Ian Betteridge

Time is strangely stretching. When I started writing this post I had to check my calendar to see what I have done this week, and found that events I thought have happened the previous one had, in fact, been within the last seven days.

That's partly down to Kim being away, and partly due to not working. When you don't have the rhythm of work, you lose one of the main things which anchor you in time. There is a pace, a way of being, which is set for you and that you don't have to consider. All of which is a challenge to me: while I am not working, I need to reestablish that pattern.

And yet this week has been pretty full. Monday, of course, was a bank holiday -- and what do you do on a bank holiday other than go to the seaside? Myself and my friend Edward headed down to Margate for a bit of a mooch around. It was surprisingly quiet, much more like a regular Sunday than a Bank Holiday Monday, which is probably not great for the local traders. I have heard that the great post-pandemic British seaside boom was over, but this was the first time I saw it with my own eyes.

On Tuesday I went into London to catch up with an old colleague, deep in the heart of News UK. It's an impressive building -- and it was good to have a chat to someone who was both a big influence and a good mate.

After that I went to the V&A to see the Diva exhibition, which I would absolutely recommend. And it's the first exhibition I have been to where I think there's a benefit to having the proffered headphones: divas definitely need a soundtrack, all the way from Victorians to today.

The V&A is one of my favourite places in London. I became a member there quite a few years ago, and would occasionally sneak off work for an afternoon's "inspiration" there, sitting looking at lovely things, clearing my head and writing stuff in my notebook. It's one of the things I miss about London: there is space like that in Canterbury, and few enough in Kent as a whole.

The rest of the week was taken up with bumbling around, washing, and generally wasting of time. I spent a chunk of time working on setting up Obsidian to make it a better environment for writing, experimenting with plugins which let you do things like post directly to Micro.blog, make your use of Markdown and punctuation more consistent, and so on. It's now pretty plugin-heavy but it's really coming together.

The three things which most caught my attention

1. Primary documents in "Making the Macintosh" is a brilliant collation of documents about the early Mac. I could spend a month reading this stuff.
2. An absolutely fantastic interview with M John Harrison, who remains my favourite writer. With bonus almost-retelling of the story of how Iain Banks made him write another space opera.
3. An interesting report from 2020 on the ownership of shares on the stock market. What's fascinating is how this has changed from (in the UK) largely pension funds to foreign investors, and what that means for the governance of our largest companies. the shift from mostly individual investors to mostly pension funds had a big impact on the way companies saw themselves, and who they saw as the important people to serve, and this change to being owned by people who largely have no particular interest in the health of UK society is also an important one.

Things I have been writing

I'm writing a big blog post on how I have customised Obsidian for writing. It's currently about 1,500 words and I should finish it off in the next day or so. This post was written in Obsidian, as are most of my weeknotes, because one of the best things about it is the ability to create and use templates very easily. That means it's brilliant for articles like this.

Things I have been reading

I've been REALLY enjoying – if that's quite the word – Tansy Hoskins' The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion, which I highly recommend to anyone remotely interested not just in clothes, but also anti-capitalism.

Being on my own is weird. Many of the things that I tend to do when Kim is at home turn out to be less attractive when I’m on my own for a longer period. For example, TV: I’ve watched almost nothing this week, which is unusual for someone who grew up nursemaided by the television.

(This is true. My mother used to say that before I could sit up on my own, she would prop me up with cushions so I could watch television, as it kept me quiet.)

I had a trip into London on Tuesday to see my old colleague Maria, who now works about five minutes walk from where I used to work – we had been that close to each other for months and not realised. It was great to catch up and – as it typical for when we meet up - what was meant to be a quick coffee ended up as nearly two hours of hilarity.

Despite my enthusiasm for Readwise Reader I have been tempted this week to dump it in favour of something more simple. However, I have a feeling that’s because I have a huge backlog of unprocessed reading in it and when I have that backlog in any system my instinct is to dump it and use another tool, starting from scratch. It’s a bad habit, so I’m making myself spend time going through and triaging what I still want to read.

