Recursive Words

We still have no bathroom, no shower, and no washing machine. Two weeks now. Another week to go. It didn’t help that the entire family got sick in the middle of the project, which caused the builders to get the hell out of dodge.

I never got sick. I did all the housework, cooking, and relentless cleaning for the better part of a week. I also continued working as per normal, but of course can’t tell you what I am working on, or how much it has consumed me for the last year.

The year has been brutal. Quite how I’ve held on to the few friends I have throughout it is anybody’s guess – but by the same token, I keep hearing the same from them too – about the relentless trudge from day to day – the work commitments – the chores – the disasters that seem to unfold one after another.

We are a house of seven now. Eight on particularly bad days. The chaos is relentless, and there’s no way to ever get ahead, let alone keep up.

I still haven’t managed to start running again. The only way I can see it happening at the moment is to tip myself out of bed at 6am – when the world is still dark, and the roads are invariably covered in ice – which means I can’t run on them. If I run in the evening, that pushes back content creation for the YouTube channel even later.

I used to try and take part in group meet-ups on the internet – they invariably start at 8pm – I’m rarely available in time.

It’s no surprise that posting words here has stuttered almost to a standstill at times.

The funny thing? In the middle of the chaos and mayhem, receiving words from distant friends has become more precious than it ever was before.

Anyway.

It’s Valentines Day today. Movie night tonight, and perhaps get some food delivered. A deliberate step away from the mayhem for at least a couple of hours.

My middle daughter is working at the huge pub in town. I would love to be a fly-on-the-wall in the bar on Valentines night – to see the nervous first dates unfold. Actually, I’m guessing first dates rarely if ever happen on Valentines Day, do they? That would just add to the pressure and turn you both into bumbling idiots.

Here I am at the beginning of another week, and I can’t help wondering where on earth the weekend went. I will admit – I spent much of it cleaning the house – which was made relatively straightforward by most of the household staying shut in bedrooms – to hopefully stop the virus that had slowly worked it’s way around us in it’s tracks.

It’s amazing how things stay where you left them when nobody is around.

By yesterday afternoon everybody had begun to re-appear from their hiding places. After cooking dinner for everybody I put a movie on in the lounge and we tried to watch it – of course the newest member of the household – now two weeks old – had other ideas.

She picks her moments to wake up and announce her presence.

Late in the evening I found myself alone in the lounge and picked a random live show to listen to while noodling on the laptop – and the most wonderful moment of serendipity unfolded.

I had not heard of Kacey Musgraves until last night.

She reminds me a little of Taylor, a little of Kate Voegele, a little of Christina Perri, but mostly not like any of them. Over the space of a couple of hours I listened to both the “Golden Hour” and “Deeper Well” albums.

I messaged a friend from the mid-west – telling them about my discovery – predicting their inevitable eye-roll. They responded instantly with the kind of excited platitudes you never quite expect, but are nevertheless wonderful.

Isn’t it great when somebody you know discovers something you like too, but you perhaps haven’t shared.

After a day cleaning the house from top to bottom, I slept on the sofa last night – to avoid any chance of catching the bug my other half had on Friday night. My youngest daughter and her baby have been on lock-down too – staying in their room to avoid any chance of catching anything while I cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned.

It looks like we’re out of the woods now.

While wrapped in a blanket on the sofa last night I watched a documentary on the TV about the Polgar sisters – the youngest of which, Judit, was the strongest female chess player on the planet for decades. She may still be – she retired while still at the top.

Something that particularly struck me about Judit’s story was her game against Garry Kasparov in 1994 – when he violated the touch-move rule (he essentially cheated). He was interviewed about it during the documentary – decades later – and instead of being contrite, came across as incredibly conceited, arrogant and dishonest.

I’m guessing the documentary gave rise to the very, very odd dream I then had.

I was travelling with work, and had a laptop and clothes in my backpack. For some reason I took a detour en-route, and ended up at a railway station where I met up with an old friend – a professional chess player. Here’s the odd thing – I have no memory of ever meeting the girl in the real world – but apparently I had known her for years. She ran towards me on the railway platform, and we hugged before setting off to find her fiancé – who was waiting in-line in a coffee shop within the station.

