Share Sg–ething Every Day – Sunday–R Coding Various

First thing is that 13th September is my blogiversary. It’s now seventeen years since I bit the bullet and committed to keeping a weblog at https://perfectpath.co.uk and not deleting it. The main things I thought about this today were how much stuff there is in here and how I’ve never quite achieved the goal I … Continue reading Share Something Every Day – Various →

First thing is that 13th September is my blogiversary. It’s now seventeen years since I bit the bullet and committed to keeping a weblog at https://perfectpath.co.uk and not deleting it. The main things I thought about this today were how much stuff there is in here and how I’ve never quite achieved the goal I had at the start of using it as a learning tool, it’s been great for recording and capturing and supporting that first burst of creativity but I’ve not managed the double loop stuff. Not on the blog material itself. This is probably a lie and if I went digging I’d find the evidence – the most obvious kind of thing is to see how my thinking does develop over a number of posts, just through the writing down of ideas and arguments and rambling nonsense.

I made some progress today on automating the workflow – especially making a pipe between Drafts and logseq – I’m bored with thinking about it and why it’s important – it’s not that important, but it’s neat.

I was at work this morning and most of the time was at a funeral. It’s an occupational hazard of working with older people that you see more death than the average person. I think so anyway, it sounds right, but then I think of all the people I’ve worked with who died, who were (almost by definition) below retirement age and there’s something about the structure of this sentence that makes it sound like they died because they worked with me. Which they didn’t. I am not a psychopath. Psychopaths don’t keep a blog for seventeen years.

No matter, a Requiem Mass on Monday morning is a sobering thing, whoever you are. None of the silly things floating through my head over the weekend were important compared to the visceral grief of a woman who’s lost her husband and partner in joy and laughter, even in the face of a strong faith in the resurrection. And we got to sing Psalm 23 to Crimond, which is one of my favourite things to do at any time. I’ve always loved belting it out regardless of whatever reedy wheezing and croaking of those around me. I miss Roy, who I met through his attendance at our dementia-friendly café and singing group. He had a great smile and a twinkle in his eye. He was always smartly dressed and loved his bow ties. And despite not being able to remember much about what he’d done earlier in the morning, he loved talking about his working life as a chauffeur for the top brass at British Aerospace. I already missed his face for a while because of COVID when Julia told me that she was having a bed put up in the living room to look after him and that he wouldn’t have long. I last saw them both just after Christmas – there wasn’t any point in them getting excited about restrictions being lifted particularly, they knew that they didn’t have too much longer together.

I scanned this photo of my grandma today. I’m sure she’s in her garden – a middle-aged 1950s housewife. It was taken by my dad on his twin-lens reflex. She couldn’t see without her glasses but she also refused to be photographed wearing them. She’s probably about ten years younger in this picture than I am now. Being in your mid-forties then was not as it is now, her life must have felt like it was nearly over. Her older sister had died a few years previously. Her youngest son was a teenager, her oldest had just come back from Oxford early. She didn’t like her husband very much. She didn’t know it, but in a few years time she’d have a bleed on her brain and almost die. She also didn’t know that she’d got another thirty-odd years to live and would see her first two great-grandchildren. Who knows what she was thinking here.

Time passes.