Ian Betteridge

I feel like in the past week I’ve travelled the country — and that’s mainly because I almost have. Last Saturday I travelled back from Devon to Kent, then on Thursday we drove up from Kent to Cumbria, where I am at the moment. We’re staying in lovely Ambleside, at a friend’s place (on our own).

Of course I love it and have a bunch of memories of the Lake District. It was a place where we went on family holidays a lot when I was a kid: here, along with Devon, Cornwall and the Cotswolds. My parents discovered country cottage rentals when I was young and after that pretty-much every holiday involved a drive to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a small rented house and a lot of fun.

These parts of the world are very evocative for me, and I’ve always loved the countryside since. We arrived after dark and in the rain (of course), and so didn’t see the view at the back till the next morning. It was quite a view to wake up to:

I would, of course, quite happily live somewhere like this. The irony that we have better internet here than where we normally live (2Mb “broad”band FTW) is not lost on me.

Christmas presents were, of course, opened this morning: Art supplies for Kim, and a lovely replacement Lamy Studio pen plus one-off notebook for me. We had agreed a price limit: Kim cheated. Fortunately so did I.

Now it’s Radio 3 till the King’s Christmas Message, then there will be dinner making the and some TV watching, then probably reading books. Kim is even darning. We appear to have become domestic, rather than feral.

Writing

I’ve been working a little on the Alice and God project this week. This is a maybe-novel length story about a woman who meets God (as you do) and goes on an adventure. It doesn’t quite feel YA territory, but it’s fun and light. One of the things I’ve been working on is using humour to counterpoint seriousness and threat, and there’s a lot of that here. It has to be a serious story, with danger for the characters (and maybe, just maybe, one of them doesn’t make it), but the humour which is intrinsic to my writing style is there.

One of the resolutions for next year is to establish more of a rhythm to my writing. I like the idea of two blog posts a week, one piece of micro-fiction, and some work on bigger projects, but that feels like a lot when I’m also holding down a full time job. We’ll see.

Reading and watching

I finished Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet. I really like her writing, but there are definitely parts of the book where you can see that it was published in chunks, with some of the chapters almost being short stories in their own right. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, but it means that the overall plot is a bit in the background (and there’s not much to it). But i still enjoyed it a lot and now I’m on to A Closed and Common Orbit, the second in the Wayfarer series.

Because we’re away we (OK, I) have got out of the habit of just putting “the telly” on, which means I haven’t watched that much of anything. Being more intentional about what I watch is definitely a theme for the new year!

This week has been almost my last time at work this year. I’m off to the middle of nowhere for a five day writing retreat tomorrow, returning on Saturday, then back at work for two days before I break for the year. Amazingly I have managed to get through the year and use up all my leave, which is a pretty rare event (I get nagged about this by my managers every time).

Despite being a journalist for 28 years (gulp) I have never really done much creative writing until this year. One of my goals for 2022 was to go on a creative writing residential trip and I’m quite surprised at myself for having actually arranged it. Like most people my years tend to start with a bunch of promises and commitments which I only realise I haven’t done in December. This year appears to be different, but now that leaves me with the dreadful job of following on in 2023 with something else.

The last couple of days have been marred by me getting a particularly nasty cold, which kept me off work on Thursday and consigned me instead to either bed or the sofa underneath a blanket, gently whimpering. There’s definitely been a theme this year of getting minor colds whenever I spent any time out – and the start of this week involved a day-long workshop with work, plus of course Stereolab was last weekend. This the post-lockdown phase of an overall lack of immunity, quickly bred in by not being constantly around people. Or it could just be that there’s a lot of bugs going round. Maybe the experts know.

Things I’ve been writing

Quite often the answer to “what shall I write” is “start writing something about the last thing you read/watched/ate/saw”. That, though, can be a bit tricky — particularly if “the last thing you saw” is the movie version of On The Buses, one of the most low-rent but incredibly popular sitcoms of the 1970s. It was on ITV3. Don’t judge me.

But there is always an interesting tangent, if you spend a little time looking. In this case it was the story of Bob Grant, one of the main actors in the series. Despite having a really good track record in serious theatre – he was directed by Joan Littlewood in a few things, and Joan didn’t suffer bad acting gladly – Grant become horribly stuck in typecasting hell, and apart from a few one-offs and panto barely worked again.

He ended up making three suicide attempts over the years as the debts and hopelessness mounted with the third one being successful. It’s an incredibly sad story.

