write.as/jonbeckett

I’m busy clearing the decks at work this morning. I travel to Germany first thing on Monday, so there’s not much point getting involved in doing anything of consequence. If you suddenly see a swathe of comments from me on your blog, at least you’ll know why it happened :)

I had to leave work early yesterday. My other half called, after discovering ANOTHER leak from the upstairs bathroom. I raced home, ripped part of the ceiling away downstairs (inside a walk-in-cupboard, thankfully), and discovered the source of the leak. It’s dripping once every few seconds, so it’s not serious, but I’m guessing it will become more serious if we don’t deal with it. We’ll have to find a plumber while I’m in Germany. I’m hoping the bathroom floor doesn’t have to come up again. It’s more cost though – more money we had not planned on spending.

In between procrastinating famously, I’m also scouting out places I might go for meals next week in Frankfurt. I discovered a wonderful Turkish restuarant last time, but it’s about twenty minutes walk to get there. I suppose if the weather is good, it will be worth it. There is a traditional Germany pub just round the corner from the hotel, serving hearty hot food – so that may well become a regular place too.

I’m also looking at the various art galleries in the middle of Frankfurt – figuring out which ones have exhibitions going on, and which ones are open late. Given that I don’t know anybody in the city, wandering around an art gallery seems like a good thing to occupy me.

In other news, I woke up with the headache from hell this morning, and kept very quiet about it. I discovered an unopened bottle of sherry last night at home – obviously bought for Christmas and forgotten about. I had three glasses, on top of a couple of cans of beer earlier in the evening. I need to stop drinking so much – if we don’t have alcohol in the house I don’t even think about it – I’m only drinking it because it’s there.

At least I haven’t written a drunken blog post (yet).

Before arriving in the office this morning I paid a visit to the local barbers, and sat quietly while a nice lady called Mary, from Tipperary in Ireland cut my hair. After the requisite conversation about what might happen to my head in the next twenty minutes, we talked about cross channel ferries, airports, flights, visiting family, and all sorts of other things you end up talking about with anybody from Ireland. We also talked about how nice Dublin is, and how I really should go back and spend some proper time there.

At one point she tipped my head forwards, and my gaze fell on the small pile of hair gathering in my lap. I was kind of horrified. At this rate I’m going to have grey stripes down the side of my head like Doctor Strange within a year or two.

After thanking Mary for her sterling work and amusing conversation, money was exchanged, and I set off down to road to the bank.

I very rarely have cause to enter a high-street bank any more. It appears very few other people do either – because the entire branch seemed to be staffed by one man, standing at a lectern, adjacent to a row of meeting rooms.

I handed him my debit card, and explained that it didn’t seem to work. He pressed buttons, read things, murmured to himself, and frowned. I tried the card out on a machine opposite him. Apparently there was nothing wrong with the card – I had just forgotten my pin number. I figured this might be because the previous card fell in half over a year ago – and in that time my brain obviously started remembering other far more important things – you know, like what time to pick our youngest up, or what time football practice was, or where rugby training is this week, or where that birthday party is, or when that parents evening is.

I finally arrived at the office a little before 10am. I opened Outlook in the same manner people crack open attic covers in horror movies – peeking in at the horrors that might lurk with quite some trepidation. I live in constant fear of what might arrive in my work in-box next. I like to think of it as a healthy fear, but it really boils down to hoping the world will leave me alone.

Anyway. I better get on. If I look busy, I might hopefully be left alone.

A taxi will arrive at my house early on Monday morning, and take me to Heathrow Airport, just outside London. I’m returning to Frankfurt in Germany once more – the first of many trips this year. Through until August, I will be spending one week of every four in Germany.

Get ready for all manner of introspective posts about airport departure lounges, breathless stories about luggage carousels, and blow-by-blow accounts of finding places to eat in the depths of the city.

I told our eldest daughter about the year ahead while walking between dance classes, coffee shops, and football last night. We had hoped that the Germany visits might coincide with school holidays at some point, but sadly not – I think she had visions of accompanying me on one of the trips – sleeping through the day, and accompanying me into Frankfurt of an evening. Oh well.

I better start adding to the list of movies and books I have not seen or read – travel often affords me the one thing I rarely get at home – time to myself. While I know the work schedule may often run late while holed up in hotels, I’m also aware that I won’t be washing up, tidying up, or fetching and delivering children from after-school clubs.

I’m hoping travel will also afford me time to catch up with distant friends. Over the years I’ve been writing a blog I’ve come to know quite a few people dotted around the world – and have become increasingly lazy about keeping in touch with them. Come to think of it, only one or two have put any effort into keeping in touch with me either, but still – that’s no reason for me not to try. If you suddenly receive an email from me, at least now you’ll know why.

It is now a week since the Nokia 3310 arrived, and I performed a factory reset on my previous phone (a rather lovely Honor 8 that now resides in my other half’s handbag). I thought it might be interesting to record a few thoughts about my experiences so far.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that I have not missed having a smartphone in my pocket that much. This may be because I have not traveled anywhere yet, so had no need for information while out and about. When I travel with work I will of course have my work phone with me (a Google Nexus 5X), so it’s a bit of a moot point.

