Euan Semple's Blog, page 57

Strictly

There are many things that I love about Strictly Come Dancing: the amazing production skills; the amazing live music; watching people learn a new skill and get really bitten by the dancing bug.

But the biggest delight is watching many of them discover things about themselves that they may have kept buried for years if not their whole lives.

There are a couple of contestants this year who you can see are going to open up and deal with aspects of their approach to life that will transform them. This happens every season on Strictly. This is what makes it so compelling.

Time travel

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The amazing images of cities in the Apple TV screensaver prompt daily memories of my various trips. I have been to all of the cities that they show, many of them many times. I have been so lucky to see so much of the world and never take it for granted.

The image at the top of this post popped up in Facebook today and is of me sitting in a restaurant opposite Doc Searls’ apartment in New York a couple of years ago. The good friends that I now have all around the world are another thing that I very much don’t take for granted.

But as we sit here in our much constricted world I find myself thinking of those far flung places and people and wondering if I will ever travel to the same extent again? Will I ever “really” be there “really” talking face to face to all of those people?

My interactions with both people and places have taken on an air of unreality. My memories feel more like dreams than recollections.

Those places are still there, or are they?

The people are still there, or are they?

Consider this a little experiment

I would love it if I could just post on my blog and generate the sort of interesting conversations that we used to have in the old days but, let’s face it, that’s just not going to happen.

As the main Facebook news feed gets noisier, and the ads get more obtrusive, I have started to choose instead to go directly to the pages of people whose writing I enjoy. This makes for a more considered and less enervating way to keep up with their thoughts.

So putting these two together I have decided to set up a page where I will be able to auto post to from my WordPress blog in the hope that what I write will pique people’s interest and start interesting conversations. I will also revert to posting stories about mountains and cat pictures to my normal profile feed.

Wish me luck!

Noticing

Writing helps me to notice more. Sharing online makes things feel that they matter.

Posting less to Facebook has made me notice less.

I just thought I’d share that I’d noticed this.

Doing nothing

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées”

It’s really hard. We are so used to always having something to distract us, even if it is our next attempt to be productive.

Doing nothing feels like a guilty pleasure, or a never ending torture, depending on our mood. But it is good for us. It is essential.

It is worth practicing.

Ted Lasso

Having just finished the first series on AppleTV+ it was great to hear that the second series starts shooting in the new year and a third series has already been commissioned.

Clever writing, great acting and even the cinematography was innovative and on occasions beautiful.

Any fears we had of it being a syrupy romanticised US take on British culture were soon dispelled. Lots of wry humour, sensitive character portrayal and loads of one liners like “Hey Dad, what’s a scone?” “It’s like a muffin but it sucks all the saliva out of your mouth”.

South Downs circuit

One of the advantages of having a daughter studying in Brighton is that when I drop her off I will get to do a walk on the South Downs. Today it was just over 8 miles round Ditchling Beacon, the Jack and Jill Windmills, and the Chattri Monument to Indian forces killed in World War One. Blustery weather and great skies certainly blew the cobwebs away.

If you are interested in the route and precisely where the photos were taken you can see it all on Viewranger

Facebook hasn’t ruined social media, people have.

I have been enjoying not being on Facebook or Twitter so much. My experience of both was better than most, because of the effort I put into building and maintaining my network, but even so there is something about these online spaces that encourages mithering. In fact the algorithms bring mithering to the fore.

Don’t get me wrong, as many of you will know, I have enjoyed a good mither in the past, and it has occurred to me in the past weeks that I miss that opportunity to a degree.

But no, I feel better for not having a focus for my disgruntlement. I am less disgruntled as a result.

Hunkering down

I get tired of the way all news has to been attention grabbing these days. Even news stories about Apple, that I would have previously enjoyed , all feel the need to have some sensational angle to them. I am more and more inclined to restrict my reading to a few tech sites that I trust to give me information rather than opinion, that celebrate the positive about tools rather than sensationalise their downside, and that don’t knee jerk to every meme that rattles around the internet.

Come the revolution…

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As someone who has a daughter who is studying dance, a wife who works in comms for a cyber security firm, and having thought a bit over the last few years about the impact of technology on the world of work, I feel reasonably confident in predicting that the dullards whose thinking is behind this sort of advert will regret not having more sources of entertainment available to them as they sit at home twiddling their thumbs wondering what the hell happened to them.