As a kid, up until my 30s, I was a diarist. This meant that thoughts got captured for posterity in the private space of my journal rather than fading into the ether of memory. This approach to thought outputs eventually migrated onto my first blog, resulting in a change of tone and audience from personal to (potentially) public. I tempered some of the expressions of my thoughts, given that there was a chance some of them would be read by others, but the blog was nevertheless a useful place for expressing myself and working through ideas. With the rise of social media, these published thoughts got reduced into smaller fragments as my blogging moved more towards tweeting. I opened a Medium account after a few years too, so I still had somewhere for more longform writings to go. However, as the user interface felt more ‘hi-fidelity’ than the ‘lo-fidelity’ style of the likes of Blogger, I have largely used it so far for writing that was more carefully crafted than the more impulsive bursts of a personal blog. Since the enshittification (see below for explanation of term) of Twitter in the Musk era, I have found myself naturally spending less and less time on that platform than I once used to. This means that recent thoughts on life, self and the state of the world have largely just slipped into the memory ether. Some may get built on and come back as something more useful, while others will just dissolve into the mists of time.
As Spring started giving way to Summer last year, I spent some time alone at home while my family was away overseas for a few weeks. I once again found myself once having thoughts that I wanted to do something with and experiences I wanted to reflect on a little more. Although it’s now a few seasons later from the moments in question, I have returned to Medium — my active publishing platform for long form writing — to write a good old fashioned blog post about those few weeks. What follows are a few fragments (and a handful of images) from three weeks in May and June 2023. I had every intention to put this out while the fragments were still fresh. That turned to ‘before the end of the year’ or as one of those wrap-ups of 2023 before the year was done. Now, it’s a case of doing it while I still have this particular set of memories to chew over, a chance to write something a little personal, and a vehicle for just continuing to flex a little writing muscle.
With a busy family and working life, I seem not to be able to make much time for personal fitness, so it was good to be able to put some aside for this. I’ve never been much of a runner as running just seems to exhaust me far too quickly, but I gave it a try this time on a handful of occasions. Baby steps, like seeing if I survived a single circuit running around the park just once, but I managed about five runs and all of them pretty early in the morning (for me). I got to experience the exertions that come with a run, but also how good you can feel later in the day as a result of having been through such a full body exercise. I managed a handful of cycles too, including a few long ones down to the beach, along the seafront and back, and also fitted in a single swim during this time.
Like many people, during the successive periods of pandemic lockdowns and with the transition to a more sedentary working pattern, I’d developed a bit of a paunch over the past few years, and my hope was to be able to lose at least some of it this year. I was pleased to say that, presumably as a combined result of being more active and eating less than I tend to, I was able to get back into a pair of shorts I’d struggled to comfortably fit into during the pandemic. I can’t claim to have adopted a more rigorous fitness regime since then, but it was good to manage even that much and served as a useful reminder of the benefits of a more purposeful approach to personal fitness. I aim to be at least marginally better at personal fitness in 2024, something I haven’t completely abandoned thus far.
Having all this time to myself, I was able to get down to tasks I’d been meaning to do for ages, like clearing out the shed, sorting through my old paintings, or varnishing my grandfather’s old wooden sculptures that I have languishing outside in the garden. Having sole use of the car, I drove a little and it felt good to get back behind the wheel again. Not too much though, as I didn’t feel a great deal to spend too much time driving. I squeezed in a barber’s appointment, indulging in the luxury of letting someone take care over a haircut rather than the more functional run of a pair of clippers over my head that my wife has been doing since Covid. I spent more time down at the sea than I’m usually able to do too. There’s little quite like sitting on the rocks, just looking out at the ocean and allowing the head to gradually calm as thoughts fade into nothingness.
There were a few slight landmark moments too. Wearing a mask on public transport had been my sole remaining mitigation against contracting Covid (which I miraculously so far still seem to have avoided). With the combination of an unexpected train journey with a colleague, the World Health Organisation announcement that the emergency phase of the pandemic was over and the time gap of my family being away (and so if I did catch it, I’d have time to recover from it before they returned), I gingerly stepped into the period that many others had already marked as ‘post-pandemic’, and walked into the new world that somewhat resembled the old one in rather familiar ways. In these times of polycrises, it can feel like quite a luxury to be able to drop one of the list of things to always be worrying about. Spending time in places like London, though, I could certainly taste the pollution in the air more in the back of my throat again, when I stopped wearing a mask.
