Tag Archives: writing

words

micro digestion

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This is mostly for Dave but I welcome eye-rolling discussion from all.

screenshot of my micro.blog
a screenshot of my micro.blog front page. My Gravatar is a picture taken by Johnnie Moore shortly after I returned from “Please Look After This Englishman” in 2011.

I’ve been doing a thing for a little while now, but only Dave has asked about it. And so, in our cozy, little internet for two, I’m just going to talk to him about it now.

Dave, hello, old friend. Thank you for paying attention to my RSS feed and this long, slow ongoing conversation about blogging that makes other people’s eyes glaze over sooooo quickly.

You asked:

@lloyddavis.bsky.social please can you show me how you do your micro.blog > WordPress daily thing. I think that’s probably the best way for me to achieve this: da.vebrig.gs/2024/10/30/%…— Dave Briggs (@da.vebrig.gs) December 10, 2024 at 5:52 PM

Well. So. Yeah. Hang on a sec.

In the summer, I was having cognitive capacity issues, keeping track of who I was talking to where about what. So I looked at the cross-posting capabilities of micro.blog – I was attracted to it first by seeing it being used by my early blog heroes Adam Tinworth and Robert Brook and I’m a big fan of how Manton Reece eats his own dogfood. Each of these people do their own thing with it and none of them are to blame for the stupid things I might choose to do when I pick up the same tools. I just mention them because I don’t want to look like I invented all this or that I think I’m cleverer than anyone else.

Where was I? Yeah so one of the cool things Manton has kept on top of is cross-posting to these different platforms. It was the most straightforward way of writing a post once and having software post it in several places (btw they also go to my ancient tumblr – and could go to medium, linkedin and nostr if I wanted to go bananas). And recently, I’ve been able to see my BlueSky and Mastodon replies there too, but that’s another complication and we’ve got enough complications here already, I think. Focus, Lloyd, focus!

Cross-posting deals with the copy/paste problem, but I was still feeling a gap. Ever since I got on Twitter, I wanted to have a place where I could find all my stuff instead of it being in different places. I couldn’t get my act together to go full POSSE, so maybe it’s cousin – PESOS might work. PESOS means publishing elsewhere, syndicating to own site. It feels inferior, and a bit wrong, but it kind of works for now.

I feel the need to just step back and acknowledge that I don’t know what I’m doing here. I’m just bumbling along having a life and now and then saying stuff on the internet. I don’t have Information Strategy meetings with myself to work out the ideal infrastructure and architectural approaches. I’m just the same bumbling blog-hacker, driven by novelty, that I’ve always been.

So I decided that what I’d do now, since I’d got all the chunks being made on micro.blog, it might be nice to make a daily digest post on here (perfectpath) of all the chunks I’d made that day. (turns out, it’s hard to get *all* the chunks, I’m human, sometimes I forget and just post something on one platform directly – also replies – we’ll come back to that).

I was also interested in how to use ChatGPT for helping me remember how to write code. So I asked it to write a script using the WordPress XML-RPC API (because that’s all I could remember there was) to take my RSS feed from micro.blog (because that’s all I could remember there was) and automatically post it here at about midnight every day. After some iterations I got to this version of the script. I then made a cron job on my home desktop computer to run at 11:55 each night, redirecting the output to a log file. 

55 23 * * * /usr/bin/python3 "/Users/lloyddavis/blog digest/micro_digest.py" >> ~/microblog.log 2>&1

It’s all a little bit shit, but it’s my little bit of shit. Before we start with the “why don’t you just…” here’s where I can see it needs improvement:

  • It only handles my original posts, no replies (but see json stuff below)
  • I see that WP has lots of APIs – I’m tempted to believe that my first choice of XML-RPC is not the best (given it was basically down to ignorance of the others)
  • I also realise that micro.blog will give me feeds in json format which might well be more elegant to handle (and less error-prone?) than trying to parse the RSS into a custom data structure and then remember what I called the variables. There’s a whole API for doing more complicated stuff (including replies!)
  • The formatting is horribly basic (but then so am I).
  • If I want it to run more reliably, perhaps I should put it on someone else’s computer rather than my mac mini which is prone to attack via the feline keyboard marauder and my own stupidity.
words

Weeknote 24-49

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.

What I think

August 28th 2024 – Morning Notes

#wewillgather team breakfast with @artistsmakers and @sophontrack
So many breakfasts, so little time

The quiet early hours, from 5 to 7 in the morning, have always been my most fertile time for ideas. However, there’s a catch: when I sit down to type, I lose the flow of thoughts because I’m still processing them while trying to write.

