wordsmith.social/jonbeckett

I'm sitting in the junk room listening to the radio, typing into a text editor. The clock is ticking towards 9pm and I'm wondering where Saturday went.

Clothes and dishes got washed and put away. Visitors arrived to see Miss 16, who continues to make progress after having her leg re-assembled by surgeons a few days ago. She made it up the stairs today and broke into a huge smile en-route. Her confidence is starting to return and it's wonderful to watch.

I saw a humorous book title on the internet a while ago – “How to do nothing, with nobody, all alone, by yourself”. It's an actual book – you can look it up. While it's aimed at parents of young children, I found myself relating to it quite a bit more than I should have. Oh to be left alone sometimes.

The wonderful Micky Flanagan did a standup comedy routine years ago where he decried the lost skill of “f*cking about”. He talked at length about the many and varied strategies you might employ in order to get nothing done – I will admit to bursting out laughing when he advocated buying the cheapest electric kettle you possibly can – because it will take longer to boil, affording you more time to stand in the kitchen waiting for it.

The man is a genius.

You might argue that most of my writing is “f*cking about”. Maybe I should re-title the blog accordingly. I used to tell myself I was sharing my life with the online community – but let's face it, the blogging phenomenon of the early 2000s lasted about a year. The hipsters that arrived during the Web 1.0 explosion and took ownership of “cyberspace” left shortly afterwards to cultivate their MySpace profiles before vanishing into the emerging “social” internet.

I write to escape. I sit in a room on my own while writing these journal entries as an escape from daily life. Sometimes I tell stories, sometimes I grapple with the mundane, and sometimes I just wonder about the most random rubbish. Sometimes I sit in front of the keyboard and get no further than the first sentence before being called away. Sometimes my fingers can't keep up with the torrent of inconsequential thoughts that pour forth. There's no pattern to any of it.

I suppose in a strange sort of way the title the blog has ended up with – “Jonathan Wrote This” is quite appropriate. It's the most accurate description of it's contents – both in a good, and a bad way.