wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

For the first time in two years I met up with some of my co-workers at lunchtime for something to eat. It seemed very strange being in each other’s company rather than on the end of a video conference call, but after a few minutes we all relaxed, caught up with each other, and grinned while reminiscing about working in an office.

It’s been interesting — working from home. I’ve never had a problem with it, but then software development tends to suit isolation better than many other careers. While working on a project you tend to work alone anyway — communication with your peers becomes sporadic at best. I remember one particular project several years ago when I found myself turning up in the morning, writing code all day, and leaving on an evening without interacting with anybody at all — for weeks on end.

I guess working alone very much depends on what sort of person you are too — your personality. I’ve always been happy enough in my own company, but I’m only too aware that many others need more.

I wonder if the lunchtime meetup will become a regular occurrence? I wouldn’t mind; at least it would tick the box labelled “Jonathan should get out more”.

You find me sitting in the dark of the junk room, listening to an 80s playlist while quietly tapping away on the computer keyboard. My happy place. Maybe happy is an exaggeration. My place feels somehow more accurate.

Foreigner are singing “I Want to Know What Love Is”. I'm trying to remember if it was in a movie. Wikipedia helpfully tells me it has been in several movies, but doesn't list them. Great. I'm deciding right not not to jump down the internet rabbit hole. There's probably a website out there that lists such useful information – I'm not about to go looking for it because the clock will slide forwards an hour, and I'll have ended up watching ABBA, Bronski Beat, and The Buggles rather than writing any more words.

I seem to have an alliteration thing going on today.

Life seems to be on a somewhat circular track at the moment – each day revolving much as the previous day has, and the next day will. I'm surprised I'm not suffering episodes of deja vu.

Did you know deja vu is related to temporal lobe epilepsy? When you get the sensation that you've been somewhere before it's actually a sign that your brain is getting stuff wrong. It's perfectly normal though. Our brains seem to be very good at dealing with the inexact; much more so than computers. Can you even imagine if our brain worked like a computer? Sure, we could add numbers up really quickly, and drive cars insanely sensibly, but we couldn't describe how the wind feels, what chocolate tastes like, or why a hug makes us smile.

It doesn't take much to make a brain malfunction – high temperature makes most people see things and talk rubbish. I once had flu and my Mum found me sitting at the foot of the stairs with my head in my hands – whispering that I was going mad. I was seeing things, and knew they were not real. Walls of rooms had turned into machinery – cogs, wires, pistons – for months afterwards I remember feeling somehow unstable if I even recalled memories of what I had seen – almost like patches of memory were broken.

Maybe the matrix started to fail and I saw it.

It's early on Sunday evening, the kids are hidden in various corners of the house – their noses inevitably buried in phones – and dinner is bubbling away on top of the cooker. Chicken curry this evening – designed mostly to burn the cold virus out of our youngest daughter.

We all went to a school fundraiser yesterday evening – a “Bingo Night” at our youngest's school. I found myself torn during the evening between valuing the school raising funds, and one team in particular pretty much destroying the raffle for everybody else.

We arrived early – to help setup the hall. One of the school staff members asked if I could re-arrange the tables to make room for a group of 12 that were expected. Here's where it gets interesting – most families that bought raffle tickets bought a strip of five tickets per person. The group of twelve bought at least five strips per person. When the raffle was finally drawn, the inevitable happened – with the big table winning again, and again, and again.

They kept on cheering.

I had to tell myself that the school had raised lots of funds from them, so nobody could complain, but for the children on every other table in the room it kind of destroyed any chance they had of winning anything – and that made me a bit sad.

I've seen it happen once before. Not long after our children started at infant school we went to a fundraising dinner, and a particular table bought most of the raffle tickets. As they won prize after prize they laughed hilariously at their cleverness. Thankfully that event didn't include any children, so the rest of the room just rolled their eyes and quietly filed everybody at the table away as colossal arseholes.

Anyway.

Dinner will be ready in a bit – we're just waiting for the rice to cook. I imagine the rest of the evening will be filled with writing, rubbish TV, and a few retro video games. I've resurrected the Raspberry Pi, filled with inumerable arcade machines from the early 1980s.

Anybody for a game of pacman ?