Just after reading this I watched a 1987 Arena “day in the life” piece about Jeffrey Bernard, the legendary boozer and occasional journalist who bestrode Soho in what might have been its more creative period. Bernard too had something of a sad end. Thanks to the drinking, he descended through diabetes to having a leg removed, which made him virtually housebound in a small shabby Soho flat. Unable to do his habitual routes from Coach and Horses to bookies to Colony Club, he withered away.

So I started writing something which I wanted to get into Bernard’s voice and after a few paragraphs it morphed into the story of an actor, like Grant, who struggled to get parts after national success. Three thousand words later, I have the kernel of a decent story, called “Bill and Trudy”, about an encounter between our Bob/Jeffrey amalgam (called Bill) and a homeless girl called Trudy during the height of the first wave of poverty caused by Thatcher in the late 1980s. I want it to be fun and upbeat and not too serious, but the end (which I’ve written already) is potentially a bit downbeat. It will be fun to see where it goes.

Things I’ve been reading and watching

Having cantered through Harry Turtledove’s Three miles down I’ve continued in the SF vein by diving into Ken MacLeod’s Beyond the Hallowed Sky. It’s an interesting romp through robots and faster than light travel which makes it sound horribly cliched, but it’s actually fun so far. It is, weirdly, the first book of MacLeod’s that I’ve read, which feels very remiss of me.

Thursday saw the arrival of my Kindle Scribe, which I pre-ordered on the day it was announced. I've long wanted a bigger Kindle because the smaller ones just aren't that great for reading on, and although my iPad is huge, it's also got a lot of distractions on it, which make it less suitable for reading. The ability to write on it is a bonus, but I'm surprised how effective adding comments using the pen is. It's like adding little Post-Its, which is exactly how I work with paper books.

Big trip to that there London yesterday, when we caught up with a lovely friend over from New York in the Royal Festival Hall bar, then headed to see Stereolab with another lovely friend. There was dancing -- well more shuffling around from me -- and this morning, an inevitable plethora of aches. Kids, if you're under 40, look after your body. Do yoga or something. Don't eat so many pies.

All that means today involved a greasy spoon breakfast -- well, 1pm breakfast -- plus many cups of reviving tea and a sofa.

One other thing today has been winding down my Twitter account. I finally downloaded the 1.4Gb archive of all my content from it, and used the Twitter Archive Parser on it. This does four things:

1. It converts tweets to Markdown with embedded images
2. It replaces the t.co links with the originals
3. It copies all the images into a single folder, useful for importing them elsewhere
4. If an image is a low-resolution version, it download the original
   Once that was done I used ByeByeTweets to do three more things:
5. Unfollow everyone I was following
6. Remove all the likes I had put on other people's content
7. Delete all my tweets
   ByeByeTweets costs a few dollars if you want to delete all tweets (it will do a limited amount for free) but I highly recommend it. I ran into a bug uploading my archive, which you need to do if you're deleting all of them, and emailed them. They responded within a couple of hours and had fixed the error.

So that's pretty much it with Twitter and me! You can find me on Mastodon.

Writing

I've written a lot of notes on how to improve a story I've been struggling with, along with an outline of how to move it forward.

Reading and watching

I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Three Miles Down which is, so far, an enjoyably frothy alternate history novel. It's really interesting that I'm starting to look at books like this with a more technical writers eye, spotting elements of foreshadowing and the odd McGuffin.

My notebook, like my week, is blank. This is not a good sign: when there's nothing scrawled there other than work notes, it indicates my life is moving slightly out of kilter.

That truth is piled all around me in books unread, mugs unwashed, and food left uncooked. It's there in the MacBook Pro near me, still lurking on the to-do list as "fix MacBook Pro" a good month after it first gave me a random "cryptographic error". Thank you, Apple, for making things stupidly easy when they go well and stupidly complex when they go wrong.

I keep reminding myself that my inability to fix it isn't due to age finally stopping me from taking in new information and understanding fresh technology. It's simply that Apple, and most other companies, have put people being able to fix their own technology at the bottom of a long list of priorities. I suspect it's just underneath "Make sure Tim's latte is on his desk at 7 am precisely". And why would anyone want to fix their own Macs? Just visit a Genius Bar, where a friendly blue-shirted barely-trained youth will try and use you to fill his quota of upsell opportunities.

As you may have noticed. I'm slightly out of love with Apple. Less so with the company's products. I still love my iPad Pro (and wish I could make it my only machine), and I have yet to find an Android phone which didn't make me want to run back to an iPhone.