There was a social side to the time off too. In the past couple of years, I’ve reconnected online with an old friend — a Seattleite I used to know in Tokyo. He’s still there and I’m in the UK, but every now and then we manage a bar-room chat at the end of the week. Well, it’s the end of his working week, but due to the time difference, the start of my last day of the working week. Having long aspired to do so, over this period, the two of us managed to catch up and grab a couple of beers together too, which I obviously can’t usually do as I have a working day ahead. It’s been decades, probably, since I’ve had beers at breakfast, but without a day of meetings ahead of it, was a great way to start the day. Not something I can see myself repeating that often though!
I caught up with my folks a few times too. On one occasion, we went for a wander in the Sussex countryside, discovering a lovely little spot called Malling Down. Hidden round the back of Lewes, this steep and hilly area was rich in vegetation and felt quite remote, despite being just off a fairly main road. As we clambered up a hillside slope, stopping to watch a raptor of some sort eddying in the sky above us, I recalled the family visits to far-off Scottish islands that we undertook as a family. As a teenager, I explored British wildernesses with my family while my friends were spending their summers in some Spanish Costa Del somewhere-or-other. Up on Malling Down, I discovered from my father that when British people were starting to holiday in Spain rather than the likes of Blackpool during the 60s, his parents had refused to take the family there on the grounds that Spain was still then under fascist dictatorship. How far we’ve come, I thought, yet how close that resisting Franco still falls within my recent family history.
Tucked away behind our initial climb was an unexpected discovery that we’d end up spending quite some time in. At the bottom of a sheer slope of chalk scree, ringed at the top with barbed wire intended to prevent livestock tumbling down, was a quiet grove of trees and a chalk spiral embedded on the ground. The natural-looking art piece reminded me of works of the likes of Andy Goldsworthy — of nature, in nature, and likely to be overtaken by nature in time. In one of those moments that felt like it had been scripted in someone else’s short story, Dad struck up a conversation with a young woman he found at the chalk circle. We’d heard a singing voice through the trees as we’d approached, which turned out to be her. She was apparently an up-and-coming Norwegian opera singer, who was spending some time performing at nearby Glynebourne prior to making her debut in Berlin.
After a few friendly lines of conversation, Dad left her to it. It turned out that not only was she using the solitude of the place for some vocal practice, but she also had a rendezvous with her lover there. An unusual momentary encounter, for sure. While my parents were selecting a resting spot in the shade, I headed off in the direction of the scree slope. It was very steep and the surface was highly unstable as it was mainly comprised of loosely-balanced chalk stones. However, with careful balancing, meticulously choosing each step, and grabbing on to clumps of vegetation along the ascent, I was able to make it most of the way to the top. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I last did anything that might have counted as climbing — decades, probably — but it was a joy to just focus in the moment of an ascent.
The day before, over tapas at The Rights Of Man pub in Lewes, we reminisced about my Uncle Mike. Mike, who had recently passed away, turned out to have been an alumni of UCL and had been the first in the family to go to university. Higher education being an environment in which I now spend my professional life, this discovery sparked my interest, particularly as I now have friends and colleagues that work at UCL. We spoke about Jeremy Bentham, who had played a role in the establishment of the university in the early 19th Century. My mother hadn’t heard of him, so I tried to see what I could recall about him from when I had been first introduced to Bentham as an undergraduate, discovering the strand of philosophy known as utilitarianism. I don’t think I could recall enough to effectively explain it at the time, but Wikipedia currently describes it as ‘a family of normative ethical theories that prescribe actions that maximise happiness and well-being for all affected individuals’.
I was better able to describe the Panopticon, an idea also associated with Bentham, presumably as it was translated into a diagram and diagrams can often be useful ways to convey complex ideas. The Panopticon, a circular design for prisons where the guards are all in the centre and the prisoners are fanned around the outer rim of the circle intended as a prison reform idea where the prisoners never know who’s watching them and so more instinctively moderate their own behaviour, has become a useful metaphor for today’s CCTV-heavy societies where technology is seemingly always watching and it therefore costs the state less to run a police force.
For a moment, I struggled in my head to marry up the idea that the father of utilitarianism, a theory supposedly intended to maximise happiness, could also come up with the precursor to the surveillance society where effectively we’re all guilty until proved innocent. But then I remembered that humans are contradictory creatures at the best of times and that different times also produce different ideas from the ones that make sense today.
