family | Perfect Path

MyFlickrYear24 Photo — marginally less pathetic than my Spotify For Artists 2024 stats.

I’ll never be a consistent weeknoter – at least in the sense of consistently posting week by week. I’m consistent in my irregularity – I just looked and it’s almost exactly a year since my last one.

So this is December 2024. I’ve been looking forward to this (in the way that people say to their proctologist that they’re looking forward to their next appointment) for a while. I’m now into the last few weeks of my fifties. After the weekend I’ll be saying “I’m now into the last fortnight of my fifties.” That’s how I’ve been dealing with it. Doing a time check every now and then through this year in an effort to make the passing of time feel slower. I’m pretty sure it’s the anticipation that’s doing me in. Once I’m there and I have a badge that says “I’m 60 (you might have to speak up a bit!)” or something, then I’ll be OK with it. That’s what’s always happened in the past with so-called significant birthdays anyway.

The main difference with this one is that it comes with some small benefits, not just free NHS prescriptions but also the start of my Audit Commission pension. It stems from my employment there between 1996 and 2002 when 2024 still seemed a long way off. Nothing huge, but still, it’s money every week for the rest of my life (the end of which, currently at any rate, “seems a long way off”)

On Monday I went to a Hard Art meeting. It was exhausting. Lots of people said so afterwards, although I always find it exhausting, so I’m not sure what was different from them. I’m pleased to see that lately we’ve adopted more Open Space ways of working (without it being *me* who’s pushed it to the fore). There’s lots more to think about in terms of how we work on stuff together and I’m a bit depressed that I haven’t been able to give that as much attention as I’d like this year, but when I pause and look back, I recognise that we’ve made progress.

I’ve been experimenting with republishing my micro.blog entries in a digest here. If there isn’t a digest that’s because I didn’t write anything. I use micro.blog as the place I write stuff that will end up on BlueSky/Threads/Mastodon. Everything gets cross-posted to those three (plus my old faithful tumblr). I have a script that runs just before midnight and checks the RSS feed for my micro.blog and puts them into a reverse-chronological list with a timestamp that links to the original – as always, it’s a prototype for something else. What I want is a digest of all my microblogging activity – a record of the little conversations I’ve had that day – but those are fragmented across the three platforms and although federation is coming (probably in a slightly sub-optimal way for the two newer ones) it’s still hard to catch it all. It’s also not mission-critical. My main aim at the moment is that it doesn’t piss people off.

I started to feel that thing where the natural world round here is slowing down getting ready to pause and reset, but the human world is speeding up, desperately trying to get stuff done before any sort of pause.

I’m not rushing, but I sent a few emails to tidy things up and clarify when we’re going to do some work and when it can be billed for etc. I’m very grateful not to be having the kind of end of year where it’s unclear just how we’re going to make it through to January. My condolences and solidarity if you are having that kind of end of year – it sucks.

On Wednesday, I remembered that micro.blog will host audio for you, so I made a little podcast about podcasting and cross-posted it here.

I also went to the dentist. She confirmed that I do need another crown to replace the mishmash of fillings on the upper left side, but that it’s not super urgent (but could easily become so if unattended).

My dentist is on the other side of Guildford town centre. I’m glad that I gave myself space to walk into town, but not so glad to find that a suspicious package had closed the train station, so I chose to get a slower but less crowded bus home rather than the faster, crammed one.

We gave in and handed a list of odd jobs to a chap who is much more able to do these things than either of us are. So now we have pictures on the walls; all the downlighters in the kitchen work; we have working lights in both the attic and garage; and best of all, he fixed the handle on the dishwasher so that I don’t have to scrape skin off my fingers trying to open it first thing in the morning.

I’m working on a first product to put out on metalabel. It’s an annotated version of the Tuttle Annual Report that I wrote in 2009. It’s fun to do and to noodle over what all that was about back then. I did get round to creating a Tuttle Club label page and the emptiness of that is motivating me to have something to put up there. I’ll be opening up conversations about collaborative working to share there in the New Year.

I’m aware of my tendency to make up systems to make stuff and then be too exhausted to implement those systems. But I’m doing some of that kind of stuff too – (hopefully with more of the actual making stuff and without the exhaustion).

That’ll do for this week.

My uncle, my dad’s little brother, died sometime this week. I hadn’t had much contact with him for some time, which I regret. He was christened Granville John and though in the family he was known as Granville, he preferred to be called John.

Because he travelled so widely, he was only around from time to time when we were growing up and my knowledge of his life is patchy (and could quite easily be inaccurate). As far as I knew, he was a professional full-time musician, playing tenor sax, primarily, but also clarinet & flute. I believe he started off playing in military bands while in the Army, then theatre (often for shows the Alexandra Theatre in Birmingham) and cruise ships. He was also a keen amateur painter. His paintings were hung proudly on Grandma’s walls. I’m sure there was much more to his life than this, perhaps we’ll uncover stuff in the coming weeks. As he was away so much, I don’t think he really moved out of his parents’ home until they died. As a child, I remember many hours being allowed to pore over his insect and stamp collections when we lived just round the corner.

Though my father’s relationship with him was never hugely close, and musically, John was much more of a modernist, I have very happy memories of seeing them play together.

It’s a bit of a shock so soon after losing my last grandparent. John is the first of that generation in my family to go. It’s a reminder of how little time we have here and how suddenly things can change. I’m resisting thinking about death coming in threes.