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The radio alarm clock exploded into life at 7am, filling the bedroom with the local radio station, playing pre-recorded news from the big networks. I rolled over, groping for my phone on the bedside table, and spent a few moments squinting at the avalanche of notifications that had stacked up overnight – swiping them away one by one.

After staring at the ceiling for a while and trying to organise my thoughts, I rolled upright and peeked from the bedroom window at a world that had been blanketed in frost overnight. One of the cats forced the bedroom door open, and jumped onto the bed cover, greeting me with a friendly “meow” that really meant “get out of bed and feed me you lazy asshole – I’m hungry”. While waiting for me to respond he practiced “Cat-Fu”, concentrating his entire bodyweight on one foot, placed deliberately on a pressure point while staring directly at my face.

Fine. I’ll get up then.

After a shower, a shave, throwing some clothes on, loading the washing machine, unloading the tumble dryer, folding clothes in the lounge, picking up after my other half and the kids, and putting fifteen pairs of shoes away, I finally got around to feeding the cats and the fish. The cats were by this time furious.

I looked in on the argument that had been going on in the junk room since I woke – Miss 12 and Miss 13 were hunched over the old desk, playing FIFA against each other – smack talking continuously. 12 had slept in her school clothes – for some reason she thinks this is acceptable at the moment.

“You need to go and get ready for football”

“After this game”

They always have an answer that delays your request.

Across the hallway I looked in on Miss 17, who was curled up in the bedclothes not unlike her hamster. We got the hamster out again last night – slowly getting her used us. I mentioned about making coffee and received a fidget in response.

A few minutes later I heard a shout from upstairs – “Football is cancelled – the ground is frozen”. That single notice brought the entire house to a screeching halt. Everybody stood down. All plans for the morning scrubbed – it almost felt like a wave of relief descended. Apparently baking is going to happen in the kitchen – lots of baking. This means I will spend an hour later cleaning the kitchen again. Fun.

I’m supposed to be going Christmas shopping with Miss 17 today. Given her current reluctance to even answer “do you want a coffee” with an audible response, I’m guessing it’s not happening. There’s always tomorrow, and she knows it. Why do today what you can do tomorrow? It’s built into teenager DNA isn’t it ?

I suppose this has been coming for quite some time. While waiting for a virtual server to spin up at work this morning, I logged into Instagram (where I had shared nearly four thousand little square photos), and deactivated the account.

I know, I know – this is me flying in the face of everybody else, as per usual. Almost everybody is using Instagram now – I get it. I’m just getting a bit fed up with little square photos, when I could be sharing big rectangular photos.

This is probably where you tell me I’m a colossal idiot, and shout something about reactivating the account immediately before you do something quite drastic to my bits and pieces.

I’m slowly uploading the universe to Flickr. If the world-wide server farm crashes in a smoking heap, I’ll happily claim that one. I can imagine pulling the team behind Flickr from the wreckage, wide eyed, mumbling incoherently about the torrent of little square photos that signalled the apocalypse. Ok, maybe a little dramatic.

Oh, and huge thank you to Giorge Thomas for saying all sorts of nice things about my forgettable photos of London, and featuring them in her recent posts.

Postscript – I reactivated, after switching names – I’m now StrangeCodex at Instagram too, but don’t plan on using it much.

I took the photo accompanying this post while wandering back towards home this evening – after most of the streets had already emptied of the thousands that descended on town for the annual “late night shopping” extavaganza that shuts the road, and causes motorists hours of hell in the surrounding area.

While being bumped and pushed between oh-so-very-important families forcing their way through the crowds, we drank mulled wine, ate mince pies, and spent money on several bits and pieces that will re-appear on Christmas morning. We listened to the Salvation Army band play two or three carols on repeat, and tried to ignore a small army of sales people pushing leaflets under our nose.

We won two ridiculous Minecraft swords on an air-rifle shooting range. It struck me while taking my shots that Miss 17 had never held a gun in her life – she was genuinely terrified.

After twirling the swords in the middle of the crowds and variously shouting “SIGHT BEYOND SIGHT!”, and “BY THE POWER OF GREYSKULL!”, we headed for Starbucks, and spent the better part of the next half hour sipping coffee, scrolling through our phones, and laughing at idiocy of our own invention.