Time with my parents also meant a little delving further back into actual family history. Many years ago, as grandfathers passed away and possessions were rifled through, passed on, and disseminated, I inherited piles of Super-8 film reels — early steps towards the democratisation of video-making capabilities into the hands of the general public. My intention for several years has been to digitise these myself so that I could make the footage on them accessible again. Digitising Super-8 films, however, is not a simple process in the same way that something like digitising cassette tapes is far easier. Without a dedicated machine, it involves projecting the films onto a surface and then filming the projections. Consequently, although I’d made a few attempts to do this over the years, I’d never made it as far as completing the process.
However, it turns out that many branches of Tesco offer a photo development service that includes Super-8 capture. I took a sample reel in, stumped up my £30 to see the results, and a few days later picked up a DVD with three minutes of silent video footage from my grandparents’ house in the mid 1980s. There were many faces that I didn’t recognise that were presumably colleagues of my grandfather’s, but then there were also pans around their house that took me back to my childhood there. My grandmother was depicted showcasing her garden for the little whirring video camera. She passed away over 15 years ago in her 90s, so it was a strange sensation to see a moving image of her looking very much alive and presumably not hugely older than I am now.
At £30 a pop, I can’t see me working my way through these remaining reels with any great urgency, but it will be interesting to start bringing reels of family history back to life in time. I even used the Super-8 camera myself a little in the 90s, when I started experimenting with film-making. Not got any copies of any of that footage yet either, but here’s a video I stumbled across where somebody managed to attach a Super-8 camera to a drone and make a film that raises, for me, some interesting questions about the intersection of different generations of technologies.
The last delve back into family history involved passing over some piles of paper my father had lent me where he had conducted his own research and traced back centuries of Pates lineage. An American cousin of mine had been expressing interest in digging through the roots of the family tree, so I digitised the pile of stuff my Dad had given me. One of the discoveries in doing this, which took me by surprise, was an old biography of a Richard Pates MP. It turned out that one of my ancestors had been a Member of Parliament during the time of Henry VIII and had been at least known by the renowned king. He would have been a religious man, but beyond that I know little more. I’m clearly going to have to read that biography at some point and see what I can find out.
Away from family and off work, I managed to spend some of this period as a form of ‘retreat at home’. It reminded me of aspects of the first Covid lockdown, where I was alone for long periods at a time, kept blinds down in the house during the day time, didn’t go out a lot, and managed to focus on catching up on some long-stalled personal projects. This time though, without the fears of a dangerous and unknown pathogen stalking the world outside the household, from the neighbourhood to the nation.
I wasn’t completely alone during this home period. Sharing our dwelling space with one rabbit in the house and three chickens cooped up in the garden, I spent time communing with the animals, feeding them, and observing them. With the rabbit in particular, it felt like I got to know him better from watching his movements, behaviours and responses in close quarters. This experience took me back to doing Biology at school, and learning about the seven characteristics shared by all lifeforms — respiration, growth, excretion, reproduction, movement, metabolism and responding to the surrounding environment.
It sounds funny to say so, but was kind of humbling to consider the experiences I shared with another lifeform in our household that was in so many other ways very different from me but with whom I shared those same essential characteristics of life. I pondered over how the world looked through his eyes, what was going on in his mind, how/if he experienced consciousness, and what he thought about. This article goes into a little more detail on the consciousness of animals, and made for a fascinating read.
One morning, I heard a great disturbance arising from down at the end of the garden. I ignored it at first as the chickens often squabble together and make a racket. After a while though, I couldn’t ignore it any longer and went out to see what all the commotion was about. I stepped into the cage, opened up the coop where they sleep and lay their eggs, and found that one of them had died. The commotion was the other remaining two trying to either rouse her or draw some attention to the fact that she was now immobile. Presumably, even with the much smaller brains that chickens have, they can nevertheless comprehend death.
Unceremoniously, I grabbed a spade, shovelled the carcass into a black bag, and dropped the lifeless body into the garden bin. It took me a couple of days to confess to my wife that we’d gone down from three to two of our egg-laying garden inhabitants. The old boy next door, who’d lived on a farm as a kid, told me over the fence that sometimes they just die and you often have no idea why. I must admit that a death in the family was not in my expectations for this period. It certainly reduced the build-up of eggs in the kitchen.