I shook hands with her fiancé, and was in the middle of exchanging greetings when he suddenly looked past me in horror – and realised their bags had vanished – and so had the backpack I had placed at my feet moments before. The hollow feeling was horrific.

And that’s when I woke up.

For a few minutes after waking up, I worked through the moment in my head – realising there had been some jostling in the coffee shop, and wondering if there was anything I might have done differently – if I should have had air-tags in my bag, or something similar.

I’m still thinking about it now – an event that never happened – hours later.

My other half went down with the bug that’s gone through the house this morning – which we’re guessing in norovirus. The builders were supposed to return today to continue working on our now non existent bathroom and laundry room (yes, that’s right – we are down to one bathroom, no shower, and no washing machine at the moment). They heard the word “norovirus” and retreated until at least Monday.

Just after all that happened, my other half was then so ill that I had to strip the bed and wash the bedclothes in the bath – with no way to dry them. They are currently hanging on the washing line in the garden, while the sky tries to rain on them (we have several sets of bedclothes, thankfully).

After sorting all of that out, cleaning the house from top to bottom with bleach sprays, hoovering everywhere, and tidying up, our elderly cat decided to pee and throw up on the landing – because obviously that’s helpful.

Thankfully our middle daughter seems to be on the road to recovery, and our eldest is pretty much back-to-normal (she’s eating everything in the kitchen while I write this). We seem to have shielded our youngest daughter and her baby from it all. I have requested they stay in their room until tomorrow night at least, if they can.

At this point I’m just wondering what’s going to happen next. I’ve gone through half a bottle of hand-gel just for myself so far today.

In other news, you might have noticed I’ve reverted the blog back to stock photos instead of AI generated sketches. This was entirely on purpose – to ward off the anti-AI brigade that seem to be marching the internet in much the same way that the trans-brigade went after J K Rowling following her request that women be allowed to be women, and to protect their spaces (mad idea, I know).

To say I disagree with keyboard warriors about most things is an understatement. I don’t understand what they think they achieve, other than causing legions of people to block, ignore, and dislike them. I also notice they rarely go by their real names – because of course they know they would become unemployed remarkably quickly if their toxic use of social media were to become known.

While having a rant, I’m getting ever-so-slightly fed-up of people from all over the developed world complaining at length about the political leaders their countries voted for – and never actually doing anything about it. Of course there’s money to be made in repeating what the silent majority is thinking to draw their likes and comments.

Invariably – because of algorithmic timelines – they are preaching to the converted – just as the people they are complaining about are doing the same – and given the mighty social platforms would rather keep you reading than cause you to walk away, they’re never going to cross the streams.

Don’t even get me started with social networks allowing robots to generate content. It doesn’t take a genius to spot a “generated” post, and yet they are flooded with reactions – partly from robots fanning the arguments.

Google+ got it right, many years ago, when they forced everybody to assume their real identity. Without your real name, and your real profile photo, you could not take part – and enough people didn’t like that, that the effort failed – so nobody can really complain now about the world they helped create – where anybody can hide in plain sight, and enlist armies of idiot robots to pedal any message they want, no matter how hateful.

Phew.

Deep breaths.

I’m going to go watch the Winter Olympics. If you want to say hi, feel free. Send me a stupid selfie or something – I could do with something light hearted and fun to lift the weekend out of the ditch somehow.

Maybe I should go order some LEGO from Amazon to get delivered?

We are having the downstairs bathroom ripped out at the moment. A complete replacement for the bathroom I have used every day for the last twenty five years. It’s the worst bathroom in the house but I put up with it, clean it, and make the best of it while everybody else uses the bathroom upstairs.

After the first team of builders turned up early in the week for a “one week job”, and ripped out the fittings and plaster, we were left with an empty room for a day before the electrician arrived – this morning.

