Euan Semple's Blog, page 41

A grand day out

Nice walk on The Wiltshire Downs with Dave. Kettle on now for a coffee while enjoying the sunset on the way down to Dorset.

Alby is showing no inclination to come out from under the blanket.

Root system drawings

Tree Root System Drawings — more on kottke.org/22/01/tree-root-system-drawings

Ephemera

I am going to delete my Mailchimp account in a couple of days and the thought of keeping a copy of my old newsletters crossed my mind.

But I won’t.

I’ve made a couple of service and server moves with my blog that gave lost bits of it over the years so I occasionally consider backing it up.

But I don’t.

I sometimes try to go back and write about memories from the past in my journaling tool Day One. I make attempts to capture the day to day events of my life there too and wonder if my family will read it when I am no longer here.

But they won’t.

It’s all flotsam and jetsam. The value is in the process of writing not the created objects. It is the noticing of life as it passes that matters, not any attempts to hold on to it.

Newsletter

I am in the process of closing my newsletter. It looks like I mangled pasting the url for this blog so congrats, and thanks, to those of you who made it this far.

Some have unsubscribed in response to that email which I said was the last one which is a bit like jumping up and down on it just to make sure it’s dead!

TV Centre Dreaming

I had one of my frequent dreams about BBC Television Centre last night. I was walking round the circle of the building passing through dark, grubby, technical areas. As so often in my dreams the building was in various stages of dismantling and disrepair. I was trying to find a colleague and ended up in a huge staging area which was being set up for a band.

When I started working there in the eighties I used to walk around the viewing galleries on the second floor to see programmes like The Two Ronnies, Top Of The Pops, or Black Adder being made. It was such an exciting place to work and full of life and energy.

But my recent dreams have all been melancholy. Something is not right. The building is dark and brooding, like a scene out of Bladerunner!

Dusk…

…is always a good time to go for a walk. It’s been a grey day so no sunset but I did see ten deer (in four separate groups) and an owl gliding in a beautiful straight line between two groups of trees.

Turf wars

Before I got to them they had jumped down into next door’s garden, there was a loud caterwauling and screeching noise and then Alby jumped back onto our roof with what looks like some of the other cat’s fur in his mouth!

Wait…

“The late Dr. Richard Carlson, the author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and a dear friend of mine, told me the story of his wise and resilient six-year-old daughter Jazzy. One day he was grousing to his wife Kris about an upcoming dinner they had planned with friends who often argued politics. Jazzy interrupted and innocently asked, “Daddy, why don’t you wait to have a bad time till you get there?”

– From Thriving In The Eye Of The Hurricane by Joseph Bailey

Different worlds

I keep thinking about probably my most uncomfortable experience on stage taking about social media which happened in Kosovo.

There I was, stood in front of about four hundred young, upwardly mobile, marketing professionals, all expecting me to tell them how to write a killer tweet or how to make an instantly viral YouTube video. They were the sort of people who I am sure are now using “influencers” to “drive” business in the indignation engines, sorry, “social media platforms”, that now dominate the web.

And there was me, standing on the stage, twaddling on idealistically about the internet’s potential to make the world a better place. I will never forget the blank looks on their faces!

Sadly I was only in and out for the conference but it was fascinating to see a place with such a sad and recent history. NATO were everywhere, there were shell marks on the walls in the main streets, and people were just beginning to rebuild their lives. They told me that the mafia were largely running the place because they were the only ones with organisational skills in their post communist world.

I probably shouldn’t be so judgmental about the audience and I hope they were successful in hauling their country out of the dark hole they had been stuck in.