So, this morning, as I sat with my half-drunk coffee and a half-completed Sudoku, my thinking drifted, yet again to the challenge of producing consistent work and/or producing work consistently. In my personal technology-free fantasy world—definitely sometime before I was actually born—I would have a secretary to transcribe my handwritten notes or dictation, an editor to review my drafts, and a publisher ready to turn it all into paper material to be distributed to places where people who might like my work might pick it up and pay some cash for it.

But inspired by Jay Springett’s recent words about his “Menagerie of Models” I’m now playing with tools that can serve as my own digital secretary and editor. They’re still my words, but I’m getting help from the machines when it comes to capturing and organising my ideas so that I can distribute them more effectively. And here we are, writing not only to people who happen to be in a bookshop or newsagent or are lucky enough to be my personal correspondents, but to just about anyone with a computer.

The 1960s are the only decade in my life (so far) which I didn’t use computers. I had a bit of a dip in such activity in the eighties (at college *nobody* thought of using a computer for anything!) But despite that long relationship, I’ve always had a nagging unease about letting machines do all the hard work that I thought I had an obligation to do myself. But if I really believed that, where would I draw the line? Is using a word-processor too lazy? Should I be hand-coding my html pages? I don’t think so, so why am I squeamish about using ChatGPT with due intelligence and discernment?

That’s the question. Where’s the line between what’s authentic and what’s too artificial? I recently saw a personalised video response, for example, which addressed the recipient by name. And it made me uncomfortable in a way that personalised text does not now, but might have done when I first saw it (just to remind you that I’ve been mail-merging since before you were born!) And that leaves me wondering about future generations who are being born into this kind of digital intimacy or weird (to me) interactions. Will they find it perfectly normal? Or will there always be an inherent strangeness that they learn to ignore? It makes me think of my relationship to photographs – 200 years ago people might have wondered about what effect it has on me that I have so many photos of myself, my family and my breakfasts.

Anyway, I’m not (yet) making video mail-merges but if I did, I wonder how long it would take you to realise?

words

Oh, hello.

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I’m doing a couple of things at the moment that have reminded me that I have a blog to do things that other things can’t do. And it’s not nearly as horrible to use as I make up it is.

The first is that I’m using Mastodon and the wider Fediverse quite a lot (isn’t everyone?) and it’s rekindled my ability to post shit quickly and sometimes impulsively in short bursts. One of my resistance points with blogging is that it can so easily seem like I’ve got to write an essay and get it right before hitting “Publish”. And that’s bollocks – it certainly wasn’t true when I started – go back to 2004/5 around here and you will see it very clearly! So I’m here, trying to blog like nobody’s reading… again. Because there are things that I don’t want to pour into my stream in tiny chunks. I do want to be able to take some things a bit slower and more thoughtful and catch up with bigger themes rather than the things that pop into my head and “need” to be said immediately. The open web feels like it’s coming back or rather that we have another chance at building an open web.

The other thing I’m doing is that I gave myself a 30-day challenge at the beginning of November to record four songs that I’ve written and performed over the last twelve years or so and release them. The main aim was to give myself something to focus on every day (you’ve heard that one before) but it has also become a thing in my head where I’ve committed to releasing my best work ever next Thursday and if I don’t then the whole month will have been wasted. Also bollocks. Working consistently is the thing that I find very difficult to maintain but I *have* maintained it for (looks at calendar) 26 days on this project and that’s fantastic already. This too feels like “another chance” – it’s a chance to remember that I am a musician and that I can do this stuff as well as it being a mega learning experience both in technical terms (performance *and* recording) and in being able to commit to making a something in manageable chunks.

And right now, it’s creeping up to midday, so I have to let go of the need to document because there’s a greater need to do the actual work.

What I think, words

What even *is* an idea?

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David Lynch talks about ideas as fish. He says if you sit still and wait and are open to catching one, they’ll just pop into your consciousness, so you right them down and then others come and join it and you write them down too and then you can express them in whatever way seems right – a film, a poem, a piece of wood, whatever. For a long time I was stuck in wondering what this meant in my experience, “is *this* thought an idea?… or this one?” – that’s a sticky place to be and it stuck me good. From the perspective of today it’s easy to say, well that’s the mind getting tangled up in asking stupid questions instead of just doing what you’re supposed to do. It’s hard to admit that one’s mind has been so stubbornly in control – especially when you’re supposed to be thinking up ideas! I’ve been meditating for years. Have I been doing it all wrong all that time?