I used to listen to podcasts while cycling to and from work (I have about a six mile commute each day) – I hadn’t really given them a thought until writing this. To be honest it will probably save my ears – wind noise causes you to crank the volume up a lot to hear the spoken word – it’s amazing how loud ambient noise is on a busy road.

There have been moments when I reached for my pocket to take a photo of something – which would normally have been posted to Instagram. Each time I’ve done it, I’ve been reminded how much disposable content people post across Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram, and smiled at my own idiocy. I still love photography though, so bought a point-and-shoot digital camera, and have resurrected an old Flickr account – I will be adding a few well curated photos to it from time to time, rather than posting from a phone like some kind of photographic machine gunner.

The reality is that I sit in front of a computer almost all day, either at work or at home, so not having a smartphone in my pocket really makes very little difference. If I want to use Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress, or whatever else, I will pull them up in a browser. I won’t miss paying with NFC because I have a bank card in my pocket. I won’t miss Google Maps because I’ll figure out where I’m going before I leave – you know, like we did for generations before smartphones arrived.

Don’t get me wrong – smartphones have their place, and they are tremendously useful gadgets – but when they result in everybody shuffling along footpaths in town centres like automatons, consumed in their own private data feeds, it feels like something has gone very, very wrong.

No, this post isn’t about two little girls growing up in a far away land where one has magical powers, the other falls in love with a dastardly bastard, and a snowman comes to life to sing about summer. This post is about standing in an exposed field for several hours while cheering on your teenage daughter as she trudges back and forth with the rest of her rugby team.

The result isn’t really that important. They played well, and they lost, but they played well. That’s the important thing. Try telling her that. Her face was like thunder as she came off the field at the end.

The photo accompanying this blog post was taken shortly before kick-off – while she practiced conversion kicks. Before kick-off, she hoisted each kick over the bar. After kick-off, she missed every one. Go figure.

After returning home from rugby, myself and my other half set about making roast dinner for everybody – something of a Sunday tradition. While I say “myself and my other half”, I really meant “my other half”. I tidied the lounge up, prepared the table, and washed up afterwards. I really didn’t have any sort of hand in the cooking beyond peeling the potatoes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a long overdue cup of tea waiting to be made in the kitchen, followed by quite some time pretending to watch TV, but really scrolling through rubbish on the internet. I fully expect later this evening to avoid the arrival of Monday by sitting up until all hours continuing to scroll through rubbish on the internet. I’m getting good at it.

Friday night has somehow become “Pizza Night” in our house – a lazy reward of sorts for making it to the end of the week. It started some time ago, when some friends of ours would regularly visit for the evening – we took turns buying the pizzas, I cooked them, and we hung out in the lounge with a couple of bottles of wine, a table full of pizza, and a terrible movie to talk over the top of.

The best/worst movie we ever saw during that time? Almost certainly “Balls of Fury” – a bizarre low-budget mash-up of table-tennis and karate.

Somehow the pizza and movie nights morphed from a night with a friends to a night with the children. I guess they grew up, their bedtime became later, and the night became theirs to spend with us, instead of ours to spend with our friends.

The pizzas changed too – my other half now makes the pizzas from scratch, rather than buying them from the supermarket. We began doing this so Miss 17 didn’t feel like the odd-one-out. She has coeliac disease, so can’t go anywhere near anything with gluten in it. In a strange way her dietary restrictions cause her to almost certainly have the best diet of any of her circle of friends – almost all of her food at home is cooked from fresh ingredients, and while eating out, she invariably has to choose the more healthy options on a menu.

Anyway – finally getting back to the title of the post – last night we sat down with the children, and picked “Back to the Future” as a family movie. The younger children had never seen it. Fingers crossed.

It always surprises me how powerful formerly inconsequential scenes in movies become once you’re a parent, and in the presence of your children watching the same movie. The scenes where George McFly finally stood up against Biff had everybody on the edge of their seats, and caused Miss 13 (always the least able to contain herself) to exclaim out-loud “YESSS! IT’S ON!”.

You know the most perplexing thing though? Five minutes later – during the closing scenes of the movie where Marty returns home, and Doc Brown returns from the future? Miss 13 got up and left the room.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ve got stuff to do. It’s boring now anyway.”

I implored with her to watch the final minute of the movie – to see Doc Brown return, but she flatly refused and ran up to her room to watch YouTube on her phone. What the hell? Is this really what social media has done to teenagers? Can they really not be unplugged from idiots half-killing themselves or making an idiot of themselves for more than an hour? I saw the same thing happen at the cinema when we went to see “The Last Jedi” – the teenage daughter of our friends complained quietly to her Mum throughout the second half of the movie – asking how much longer it was on for.

I guess half the reason I struggle to understand is because I will generally find something of interest in anything. If given the choice I will find original, or different movies to watch than everybody else – it’s how I discovered “Mistress America”, “Flakes”, “Begin Again”, and “Falling Uphill”. I tend to like quiet movies about people.