I tend to have a reduced appetite when I’m on my own and don’t end up doing a great deal of cooking. This left me with a build up of items in the kitchen that I didn’t want to go to waste. My wife has all the cookery books rather than me these days and they’re all in Japanese, so I couldn’t turn to them for thoughts on what to do with the extra eggs and ripened bananas that were starting to blacken. Instead of turning to Google and looking for some recipes on what I could do with them, I decided to do something I’d not done before and turned to AI instead.
I provided ChatGPT with a list of some of the items I wanted to use up and asked for recipes that I could follow with those ingredients. The AI chatbot gave me a few options, including banana bread and banana pancakes. I refined things further by enquiring if I could substitute some items it suggested for others than I actually had on hand, and then proceeded to cook my first dish based on an AI-generated recipe. Although a little heavy in parts, the banana bread was perfectly edible and, having actually baked it myself (my first time baking anything in probably decades), I was rather pleased with it. It was an interesting experiment to create and consume food that had been ‘imagined by AI’.
‘Enshittification’ is a term coined in 2022 by sci-fi writer and tech activist Cory Doctorow to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms. Doctorow describes the process thus in a January 2023 edition of Wired:
…first, (platforms) are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
This principle seems to very effectively describe what I feel I have witnessed in the gradual experiential degradation of many big online platforms over the years that I’ve been an enthusiastic user of the Internet, so it was good to put a name to the idea. Doctorow gave a talk on enshittification to UCL’s Computer Science department as part of their Peter Kirstein lecture series and streamed the talk over YouTube. I watched it live over one lunch time, in one of my few concessions to doing something that felt a little work-related. Watch the full video below:
The day I was to pick my family up from the airport was also the day of Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC). In the run up to WWDC, there was a lot of furious speculation about Apple’s rumoured forthcoming ‘VR headset’, and I did spend a good chunk of my time in this period imbibing some of that speculative froth.
What the company announced in the end, titled the ‘Vision Pro’, was described by Apple as a ’spatial computer’ and thus a categorically different product from the existing VR headsets already on the market. Although it was also a computer that you strapped to your face, in the same way you might with a Meta Quest or a Pico headset, in typical Apple spinning this was framed more as a new computing paradigm than an existing tech category. It was to be profoundly expensive when compared with its market competitors, but was also functionally significantly different from them too.
You could use it as a home cinema device (that would be strapped to your face rather than projected onto the wall), allowing your film collections to be highly expansive and that you could immersive yourself into. You could use it as a spatial camera, capturing immersive video of the world around you that allowed a sensation of ’stepping into your memories’ when played back. You could use it for work purposes, enabling you to configure virtualised versions of your regular apps in a multiplicity of spaces comparable to the likes of work spaces in sci-fi movies like ‘Minority Report’.
The Vision Pro, with Apple’s design approach and technical capabilities behind it, clearly appeared as a device that would set new standards in its category, push the envelope in what competitors strived for in virtualised, augmented and immersive technologies, and would open imaginations to what might be possible with these sorts of technologies. It also hinted at the experiential perfecting of technical isolation behind a facial computer and raised big questions — particularly given the price of the device — about what the Vision Pro was actually for, other than being an expensive elite toy. In early 2024, the device has now finally been released into the wild, so we can already see some of the effects of people putting it on and using it. If 2023 ended up being a story about the rise of Generative AI, I would not be entirely surprised to look back on 2024 and see it as a year that say the rise of spatial computing. New paradigm indeed. Watch this space.
One thing I did do during this period which also had profound technical dimensions yet which I experienced as an unequivocally joyful thing was to go to an art gallery again for the first time in many years. A very differnet one, though, from those I might have visited in earlier years.
Titled ‘Bigger and Closer (not smaller and further away)’ and held at new London venue Lightroom, behind Kings Cross, this was David Hockney’s contribution to the rise of immersive art exhibitions, best known via reimaginings of the works of the likes of Van Gogh. ‘Bigger and Closer’ was effectively a career retrospective of a British artist still very much alive, who was able to play a substantial part in putting the experience together. The exhibition was constructed as an hour-long show that took Hockney’s works in phases, and displayed projections of them, animated and otherwise, across four huge gallery walls and the floor of the venue itself.
A narration from Hockney himself played out in the room during the exhibition/show, which provided a sense of being a tiny figure immersed within the artist’s imagination itself. Being stationery throughout but moving just my head, it was a very different experience from walking around a gallery, looking at paintings and reading the artist’s narrative in an exhibition catalogue in order to make better sense of their work. It was my first taste of an immersive art exhibition and it certainly suggested all manner of possibility for new human experiences.