But I wish Apple the company would stop acting like greedy assholes and start reading the room. No, Tim, you cannot sustain a 30% cut of app revenue for the rest of the time. No, Tim, you cannot keep building your devices in a way which makes them hard to repair and then pay sneering lip service to making parts available for them. Those days are over, and if you want to preserve the things which are good for customers about the App Store and your products, you need to accept that sooner rather than clinging on till a regulator changes things for you. Call Bill Gates and ask him how long a company takes to recover after regulators take things out of your hands.

Ah, capitalism.

Things I've been reading and watching

The final episode of Andor wasn't quite the finale I had been hoping for, but it was good. The whole series was excellent, and although it's a cliché to call it "Star Wars for grown-ups", it is still the best description. It's a thriller and a spy story rather than a space opera and an excellent example of what happens when you apply a different genre's set of rules to a world built for another kind of writing.

Things I've been writing

I started a new blog just for creative writing. The first was a piece about a child's Christmas -- OK, my Christmas -- and the second was about a couple of early memories and my family. The third piece was just something super-short about a sound you don't hear much anymore: the ticking of a clock.

I like writing fragments like this (I have a tag in Obsidian, where I do most of my short writing, called "fragments", just for this). Of course, it comes relatively easy to me, unlike plotting which makes me feel like I am pushing a wheelbarrow full of concrete up a hill while the wind and rain come straight down on my face.

This week has mostly revolved around the trapped nerve in my shoulder, which came on last Sunday evening. It took me almost completely out of action on Monday and Tuesday, as I just couldn’t sit at a computer and work – sitting up for too long was just painful.

I think that a lot of it is to do with posture, not so much when I’m sitting and typing but when I’m in the endless parade of online meetings on Teams which forms quite a chunk of my work. When I’m in meetings I tend to slump a bit to my left, usually with my hand supporting my chin, which probably isn’t the best position to be sat for a long while.

That’s exacerbated by my chair, which is lovely to look at but not ideal for spending a great deal of time sitting in and typing. The height of it isn’t adjustable, and it’s a little low with a back support which is OK at the bottom but not quite at the right sort of angle for my daily use. To compensate, I’ve raised the height of my monitor so that it’s higher, which forces me to sit more upright when I’m using it.

Of course, this was also the week when the long-awaited Muskapocalypse basically happened on Twitter, which led to some reflection on the state and development of social media. I should, of course, write something up properly about this, but it’s made me understand that the difference between social media now and in 2006 is that the news we think requires immediate delivery to our followers is no longer personal, it’s political.

When Twitter started, it was one of a slew of services which aimed to decouple the “Status” field from instant messaging apps like AIM to a third party which could then provide a brief message about what you were doing to all your friends. My first tweet on December 3rd 2006 was “going for a dump”, and in a scatological way that summed up what Twitter was there for.

It became that, but on a much larger scale: a method of delivering “vital” information in a timely fashion to large groups of people. News breaks on Twitter now, even before it hits the (already fast) 24-hour news services. I doubt that’s a good thing, for reasons which would take a whole post to define.

Weeks which start with being off or sick often don’t turn into particularly productive times, but this one was a little different. We’re at the end point of a phase in the project I’ve been focused on at work, and the beginning of planning for the next phase. That means there’s some breathing room, although there’s still a lot of wrapping up to do (and there will be until the end of the year).

We also went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever on Friday (more on that below) and I booked my train ticket for the weeklong writing retreat that I’m going on in December. I’m really looking forward to this, not only because it’s a week of writing, but also because it’s a week with no internet. Yes, that’s right: there’s no Wi-Fi (thanks to the building being ridiculously old and so hard to get connected) and virtually no mobile signal (5G? Forget it). I can’t wait.

Things I’ve been reading and watching

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was good. It wasn’t as good as the first film, but given the awful death of Chadwick Boseman, how could it be? The way it handled his passing and made it a part of the movie was brilliant: sensitive, emotional, everything you could have asked. I think I counted four or five times that had me sobbing, from the opening Marvel logo (which forsook the usual montage of many heroes to be all Chadwick) through to the credits which start with “For our friend, Chadwick Boseman”.

I have no idea why his death has affected me so much – I can’t remember an actor’s death making me feel like this – but I think it is something to do with the impact of the first film and the realisation of how a black movie made me feel. Or maybe how having a movie which attracts a young black audience makes me feel: as with the first film, the majority of the audience at our showing was young and black and very much not the kind of audience you see at most Marvel films. It’s huge, and feels important.

Meanwhile, Andor continues to be the best Star Wars ever made. It’s lazy to call it “Star Wars for grown-ups” but it’s a proper adult thriller set in the universe, and has some absolutely terrific acting in it. Even if you don’t like Star Wars, I would recommend it.