It’s worth noting that henceforth whenever I walk into Starbucks I will be known as “Cappuccino John”, after a moment of colossal brain-fade on the part of the guy that served me – he burst out laughing at his own mistake, and announced it to the baristas – having written both the drink, and my name on the cup. The baristas then of course shouted it across the caf when my drink was ready.

One day I will remember to say “Spartacus” when they ask the name for the drink order, and return their call with “I’M SPARTACUS!”. I fear I may be the only person that will get the joke though.

I spent the entire day buried in programming again. Another thousand lines of code, some user interface design, and some workflow wrangling. Don’t ask what I mean by workflow – it’s the thing I get paid to talk about in front of rooms full of business people all over the country – the reason I sit on planes and trains so often.

In recent months I’ve been parachuted into other people’s projects to help them out – to dig them out of holes, or throw water as flames lick at their feet. It’s rare that I get to design and build client solutions on my own – but that’s what’s happening this week. It’s kind of fun, but also soul-destroying in a way for the other consultants. What do I mean by that? Maybe that my arrival on a project is kind of like Flynn making his appearance in Tron Legacy.

Anyway – enough about work – even if it has been all-consuming in recent days.

This evening I visited Miss 17’s college to meet one of her tutors – to find out how she’s doing. Quite apart from recent dramas involving college friends, it turns out she’s doing remarkably well. The word “flying” was mentioned more than once. We left with not a small amount of relief, pride, and broad smiles. Of course none of it stopped the murmurs of “I still don’t like her” on the way back to the car.

I understand though. I remember nurturing quite the pathological hate for my economics tutor at college. It came to a head after a year when I sat in her classroom and said I wanted to drop the subject. She sat opposite me, staring at me, without saying anything for several minutes – I eventually broke the silence by getting up from my chair and leaving the room.

I’ll save the story about switching from Economics to Art, and staying at college for an extra year for another day.

Today I wrote over a thousand lines of programming. Tomorrow morning I’ll try executing them, and hide behind something sturdy while they spew error messages all over the place. Or not. Sometimes my code works first time – it’s rare, but it happens.

I’m writing the programming to bring a system into existence – kind of like an IKEA flat-pack with a giant “build yourself” button. Damn – now I’ve got the “treat yo-self” meme from Parks and Recreation stuck in my head. If you see me wandering around your nearest shopping mall dressed as Batman, you know what happened.

Other than the programming, I have very little to report today. Being head-down in mounds of programming doesn’t really make for an anecdote laden day. It’s kind of hard to tell stories about that time when you realised you forgot to change that keyword, and that’s why that chunk of code fell over. Not exactly a good story, is it.

I’m sitting in the junk room at home while writing this. Miss 17 is alongside me, setting fire to Tumblr – well… kind of waving a sparkler vaguely near it. I’ve shown her how to find people, and she’s reaching out for a change. Reaching out is hard for her – watching her is kind of like watching Marlin in Finding Nemo.

I started uploading photos to Flickr earlier today. Quite when I’ll get around to properly labelling, tagging, and curating them is something of a mystery at the moment. I started the long and arduous boring process earlier, but didn’t get very far.

I dread to think how many thousands of photos are squirreled away in Google Drive – there was somewhere in the region of seventy gigabytes worth before I started shovelling them in automatically from the Android camera app.

While sorting through photos to upload – most taken via Instagram (because I’m incredibly lazy), I noticed they seem to fall into themes. Take the following photos of drinks for example:

[gallery ids=“2106993370,2106993371,2106993372,2106993373,2106993374,2106993375,2106993376,2106993377,2106993378” type=“square”]

It’s not just the crazy angles, and tendency towards close-ups – it’s the tonal range. I had never noticed before – my filtered photos are invariably skewed towards high contrast primary colours. I tend to focus on details too – a part of the whole, rather than the wider scene. I think I’ve always done that because mobile phone cameras have such a small lens – vistas and panoramas demand as big an aperture as possible – it’s the reason “real” SLR cameras take such stunning photos.

Anyway – I uploaded several collections to Flickr as albums earlier – each linked below – feel free to go have a look:* London A selection of photos taken in and around London * From Here to There A selection of photos taken on trains, planes, and buses * Miscellaneous A selection of random photos of everyday objects and scenes

Many years ago – before the advent of Instagram – I had a Flickr account. Thinking about it, I had a Flickr account before Flickr was owned by Yahoo – a long time ago now. I used to take photos on my little Fuji digital camera, download them at the end of the day, upload a selection of them, title them, describe them, and arrange them into albums.

