wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

My other half is sitting up in bed today, eating porridge and drinking lemonade – a huge improvement on recent days. Apparently her body is staging a spirited fight-back against COVID19.

Somewhat miraculously, the rest of us remain symptom free.

I'm hoping she will be returning negative tests by Sunday at least – so she can watch the kids open their Easter eggs in person. Somehow I think it might be early next week though, given the experience of friends.

The last few days have been strange – knocking around the house, sleeping on the sofa, and doing the chores like a lonely automaton. If not for catching up with distant friends on the internet, I would probably be sporting questionable personal hygiene, growing a beard, and falling into the gravity well of daytime television.

Anyway.

Another hour, and the family will no doubt be asking about dinner. I wonder if I can point them towards the leftovers from yesterday's “party food” dinner?

Our youngest daughter had a quiet birthday at home.

After blowing balloons up late last night with my eldest daughter, and decorating the room suitably horrendously, we wrapped presents in brown paper and then went to bed.

This morning we watched as the newly crowned Miss 17 opened her presents, and included my other half via video call from the bedroom.

We went shopping for groceries together this morning – and returned with Miss 17's choice for an evening birthday meal – “party food”.

In her mind, party food meant tortilla chips, dips, peppers, salad, sausage rolls, hummus, olives, cheese, and various other bits and pieces. We laid it all out across the table this evening and watched an entirely forgettable movie together (Tarzan – the one with one of the Skarsgard brothers in it).

The clock is now ticking towards midnight, and I'm watching another day of my “holiday” vanish. My other half is still isolating in the bedroom, having being hit by the COVID genetic reaction lottery quite badly.

Let's hope tomorrow brings a better day.

My other half tested positive for COVID19 this evening. She has had cold symptoms for the last several days. How typical is that? She works in a school – she has been testing several times a week for the last several years, we get to a holiday, and bang – first day of the holiday, positive.

Our youngest's birthday trip to Thorpe Park is now delayed. Her sleepover with friends now isn't happening. Our middle girl's new part-time job might be over before it begins... the dominos are falling fast.

We have a huge stack of test kits at home – I'm guessing we're going to go through them at a rate of knots now. The rest of us tested negative this evening, and my other half is now quarantined in the bedroom. She's already turned it into a knitting nest, with Netflix playing on her laptop.

I cleaned the kitchen and lounge down after she retreated earlier. I also retrieved a sleeping bag from the loft – I'm on the sofa for the next few days.

I'm going grocery shopping first thing in the morning – before I test positive. While we're technically not required to self isolate any more, it would seem tremendously unfair to go about normal life, knowing you're spreading the virus.

I'm reminded of Japan, where people have protected those around them from coughs and colds for decades. Don't get me started about the rabid antivaxxers who believe it's their right to do what they want, where they want, whenever they want. They're up there with the most pious in thanking this, that, or the other for their continued good health – until they get ill, and immediately seek the fruits of the last few hundred years of scientific research.

Anyway.

Thankyou, scientists. Thankyou for reducing a potentially deadly disease to a runny nose, and a few aches and pains.

Looks like we're going to have a very quiet Easter.

p.s. my other half is already using the Amazon Echo network around the house to call for room service. It was funny the first time...

Today was the first of my “staycation”. Nine days away from work. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to fill those days with, given that we can't really afford to go anywhere or do anything, but I'm sure the universe will figure out something that needs doing each day, and results in returning to work without really feeling like I've had a break.

It's funny how that happens.

Everything feels so detached at the moment. I find myself rarely setting foot in Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. “Social” feels like such a lie. I suppose if I'm honest, I'm really not a very “social” animal at all. I used to think I was. I would share thoughts about things as they occurred to me. Share photos. Words. These days I find myself hesitating over anything and everything.

Having an opinion has become poisonous. Any firmly held view can be demonised by a vocal minority, and suddenly you're fire fighting perceived judgements that haven't happened.

I can't help feeling it's easier to keep quiet than volunteer much of anything to anybody any more.

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only person that has realised the truth behind the various influencers and mouthpieces that dominate online discourse – that their deliberately mansplained lectures are designed more to cause reaction than to evoke empathy, or understanding.

Perhaps I should try harder to remember that the vocal self-proclaimed majority of the social internet are not only a small minority of the largely silent online whole, but an almost immeasurably small fraction of the wider world.

According to folklore, midnight marks the time in the day when witches, demons and ghosts are thought to appear, and be at their most powerful. There seems to be some disagreement about which exact hour is the “witching hour” though – with stories ranging from midnight, all the way through into the early hours of the morning.

I don't know why I'm telling you any of this. I just looked at the clock, realised today had already become tomorrow, and thought “ah crap, I forgot to write in the blog again”.

