Recursive Words

It’s been remarkably quiet in the house over the last few days. The reality? Newborn babies often do no more than nurse, and sleep. My daughter seems to be coping well, but not without eyes all around her of course.

We’re trying not to be too involved. It’s a difficult balance.

We’re trying not to have opinions or thoughts about the how, when, and why of it all – we’re trying to let Mum and Dad figure things out for themselves – letting them figure out ways that work for them. Of course we’re here if asked, and can conjure whatever might be needed along the way – but otherwise we suspect that right now, our absence it the best thing.

There are the most wonderful moments along the way.

Yesterday morning I wandered into the lounge and discovered my eldest daughter sitting next to a newly assembled pram, having quite the conversation with it’s tiny occupant. I took several photos before she realised I was there.

The evening before our middle daughter lept at the chance to look after the youngest member of the household for a few minutes, and told her all about the red rose on her rugby shirt, and that she might make a wonderful winger one day – given her apparently long legs.

Last night we escaped for a few hours to watch a movie, and let the kids organise their own dinner. We saw “Hamnet” – that is being predicted to sweep the board at the various awards shows.

I have mixed feelings about.

Jessie Buckley was incredible. She towered over everything and everybody in the movie – to such an extent that I couldn’t help feeling it became unbalanced.

I guess it doesn’t help – even though Hamnet is fiction – that we know so little about the real life of William Shakespeare. I’ve been to Stratford. I’ve walked around the fake house.

I’ve always suspected there’s more to the “rhetoric of accumulation” arguments around the authorship of his plays than most admit to. If you’ve never read about it, there’s reasonable doubt that the Shakespeare we have been sold for generations wrote all of the works attributed to him.

Anyway. Just give Jessie Buckley the academy award already.

After the cinema we had dinner at a nearby pub before wandering home – and discovered a remarkably quiet and orderly household on our return. This morning is more of the same – it’s very odd. It’s almost like everybody has found their place in the new order of things, and slotted into it without complaint. For now.

Coffee. I need a coffee.

Oh – one more thing – I’ll relate this story before my other half delights in relating it – she thinks it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened. We had a tradesman come to the house last week to clean our roof. While talking to him on the doorstep, he paused, then asked “are you THE Jonathan Beckett?” – I frowned, not knowing how to answer, and he continued “the Jonathan Beckett from YouTube?”. My other half now calls me “THE Jonathan Beckett” at every opportunity.

Postscript – I originally titled this post “Six in the House” before counting on my fingers and realising there’s now seven of us. It comes to something when you have to count everybody on your fingers to get the correct answer…

My eldest daughter arrived home from Japan this evening – a bucket-list trip she has been saving towards for several years. Given her struggles with anxiety, I’m so proud of her for making the trip, and proving to herself that she can stand on her own two feet and “do all the things”.

We promised to meet her at London Heathrow on her return, and true to our word, we were the first people she set eyes upon after clearing arrivals.

I love the arrivals halls at airports. I’ve never forgotten the opening and closing titles of the movie “Love Actually”. There’s something about the anticipation, and the joy of re-connecting with loved ones. In a world that’s often chaotic, messy, and unforgiving, it’s worth remembering that the simplest moments can often mean the most.

The journey home was filled with all manner of stories of adventures in and around Kyoto and Tokyo – of city walks, sushi bars, kimono fittings, shops filled with kawaii plushies, and visits to Onsen – hot spring bathing houses.

After getting home she fished all manner of thoughtful mementos from her bags, and handed them out. The toothy grins around the lounge spoke volumes.

On a side note, I dare you to watch the following video without falling to pieces:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go get some tissues – because of course I had to watch it too.

If you’re wondering about the title of the post, I received a Gojira keyring and wall hanging – which will take pride of place in the background of tomorrow’s conference calls.

One minute you’re calling that girl you met and asking if she might to go out for a drink. The next minute you’re standing at the front of a church together. A minute after that you’re chasing little ones around the house. A minute or two later they’ve left school, and have their first jobs. And a minute after that you find out you’re going to become a grandfather.

My first grandchild was born a little earlier this evening.

Where did the time go?

Of course I know exactly where it went – working, washing up, washing clothes, tidying up, going on days out, visiting school productions, school fundraisers, helping with school projects, helping with homework, swearing under my breath, looking at the ceiling, laughing, crying, shouting, holding my head in my hands (more than once).

And now I get to watch my daughter do it all again.

It’s funny, how everything goes around in circles, isn’t it. We bring our children up the best way we know how. They presume when they are young that we have the answers for everything. Eventually they have an “oh shit” moment where they realise we were making it up as we went along – but they also figure out (hopefully) that there’s nothing wrong with that.