Anyway. It’s Saturday. The washing machine and tumble dryer are rumbling away in the background, and I’m wondering about throwing a few more boxes back in the attic – the remainder of the Christmas decorations that have not been stored yet. Maybe I should grab some lunch first.

I’m sitting at the desk in my office, kicking around various bits and pieces – researching cloud stuff, brainstorming, and talking with the other developers about possibilities for future projects. I know several projects will be kicking off in the coming weeks, meaning travel both to the other end of the country and overseas, so this is really the calm before the storm.

The danger with not working on a specific project is your mind begins to wander – or at least mine does. Not so long ago I used to draft all blog posts as text files, saved in either Google Drive or DropBox, and copy them into Wordpress, Tumblr, or wherever else when I was ready. I’ve been thinking about going back to that. The only question is where I might store the files – Google Drive, DropBox, Box, GitHub, BitBucket, OneDrive, or somewhere else. I even contemplated using the USB stick on my key-ring.

You see – this is my own special madness – thinking up things to do that don’t need doing.

Remember last October, when I fetched the 2003 vintage iMac out of the attic, and contemplated using it for writing? I spent a couple of evenings tinkering – first connecting it to a ZIP drive, then to the internet. I somehow convinced myself it would be a good idea, and then left it sitting on the desk for a few weeks before packing it back away. I should probably give it away to charity – as I did with the old netbooks late last year.Getting rid of the things I might tinker with strikes me as a good way of preventing me from tinkering with them in the first place.

I survived my first day back in the office! The expected meeting to plan out the next year happened, and thankfully didn’t really decide anything beyond another meeting to decide what we want to do, how we will do it, when we will do it, and so on. I know. Madness. Apologies if I’m being vague.

Having a meeting to organise a meeting seems like a tremendously Vogon thing to do. I’m sure there’s a piece of paperwork somewhere to agree the plan, that has to be signed in triplicate, and filed at the correct hatch.

I tried the helmet camera out again on the way home – it’s not great at filming in the dark (and it was pretty damn dark). I’m guessing a more expensive camera would have a better sensor. Still – I’ll film my journey in each morning – it won’t be too long before some idiot does something ridiculous right in front of me – especially now the kids are back in school (I cycle through the middle of the school run most mornings).

In other news I’ve just spent the last half an hour helping my other half resurrect a blog she started nearly a decade ago. She’s attempting to stop our house contributing to the collective destruction of the planet, and is writing about it – ideas, life hacks, successes, failures, and so on. I’m guessing there will be posts about recycling, packaging, waste, cooking, cleaning, education, parenting – all kinds of things. While she had got most of it done herself, I helped out with the rationale behind categories, tags, pages, menus, featured images, and so on – a final bit of spit and polish, you might say.

I’m struggling to find anything to write about, so should probably stop. Somehow it’s already midnight, and I’ve really not done anything all evening. How does that even happen ?

I cycled to work today, and tried out the camera. It really didn’t help that the sky fell on my head for the entire journey, covering the camera in water and blurring everything, but it kind of worked. I’ll try it again on the way home (it’s not raining now – for the first time in 48 hours), but it will be dark on the way home – I have no idea what the video will come out like.

https://youtu.be/mIkDEgNFH4w

Maybe if it’s sunny tomorrow the video will look much, much better. Fingers crossed.

I’m sitting at the desk in the junk room at home, writing this on the old desktop PC. Sia is filling the room with “Chandelier” via the Fire TV wired up to the old TV across the room. Miss 12 is in her room, eating Sushi made last night by Miss 17. We are the last people left in the house – the older children and my other half have returned to school, college, and work today. I go back to work tomorrow morning.

Christmas officially left our house this morning. I hadn’t been planning to take the decorations down until Saturday (12th night, and all that rubbish), but found myself with nothing to do earlier, and thought “f*ck it”. Within an hour everything was down, packed, and back in the attic until next year. Suddenly the house seems spacious again.

The washing machine is back in action today – I’m trying to clear the decks before the onslaught of football, rugby, and school begin filling the clothes bins faster than we can empty them. While sorting, washing, drying, and folding clothes, I often wonder “is this it – is this my entire life?”. I know it’s a ridiculous thought.

I’m quietly stressing about a meeting first thing tomorrow morning – where I will get some idea how the next year is going to pan out. I’m central to several huge projects – all involving travel. I think I mentioned last year about my pending return to Frankfurt. I imagine that will happen quite quickly. I suppose at least by mid-morning tomorrow I’ll know what the future has in store for me.

Tomorrow morning will be a first commute wearing a helmet camera

In closing I just wanted to take a few moments to say that I have really come to appreciate the little group of friends I have made via the blog in the last few months. You’re from all over the world, and from all walks of life, and yet here we all are – out on the edge of the internet, sharing the unspoken stories of our days with each other. You know who you are, and you probably have no idea how much I value our friendships.