It turns out we have lived here for 25 years with the risk of being electrocuted. The ground at our electrical circuit breaker has never been “bonded” to the metal pipes that deliver water on the opposite side of the house. This is apparently quite dangerous. Fixing this situation has added to the cost of the bathroom quite considerably, because getting said grounding wire from one side of the house to the other was… interesting.

Along the way, floorboards had to come up. This meant moving a bookcase, which meant transporting the contents of it from one end of the house to another, and making my own bedroom un-passable for some time. I returned it to normal before my other half returned from work.

Anyway.

After finishing work today, I was given the task of walking into town to buy some tortilla chips. We had ordered them with the shopping to make dinner tonight (we had nachos), but some enterprising eating machine in the house (one of my daughters) had eaten the tortillas already. Of course none of them owned up.

So off I went – in the pouring rain.

While walking towards town I happened upon a young woman walking in front of me, talking on her phone, and taking up the entire path. My only way around her was to slither my way across a muddy verge next to the footpath. She still didn’t notice me as I drew level with her – hopping from one hopefully solid patch of grass to another, and praying that gravity would not deliver me to the enormous puddles surrounding us.

Even as I swore under my breath, she took no notice, and gave me no quarter.

Moments later, while turning past the entrance to Narnia (an old joke about a single lamp-post that stands among trees at the back of the high-street), another woman appeared – walking towards me – and forced me off the path once again.

What is it with people at the moment?

Perhaps they were non-player-characters in the TV show about my life that I’m not supposed to know about – challenging me to do something stupid, or to explode in rage. The directors will have to do better than that.

How come they never throw any proper sliding doors moments at me?

I simplified the front page of the blog this evening – returning it to it’s old-school roots. It’s not a magazine, newspaper, or media outlet – it’s a personal journal, filled with the almost daily, forgettable thoughts of a fairly ordinary guy struggling with pretty much the same idiocy that everybody else struggles with.

Yes, I know I filter an awful lot – but then who really wants to know everything?

It’s probably pretty good that we all have filters (well… all except my middle daughter, who seems to have a pretty direct connection with her thoughts and her mouth). If we had no filters there would be no such thing as quiet disapproval, yearning, or liking from afar – which make up much of what it is to be “English” – or to be me, quite frankly.

I am so english at times. An old friend from America once burst out laughing when I did something and said “whoops-a-daisy”. She thought it was just a line from a movie, and then instantly saw me through Hugh Grant tinted spectacles.

Nope. All those tropes from Richard Curtis movies are true. All of them. We worry about everything – particularly what other people think of us, and what to say in a given situation. We root for the anti-heroes – the ordinary folk. We don’t aspire to be something greater; we invariable aspire for no more than to make it to tomorrow without causing too much harm, and to arrive in one piece. We choose the quiet path, and hope to be left alone.

Every time I set forth across the popular social networks, I’m immediately struck by the young people of a certain country who compete in comments to be the funniest person in the room – almost invariably at the expense of the original poster, a minority, or just “anybody not like them”. It’s infuriating.

I’ve withdrawn almost entirely from the “social internet” in recent months and years. It’s almost like I don’t know it any more – even though I helped build some of the early parts of it. It has evolved, and enabled the proliferations of a culture that I really don’t like spending time anywhere near.

I’ve never forgotten Barack Obama’s thoughts while being interviewed at a youth conference several years ago;

I get a sense among certain young people on social media that the way of making change is to be as judgemental as possible about other people.

If I tweet or hashtag about how you didn’t do something right or used the wrong verb, then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself because ‘Man did you see how woke I was? I called you out!’

If all you’re doing is casting stones, you are probably not going to get that far.

This idea of purity, and you’re never compromised, and you’re always politically woke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly.

The world is messy, there are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you.

The truth is, on the internet everything is simplified, but when you meet people face to face, it turns out it is complicated. It is harder to be as obnoxious and cruel in person as people can be anonymously on the internet.

Anyway.

I didn’t mean to start sliding down that particular slippery slope.

It’s funny, isn’t it – you start out with the intention of emptying your head a little, and before you know it, you’re dredging up speeches. Dangerously close to mansplaining.