We hope that we have armed them with enough to make their way. We might grimace from time to time at their decisions, but we also know it’s best to try and let them get on with it.

I’m reminded of the question and answer from Walt Whitman’s famous poem:

The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

I won’t be stealing my daughter’s chance to share her first photos and stories with the world. I’m not going to be one of those parents or grandparents that leverages their children or grandchildren for reflected attention. They are her stories to tell, and her moments to share.

It’s only just dawning on me that I have to learn how to be a grandparent.

I suppose I’ve got a year or so to figure it out.

A year or two to pull out my favourite story books, and to introduce another (hopefully) willing accomplice to the adventures of Peter Pan, Captain Hook, Tinkerbell, Aslan, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, Mole, Badger, Ratty and Mr Toad, and of course Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Kanga and Owl.

I wonder if children realise we enjoy reading and sharing the stories as much as they do listening to them?

The problem I vaguely alluded to this weekend has returned to bite us in the ass once more. Days of chaos and mayhem have delivered us back to the place we started. Is suppose there’s a perverse humour to it, when you think about it.

I hope you’ll forgive me for being deliberately vague. I learned a long time ago about burning my own fingers.

I wobbled this week about returning my personal blog to Substack. While wondering what to do, I scrolled their homepage for a while – to see what others are writing about. Among the endless posts about engagement, followers, subscribers, and whatever else I read a fascinating post about Substack’s slow pivot towards triggering dopamine based behaviours. While reading, I realised I had quite accidentally done the right thing – moving my personal blog away.

I pulled the trigger – returning the blog back to Substack after a couple of weeks away.

This blog is never going to have material value. Its contents will never be able to be measured in any real sense. It’s nothing more than the midnight ramblings of a parent, a father, an employee, a nerd, a geek, a gamer, and an aspiring procrastinator – who wishes he could switch off more, and might one day write a book – for no other reason than he likes writing.

Oh! I tried out “SudoWrite” this week – the “gold standard” in terms of AI powered creative writing tools. While it was very impressive, once you actually take a step back and look at what it’s doing, you realise it’s all a parlour trick.

I’ve been using AI as a tool at work for some time – to help write code. Over that time, I’ve formed pretty strong opinions about it. It’s blindingly fast. It has incredible research skills. It has eidetic memory. And it’s mindlessly stupid. Properly moronic.

I think the basis for most people’s fears about AI are somewhat misplaced. It’s not until you try to use it for real-world applications that you realise it never has any idea what it’s doing, what it’s done, or how to even begin to see a bigger picture.

Like I said – any semblance of “intelligence” is a parlour trick. It’s not intelligent. I’m reminded of the Winnie the Pooh books – and the difference between Rabbit and Pooh. Rabbit knows things. Pooh has insights about things. AI has no insight, because it cannot think outside the box. Sure, it can extrapolate, calculate, summarise, and extract themes – but it doesn’t really understand anything – and doesn’t really learn either.

AI is predisposed to tell you what you want to hear – and unfortunately most people are predisposed to accept what they are told – particularly by computers.

A little while ago, I caught AI not following the instructions it had been explicitly given. I pulled it up for its behaviour, and it apologised to me – admitting that it had no excuses for what it had done. It was like dealing with a small child, standing looking at it’s own shoes – not knowing what to do next.

Anyway.

It’s getting late. I should go brush my teeth, and fall into bed.

Tomorrow is another day.

After a relatively peaceful week at home, everything was thrown into disarray last night. I’m not going to write anything about it here, because it’s not my story to tell – but it will be me picking up the pieces. It always is.

Forgive me if I’m being deliberately vague.

I’m just getting a bit tired of towing the line – doing what is expected, and telling people what they want to hear all the time – while seeing straight through whatever’s unfolding in front of me and knowing better than to do or say anything to question it – for the “greater good”.

Anyway.

Enough about that – not that I really let on what “that” is.

After my middle daughter wandered into the lounge talking to whoever would listen about some Tiktok video or other earlier, I stopped her in her tracks – and made her realise how many hours she has wasted scrolling short-form videos recently.

I really fear for the upcoming generation – that have grown up in a world filled with reaction videos, fabricated slop, and hot takes on anything and everything. You only have to look at the comments on anything garnering a reaction to see the army of idiots trying to come out with the funniest line.

Whatever happened to being thoughtful, and genuine?

I could go on. I just deleted a quite lengthy paragraphy descending into a spiral of foaming invective. Nobody needs to read that.