But I had an experience a couple of weeks ago that shifted my understanding. And funnily enough, it happened down by the river. I didn’t go fishing, I went for a run and I ended up at the river just down the lane from us. It was one of those going-to-be-hot days but it also felt like there was more moisture in the air than had been, and I’d gone out later than I’d intended. So I was hot, sweaty and worried about being late, but I had also run enough to shut the chatterbox up a bit. So I’m walking towards the path up to the main road and I see a guy whistling for his dog. He’s holding a lead but I can’t see the dog. He’s not agitated or doing anything wildly physical, just standing there and whistling and calling for the (invisible to me) dog to come out of the water. And I made up a little story, which I won’t spill out onto here, but “making up a little story” is something that I feel like I’m always doing, but this time I recognised it as and idea, as the kind of idea we were talking about when I started writing this post, the fish kind. And as I let it swim around in me, it did indeed attract more ideas and ways in which the story could expand and make sense and then by the time I was home and had stretched and showered, I could sit down and write the whole thing out and yes even more fishy little ideas came swimming along, to help me make sense of this weird story. And suddenly I’m sitting there with a notebook full of words and I feel like I’ve just sat by the riverbank and filled my nets, it’s so satisfying.

And it reminded me of some blurb I wrote for myself a few years ago when I performed some of my own songs, “that writing songs could mean just typing out those strange and silly words in his head, in a kind of sensible order, while strumming his ukulele”.

I’m thinking and writing about this now because there’s an idea kicking around that has some similar dimensions to the fish/idea I wrote down in August 2007 which then became all that stuff that happened since then (if you know, you know – if you don’t then just re-read the last 15 years of this blog and follow any links that work). But my mind is fighting writing it down and I recognise that that’s because I don’t have all the answers ready yet. But that’s not how it works, you don’t have the idea and immediately get all the other ideas and know how to implement it, how this particular set of ideas need to be expressed in the world, you just sit still with it, write it down, write down the other things that come along to join it and before you know it, it will have taken some physical form and you’ll need a few more hands to make a home for it.

I made this, words

Share Something Every Day

Untitled

Community

Today I learned that there are (at least) two model railway societies in Guildford. The one that most people seem to know about is the Guildford Model Engineering Society who have a base in Stoke Park. They have 3½, 5 and 7¼ inch gauge passenger railways and have open days throughout the year. I didn’t know this level of detail, but now, of course, I’m going to have to plan a trip. Anyway, I met someone today from the other group, the lesser-known Astolat Model Railway Circle. I understand there was a break between the groups about fifty-years ago based on whether to work on fixed layouts (GMES) or portable ones (AMRC). So now you know too (though I’m open to being put right on details by anyone who knows better).

We heard that the church garden got a Gold medal from Guildford In Bloom. Ian, who does the garden, is justifiably proud.

I also got a list of films that we might be able to show at our Film Club. It’s tricky because of the Netflix problem of (near) infinite choice but also because we don’t really know who’s going to be interested, so we’re just going to have to plump for one and see how it goes.

We did make some progress on Panto planning today too, although again it will be interesting to see how our plan fares in contact with the people hereabouts.

I spent a brain-numbing hour on reviewing the new website layout too. At least I now know the things I need to do next and it’s not a terribly long list.

Podcast/Writing

I’ve been experimenting today with talking to otter. Otter.ai that is, the transcription service. So when I’ve had a walk (to work and back and into town for something) I’ve chatted away to my phone, which is recording what I say, sending it to otter for transcription and then at the end of the day I’ve been able to download some long rambling monologues in text and audio form. That helps me identify the (potentially) interesting bits and now I can use them either as the basis of a written piece or perhaps dropped into a podcast. In any case, it’s a good exercise for me in opening my mouth, rather than just thinking things over and over – stuff moves in me when I’ve said it out loud and I just look like an average idiot talking on their phone, whereas when I was doing this sort of thing in 2005, people thought I was proper odd.

Oh and I’m making progress using logseq.com as a general note-taker and knowledge-organiser, getting my head around syncing between all my machines and thinking about tagging and workflow. Baby steps.

I have to have an early night though because I’ve got to be up for a gig first thing in the morning and I need to polish my ukulele!