I can’t stand mansplaining. I’ve even become averse to writing “you” rather than “I” while writing blog posts. “You” makes presumptions – “I” typically invites disclosure.

I wonder if it’s too late to drink coffee at 10:30pm?

At 1am yesterday evening – just as we were switching the lights off around the house, brushing our teeth, and getting ready for bed, our youngest daughter came down the stairs at some speed, carrying her baby daughter.

“We need to go to A&E – she’s not breathing properly, and 111 (on-call paramedics) said to take her”.

They all piled into the car, and my other half took them to hospital while I paced the living room at home, watched their progress on Google Maps, and drank several cups of coffee.

They returned at 4:30am. I got into bed at 5am, and back up for work at 8am. After emptying the dishwasher and cleaning the kitchen up I realised I didn’t need to be up until 9am, so went back to bed for an extra half an hour.

To say I’ve been tired today is an understatement and a half. You know that curious overheating thing your body does when you’ve not had enough sleep? That.

It’s now just past 9pm, and I’m in bed. Writing this to remember the “day that happened” in years to come. Perhaps I’ll wheel this story out when our little charge is getting married – if I’m still about then.

In other news, workmen arrive tomorrow to begin ripping our downstairs bathroom out – meaning we’re reduced to one bathroom for everybody. With a little luck we’ll only be without the bathroom for a week – and then will have a wonderful new bathroom to luxuriate in. It’s only taken us 25 years to replace it.

I’m half-thinking about joining the gym in town and using their showers for the week. I’ve been thinking about getting back into running anyway – and it’s as good an excuse as any to get back into doing something. Of course I’ll have no way of washing my gym clothes for a week, but then I could always wash them in the sink I suppose – I did it on holiday a couple of years ago.

Anyway.

I should sleep.

The clock ticked past midnight half an hour ago, and ushered February into existence – or at least it did for me. An old friend in Australia is already getting up tomorrow morning. Friends in the US are still sitting down for dinner. It’s a funny thing – life aboard this spinning ball of mud, and the importance we attach to the passing of days, weeks, months, and years.

While up to my neck in work last week, I recalled an article I read some time ago – that if any of us were not here tomorrow – for whatever reason – the world wouldn’t stop. Within days our work would have been handed over, and progressed by somebody else. So when we invent our mountains of stress – based mostly on the bars we set ourselves to meet – it’s good to remember that whatever we’re doing for somebody else really doesn’t matter that much.

What we do for ourselves, our families, and our friends is a very different thing.

I went out for a drink with good friends last night – and drank more than one drink for the first time since Christmas. Oh my word did I ever have a bad head this morning. It was a wonderful night out though – even if I did get ribbed mercilessly about the whole “THE Jonathan Beckett” story. I smiled, and admitted how wonderful it is to have friends that keep you so well grounded – not that I would ever become any sort of aloof idiot. I can’t stand pretentiousness.

(if you’ve not read the story, a tradesman we hired recently asked me if I was “the” Jonathan Beckett – the one on YouTube – my other half found this rather more funny than I’m entirely comfortable with – and it’s happened again since…)

I think it’s a very British thing – taking the piss out of your friends – a strange sort of endearment, or affection. I don’t think other countries really do it.

It was wonderful to catch up with everybody else’s adventures and escapades. I remarked during the evening about the trap I often fall into – of never really wanting to go out, but invariably enjoying my time with friends enormously once I’m actually out.

I’m sure somebody somewhere will have a pigeon-hole to put that personality trait into, and be able to lecture me at length about how that relates to Myers-Briggs or whatever you call the mumbo-jumbo that pigeon-hold-builders waffle on about while telling everybody else how to live their lives, rather than concern themselves with their own life.

That turned isn’t a bit of a slippery slope rant, didn’t it. Let’s just say I don’t react well to being told who I am.

