write.as/jonbeckett

It’s been a very quiet weekend from my point of view. In the past I’ve managed to fashion a blog post out of little or nothing, but today I just don’t seem to be feeling it. I go through these peaks and troughs from time to time with the blog.

What is there to tell? That I sat up until 2am binge-watching “Glow” last night – the TV series on Netflix about the 1980s female wrestling show? I was stuck for something to do while my other half visited friends for a “girls night”. I’m about four or five episodes in now, I think – and strangely apathetic about it.

Oh! I nearly forgot. I bought a copy of Gran Turismo 4 on Saturday – for the second hand Playstation 2 I picked up a while ago. I had the original perhaps 10 years ago when it first came out – it’s been fun, zooming around the various race tracks, pretending I know what I’m doing. I ground through the various license tests yesterday, and set about earning some in-game money earlier today. Again – strangely apathetic about it, and I don’t know why.

I still need to write out the Bullet Journal for the week ahead.

All I seem to have done all weekend is wash and dry clothes for everybody else, and wash up after everybody else. We still haven’t gotten the Christmas decorations out yet, still haven’t got a tree (planned for mid-week), and still haven’t got all the Christmas presents yet.

I can’t remember being this far behind with everything for years.

One last thing – we have tickets to see Star Wars on Thursday night. Can’t wait. I saw a trailer earlier, subtitled “Let Them Win” – it’s the only trailer I have seen where the iconic music is in a major key, and it left me with the biggest smile.

In-between chores, and delivering children to birthday parties, we managed to get some Christmas shopping done today. While browsing the books in our local branch of Waterstones, I heard the following conversation:

“Have you seen the size of the queue?”

“There’s lots of staff on the checkouts though”

“I’m just saying – if we ordered it from Amazon right now, it would arrive at home within six hours”

“Are you going to carry on like this all day?”

“I’ve been stood outside in the cold waiting for you for the last hour”

“It’s been ten minutes!”

I had to walk away, fearing I might start giggling out-loud.

Last night I was invited out to the local brewery, which holds “members nights” every so often – for paid members to visit (along with two guests per member), and try out the various beers the brewery produces. They host a live band, a barbecue, and a chance to meet up with friends you might not have seen for some time – hundreds of people from the surrounding area typically descend on the brewery for the evening.

It was cold last night. Really cold. You’ll notice in the photo accompanying this post that the hand holding the pint of beer is wrapped in a glove. That’s my hand, and that’s one of my cycling gloves. The cold permeated the glove, and caused my fingers to go numb in short order.

Towards the end of the evening I made the regulation visit to the brewery shop, where they line up the prettiest bottles around the checkouts, ready to capture guilty husbands about to set off home. I bought a bottle of wine, a bottle of rum, a bottle of Tokaji, and a bottle of marmalade vodka that happened to be standing next to the checkout. Yes – marmalade vodka – you read that right. I bought one last year and never saw it again – hopefully this year I’ll get to try it out.

Other than the cold, the beer, and the shop I got to make a new friend last night – the newly married wife of a guy I used to work with. She was funny, charming, interesting, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again at some point. I apologised for not making it to their wedding – and half-explained about the reasons we haven’t really been anywhere or done anything for the last couple of years. It turned out my new friend’s line of work coincided with the challenges our children happen to face. I worried we were boring everybody as the conversation centered around parenting, education, and child development, but nobody seemed to mind.

The brewery is a mile or so from home, so we set out into the night wrapped like polar explorers, secure in the curious blanket of warmth and laughter that alcohol seems to provide – our faces aching from laughter, and filled with conversations about meeting up soon, going to a pub quiz, or doing something -anything – together soon. I’ve lost count of the times that conversation has happened after parties with friends.

When the alarm clock ticked over at 7am and filled the bedroom with the local radio station, I woke with a start and rolled upright in bed. It turns out moving was a bad idea, given the headache that had been hiding somewhere in there before I moved. I seem to remember in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox described drinking a pan-galactic gargle-blaster as being hit in the head by a gold brick. That’s a pretty accurate description of those first few moments after sitting up in bed.

I made it downstairs to the shower, got dressed, and carried on with the usual routine of making breakfasts, lunches, cups of tea, and clearing up after everybody else. While sitting with Miss 12, waiting for her taxi, I began shivering and a wave of nausea rushed through me.

After saying goodbye to everybody as they left the house, I took some pain killers, and wandered back to the bedroom, climbing back under the covers – still fully clothed.

This is where it all gets a bit strange.