I made this, words

Make Something Every Day – Coding 001

04102008325

Today, I was more gentle with myself. I pulled “coding”. Now I definitely don’t have any coding projects all set up and ready to go. But I am interested in how to automate my workflow for blogging on Hive. The process for wordpress is straightforward and handled by lots of different clients. I currently post straight to a draft post on my wordpress.com having given draftsapp my credentials a long time ago. I’d like to be able to compose in one place and then click one button to send it to wordpress and another to send it to hive. I don’t want to be copying and pasting or doing something so automatic that it reduces my flexibility.

So today, I’ve poked around in the developers documentation for Hive. That makes it sound very efficient. Of course what I’ve actually done is googled stuff and then decided I needed to set up my own testnet and then realised I didn’t and wondered what I did need to install and then started going through the examples on the development portal and realised I’d forgotten how node.js works exactly and you know, it dawned on me that I’d started in the middle with the bit about posting rather than starting at the beginning and working my way through methodically, so no wonder…! Once I did that, I found the example for Hivesigner and by that time, either because this did what I wanted, or just because I’d looked at so much that wasn’t and so was getting my javascript-reading-eyes back, I understood mostly how it works and felt able to have a go.

Anyway, long story short, because yesterday what I really learned was that I don’t have to present something here for approval or be thinking of the audience at all, I’m writing for myself… long story short, I posted a little test post on the tuttleclub blog which I haven’t really used since I used it as an experiment in setting up a second account.

Notes on yesterday…

It wasn’t really a fail, because I did make something. I think I need to spend some time, not only reviewing what I’ve done, but also planning what I might do next. I’ve got lots of ideas in my head, but if I’m going to continue with this approach, they really need to be committed somewhere so that I can pick them up when I need them. So that I’d have something to start with yesterday morning (or today for that matter) without having to think almost from first principles.

In the case of podcasting, what’s notable is that I don’t have lots of audio clips stashed away, in the way that I have bits of writing, film or photography all ready to pick apart and put back together in a new form. Or if I do have a stash, it feels old and stale and a lot of work to breathe new life into it. I also feel like I’ve done the mumbling, bumbling improvised ramble character to death. It was so 2005 for me and, man, that was sixteen years ago – a different world and definitely a different me. And I’m not really interested in two-hander interviews either. There’s a new form of podcast out there that will excite me but I don’t quite know what it is yet. And making it will take more than a day’s sprint.

I made this, words

Make Something Every Day – Writing 002

Today I rebelled. Slightly. Or perhaps I just tweaked the rules based on learning what works. I’ve been thinking for a couple of days that Sunday needs to be a review day rather than a full “production” day.

Writing

And then I pulled “Writing” again. The first repeat. And while I have done some writing and thinking about writing today (and I’m writing this) I gave myself permission to do some of the things I’ve been wanting to do, remembering that the important thing here is that I make something everyday and don’t get pulled into chores and duty all day long.

I think what I learned from the other day’s Writing assignment is that I need a longer term project. It might only be a short essay, but I need a goal for a series of writing sessions, rather than starting from scratch each time. What do I want to write? Well, the things that came out onto the page last time were the tweet storm about what I’m doing and the beginnings of a “What were the eighties like?” piece. Also the tweet storm about my dream the other day (though that was the day after – I am drawn to this form for writing short stories with a twist).

Perhaps another way of coming at the 80s would be to write some short stories and then try to tie them together, rather than starting top down to express the feeling of being there for me without explaining what I was doing.

Fire

I’ve been meaning to make a fire in the back garden for a while. It’s good for me to build it properly and see it burn well. I have plenty of earth and water and air in my life, I miss fire. So I put it together from the dried grass and weeds pile and some of the weedier rosemary twigs for kindling and then built it up with bits of a pallet that was broken and I’d chopped up into reasonable chunks.

I had a go at making drawing charcoal from some of the larger rosemary twigs in a little tin. I punched a tiny hole in the lid of an old vaseline tin (like a shoe polish tin only more like an inch and a half in diameter). The lid goes on very tightly, which isn’t ideal for this, it turns out, because heat and metal. I’ll look out for other more suitable vessels.

Then just as the fire was nice and hot and settling down to embers and I’d popped the tin on the top to cook, it started to rain. Of course, it’s the Bank Holiday weekend, obviously it’s going to rain as soon as you start burning anything.

Anyway, I left it, the rain went off quite quickly and the embers were still hot enough. When I couldn’t see any gas or smoke coming out of the hole in the tin, I lifted it out to cool.