Anyway…

My eldest daughter – who struggles with stepping outside the front door some days – asked if I might like to accompany her into town this morning. I pulled my shoes and coat on, and we wandered all over town together. We had a late breakfast at the pub and couldn’t decide if it was a late breakfast or an early lunch. We did discover that you can’t order half the menu before lunchtime. We had no real reason for the trip – no errands to run – and it was kind of lovely – just spending a couple of hours together.

Tomorrow morning – if my youngest daughter manages to eject herself from bed, have a wash, and get dressed – I’ll take her, her boyfriend, and their new-born baby out for breakfast too. They are still learning everything – so leaving the house with the baby is a huge logistical exercise still – preparing all the things they might (but probably won’t) need.

I need to find something to do with my middle daughter too. After being off work for months recovering from ACL surgery, she’s now working like a trojan – I’ve hardly seen her for the last week. There are signs of her existence of course; shoes, bags, and various items of clothes dumped around the house – but a curious absence of “her”.

It’s getting late.

I should head to bed. And catch up with distant friends. And put the dishwasher on. And empty the washing machine. And tidy the lounge up. And… and… and…

I sat down late last night to write something, then dithered over the opening sentence for a few minutes before asking myself “why am I even doing this?”. Moments afterwards I shut the computer down and wandered up to bed.

It’s been a long week, and we’re only half-way through it. It doesn’t feel like a Wednesday at all. Of course part of that – for me at least – is because it’s already Thursday. Wednesday ceased to exist over an hour ago.

I’m only too aware that I’ve fallen off the internet bicycle once again. I haven’t written an email, sent a message, posted anything to the blog, or the various social networks in days. I need to do something about that.

I’ve never been one to chase numbers though. I see people “playing the game” at Threads, BlueSky, Instagram, Substack, or wherever else, and wonder what there is to gain in having thousands of followers. Why chase it? Surely if you’re going to be found and followed, it’s better to happen organically, rather than through any “scheme”.

Of course I see the irony – my YouTube channel has tens of thousands of followers. That’s a bit different though. I didn’t go looking for them – they found me. I never advertised. I never gamed anybody or anything.

Don’t even get me started on the common millennial business model, where people try to scrape a margin off the work of others – without creating anything of value or worth themselves. It drives me round the bend.

Anyway.

It’s late.

I should go collapse into bed.

Two more days until the weekend.

While getting on with my work early this afternoon, the community midwife arrived at our door to measure, weigh, and inspect my granddaughter. It would appear there is a lot of paperwork involved in bringing a person officially into existence, and making sure they are happy and healthy.

I caught bits and pieces of the conversation, that involved lots of the words “normal”, and “good”.

And then I heard the term “A & E”.

Suddenly whatever I was working on left my head, and my stomach fell away. I don’t remember what was on the radio, but I wasn’t hearing it any more – I was hearing every word being uttered in the next room.

I wasn’t in the room, but I could guess the reaction – given the sudden turn towards “Don’t worry – I’m sure there’s nothing wrong. It’s probably nothing. I’ve checked everything I can, and everything looks fine. I just think we need to make sure”.

The funny thing? She then carried on with her checks, and asked to take my daughter’s blood pressure.

I wonder if it broke the measuring device?

Minutes later my other half arrived home, having dropped everything. An hour after that, the emergency room physician in our closest major hospital did a “top to bottom” examination, looked up, smiled, and said “You have a perfectly healthy baby”. He then paused, and added “but she has a bit of a blocked nose”.

The relief was palpable.

I guess we should be grateful that the wheels of the national health service turned so rapidly. After a lifetime’s experience waiting in A & E after minor accidents or mystery illnesses for hour upon hour, today we discovered that when a newborn baby arrives on their doorstep, all the cogs turn at once.

Given the amount of flack the national health service often receives – from an entirely predictable demographic – I thought it worth calling out how amazing they were today. Yes, they scared the life out of us, but they also stepped up to the plate without hesitation.

This evening the house is quiet once more.

A wonderful quiet.

Quiet except for the gentle music I’m filling the junk room with. A playlist called “Winding Down”. I might have poured a glass of red wine for myself and my other half too.

Breathe.

Remember to breathe.