wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “What is something you wish you knew how to do?”.

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Whenever I happen upon somebody that can speak more than one language, I tend to regard it as the most wonderful parlour trick, and cannot quite fathom how they do it. I wish I could do it too, but the extent of my ability only extends as far as useful sentences such as “I am 12 years old”, “My name is Jonathan”, and “I have a black dog” in French.

I was always terrible at languages at school.

I would like to blame being elevated into the advanced French class at school when I was twelve years old for my lack of ability. We all learned French at school – I'm not sure if kids still do – if you were good enough at it, you learned German too. I never learned German. I had no place in the advanced French class. Sure, I could work hard at it and do well in tests, but I couldn't string a useful sentence together. It didn't come easily to me.

While working in Germany a couple of years ago I was invited to visit a co-worker and his family for the evening. He and his partner were from Romania. So they were in Germany, already speaking one foreign language, and inviting me over for dinner, and speaking another with me. They invited another co-worker from Holland. I gazed in wonder all night at their linguistic gymnastics.

They described switching languages like changing radio channels in your head. There was no conscious translation as such – you just switch from one to the other.

My brain doesn't appear to work like that. I think I got the basic model. It's very good at doing simple tasks, one after another, and that's about it.

That being said, while working as a software and web developer I have learned all manner of computer languages – everything from Visual Basic, to Pascal, HTML, Javascript, C, C++, C#, Python, SQL, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and probably quite a few I can't recall right now. Here's the thing though – if I try to switch languages mid-conversation, I make huge mistakes. Most developers do. Thankfully modern computers catch those mistakes – although they never give a sensible reason for your idiocy not quite working as intended.

Anyway.

There's my answer for today's writing prompt – I wish I could speak multiple languages. I have no practical purpose for it, but I admire those that can do it tremendously.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's writing prompt is “What was your favourite toy as a child?”.

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I was born in 1973. Although the memories are hazy at best, I would have gone to the cinema to see “Star Wars” when it was originally released. I can vaguely remember “The Empire Strikes Back”, and can clearly remember “Return of the Jedi”. More than the movies, I remember the experience of visiting the cinema with my Dad and brother – the feeling of exhilaration while walked out into the night air afterwards, and the excited conversation during the car journey home.

In the years that followed, each Christmas brought another spaceship from the Star Wars universe, and one or two more figures for my collection. I vividly remember the year the AT-AT arrived, towering over the assembled rag-tag fleet of spaceships that assembled under the stairs before lunch.

I spent countless hours playing with the Star Wars toys during my formative years. Bookshelves became space stations, with books pulled out to provide blast doors. Darth Vader remained the villain throughout – although he only ever had one or two storm-troopers under his command in my stories – because that's all I had. I never had an Imperial Tie-Fighter either, so most stories involved the theft of the X-Wing, or my brother's Snow Speeder.

It's funny – the more I write, the more I remember.

One day in my early teens – after computers had entered my life and swept all toys before them, my Mum told me about a fund-raiser for a local children's home that was happening – and would I like to donate the Star Wars toys. I didn't hesitate.

Collectors are probably grimacing at this point, but my Star Wars toys were played with – not locked in glass cabinets and admired – and they went on to be played with. We found out years later that the children's home didn't sell the Star Wars toys – they kept them. Countless children in their care shared them, and created their own memories with them.

Fast forward thirty years, and I (of course) took my own children to watch the new movies – to cheer as Rey awakened the force, to cry as first Luke and then Leia died, and to walk into the night air exhilarated all over again.

For several years my youngest daughter went everywhere dressed as a Jedi. The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's theme is “Write about the last time you left your comfort zone”.

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In the daytime I work as a software and web developer. Since the pandemic ravaged the world, for the most part that means sitting alone at home in front of a computer trying to make sense of requirements documents, and constructing solutions for staff I will never meet.

While I may not be able to speak multiple languages – a feat I'm always captivated by when others perform it – I can write software in multiple languages. Multiple machine languages come with the territory, because the development of computers doesn't stand still. Just as real-world languages evolve, so do the means by which we instruct computers to get the job done.

Which leads me to the departure from my comfort zone. It's happening right now.

For the last several years I've been in a comfortable little bubble – partially of my own making – using the same technology stack to build solution after solution. Well that has all come crashing down in recent months – with opportunities in the marketplace pivoting towards something different. It's a little like turning up to a school to teach French as you have for the last decade, only to discover one morning the label on the door has been replaced with “German for beginners”.

The problem with computer languages isn't so much the language itself – it's what you're doing with it. It's never as simple as learning the wording, and the sentence structure. Invariably you need to also learn how it has been used for an entire library of pre-existing stuff. Perhaps an analogy might help. Instead of just learning about the fuel, springs, and the nuts and bolts your car is made from, you have to learn about suspension geometry, the theoretical workings of the combustion engine, the GPS system, the locking system, and so on.

For most software development projects you find yourself standing upon the shoulders of countless generations of giants that came before you – and that can make the learning curve incredibly steep.

I'm on that steep slope at the moment. Thankfully the hard climbing is already done, and the gradient is beginning to level off. Of course the problem now is looking back down, and realising how high you are – and how far you might fall if you make a mistake.