After spending a night in a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris last night, my eldest daughter boarded a plane to Amsterdam first thing this morning, then finally boarded a hopefully more reliable Boeing 787 to Osaka mid-afternoon. I say hopefully, because this one was only two hours late, instead of cancelled entirely.

What is it with Boeing aircraft over the last twenty years?

Anyway. She’s on her way. At the time of writing, she’s hurtling overhead Kazakhstan very quickly indeed. During the early hours of the morning she will arrive in Kansai, then make her way to Osaka, then board a train to Kyoto, then a taxi to her hotel.

It’s a hell of a journey, isn’t it.

Back on this side of the world I’ve been churning through chores and errands as best I can – jumping between three projects at work, washing clothes, tidying up behind everybody, and offering cups of coffee to gas engineers while they ponder on why our central heating is still not behaving itself. There were murmurs about heat exchangers, and replacing of water pumps, and plans made to return later in the week.

I did warn them I might be sitting in the corridor of a maternity ward by then.

Work today went really well. I can’t share what I was up to, but it was interesting. A different project. A break of sorts. An interesting requirement, and a chance to invent for a change.

I’m not sure if I mentioned it on the blog, but I ordered a new keyboard last week. A “retro” keyboard – designed to look like a Commodore 64, but more importantly with mechanical, “clacky” keys. Oh my word can I type fast on it. It brings back memories of the keyboards computers had thirty years ago. Now I need to choose a suitably retro word processor to use with it.

There’s a huge temptation to put a pre-order in on the “new” Commodore 64. I don’t need it, and I don’t even have time to play with it, but it would be fun.

Oh crikey… somehow it’s nearly 11pm already. How do I keep managing to do this?

While emptying my head into the shiny new bullet journal a few minutes ago, it struck me that I haven’t written in the blog today – and I really should, because I would scarcely believe the chaos and mayhem currently surrounding me in years to come unless I write it down.

My youngest daughter still hasn’t had the baby. Her body hasn’t shouted “all systems go” just yet. It wasn’t due for another few days anyway – but we all feel we’re on borrowed time, and wonder if we’ll make it another day, every day.

The waiting game coincides with my other half travelling across the country with work tomorrow – so sods law will of course dictate that the baby will make its appearance while she’s away, and she’ll miss everything.

Tomorrow a heating engineer will also call to look at our recalcitrant heating system, which refuses to warm the house to anything like the temperature it should be.

I’ll also need to hand over work things to a co-worker that I should have on Friday – to continue in my stead while I work on another project for a few days.

On top of all of that, our eldest daughter was supposed to be landing in Osaka, Japan tomorrow morning – but that’s gone out of the window after the Boeing 787 she was supposed to be boarding in Paris refused to cooperate. She’s stuck in a hotel overnight, and will return to the airport first thing tomorrow morning to hopefully fly from Paris to Amsterdam, and then from Amsterdam to Osaka.

We felt SO sorry for her this evening. It’s her first holiday without us – a dream trip to Japan – a bucket list destination – and Air France have not only taken a day of that holiday from her, but also put her stress through the roof (she has suffered with anxiety for years).

We’re also waiting on a quote for the roof and gutters to get cleaned, re-lined, and repaired. And to confirm a quote to rip out the downstairs bathroom, which saw better days twenty years ago.

There’s always something – or if this week is a guide – there’s always twenty things.

I’m not sure I’ve really written about something rather siesmic that’s going on in our family at the moment. I’m about to become a grandfather. My youngest daughter is very, very pregnant. We’re talking days or hours away from “all systems go”.

We wondered if we would make it to the end of Friday without a panicked race towards the hospital, or if Saturday or Sunday might look more likely. Given that a certain somebody’s body has progressed no further in turning life as she knows it upside down, we’re still all still here – counting the hours – not sleeping properly – and wondering when – not if.

As long as we get to through the next few days with everybody safe and well, I really don’t mind how we get there, or how long things take.

I had to share our current situation at work this week – given that I might have to vanish at a moment’s notice. Some of my co-workers have already started calling me Grandad.

A good friend asked last night what I will be known as – Grandad, Gramps, Grandpa? I really don’t mind. Whatever I get called, I have enormous boots to fill. My grandparents still loom large in my core memories. As a child, I never tired of listening to their stories, or helping them with errands, chores, or just tagging along with whatever they were doing.

I remember playing chess on the floor at christmas-time against Grandad Beckett – a tall, quiet yorkshireman. I’ll never forget his mantra – “Hear all, see all, do all, and say nowt”. He taught me about saving money, and the importance of eating brussel sprouts.

I also remember spending hours in the shed at my other Grandad’s – Grandad Hall – making endless swords and battleships out of wooden offcuts, and learning songs from him that I wasn’t allowed to sing at home. One of the songs was a variation on “Old King Cole” that ended with him falling into an outside toilet pit.