I woke back up, and went off around the house looking for my Christmas sweater – we were going out for a Christmas meal with work and a call had gone out to wear Christmas sweaters if we had any. I do – a particularly ridiculous one with LED lights that flash all over it, around the face of a ridiculous grinning reindeer. I ran all over the house looking for it – turning rooms upside down.

I had failed to notice one thing – I was running around my parents house, circa 1995. It was a dream.

I figured this out when I woke for a second time, and realised the time on the bedside radio now read 9:45am. Reality slowly re-assembled itself in my head and I raced downstairs, picking up the sweater I had folded the night before, throwing my bike helmet on, and heading out the door – emailing work to tell them I would be in a little late. The headache and fever had miraculously vanished. The pain-killers had worked.

I still don’t know how I made it through the work Christmas lunch.

I thought about retreating from the internet today. I’ve done it before. I thought about tearing down this cardboard construction of blog posts, photos, status updates, and messaging accounts, and retreating back under a sturdy looking stone.

I haven’t done it yet.

I’m thinking about it though.

I need to remind myself why I built this bolt-hole on the internet – why I put such effort into it – connecting so many dots – rounding off so many rough edges. I often visit other people’s blogs and find unwritten about pages, or social links that lead to nowhere – in contrast I obsess over every last detail – not wanting anybody to think badly of me, should they discover a broken link, or a misspelled word.

I’ve driven a wedge between the “public” me – the smiling face in the LinkedIn profile, and “private” me – the author of thousands of forgettable blog posts telling stories about cycling to work, sitting on trains, shouting at the children, and endlessly re-filling the washing machine. It took time and effort. Throwing it all away now would seem like a waste.

Perhaps more importantly, if I were to burn my cardboard fort to the ground, I would also lose touch with the rag-tag community of kindred spirits I have happened upon during it’s construction. You know who you all are, and I think the world of you. Perhaps you are the reason I haven’t got the box of matches out yet.

Every few months over the last couple of years I have changed my mind about sharing my life in such a public manner. Rome has burned many times. This slightly odd book of my life (an almost literal translation of it’s title) is all that remains of a trail that sweeps through LiveJournal, Vox, Blogger, Ghost, Squarespace, Tumblr, and now Wordpress. If you know what to look for, you can trace me through the “Wayback Machine” to the beginning of the web. I never really leave. I never will.

I ordered a new mobile phone this morning – it will arrive in the post tomorrow. It’s the 2017 version of the cheapest handset Nokia make. Before you think “oh my word – he’s finally lost the plot”, it’s probably worth clarifying that it’s only intended as a backup phone, with a pay-as-you-go SIM in it.

I will admit there is a huge temptation to switch to it though – to divorce myself from the legion of mobile phone apps I’ve come to rely on. It might also have something to do with my old Instagram account being hacked overnight. I got the account back, and changed passwords everywhere, but in doing so it made me realise how big my footprint on the internet has become, and how ridiculous it all is.

Beyond a phone and text messaging, there’s very little I really use my mobile phone for. Sure, I have KIK, Snapchat, WhatsApp, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, and all the rest installed, but I very rarely use any of it. If my other half ever wants to get hold of me she either calls, or sends a text message.

Would you miss the apps on your phone if you didn’t have them?

For the last year or so, Tuesday nights have seen me break all manner of pretend fitness app step records, trudging around town to pick children up from one activity, and deliver them to another. One by one in the run-up to Christmas, those activities have come to an end. When I checked Google Calendar mid-way through the afternoon at work and realised the entire evening stretching ahead of me was empty, full of promise and opportunity, it felt like a wave of relief washed over me.

Did I use my evening wisely? Of course not.

I used the evening to re-affirm that two glasses of wine are enough to stop me from doing anything constructive at all. I followed them up with a cup of coffee, but given my apparent immunity to caffeine following decades of misuse at work, it hasn’t really had much effect. I suppose I’m writing this though, which is something, right?

When I was younger, and practiced this whole “drinking” thing far more often, I could put a bottle of wine away without so much as thinking about it. Not any more it would seem. The first glass inevitably erases the stresses and strains of the day – just enough to encourage you that the second glass is a good idea – and that’s the one that injects a fairly sizeable dose of “can’t give a shit” into your system. I was going to write “apathy”, but thought “fuck it”. Apologies for the language – I know I rarely swear on the blog. I’ll blame the wine.

You’re probably carrying on reading now, thinking “oh, this is going to get good – he’s unloading like Chunk” (a curious Goonies reference if ever there was one).

The truth? I have no exciting stories to share.