What new stories will we now be able to tell in a world of spatial computing and immersive experiences?
Other cultural moments that peppered this period included getting stuck into some TV, continuing my listening journey into podcasting (mainly ‘Origin Story’ and ‘Empire’), and picking up some new books (Kate Raworth’s ‘Doughnut Economics’ and a couple by Rebecca Solnit).
I’ve generally stayed away from TV for what seems like a good chunk of my adult life, but seem to have been getting a little more into the medium more recently, as another form of storytelling. I delved into Apple TV+’s second ‘Prehistoric Planet’ series, which launched during this time — a visually glorious rendering of life on prehistoric Earth, done as nature documentary and including narration by David Attenborough himself.
Also on Apple TV+, I brought my viewing of ‘Ted Lasso’ to a close with the season finale of the final series. ‘Lasso’ had effectively become my gateway back into watching TV, helped by the ease of watching across devices and the zeitgeist of being well-made feelgood television that emerged during the pandemic, a time of people really needing to feel a little better about the world. At first, I was a little cynical about the show as I saw it as Apple’s very expensive attempt at product placement (given that there’s clear use of a different Apple product in each episode), but in the end, I got rather sucked into the characters and their stories. It’s rather fascinating to observe what Big Tech money is now doing to traditional media, with the likes of Amazon and Apple commissioning their own television and movie series.
Another viewing that I brought to conclusion was the final disc of Peter Jackson’s ‘Get Back’. Effectively decades in the making (or at least in the resurfacing), this three disc romp through the archive footage of The Beatles’ recordings for the ‘Get Back’ sessions were a delight to witness as they shone a light on The Beatles actual creative process itself as it unfolded. The final disc tells the tale of the concert on the roof of the Apple Corps building in Savile Row (a different Apple from the computing giant), and was a delight to watch for an old Beatles fan like me.
Demonstrating that the Sixties rock ’n’ roll generation was still very much alive, one day while out and about, I spotted an ad for The Who live at Hove Cricket Ground later in the summer, accompanied by a full orchestra. Well, the two members of The Who that are still actually alive, anyway. I was sorely tempted by this as I’ve never seen them live and I doubted that I’d ever get a chance to do so again, never mind on my own doorstep, but I baulked at the £85 price tag for doing so.
As ever, music was the other great joy that I was able to spend time on during this period. Following investment in a standup electric bass, a good friend has recently put together a jazz trio and I got to witness their debut gig, over at a pub in Rottingdean. Even though they had to get a stand-in drummer on the day, it was a great first show and a delight to have been present. It made me realise that it’s been a long time since I’d performed music on stage in front of a live audience, as my last gig would have most likely been with Shelf Life at Rubber Soul in Tokyo, way back in 2010. Damn, was still just about in my 30s then! No live music at all during my 40s, and nothing yet into the first few years of my 50s either. From my point of view, it’s a bug you never quite grow out of, but is pretty hard to get the momentum back up and running again once you’ve put things on hold.
One of the main things I was looking to get out of this period alone was an attempt at songwriting with The Zamora, the Brighton band I was in for a little while at the turn of the millennium and which first reunited in rehearsal studios back in 2014. During the first Covid lockdown, I ended up writing close to an album’s worth of new songs meant for the band (or lyrics, at least), that were based off scraps of songs by the various band members. I have been looking to do something more substantial with them ever since, and attempted to set up a ’songwriting retreat’ at my place while I had the opportunity to do so at home.
We didn’t quite manage the full extent of the ambition on this occasion, but a few of us did get to progress at least three songs into something more substantial than they had otherwise been. I had to take that as a win. Turning my conservatory into a temporary recording studio , I managed to lay down some vocal tracks for these new songs, which was better than making just another scrappy phone recording.
We also managed a rehearsal session at Brighton Electric with all five of us and this time booked a room with a stage in it. Sometimes used for gigs, I think. It felt both very strange and yet also very familiar to be back on a stage with the band again, standing in a row all audience-facing and going through our own new songs, almost a quarter of a century since we last did that. Unlike the last time that we were operational and when there was a greater sense of urgency to what our younger selves were trying to do, this time around it seems as if we’re happy to play the long game instead. If it takes several years to write a handful of great songs, maybe that’s just the right gestation period for them? Provided they end up as a good set of songs, that is!
Three weeks off duty from work and family. Although I didn’t end up achieving everything I intended to cover during this time, I managed to get an awful lot done anyway.
Here’s to time out.