Somewhere along the way I stopped doing it. I guess Instagram, and Google Photos came along, and seduced us all into sharing little square photos with each other, or even saving everything we take into “the cloud” behind our back. Laziness won.

I’m trying something out – I’m staging a return of sorts to Flickr. After signing up for a Yahoo mail account yesterday (strangecodex@yahoo.com), it occurred to me that the Yahoo account would come with a free Flickr account. To begin with I’ve just uploaded a selection of Instagram photos from the last couple of years – over the coming weeks and months I will try to remember to upload the better photos, and perhaps curate them somewhat.

Anyway – here’s the URL – https://flickr.com/photos/strangecodex

If you have a Flickr account, feel free to have a nose around. I’ll almost certainly follow back as long as you’re not a marketing moron.

I thought I was going to be standing on the touchline of a rugby pitch at 10am this morning. After sliding out of bed a little after 8am, and finding my way to the shower, I heard my other half shuffle path the downstairs bathroom door towards the kitchen.

“Where are the kids? Am I not taking them to rugby?”

Apparently not. I won’t go into why, but I’ll admit to a huge wave of relief. Needless to say the remainder of Sunday opened up in front of me like a yawning, happy chasm.

Minutes later Miss 17 arrived in the kitchen, rubbing sleep from her eyes and pretending to yawn. She had been up for some time after checking her advent calendar for more cosmetics (and no, she doesn’t have the rip-off Zoella advent calendar). She cheerfully told us about the smallest lipstick in the known universe – quite the reverse of the night before. The re-building process is still happening, but today has been a much better day.

There’s an old saying about nature abhoring a vacuum, isn’t there. I filled my morning with a visit to the local pet store, to replace “Totoro” – the little russian hamster that passed away a few days ago (yes – in the middle of Miss 17 hitting rock bottom, her pet hamster died).

It has to be said – our local pet store rules – mostly due to perhaps the most dedicated, friendly, talkative staff member you could ever wish to meet. Not only did he show us the hamsters they had in stock, he also told us the life story of the hamster that lives in the store and is not for sale.

“She’s called Maddie – short for Mads Mikkelsen”.

“Oh, why’s that?”

“Well… we’re not really sure. There was a story that she ate one of her siblings. And Mads Mikkelsen played Hannibal Lecter of course. I thought about calling her Annabel Lecter, but thought that might be a bit too far over the line.”

Here’s the thing – he remembered selling Totoro to our eldest, over a year ago. He also remembered Totoro having a sibling, and both of their original names (they were taken to the pet store after fighting with each other – Hamsters are known for it apparently). I would love to have a memory that worked like that. I can remember passwords for server farms all over the country, but can’t remember the name of people I have just met.

While chatting in the pet store, a lady walked in and greeted us – apparently she knew my other half, and knew of our eldest daughter’s story over the last couple of years. She had apparently been down a similar route herself, and gave Miss 17 the biggest hug before handing her some money towards the new hamster. That’s when we also learned she had donated towards Totoro – her original hamster – too. It all got a bit emotional and tearful – enough for the mysterious visitor to make her excuses and leave before everybody started crying.

So – we have a new hamster in the house. A pale syrian hamster that Miss 17 is calling “Poppy”. Tonight she is settling into her new living quarters – the equivalent of a luxury apartment after the converted fish-tank in the pet store. I’m sure there will be more stories to tell over the coming days and weeks.

I suppose, strictly speaking, Saturday isn’t over yet. Having cleared the fridge ready for groceries to arrive (other half is out shopping right now), helped clear Miss 17’s room up, and put yet another load in the washing machine, I’m finally sitting down to do nothing for an hour (he says, furiously typing this into the keyboard while a cup of coffee goes cold in front of him).

I wonder if I would be any good at plate spinning ?

The first hour this morning was spent running around the house making breakfasts for little people, and emptying the dishwasher from last night. A little while later I began walking to the local school to watch Miss 13 play football. Unfortunately half of the rest of her team didn’t turn up to play football – they were there, but not really in spirit. By half time it was 5-0, owing mostly to the most gifted player I’ve ever seen on the opposition team. One of her goals – shortly after half time – was a wonder-goal. She ran through perhaps six players, and scored a crazy goal into the top corner from an acute angle. It was unsaveable – both sides parents applauded.