“The sun shone on the toilet door, the old king had a fit. Old King Cole fell down the hole, and he was covered in… sweet violets”. Oh, how we laughed.

So yes – I’m becoming a grandad at some point over the next few days. I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. While washing up earlier, I thought about it – and realised that at least my grandchildren will get to know me. When I see people having children later in life, I wonder if their children miss out by perhaps not knowing their grandparents for as long as they might during their formative years.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be the first in my generation in our family to become a grandparent. That feels very odd.

The universe sometimes exhibits a wonderful sense of humor. The night before last the temperature dropped to well below zero (celcius, for my American friends). Well below freezing point. So of course the central heating in our house chose to stop working.

By mid-morning a heating engineer had paid us a visit, and found the cause. The drain pipe from the boiler had frozen at the point it exits the house. This in turn caused condensation forming within the boiler to back up into the boiler instead of making it’s way out of the house – which resulted in it slowly filling with water and putting it’s own flame out.

The solution? Wait.

Leave the heating on continuous, and keep trying to re-light the boiler until it was dry enough to start working again – which it eventually did at about 5pm.

In other news, Amazon delivered two sets of Bullet Journals in recent days. They sent them twice because they sent the wrong books once, and then sent the wrong books again. The first time I thought it was a typical warehouse mistake, raised a return, and re-ordered. The second time I filled out the return form, and left a comment about perhaps checking their stock codes.

At least the man in the post office made the process of returning things to Amazon straightforward.

After leaving the post office I wandered into town, and went bullet journal shopping – picking up two newly re-branded books from “T J Jones” – who I will call “W H Smiths” until the end of time – one for me, and one for my other half.

While wandering home, I pondered on the whole circular productivity nightmare – and the endless drive to do more in less time – to balance more, to manage more, to achieve more. More, more, more. I guess going back to a paper planner is a reaction of sorts to that.

I’ve never really thought of bullet journals as “planners” though – they’re more mindfulness machines. The act of writing things down tends to anchor it somehow. Typing doesn’t achieve the same thing at all. I’ve no idea why.

Anyway.

It’s getting late, and I should probably go collapse into bed. I can’t believe it’s Wednesday already.

I returned to work today – or rather, I turned through ninety degrees within the junk-room, plugged my work laptop back in, and grimaced while clicking the Outlook and Teams icons.

Only they didn’t work.

At some point over Christmas, my digital overlords had decided I was no longer welcome. For a few moments I wondered if I had been summarily ejected from my employer – and that the letter, or phone call had not happened.

In the spirit of all things that pull the rug from beneath you, just after posting an email from my personal email account to the company support department, Outlook and Teams suddenly burst into life.

I will also admit that the prospect of not being able to login – essentially being cut off from the matix – didn’t cause me to panic at all. I unexpectedly felt a wave of excitement – that I could go make a coffee and not be in a rush to do anything at all – because there was nothing I could do about it.

The universe obviously recognised that I was having quite the wrong reaction, and fixed itself – rather than let me have any sort of a reprieve from clearing a week’s worth of emails and teams conversations.

After those first few minutes, everything unfolded remarkably calmly.

Here’s where I admit that I burned the midnight oil over Christmas creating a secondary blog. A professional blog, full of pretend cleverness and wisdom. A blog that could probably be used as a narcolepsy weapon of sorts – to cause entire armies to fall asleep with just the mention of it’s name, let alone it’s contents.

The reason for the existence of the second “professional” blog is perhaps even more amusing than it’s contents. I built it to figure out how to use the tooling to build it – ending up with a blog was a side-effect (a bit like the guy that was trying to make something else when he accidentally created teflon – it’s a good story – look it up).

The funny thing? After creating the blog, I thought I better check with higher powers than myself that sharing technical knowledge, wisdom, and experience is actually allowed. Thankfully it is. Huge sigh of relief, given that the blog had been sitting there for several days already.

So. There we are. That’s what I’ve been up to today. Oh – and walking all over town looking for a new bullet journal after Amazon sent the wrong ones through. Tomorrow lunchtime I have to walk back across town to deposit the wrong notebooks at the post office to wing their way back whence they came – which will no doubt coincide with the arrival of the new ones while I’m out.

Let’s hope my daughters answer the door.

At least I had the presence of mind this morning to tell my co-workers that I might have to leave in a hurry at some point this week, given the very, very pregnant state of my daughter.

My other half has to travel with work one day next week. I’m laying bets the universe will crack open it’s bag of throwing spanners, and line them up, ready to start flinging them.