I've not been sleeping well recently. Some combination of lockdown cabin fever, racing thoughts about the excitement and challenges of impending fatherhood, random middle-aged worries and musings (not a crisis yet!), and the inevitable mental and physical clutter that always seems to come with the process of de-cluttering.

Reading other people's blogs on “Read Write.as” and “100 Days to Offload” feels like a mix of voyeurism, a search for inspiration, and through time, an emergent sense of being part of a virtual community. Right now I'm particularly enjoying seeing linkages pop up between blogs. Here are a few examples:

Towards the end of last year I started thinking about getting a new smartphone. My Samsung A3 (2016) was nearly 3 years old, the battery was struggling to get through a day, and apps were becoming too slow. However, I felt an innate rejection of many principles the smartphone industry held dear. Its business model clashed with my desire for sustainability and privacy.

Beep-beep, beep-beep – coffee alarm! coffee alarm! Beep-beep, beep-beep – coffee alarm! coffee alarm!

Every morning The Canadian wafts aromatic steam in front of my nose from a coffee mug as she stands besides the bed. I blurringly try to focus my eyes and murmur my semi-coherent thanks.

I'm fighting a multi-front war against cardboard boxes and the boxes are winning. Beer boxes. Baby boxes. Lockdown boxes full of home-office IT kit, toilet rolls, tissues and bulk eco-friendly toiletries. A Friday night pizza box in the kitchen. Boxes in the living room. Boxes in the bedroom. Boxes in the office. Boxes multiplying every time I turn around in the downstairs bathroom.

How much information do I need on a daily basis about this global pandemic? At the start of it all, I was following stats from John Hopkins several times a day. Checking news websites. Debating pros and cons of the different response options from different countries. Railing against the apparent sheer stupidity and ignorance of certain politicians and swathes of the public. Not everyone has the same level of education but distrust of experts, buying into conspiracy theories, and wilfully harmful spinning of facts to fit political and other world-views and narratives in the name of “freedom of expression” seems, to me, just plain wrong.

I miss the pub. An impromptu drink after work before home. Meeting up down the Albany on a Friday night. Pub quiz at the Pear Tree Inn with my regular team on a Sunday night. The background noise of other social drinkers, raising a glass, chewing the fat and putting the world to rights. The casual relationships built up through time with landlords and bar staff at local haunts. Cask beer!

I may add a search bar at some point but for now, you can also navigate posts according to hashtags, grouped below in a way that makes sense to me and evolving as I post more. Expect a mixed bag. Some of the posts will feature the tagged topic as the central focus of the post, others will merely touch on it. If you'd prefer to scroll through a timeline of posts, head to my Archive.

I guess it started at some point in the late '80s (or maybe early '90s) with painstakingly typing in lines of BASIC on a ZX Spectrum +3, for the dubious reward of a simple Pong style game. I was a curious child, always wanting to know things. Typing all that code didn't lead me to a lifetime at the command line or a shadowy teenage life as a hacker but it was my first experience of looking beyond the standard Graphic User Interface (GUI) kindly presented to the world by mainstream computing.

For drinking between “normal” beers on a long session. For a week-night. For the Designated Driver. For cutting down. For starting early after the third #lockdown Zoom meeting of the day. For getting through pregnancy and breastfeeding. For all these reasons and more, the recent explosion in choice and quality of zero and <0.5% abv beers has been a boon and I love them!