There was no prospect at all of my leaving the house today. Thoughts — and the discussions with the Zoomland colleagues depicted, vaguely, at the top of the laptop screen — were of planning for next year, not finishing off this one. This is a photowhack: the one and only photograph I took today.
Yes, I did first type ‘2023’ as the date in the heading. Don’t we all do that for a while? But 2024 it is, and as it starts off in a work sense, here’s my definite aspiration for the year expressed on the cover of the work diary I quite deliberately bought back in November sometime.
Having walked around eighteen miles yesterday, I did not leave the house today and got on with necessary work, stuff like online teaching (two of those), marking (lots), etc. Exciting it was not. Playing with some effects on my relatively new camera was as much as I managed. This is a truly naff image, I accept that, but so went the day.
After the expanded horizons of yesterday, it was back to work today. I could have posted a pic demonstrating that I am a Pinball Wizard (all-time high score on the pub machine) but that would just have been me showing off, so let’s try to make out that I was engaged in some gainful employment. Whether the message on the pen is a metaphor or not, that’s up to you to determine.
Eight and a half hours’ work today — almost all spent in online meetings. Even in the depths of lockdown I did not do such a day. These objects marked the limits of my real world. (Yes, that’s a sticker of Graham Chapman’s face stuck to the Macbook.)
The allocation of Mondays as designated stay-at-home days seems to have become a set pattern. Tools of my particular trade: the Mac, the backup disk, and we are at the time of year where the 2021 diary needs to come to the fore. It ain’t high adventure I know, but at the moment it’s what there is.
Dull photo, but it was a dull day as everyone waited for Storm Dennis to see whether it felt like adding to the misery. But it did not.
This blog is really just an outgrowth of the personal diary I have kept every day since the start of 1984. I raided the archive today, and here are a bunch of the thirty or so volumes of my other auto-chronicle. Is there a word for this urge to record things? Whatever the name of the condition, I have it.
Being 42 