And a reminder today that caffeine addiction is a fearsome thing. Since I stopped working my coffee intake has done up. Although I don’t drink any after 5pm it’s rare that I have less than six cups through the day, which is a lot. Enough, in fact, to make the symptoms of caffeine withdrawal bad. If you have never had a caffeine withdrawal it’s a reminder that it’s a physically addictive drug: for me, it manifests as a headache which nothing will shift, plus nausea. There’s nothing you can do except ride it out by lying down in a darkened room. Not nice

So of course I went out and got coffee. It still took a couple of hours to shift. By god I love coffee.

The three things which caught my attention

1. Notes on being a single person Mastodon server is a good introduction to the pros and cons of running your own instance. It’s one of those things which falls into the category of “because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
2. Another thing in the same category: how Michael Moorcock wrote a novel in three days. No really, don’t do this, unless you are Michael Moorcock.
3. This unpublished (till now) piece by Harry McCracken reminded me of how much work goes into journalism before you put any words on the screen. 90% of journalism happens away from your desk – or it used to. I used to say “journalism happens when you pick up the phone” and while the method of communication might have changed, the fundamental principle hasn’t.

Things I have been writing

I wrote an ending to a story and then junked it. So much for that.

Things I have been reading

The Agony and the Ego, edited by Clare Boylan, is out of print but I was lucky enough to find a copy in the University of Kent Library. It includes a wonderful essay by Hilary Mantel on her writing method, which appears pretty close to mine: it involves the steady accretion of phrases, characters and situations until something takes shape, rather than a pre-planned, heavily plotted form. Annoyingly this appears to be the only time this essay has been published – and Boylan’s book is now out of print. Copies go for about £20 secondhand.

This has been a week of joining. First, I joined the Society of Authors. Although I’m not a published fiction writer, the body of work I have from a 28 year career as a magazine journalist counts – which means that I’m in some illustrious company.

Second, I now have a borrowers membership for the University of Kent Library, which means not only can I go along and enjoy the WiFi (you can do that for free if you want) but also borrow books – and the kind of academic books I sometimes want to read can be ferociously expensive.

This week has veered between too hot and too much rain, which is probably a harbinger of the way that British summers will be in the future. Despite my Indian DNA, I'm a northerner at heart: anything above about 23 degrees and I start to basically want to curl up and fall asleep for the hot bit. The siesta is a natural response to weather that gets too hot in the afternoon, and I expect the British to eventually embrace it.

The three things which most caught my attention

1. Tim Bray has a really good review of the current state of Mastodon. It's mostly positive, and I agree with Tim that some of the things that people want (post migration) really aren't all that important. And speaking of Mastodon, StreetPass is a REALLY useful extension for finding people there.
2. Elon Musk's quest to destroy Twitter continues. For me, Twitter got to the point where ethically I could no longer be part of a service which was rolling out the welcome mat to the extreme right, misogynists, abusers, racists, homophobes, transphobes, grifters and general scum bags. It’s one thing to be part of a service where they are present, but another to have an owner who actively goes out of his way to orient the service towards those users’ needs.At that point, it’s a moral question, and no amount of “value” or “usefulness” I get from that service makes a difference. So if you see me on Twitter... it's not me.
3. Steve Albini used to be one of the most talented musicians and producers around, but with that came a level of assholery that was Olympic standard. He's rowed a lot of that back, and now sounds infinitely more grounded and – dare I say it – happy.
   

Things I have been writing

I wrote a little piece of micro-fiction which I published on Mastodon. I'm interested in doing more of this. Micro-fiction appeals to my sense of minimalism.

I also worked on a couple of exercises which might turn into stories, one about a man who is killed by a wasp and another about a man in an immense galaxy filled with humanity who goes off in search of his double.

Things I have been reading

I picked up War Bodies by Neal Asher again. Everyone needs a bit of science fiction horror in their lives, right?