So yes. I'm out of my comfort zone at the moment. I have to remind myself that I'm surrounded by wonderful co-workers, and that the internet is but a few keystrokes away – where an army of fellow developers often share their knowledge and enthusiasm.

Fingers crossed for the months ahead.

While wandering the halls of Wordpress late last night I stumbled upon Bloganuary – a series of writing prompts that will be published throughout the month. I've decided to take part. I'm a day late, so playing catch-up already. Enjoy!

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This letter has travelled 30 years into the past to find your hands. At the time you read this you are single, you still live with your parents, you have just left college, and you are working for the family business.

You better sit down.

At the moment you're pretty consigned to always being everybody's best friend – to never meeting anybody. You couldn't be more wrong.

In 30 years time you are married.

You met a girl in Oxford one Sunday afternoon in 2000. Neither of you thought it would go anywhere at first, but you saw each other again, and again, and nature took its course.

Months from now, your entire family will scatter across England. You will find your career a couple of miles from the girl you're going to meet near London, and will work as a software and web developer. Code you are going to write will be used by big companies all over the world. Thousands of people will rely on the things you build to do their job every day. You will be regarded as a pretty good software developer by your peers, and a great web developer.

You're going to love the web.

The next one is huge. You're going to have three children. Three little girls. They will be fantastic, and will make you smile, laugh, and occasionally shout. The eldest will be just like you, the middle one will have the loudest voice in the known universe, and the youngest is going to be all sorts of trouble (and will have no idea).

You will write a journal.

Compuserve – that you're thinking about joining at the moment – will not last for long. The “internet” will replace the various BBS and subscription services that you've just started using. The internet will be generally available to everybody, and will become everybody's primary means of communicating. It will not be owned by anybody.

Your mobile phone will do everything your current computer does, and much more. You will use it as a camera, to listen to music, to watch movies, to play games, to send and receive emails, and to chat with people all over the world.

You will make friends across the globe. You will become closer to some of the friends you make through the internet than those in the real world, and will catch up with each other almost every day.

Your life is going to change enormously.

You are going to be happy, have a wonderful family, and many friends. Its all good. Look forward to it.

This year I'm taking part in “Bloganuary” – a series of writing prompts published throughout the month by Mindy Postoff. Today's theme is “what is a road trip you would love to take?”

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Back in 1999, when the world and I were very different, I had just returned to England after visiting my younger cousin in San Francisco for the spring.

Being young, naive, and not having seen much of the world, America walked straight out of a movie. From the blue shirted police officers wandering the crowds in the airport, to the hotdog sellers, the impossibly pretty college girls, and the war veterans holding placards in the street. A new world filled with unfamiliar sights, sounds and smells.

I wouldn't so much say San Francisco made an impression on me, so much as grabbed me by the collar and shook me. Days were spent walking the various parks, eating sourdough bread, and retracing the haunts of Kerouac and Ginsberg.

The America I experienced during the spring of 1999 has stayed with me ever since.

In the months that followed – having read “On the Road” – I started to make plans for a coast-to-coast adventure. Perhaps the following summer. I would fly to New York and travel westwards across the United States – using cars, busses, trains, boats, taxis, bicycles – as many forms of transport as possible. My cousin would meet me for parts of the journey – perhaps to revisit her birthplace in Chicago, or the home of her formative years at Lake Powell.

At the end of the year I began researching the papertrail to make the visit somewhat more permanent – sponsorship, green cards, and emigration forms became the subject of transatlantic phone calls.

And then none of it happened.

I met a girl.

A chance meeting with a girl in Oxford re-wrote my future during the spring of 2000, and the road trip, the emigration, and the arrival of an English web developer in San Francisco during the dot com boom never happened.

I've never forgotten the plans though. One day. One day. Quite how the money or time might ever present itself remains something of a mystery given the arrival of houses, daughters, pets, and so on – but the thought remains – one day.

So here we are. Another new year. While it's tempting to make resolutions, to “double down” on that which was intended but not done in the past, I'm resisting. Resolutions are invariably not kept. Aspirations are invariably not met. While it sounds tremendously boring to have no aims, given the past couple of years just making it through in one piece seems to be as good a goal as any.

We stayed in last night. Everybody we know stayed in. We ate dinner, watched television, and poured a glass of fizzy wine at the allotted hour.

My middle daughter worked throughout the afternoon and evening at a bar in the centre of town – I met her as her shift finished at 10pm and we wandered home through the Christmas lights together.

We were all in bed before 1am, and struggled to get up this morning. I think today might be very quiet indeed. A day for reading books, watching movies, playing board games, and setting out pages in new bullet journals.

My use of bullet journals over the last few years has now spread like a virus throughout my family. My other half now has one, as does my middle daughter. I wandered into the lounge yesterday and interrupted a very serious conversation about future logs and migration. I smiled.

Anyway.

Time to make a cup of tea, and catch up on the written adventures of far flung friends.