It's half past midnight.

When my middle daughter was young, she liked to know things, and liked to demonstrate her mastery of all things – no matter that she might have things the right way round, or joined together entirely correctly. On more than one occasion she asked “is it half past my bedtime yet?”

It's half past my bedtime.

I looked at the clock a couple of hours ago and thought about going to bed early – to continue reading the book I've had my nose if for the last several nights. Somehow I now find myself staring 1am in the face, playing a game of chicken with it.

I'll scrape myself out of bed in the morning. I always do.

I have two more days of work, then I'm off for a week – the first week of the Easter holidays. I had originally asked for the second week, but work schedules piled up like a train wreck, and I found myself volunteering to move my holiday. It's not like I was going anywhere or doing anything anyway.

Anyway.

I'm writing this stream of consciousness, only too aware that I have nothing much to report. The words are leaving my fingers before they've really left my head. I'm not “putting them together” – they're just happening.

Maybe that's how the best writing happens.

Here we are again – watching the clock slip effortlessly from one day to the next. Our marking of time is a curious thing, isn't it – we place such significance on yesterday, today, and tomorrow – when in reality we're just specks on a ball of mud floating aimlessly through space on a path it has been repeating for millions of our years.

Many try to convince themselves that we are somehow special – the product of a mysterious creator sharing a similar form – a master puppeteer pulling the strings of everything we know.

I've always thought that view tremendously conceited.

We really are specks. Tiny specks on a fairly normal ball of mud in a quiet backwater of a normal spiral galaxy. We are here quite by chance. Yes, we are sentient, but then so are the billions of other creatures that no doubt exist in the far reaches of “space”. Far is of course a relative term – relative to how far we have managed to travel, in timescales we understand.

For nearly a thousand years the rulers of ancient Egypt sold their citizens intricate stories of gods eating each other in the sky – of animal headed beings that birthed the sun in the morning, and consumed it at night. Over time ideas changed – evolved – with early scientists being silenced for daring question the “accepted wisdom” of their day.

We look back now and try to separate ourselves from the powers that fought against Copernicus, Kepler, and Archimedes – but we really haven't moved on. We haven't moved on at all.

Children all over the world are still instructed to believe in imaginary beings in the sky – backed up by weighty tomes interpreted by scholarly liars trained to pray on the gullible and weak. We protect freedom of choice – freedom of thought – freedom of speech. We allow people to be exploited by a placebo that has persisted for millenia – taking different forms on each continent, and in each epoch.

Anyway. Enough mental rabbit hole excavations.

Time for bed.

Here I am again, sitting in front of the computer in the dead of night, only too aware that I haven't posted for several days. The world just seems to be getting away from me at the moment – I'm not sure if I'm just trying to be involved in too many things, or if I'm not pedalling fast enough.

I can't help reminding myself of a message I've seen written by several friends recently – that it's ok not to chase your own tail – that it's ok to say no – that there is value in slowing down.

There are so many things I want to do though. I end up laughing at myself – I have always been my own worst enemy.

Last night we went out to a fund-raiser at the infant school where my other half works – propping up the “staff table”. It was supposed to be a quiz, but involved little or no knowledge. One of the rounds involved identifying the flavour of jelly beans. On the way home I opined that this is the future – whether we like it or not. Generations are coming through where the majority seem to have have no knowledge about anything much in the world. If they haven't seen something on Facebook, Tiktok, or their friends haven't texted them about it, they have no clue. The traditional subjects – history, geography, science, nature, art – you may as well be asking them to write out the equations of motion.

One particular table at the fund raiser stunned us by leaving a considerable amount of rubbish, empty bottles and food wrappers strewn across their table and the floor when they left. Because of course we were there to clean up after them. What is it with some people thinking the rest of the world is there to serve them? How conceited are they?

While walking home – furious with the many small slights that had mounted up throughout the night – I had to remind myself that none of it really mattered. Less than half a world away, a catastrophe is being discovered – with evidence that the retreating army of a superpower have massacred civilians en-masse.

I will admit that in recent weeks I've wondered what the point of it all is – this life thing – when you could be cut down tomorrow. Why do we strive, hope, dream, or even attempt to build when a hostile adversary can invade, kill, and destroy with wanton abandon? How do soldiers of any army reconcile their actions? How do they live with what they have done? Can people really be conditioned to such an extent that they become machines without conscience ? Sadly experience of conflict around the world seems to tell me they can.

Suddenly the method I use to get from one day to the next seems like a good one – putting one foot in front of the other. When the world seems a little too big, and a little too loud, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other works well. It gets me from today to tomorrow – and tomorrow it will get me to the next day.