A minute later one of our players – a notoriously mouthy defender – clattered into that gifted player (supposedly accidentally), knocking them both to the floor. The other girl was stretchered off with a suspected broken leg. The resulting laughter from the girl that did it was perhaps the most disgusting reaction I have ever seen on a football field. The referee stared at her (I’m guessing sporting reactions are not within the rules, so not cardable), and she shouted “I DON’T CARE”, while walking away. Her face only began to fall when she realised the rest of her team were obviously horrified. By then the damage was done.

Once wonder-girl was off the field, the game completely changed – which raises questions about how much the opposition team relied on her. If you took the score before the incident, they won 5-0 – if you reset the score from then on, our team won 1-0. Hardly a great thing to take away from the game.

By the time we arrived home we were frozen – it had only nudged above freezing all day. We learned that Miss 12 had been awarded “Player of the Day” in her match, and listened to a breathless account of the game while tucking into soup and crusty bread.

This afternoon has been all about chores – the endless weekend routine of trying to set fire to the washing machine, the tumble dryer, and emptying half the contents of the fridge into the rubbish bins outside. While running back and forth the children sat with my other half in the lounge watching “Superman the Movie” (the 1978 version). It proved something about great movies being great regardless of their era – the children sat in absolute silence throughout. I will admit to being a little disappointed when Superman caught Lois Lane again, instead of slicing her into three equal pieces, as postulated by Doctor Sheldon Cooper in the TV show “Big Bang Theory”.

I’m currently waiting for Miss 17 to finish drying her hair, then we’re going to binge-watch something on Netflix. The “re-build” project is still very much a work-in-progress; she’s a work in progress. It’s going to take time to put her back together – we’ll get there though.

Right – what series haven’t we watched?

I signed up for a Snapchat account yesterday. My third of the last few years. When Snapchat first appeared I didn’t have a good enough phone to run it, so carried on with Instagram – posting endless little square photos to the internet for strangers to like and sometimes comment on. The first Snapchat account is still out there somewhere – I fell through some sort of crack in the system, and couldn’t log into it again. I signed up again last year with a new account when the various novelty face filters appeared – and then forgot all about it for months.

You see – and this is probably a surprise to anybody that has followed my blog for any length of time – I don’t tend to use instant messaging apps. Sure, I have tried to keep in touch with one or two people over the last few years – trying out just about every app to find something straightforward (“Telegram” is awesome, for what it’s worth) – but given that I’m on the opposite side of the planet from the majority of those I might keep in touch with, I tend to be asleep when they are awake, and vice versa.

So why on earth did I re-install Snapchat, and KIK yesterday? Maybe hope? Maybe because I’m an eternal optimist – who thinks the best of everybody, and wishes sometimes he had a few people to share the quiet moments with (yeah right – the “quiet moments” – that will be the last hour of the day after clearing chores, while watching Mr Robot in the junk room while eating cereals, and convincing himself that cornflakes at 1am is “supper”).

Isn’t this blog the quiet moments though? I just glanced at the clock – it’s 8:40am. The washing machine and dryer are already on. Clothes have already been folded in the lounge. The dishwasher is already empty, and ready to go for the day ahead. Miss 12 has already left for a soccer match half-way across the county with her Mum, Miss 13 is hiding upstairs in her hell-hole of a room (that I cleaned up for her last week) before her soccer match in an hour, and Miss 17 is stumbling around in her pyjamas – her face glued to her phone.

I suppose I write in the gaps – while waiting for the washing machine, waiting to leave the house, or while doing my best at 1am to avoid the arrival of tomorrow.

The hope is not misplaced though. Late last night a new face appeared in Snapchat – the conversation began with a simple “hello”. I scrambled to figure out how the hell Snapchat worked (yes, it’s still the least intuitive app in the known universe, and I’m a bit rubbish), but I managed to keep the conversation going while fumbling with typing, swiping, and being instructed how to do things mid-conversation. An unlikely bond was forged – a new friend made. After emptying our heads for the next little while, it felt like we had “lucked into” discovering each other – real, genuine people that didn’t post “ASL?” as an introduction.

Maybe there is hope after all. Perhaps the internet hasn’t gone completely to hell – not just yet, anyway. If you would like to join me in defying my admittedly non-existent expectations of KIK and Snapchat, I’m “strangecodex” at both. If not, I’ll still be writing here – almost every day – and rarely about anything of consequence.