Things I’ve been writing

Not much, is the quick answer. Those two days spent mostly flat on my back meant that I couldn’t write so much – this is easily the longest piece that I’ve written since last weekend – and what writing I did was mostly “manually, in a notebook” which barely counts.

This has been a pretty busy week at work because I HAVE A WEEK OFF THIS WEEK. I've promised myself that I'll spend a major chunk of it writing, as it's my writing group next week and I really do want to have something completed to share, even if it's only a bit of flash fiction. Obviously I've started something much more ambitious than that (see below).

Something happened in politics this week. Not sure you saw it. The only thing I can add is GENERAL ELECTION NOW.

And that's about all that's gone on this week, other than some vague discussions on what to do at Christmas (other than read ghost stories).

Writing

I've put other stuff to one side this week and started working on a ghost story for halloween. Except that I've called it A Christmas Ghost Story, as that's a MUCH more likely deadline. Sorry.

Reading and watching

I've finally dived into Becky Chambers' A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, after it's been sitting on the top of the pile of books to read for quite a while. I adored A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the previous story in the Monk and Robot series, for its gentleness and calmness. I'm already a quarter of the way through (these are short books) and it is of course lovely.

If you haven't watched it already I would recommend The Art of Japanese Life, which is available at the moment on iPlayer. James Fox's documentaries on art are always excellent. Also well worth a watch is We Are England: Trouble at Sea, which is a documentary on the struggle of a northern fishing community to get to the bottom of why thousands of crabs and lobster are washing up dead on their beach. Really well made stuff.

I spent a lot of this week being ill, with the really noxious head cold that Kim had been poorly with finally getting me. Bad head colds are one step up from the flu: Imagine having flu, but take away the fever, and you have it. They are annoying in part because you never feel quite as ill as you think you ought to while not being able to do much, as they really sap your energy.

I recovered enough to have my annual flu jab on Saturday, and as they had some spare, they gave me the COVID booster too, which I'm really glad about. Living on a campus of thousands of students is a good way to get exposed to a wide range of exciting bugs, particularly at the start of term when everyone brings something from all over the country, like the world's worst party.

The only downside is that I've got mild side effects today, similar to what I get with any vaccination: a bit of tiredness and a mild headache that just won't shift even with paracetamol and ibuprofen administered.

(That, by the way, is a trick a nurse taught me: if you have a fever or bad aches, you can take both paracetamol and ibuprofen simultaneously to knock it dead. Because they work in different ways, it's not dangerous to do both.)

So here's to next week… and hopefully not being sick.

Writing

Unsurprisingly, I haven't written much this week -- I just didn't have the focus required for it till today. Just a couple of hundred words scattered across some of the work in progress. There are a few things in the "in progress" folder at the moment:

• A long article on switching to Linux: 1,181 words.
• Why journalism is never objective: 600 words.
• On Stage Manager and the iPad. 441 words
• Prompted by a conversation on Twitter with Matt Gemmell, I am also going to write something on using Obsidian for writing and how it can replace Ulysses if that's your thing. There are pros and cons, and it takes some setting up.

Reading and watching

We had two finales this week: Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power lived up to its name by actually including the rings of power, and She-Hulk: Attorney At Law which broke the fourth wall in spectacular fashion. I enjoyed them both.

I'm halfway through Cory Doctorow's Chokepoint Capitalism, and it's a good -- and shocking -- read, particularly if you're into the politics of technology. For many reasons, breaking the stranglehold of monopolies (and monopsonies!) is an important battle.

For a bit of light bedtime reading, I'm also going through Ian Hunter's Diary of a rock and roll star. Hunter was (is?) the lead singer for Mott The Hoople, and this tour diary comes from the era when Mott were hanging out with David Bowie, who adored them -- Bowie, learning they were about to break up from lack of success, gave them his song All the Young Dudes so they could have a smash hit. And hit it was, too -- it was one of Bowie's finest. Diary is one of the best first-person books about 70's rock, and much more honest and truthful in conveying the boredom of touring than anything else.

OK PEOPLE I got so excited doing some other writing I nearly forgot to write this. I'm slightly tired so I'm not going to write much.

Writing

First draft of a micro-short story, called Like a mother’s love. 1199 words.

Continued work on Abigail Harvey returns home, which is now 4422 words. Someday I will finish this.

Link post with Meta's Metaverse, Graphene and more: 358 words.

Musk! Twitter! And why Google is a bit cheeky over RCS: 279 words.

Does my alien have a penis and other interesting things for today: 719 words.

Reading and watching

Decentraland is valued at $1.3bn. Decentraland has just 38 users per day. But sure there's no bubble around this nonsense.