It's mid-morning on the final day of the year, and you find me perched on the office chair in the home office / junk room that I have lived in for much of the last eighteen months, bathed in the glow of a huge monitor, with Madonna filling the room with “Vogue” – the first track of a random playlist chosen moments ago. A cup of coffee sits adjacent to my left hand, with wisps of steam curling above it in the light of a desk lamp.

In a little over thirteen hours time the clock will lurch forwards and turn twenty one into twenty two. Another arbitrarily measured lap completed around an unremarkable main-sequence star on the western spiral arm of the Milky Way.

The end of a year that was both remarkable and unremarkable at the same time. The absence of any adventures of note has become the calling card of a year many will not wish to repeat. While the introverted part of me has been celebrating “not going out”, the remaining part misses close friends.

Instead of gathering with the world and their dogs to watch the final seconds of the year tick past, we went out for something to eat with close friends the night before last. A couple that live within shouting distance, but that we had not seen outside of an instant message conversation since the spring. Something as simple as sitting opposite another human being for a few hours eating, drinking, telling stories, laughing, reminiscing, and wondering about the future together proved unexpectedly healing.

I imagine today will be spent surfing the mighty internet into the homes of family and friends via webcams, mobile phones, tablets, and laptop computers. Conversations will begin with “you're on mute!” before pixelated smiles spread across faces, and the world is made small for a time.

The end of one year and the beginning of the next is often associated with the opportunity to make changes. Change to one's surroundings, one's self, or to set out on a journey of some description. After wandering through the online landscape mostly alone, and somewhat aimlessly for the past year, I've decided it's probably time to do something about it. Time to plan a journey of sorts.

It's so easy to fall into shadow. To become insular. To send your words out across the far reaches of the internet while not paying attention to the people and places they might reach.

One day you look around, and find that the intrepid band you once stood alongside while leaning into the teeth of the internet storm no longer exists. Friends become acquaintances. Acquaintances become memories.

Over the coming year I would like to journey back to the internet well that inspired so many of the memories I have cherished for so long. I have no illusions it will be difficult – I have no idea what I'm looking for along the way, or what I might find. The world has changed. Perhaps I have too.

Anyway.

Here's to the future, to old friends, and to adventures yet to come.

If you're not working – which I'm not this year – the days between Christmas and New Year seem like a kind of vacuum – especially the last couple of years. With COVID rampaging around the community, nobody is going anywhere or doing anything. Days out have been put on hold, and visits to friends curtailed.

Thank the maker for the internet. What would we do without it? When I was young finding a book to read generally involved walking to the public library – which was only open during certain hours. These days we can download pretty much any book in moments to an inexpensive reading device, or even have it read to us.

I've never really got on with audio books. I'm not sure why. I can see why they appeal to some, but having grown up with paper books, there is a sort of eccentric romance to the feel and smell of them. I dare not tell you how many books we have littered around the house – letting go of any of them during mass clear-outs is always difficult.

My brother-in-law gave me an Amazon voucher for Christmas. I spent it on a number of ebooks that were “on offer” – books I've always wondered about, but never read. I'm already half-way through “Crash” by J G Ballard, with “A Clockwork Orange” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” waiting in the wings. I've always been fascinated by classic, banned, or notorious books. I guess curiosity gets the better of me – wanting to find out why their reputation precedes them.

Anyway.

Time to go find my book, and a quiet corner to lose myself for an hour. Rain is falling outside. There's very little else to do. I guess this is what most people call “recharging”.

It's the morning after the day before. A very different Christmas than those that have come before – certainly when compared against the last decade at least. The children are no longer children.

The entire day was mercifully relaxed, and unfolded more or less as expected. There were no complaints about moving the opening of presents to later in the day to coincide with the arrival of extended family, and the walk to the pub for lunch was made in good spirits despite the rain.

We have gone out to eat on Christmas Day for the last several years. We did the math some time ago, and figured that the cost comes out remarkably close when you add together the various food and drink you might buy to feed a house full of people for the day. When you also factor in the hours you save preparing vegetables, cooking, and washing up, it becomes a no-brainer.

This year we visited the pub where our middle daughter works. The meal was wonderful, the serving staff were friendly and attentive, and we all ate too much. We can count the times we have been out for a meal on one hand in perhaps the last three years, so it was a rare treat.

Of course we all did COVID tests yesterday morning, and will test again today, and tomorrow. It's become a way of life. We had all had both vaccine injections and the booster shot. We only came into close contact with our server throughout. I wonder how we will look back on these times in years to come?

The clock has just ticked past 10:30am, and only myself and Miss 17 are up. She's watching whatever seventeen year old girls watch on television while wrapped up in a “snoodie”, and I'm holed up in the junk room writing this while listening to the “coffee shop jazz” playlist on Amazon music.

We seemed to get each other small, inexpensive, thoughtful presents this year. I asked my daughters for chocolate, and they fulfilled my wish. A number of books were requested and delivered between each of us. A couple of new board games were unwrapped.

It's been kind of lovely so far. Given that so many of us spend so much of the time going “flat out” – either working, going to college, writing essays, doing overtime, or helping with community projects, it's nice to slow down for a change.

Merry Christmas to you and yours. Here's to a quiet, happy, and healthy start to the new year.