After dinner this evening we walked into town to meet our middle daughter from work. She started waiting tables at a nearby pub a few weeks ago – her first “proper” job. On leaving the house, our youngest daughter raced down the stairs to join us – never one to miss out on a free drink.

We arrived perhaps half an hour before the end of her sister's shift and bought a couple of drinks while waiting – she eventually joined us, and shared the stories of her shift with us before we set off home together.

The moment I opened the front door, there was a hammering on the downstairs bathroom door, and shouting from within. It took a few moments to gather our senses, and figure out what had happened.

Shortly after we left for the pub, our eldest daughter went to the bathroom. When she came to leave the bathroom, the door lock had jammed – leaving her sitting in the bathroom for over an hour – waiting for us to return home.

I grabbed a screwdriver and began removing the lock from the outside – and quickly discovered the mechanism within the lock was working – but had somehow become disconnected from the bolt. I started talking in terms of having to break the door down, and slammed my body into it several times. It wasn't looking good.

While I took my jumper off, and contemplated retrieving the axe from the shed – to essentially destroy the door rather than the doorframe – my other half gave the lock mechanism one more go – and the door swung open.

I would love to say we were all tremendously understanding about our daughter's plight – sitting in the bathroom for over an hour while we sat in the pub – but we were not at all. After eventually calming down, we agreed that the bathroom door will no longer have a mechanical locking mechanism – it will only have a simple bolt.

First stop tomorrow morning will be the local hardware store, in search of a blank plate to cover where the door handle once was.

I have created a publication at Medium, and begun cross-posting my almost daily journal entries into it. In the past I've reserved Medium for the long-form “too long, didn't read” essays – perfect examples of “nobody wants to read this, but I'm writing it anyway”. Those screeds live behind a pay-wall; attracting an incestuous audience of paying Medium writers consuming a diet of platform dog food while chasing fractions of pennies from the passing torrent of visitors.

I sometimes wonder just how much of an anarchic streak exists within me. Given a platform that supports paid content, here I am polluting it with free content for the masses – standing atop a pile of furniture in the street, waving an improvised flag, shouting spirited things in opposition to “the man”.

Anyway.

If I continue writing about writing, the world will fall in on itself and cause a rift in the space-time-continuum. Probably.

Something interesting happened today (or last night, but I'll pretend it was today). Somebody followed me on Twitter a few days ago; an acquaintance of an acquaintance, and I followed them back. Like me, they seemed to be something of a unicorn of the Twitterverse; sharing moments of daily life, random observations, and other such miscellany. A fellow unicorn.

After repeatedly crossing paths, we began firing instant messages back and forth – the usual clumsy high-wire act of introducing yourself to a stranger on the internet. The inevitable question arose: “Where in the world are you then?”

We live ten minutes from each other.

In a world with fifty million square miles of land on which we might have lived, it turns out we live ten minutes from each other.

You can't even make it up.

I rarely remember much about my dreams – but today seems to be an exception. Perhaps if the dream happens immediately before you wake up, it stays with you? Who knows.

In the dream I went shopping in town, visiting several stores. Afterwards, I found myself sitting at a table in a cafe with an acquaintance. As we got up to leave, I realised my shopping bag had vanished, and became really upset about it. You know the empty feeling when you realise something has gone? As I walked away, the person that had been sitting at the table with me returned from their car, holding my bag up, smiling.

I continued on to a bicycle shop to pick up my bike – which was in for some kind of service. The entrance to the shop was covered in wooden boarding, with a wooden ramp you had to climb. As I got further along the ramp, the boards started to fall away – becoming increasingly precarious with each step. Realising there was no way through, I climbed back down and walked to the back of the store, where a lady was sitting at a desk with a paper ledger of all the bike repairs. While she looked through the list for my bike – not finding it – I realised I hadn't taken my bike there at all.

And that's when I woke up.

I wonder if dreams do have meaning? I suppose the theme of the dream was about losing or forgetting things. Of course now I'm wondering what I have lost, or forgotten.

Just before dinner this evening while finishing work, checking email, and taking a quick look at the various social sites I have accounts, I noticed Facebook was down. And Instagram. I grinned, raised an eyebrow, and went off to eat dinner with my family.