When I opened it, I was pleased to see that it had cooked – I’d been worried that the rain would have spoiled it. It wasn’t perfect – I’m not sure that rosemary is the best material for drawing with, but it’s what I had immediately to hand and it was dry. I might go down to the river tomorrow and see what I can find in terms of hazel and willow. Anyway I made some carbonised wood, I tried a new process and it worked – and it’s pretty in it’s own way.

I should have taken photographs throughout the process, but all I got was the final result.

Untitled
rosemary charcoal

35mm film

The other distraction is that I now have all the bits I need to process black and white film, so I can’t see me resisting the impulse to use that tomorrow as well as reviewing the progress to date.

I made this

make something every day – writing 001

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Today, I pulled “Writing”. Yet again, I probably spent more time thinking about what sort of writing I mean and what I wanted to do with today than on actually typing (or scrawling) anything.

I can’t see me ever being the sort of professional writer who gets up every day, has a cup of tea, dashes off 5,000 words no matter what and then gets on with whatever else it is that they do. I mean, I might make it there before I die, but it would be by accident rather than design at this stage.

But I do enjoy writing. I enjoy putting together an argument or a story, working out what’s really important in what I want to say and getting rid of the bits that get in the way of that (usually).

And it does deserve to be on the list, because writing something more substantial than diary-like blog posts and a few tweets is something I want to be able to do, I think I’ve got some substantial things to say and actually, now I think about it, I remember that the whole idea for this “make something every day” thing came out of an idea of focusing on writing – I thought I might try to turn out a short essay every week – but the prospect of doing that and only that was too triggering for my ADHD brain (mainly because it would mean I wouldn’t have time for any of the other things on the list).

So today I did two things, I suppose. I tested out the Tweet Storm action in Drafts with a little 9 tweet thread.

Before posting it looked like this:

Screenshot 2021-08-24 at 21.29.14.png

And then, after lunch, I wrote about 500 words draft on “What were the 1980s really like?”

I got sidetracked again by thinking about writing tools and blogging software – it’s a curse! – but it’s OK, the project isn’t about doing the thing all day, no matter what and not thinking about anything outside of your subject area. So I cut myself some slack and had a nakd bar.

Oh and I suppose I wrote this post as well, but that doesn’t count, does it?

lists, words

Blog Club: Thirty blog posts I’ll (probably) never write

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Bridlington Leisure Centre.jpg
Bridlington Leisure Centre By Martin Dawes, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link

At today’s Blog Club we did an exercise to kick off with. We had ten minutes to write twenty-five titles of blog posts we’d like to write. I ignored the “like to” bit and just wrote as many off the top of my head titles I could think of. I came up with thirty-five. The thing is, when you let go of actually having to do anything with them, you can come up with a lot more than you’d imagine.

The next bit of the exercise was to choose five to actually write (one of which was “Ten blog posts I’ll never write” which I’ve turned into this one).

So that leaves the other thirty, which I didn’t want to throw away, so here they are:

  1. Eating dinner with Chris Brogan
  2. How to play the violin if you’ve never done it before
  3. The hypocrisy of babies
  4. Jelly – my part in it’s downfall
  5. How to have hope
  6. Using household objects to make a movie
  7. How huge is this artichoke?
  8. The three types of people you meet at an unconference
  9. Is there anything bigger than this experience?
  10. The view from Clee Hill
  11. Eating out in Rhyl
  12. How I turned my bedroom into a cinema in 2 weeks
  13. On the bus
  14. Calamari
  15. How much coffee is too much?
  16. When caring goes bad
  17. The dark side of Jaffa cakes
  18. Dear Lazyweb, please recreate Posterous.com
  19. A man on a train in West Texas
  20. Apricots: what’s the point?
  21. Fifteen amazing people in Bridlington
  22. How corned beef saved my life
  23. Twenty-two things to do with a bottle opener
  24. Crazy golf without the crazy
  25. When did you last see your Aunty Beryl
  26. Eating shellfish: a primer
  27. If you can’t do this thing, you’ll never do anything
  28. Don’t wait, keep it moving
  29. Primary School Blues

On second thoughts, I probably will write some of these.

But what were the other five?

  1. Great tube journeys in Zone 3
  2. Ten (thirty) blog posts I’ll never write.
  3. Stop thinking!!
  4. Today I shot a gun for the first time
  5. The devil makes work for idle hands

Watch this space.