to arrive in time – but also knew that heavy rain had been forecast overnight, and that a pitch inspection was happening at the same time we might leave. At the clock approached 8, we were all up, washed, dressed, and our youngest had put her full football kit on. Just as we started looking for coats, my other half’s phone buzzed.

“It’s been called off”

The relief was enormous. We contemplated going back to bed for an hour, but we were all already up, washed, and dressed. I had even had a shave. We switched the kettle on.

So what might occupy me on this fine, rainy Saturday? I know – a re-installation of the old desktop computer in the study. I wiped it last night and put Ubuntu Linux on it. This morning I changed my mind, and installed Linux Mint over the top of it. If you’ve only ever know Windows on PCs, it might surprise you to learn that there are alternatives around, and they are almost all free.

I will freely admit that there is an aspect of anarchy involved. I hate following the crowd, and if given the opportunity will go my own way – I’ve run Linux on the desktop computer at home for years, on and off. Perhaps the independent bent in my character also explains the Nokia phone I recently switched to, and using a Filofax rather than a smartphone.

In other news, I’ve also switched back to writing blog posts in a text editor, and copying them into the browser when I’m happy with them. I always used to write this way, but had recently been writing in the browser. I guess the paranoid part of me always wonders “what if this service, or that service vanishes?” – writing in a text editor means I keep the original posts, and can easily keep backups. I’m also using GIT to sync the text up to the cloud, but we’ll ignore that :)

Anyway – I feel a cup of coffee coming on. The rain is falling steadily outside, and I really don’t feel like leaving the house.

How’s your weekend going so far ?

After a mammoth session recording expenses for this week’s adventures in Germany, I returned home after lunch to keep Miss 17 company. Her teenage friends seem intent on turning her inside out at the moment, so of course I’m going up to bat for her again, and again, and again. None of this is in the parent instruction book (not that I read it anyway).

Working from home really means “keeping half an eye on e-mail”. While doing so I have re-installed the old desktop computer at home – replacing Windows 7 with Ubuntu. We only ever use this computer to access the internet, so it kind of makes sense.

I’m also listening to Q-107 on the internet – a radio station from the US with a show hosted by an old friend. Hearing her voice reminds me how many friendships I have let slide. I need to do something about that.

Friday night is pizza night. My other half just did a run to the store to get pizzas for dinner. We have been making our own for the last several weeks, but given the rubbish week everybody has had, we have bought ready-made ones tonight. Next task – find a suitably rubbish movie to watch while eating them.

Ten more minutes of watching the work email account, then it’s the weekend. Thank the maker.