Five hours later, Facebook is still down.

On the evening news, people in the street were being interviewed about how the outage has impacted them. One young lady grinned at the camera, and reflected my thoughts – words to the effect of “the world might be a better place if Facebook didn't exist any more”.

If you're wondering what's really going on, there seems to be some sort of problem in the “border gateway protocol” system at Facebook – the software machinery that receives requests for data and routes them through the most efficient routes.

Anyway.

Perhaps I'll go read a book before bed, and revel in the silence of no notifications, reminders, or friend requests.

Bliss.

Something has been annoying me for months, if not years. You could say it all started with social media, but that wouldn't be true. It really started with tabloid newspapers, and the lack of accountability or veracity displayed by various actors purporting to report “news” to the world.

The rise of self-proclaimed mouth-pieces of the people has collided with the evolution of the social internet, and created a hellscape of grifter news stories designed to attract eyeballs for no other reason than to scrape money from the weight of traffic.

The “news” shared by citizen journalists, soapbox campaigners, and keyboard warriors has become almost entirely fictitious, distorted, or perverted to suit whatever narrative the author thought might attract enough argument and eyeballs to generate traffic – and with it money.

Unfortunately in the middle of this war for eyeballs you find the misinformed, the retired, the bored, and the easily preyed up – who then share the stories among their friends and family. The majority take no notice, but a small minority fit whichever parts of the fiction against whatever they are currently most annoyed about, and get drawn into the world of bullshit.

Before you know it, people are arguing that the world is flat, that we never went to the moon, that family pets are being stolen, that fuel companies engineered millions into panic buying fuel, that supermarkets are empty because “they” want you to believe BREXIT was a bad idea, or a hundred other made up stories.

It's kind of connected to the whole religion argument too – where a vast PR machine tells people what to believe each week, flying in the face of fact, reason, and objectivity. The vast majority quite happily disregard idiotic news stories pushed out through the social internet, but accept various invented origin stories forced on them as children.

It's madness. All of it.

After work this evening I headed out with my other half to the cinema – we saw the new James Bond movie – “No Time to Die”.

I liked it. It's probably worth noting that my bar to like movies is incredibly low though – I'm no movie snob. I'm not going to ruin the story at at all, so don't worry if you've not seen it yet.

There was a moment – halway through the movie – when I turned to my other half and grinned. Bond runs past a circular tunnel, and turns to shoot an enemy – towards the camera. We both spotted it. A reference to the classic Bond title image. Given that it was Daniel Craig's last outing as Bond, I wondered if it was put in to may a homage of sorts.

The bigger movie news for me today was the discovery that Steven Spielberg has been working on a re-make of West Side Story. I've always loved the music from West Side Story, and cannot quite describe how the trailer made me feel. I had hair standing up on my arms, and tears in my eyes – it looks that good.

Anyway. It's getting late. Time to fall into bed and sleep. Or sit in bed for an hour falling down internet rabbit holes in my phone. Not sure which yet.

Autumn has arrived with a vengeance. Over the course of the last week the temperature has dropped, wind and rain has arrived, and the nights are drawing in fast. Suddenly coats, scarves, and boots seem like a good idea when venturing out for any length of time.

Leaves have begun turning yellow and falling from the trees surrounding the house. The cats have retreated indoors after a spring and summer spent hunting and sleeping in the garden.

I'm holed up in the junk room with my work laptop, as always. Project work has slowed a little, which allows for some much needed research and development – for the same project, but looking ahead to future requirements.

(five minutes pass while I find a hoodie from upstairs, after realising I'm quite cold)

A slightly ragged bullet journal is propped on the corner of the desk – filled with nine months worth of tasks, notes, and doodles. I'm just trying to think back – is this my third bullet journal ? I think it might be. The rest are squirrelled away in a bag along with moleskine notebooks stretching back to the mid 2000s.

I started a hand-written journal while commuting into and out of London with work. For the better part of two years I left the house before the sun came up, and returned home after the sun had gone down. I remember emptying my thoughts into the notebook while squashed on trains, and while sitting alone in parks and cafes in the city.

Perhaps it's time to start looking at notebooks once again – especially as the elastic closer on my long suffering Moleskine notebook has given up the ghost.