The real trick is finding somebody to walk alongside while finding my way from today to tomorrow. I'm lucky enough to count several such people in my sort-of-secret group of far flung friends on the internet. We might not message each other every day, but when we do, the world becomes a little bit smaller, and a little bit easier to survive.

I cooked dinner for the rest of the family this evening. Spaghetti Bolognese – one of the “make something quick that everybody will eat” meals that most families have up their sleeve at the end of a long week.

After dinner I joined some friends online for an hour, before heading into town to meet my middle daughter from work once again. Before leaving the house I looked in on my other half, and asked if she wanted to come – to perhaps get a drink while there. And that's how we didn't get home until after closing time.

While sipping our drink, and talking about the week, we laughed at the teenagers in the bar – most of which we had known at the various schools our girls attended over the years. We figured we had known more than a few of them since they were in infant school. One of them couldn't take a shot at the pool-table without shouting the F word. I wondered how proud his parents might be.

Walking to and from the pub was bitterly cold. Earlier today it tried to snow. Only a few flakes, but still exciting given that we haven't seen any serious amount of snowfall for years.

Tomorrow we're headed to our youngest's school for some sort of garden tour thing. Then on Sunday it's rugby once again. I'm not going to stress too much about not getting a chance to rest – I have a week off coming up at the end of next week. The week before Easter.

That reminds me – I need to get some Easter eggs.

Once upon a time I wrote some programming (I'm a software developer in the daytime) to brute-force the problem of finding interesting blogs to read.

I reasoned that if I liked a particular blog, I would probably also like the blogs of people that commented on the blog I liked. So rather than obsessively follow the breadcrumb trail out to every commenter of every post of a given blog, I wrote some programming to do it.

It loads a page you give to it, then finds every page descending directly from it (the posts), and loads them in turn. For each page it has discovered, it looks for any addresses of blogs in the comments (e.g. xyz.wordpress.com) – and compiles a list of them all – before spitting it out as a CSV file that can be perused later.

Here's where the unexpected bit happens.

While doing some spring cleaning on my own Wordpress account yesterday, I started to scratch the “find new and interesting people to read” itch, and pointed the old programming at a somewhat famous blog. After looking through the links for a while, I discovered something really quite strange – that most of the commenters – people who had posted comments very recently – had not written on their own blogs in years.

Rather than wade through the endless stream of inactive blogs, I improved the programming to go visit each blog it discovered, and find out exactly how long it had been since they last wrote. The scale of the discovery was enormous. At least 90% of those that had commented had not written anything themselves for years.

I started scratching my head, and thought “I wonder if there's some way I can improve my program to cast the net wider”.

After half an hour of tinkering, I turned the program into a “spider”. You can start it out on one blog, and it follows the comments from one blog to another – to a maximum depth noted on a piece of paper in it's pocket. As it clambers through people's blogs, it maintains a list of all the blogs it has discovered along the way that have posted in the last 30 days.

I pointed it at my own blog this morning. It's busy churning through all of the people that have commented on my blog recently, then all the people that have commented on their blog, and so on – diving further and further down the rabbit hole. Or jumping from one rabbit hole to the next.

It's still churning now. I imagine Sauron's eye, high atop the Wordpress tower is turning to face me – wondering what I'm doing – wondering why I appear to have been asking to read blogs at several pages a second for the last hour.

Let's hope I don't start talking about the program as “my precious”.

I planned to write a blog post late yesterday evening, but somehow it didn't happen. That seems to be the story of my life at the moment.

If nothing else, this week has succeeded in detaching me from the mass media. I've become increasingly aware that modern journalism isn't so much about reporting a story – it's about attracting attention to grift advertising revenue – and if that means repeating the same story everybody else is reporting in order to syphon off a few eyeballs, well so be it. Don't even get me started with the legion of “nothing new to report” stories that regurgitate an entire story before adding one new sentence – teased in the byline – in the final paragraph.

It feels to me like “the news” has become some sort of strange placebo. I read a fascinating article on the VICE website a few days ago, that likened celebrity news to the stories of the greek gods – where we interpret their actions to make sense of our own – with everybody having a take on everything.

I guess at the heart of all of this is a dislike of being told what to think – who to believe – what to believe in, even. I have my own mind. I have eyeballs, ears, and a brain. I can watch, listen, and read. I can make my own mind up.

The thing that worries me most is that so many people seem to be so happy to be told what to think, like, do, trust, or believe. It's not just the news – it's everything that gets marketed at us – lifestyle, religion, culture, food, health, fitness – everybody seems to have a take on everything. Everybody has “alternative facts”.

I'll stop ranting now.

Perhaps another coffee will distract me for long enough that I won't write “oh, and ANOTHER thing”...