We’re all tired of takes on working from home, back to the office, and remote working, aren’t we? So now seems a good time to bore everybody even more with my thoughts after four years of exclusively remote working. Remote working works Here I am. I’ve worked from home for four years, and business has been good. Satisfaction levels have been high all round, mine and the clients’. I’ve also worked for long stretches from different time zones far afield....
We live cheaply. By choice. I don’t talk about it, usually, because it’s difficult to say anything and walk the tightrope between people’s pity if they get the impression we have to, and them thinking we’re holier-than-thou if they don’t. But sometimes I wish I could explain, so I’m going to give it a try. When we got married, I was used to spending whatever I felt I needed and not looking too far ahead....
Looking back at my music purchases of 2022, there’s some current, but a whole lot from the 70s and early 80s. One of which, weirdly, is “Plastic Love”, by Mariya Takeuchi. I can’t remember, now, why I heard it and bought it. Now, though, I know that it was suddenly everywhere in the world starting a few years before I noticed it. I know this because my wife went on a Japaneses Disco deep dive one night, because somebody has made a new video for a song of the same era called “Sparkle”, by Tatsuro Yamashita....
So what is this site all about, then? Well, it’s not really FOR anything. And sometimes that’s the point. I have thoughts and like writing. Just my thing. I’m also tired of the modern internet, where only social media, “Big Tech” and unicorn platforms seem to count. Back a few years I blogged on Blogger, which became Blogspot, which then needed a Google log-in … and Google is one of the things I’m tired of....
When I was at school, I was oddly serious about school projects. I had a mild obsession with making them look like professional books or brochures. We didn’t have a computer, but I steered my parents into getting a proportional-spacing typewriter and used that (which dates this), and a photocopier to change sizing of chunks of text. I also scraped together enough cash to get a DeVilbiss Super 63A airbrush, an old second-hand compressor, and rigged a system that let me use the compressed air at my homemade homework desk....
Right now feels like an excellent time for any British citizen who cares about the direction of the UK to join the Conservative Party. Wait, don’t go, I know how that sounds, considering “right now” is April 2024, and everybody in the UK hates Tories and wishes they’d go away. And yes, it feels very important to spell out that this is April 2024, because this take will date very fast and won’t apply in a year’s time at most....
We are shaped by our experiences more than most of us like to think. And I grew up religious. For all of my formative years, and quite a way into adulthood, religion was the dominant force in my life. So a very big part of how I look at the world has been formed by that. I see religion everywhere. It’s all religion. Especially the parts full of people who would look at me strangely for insisting on this, because religion is alien to them and they don’t understand it at all....
When Jack woke up, it was too quiet. Obviously it was dark, because it was the middle of the night. And naturally the house was quiet. But usually there was at least a bit of noise from the main road, and instead it was weirdly still. And dark, of course. A very strange time to wake up for no reason, in fact. From the bunk bed, Jack only had to raise his head to see out of the gap between the curtains, and it didn’t look as though anything was moving outside, either....
We get the leaders we deserve. Partly because we accept as unstated fact that we need leaders. The people who think it’s important that someone is in charge, are, oddly enough, the ones in charge. The rest of us aren’t so bothered, so we aren’t. And consequently we don’t get to push the point that maybe it’s OK to have less leadership, because we aren’t responsible for the conversation. For some years now, I’ve been quite visible online....
I try to take things with me where I can, Devices that seem normal, not too new, Objects that my hand knows how to grasp As well as thoughts that take no energy to think. There is a spice to newness, but it’s rich, And savoured best when sprinkled on the bland. Too many pieces of a former life Stay back among the pieces of their own, And they are gaps for me, as I for them....