When I read other people’s blog posts, I often find myself in awe of the scrapes, adventures, and idiocy they find themselves trying to navigate a path through. I compare their drama laden posts with my pedestrian drivel, and begin to question my motivations. Of course if I found myself in the thick of the maelstrom that so many of you seem to experience, I might probably be churning out the same posts you are – but then I would also have to live through it too – and that’s not quite so appealing as reading about it.

Do I live vicariously through the words of others? Almost definitely. Would like to be in their shoes sometimes? Absolutely. Would I leave everything I know for that to happen? Hell no.

I suppose in many ways I’ve come to appreciate that the grass is the same shade of green everywhere – it’s just the collection of assholes we have to share it with that varies. Of course the internet means we can make friends with a few like minded idiots braving the surrounding army of assholes, and escape in plain sight together from time to time – and that’s enough for me.

Following the blanket of snow that fell on the surrounding area throughout yesterday, most of the local schools announced their closure, along with the office where I work. Therefore this morning I am holed up in the junk room at home, fielding work emails, and trying to stop our younger children decapitating each other.

At 5pm yesterday the decision to shut everything was probably very sensible, but then of course the temperature rose just enough overnight to make everybody look foolish. The minor roads are now covered with a couple of inches of slush, which will no doubt freeze hard overnight, making the return to work tomorrow far more dangerous than today.

Oh well.

My other half walked to work – she is “the lady in the office” at the local infant school, and given that many of the teachers, and all the children come from the immediate catchment area, they can walk to school too. Miss 17 is with her – she is working in her first “placement” at the nursery (kindergarten) attached to the school – spending her Mondays playing with the children, and filling a diary with observations. I wonder if she realises how far ahead of the rest of the students on her child development course she is? I don’t think any of the other students have a placement yet.

After working through the usual list of chores this morning, and batting away any outstanding work email, the children vanished upstairs. I thought they might be doing their usual trick – sitting around in their pyjamas playing Mario Party, or watching YouTube videos, but Miss 12 amazed me when she came stomping back down the stairs in search of furniture polish and the vacuum cleaner.

“Are you tidying your room?”

“Yes!”

“Properly?”

“Yes!”

The level of incredulity in her voice prompted me to go help her find things, and send her on her way. I carried the vacuum cleaner back up the stairs for her, and peeked in her room. It’s not often I’m impressed by their attempts to tidy their rooms, but this time I was. I’ll try not to think about where all her clean clothes went (and won’t dare open the wardrobe, lest I need a search party to dig me out).

“That’s a fantastic job you’re doing – well donewill now be back in the dirty washing bins. Our poor old washing machine – if it had a voice, I imagine it would sound like Eeyore.

After spending the greater part of last night stood in a good friend’s kitchen drinking beer and telling stories, we arrived home a little before midnight, and checked through the children’s rugby kit in preparation for this morning – a long trip across the county to play a far flung team.

We woke a little after seven, looked from the bedroom window, and realised immediately that all plans would be cancelled. A white blanket had fallen across everything in sight, and was still falling steadily from the sky. I slipped out of bed, pulled clothes on, and tiptoed into our youngest’s bedroom.

“The Elf has brought something back from the North Pole”

She woke immediately and ripped her bedroom curtains open before whispering “IT’S SNOWING!” in the most excited stage whisper I’ve heard in quite some time.

The next fifteen minutes brought absolute mayhem to the house – with children running in all directions in search of warm clothes, boots, gloves, and woolly hats. I took photos of them disappearing out onto the green our house nestles in the corner of before wandering back into the kitchen in search of a cup of tea.

Dammit. No milk.

Ten minutes later, after wrapped myself up like a rather pathetic Inuit explorer, I trudged out in search of bread and milk. Across the green I spotted a gaggle of people in the falling snow, chasing after each other while a large black labrador bounded back and forth. The dog is owned by a good friend – as I grew closer I squinted through the snow and spotted her face peeking between a hat and scarf. She has the naughtiest grin of anybody I know.

After catching up with each other and perhaps throwing one or two snowballs, I continued on my journey, with a cheerful voice calling out behind.

“We’ll send a search party if you don’t return soon!”

This week Deep Mind – the Google team behind the “Alpha Zero” artificial intelligence project – tried out the game of chess on the system.

Alpha Zero spent four hours learning to play chess from scratch – essentially playing against itself – before being pitted against the result of perhaps forty years of chess software research and development (an incredibly strong chess engine called Stockfish). Alpha Zero destroyed Stockfish again, and again.

The interesting thing? It didn’t play like a computer at all – it played like a Grandmaster from the “romantic” era of chess, perhaps a hundred years ago – taking enormous risks, and throwing pieces away in pursuit of victory.

Food for thought.