ROGER CARES FOR NOTHING

Have decided that weekends would be better served with tea, rather than Shiraz-fuelled. Easier on the morning head. And just as collectible, yet cheaper. So many upsides.

So I got on down to All About Tea and stuffed my basket full of Darjeeling and Chai. Today it arrived, with custom made tasting notes, potted histories, and a tea catalogue as long as my arm. I think I’m going to enjoy this. Thank you Andrew Gadsden “Saviour of Tea”. Your service is lovely and I have a hunch you are a fine man.

This is an interesting tool. Worth checking in with it again sometime. As of today, it suggests I’m a ‘NEW’ ‘LOVE’ kind of guy…. probably because I have a lot of ‘LUCAS’ in my life : )

This will grip you. Just published a new thinkpiece for Velocity on how to do better PPC (aka, pay per click, Google Adwords, search engine marketing) in a B2B environment. Go get it!

…that’s ‘take away concerts’.

This is a wonderful wonderful web site, full of great music put together in a lovely way.

I have to thank our local, the (brilliant) Gardener’s Arms and mega barman Rick, for helping me to rediscover music. Or, more correctly, to re-experience music.

In short, last week Gerry and I ditched iTunes as our music centre of choice and reverted to CD’s. The effects have been inspirational.

As mentioned previously, I had lost more than a little of my soul (and mind) over the past decade to all things digital - conversations lost to email, magazines lost to RSS feeds, and, of course, CDs lost to iTunes.

This blog is an attempt to get things back on track - to live life slower, reclaim my attention span, and generally devote decent time to doing all things well and properly. See here for a recap…

Anyways, back to the pub.

Rick recently introduced ‘Vinyl Orders’ (or ‘The Vinyl Bell’ or ‘The Vinyl Countdown’, depending on who you talk to) to the Gardner’s as a weekly Sunday event. The idea, of course, is for folks to bring along some old vinyl, give it a spin and generally enjoy a good old gas about music (as well as being a great excuse to get skulled on the best selection of real ale in East Sussex).

Here’s what the opening night looked like:

Now, I’d never heard of Clifton Chenier before this point. John Eccles introduced me to it - as well as to his forthright views on Cajun soul and jazz. Anyways, from what I remember Clifton Chernier is great and good fun was had by all.

Fast forward a few weeks and I returned with Gerry - AKA music Nazi - on her birthday with an armful of her old LP’s. A few pints into the evening we hear this:

I loved it and got into a bit of a chat with its (proud) owner. We were both a little worse for wear, but we shared a joke and some profound (dodgy) 80’s soul insights and moved on. At the same time it made me realise that something I used to enjoy was missing from my life.

I’d not really passed any music around with any enthusiasm for a while. In fact, I realised that Gerry and I hadn’t really shared any of our (large) collection together in the past five years - ever since we went digital. Then I realised what we were missing and what had gone wrong….

This interface is a search interface. I can browse covers, but this is a poor substitute for cradling an LP or a CD and rooting around the sleevenotes, pullouts and tracklistings. Also, unlike an album sleeve, it’s not a thing of beauty.

This interface isn’t a search interface (search really is crap on an iPod). It’s more a doing interface - an application interface. It helps you to get to the tracks you want and to play them.

iTunes and the iPod (and all their mp3 brethren) are great little interfaces for finding the stuff that you want - for searching out specifics. But as a window onto your world of music, they’re totally crap. They don’t accommodate idle browsing or encourage random acts of serendipity. They’re also extremely private - unless you and other people are connected to a Mac or PC - so they don’t inspire any real interaction with other people.

To my mind, all of these physical things represent the absolute joys of owning a music collection - and not many of them can be replicated in ones and zeros.

Here’s how and why music works best for me:

Cooking in the kitchen whilst G goes aurally AWOL on a quest for remote sea shanties


Playing top trumps with G on best film scores


Annoying G with loud inappropriate rap whilst she’s eating breakfast in the morning

Drunken collaborative DJ sets after dinner with friends

….and generally spending slow time rooting around, finding forgotten stuff, and surfing some good old waves of nostalgia

So, the day after our vinyl session at the Gardener’s I built this in our kitchen:

Which now looks like this:

And this morning I managed to dig out OutKast’s ‘The Way You Move’ (Speakerboxx/The Love Below) - a track I hadn’t heard for years, but one that right now feels like the best piece of music ever invented.

Next week the Warner household fully regresses to Phono….

Sidenote - A DISCLAIMER: Gerry warned me of this adverse effect of iTunes before iTunes was invented. She is VERY wise and I love her madly and deeply.

Footnote 1: iTunes is still part of our lives, but it’s a footnote. Useful for train journeys and cars.

Footnote 2: Dammit! I can’t find The Stone Roses. Need a better search apparatus. D’oh!

Health note: if you restrict your breakfast intake to things only eaten with a spoon, then life would be a lot slimmer. (NB: Hands - and hence toast - are off limits).

It’s taken me thirty six years to figure out that ‘Nothingness’ is smart.

Until now, fast meant pro-active, which in turn meant busy, which had to mean smart. A friend of mine at IBM used to use the phrase ‘busy fools’ - there were so many of us who were trapped in the wilds of our inbox and working on weekends. I now know what he means.

Anyway, the penny dropped this weekend. I found myself in Spain sorting out some family business. I took Anne Fadiman’s ‘At Large and At Small’ with me for company, on the recommendation of Russell Davis’ (very excellent) blog.

It’s Sunday morning and I’ve just finished the book. It’s wonderful: a celebration of the ‘Familiar Essay’, a step back in time to essayists and letter writers of the nineteenth century, where the author pours more than a little of him or herself into the material and takes it slow, reveling in the text like a good old rambling chat (I’d liken the format to an extended newspaper column, where familiarity with the author is at least as important as the content itself).

Fadiman covers a variety of unconnected topics: ice cream, arctic explorers, moving home, the Royal Mail and Coleridge. It’s random and unpretentious and I loved it - mostly because I know the author has taken a great deal of time collecting and composing each essay with no other goal but to please herself.

Which got me thinking. The setting helped. With no distractions other than Spanish network television, the book was the clear winner of my attention for two days. I can’t remember the last time I read a book in this way. In the bath. In bed. In the lobby. In the bar. It was one of my top experiences so far this year. But what, I now wonder, was so enjoyable?

My conclusion (written in a moment of clarity, pre-dawn in the airport lounge) is this: above all other things in life I most enjoy doing nothing of importance.

It wasn’t really where I read the book that mattered, but how. I had long periods of ‘downtime’ so I just grazed on it, re-reading passages and stopping occasionally for ten minutes to mull things over. The content encouraged this approach. It’s the literary equivalent of Seinfeld. A book about ‘nothing’.

The concept of ‘nothingness’ deserves more thought. As a category, I’m beginning to see its value, especially when assessed against its alter ego, ‘busy.’

My wife and I are at our best together when doing nothing. We’re at our worst together when stressing about work. We love each other when we’re tootling around at home or abroad. We generally hate each other when we revert to a space race of working ‘importance’ to justify why we can’t do nothing.

We have a boy, Lucas, 18 months old. Set against time BL (before Lucas), walking a pram is nothing. Sofa bombing is nothing. Sleeping in on the weekend with his snot on my face is nothing. Whereas doing email on Sunday is busy. As is having a beer with Gerry and replying to emails on my phone.

Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. But if I evaluate my major decisions of the past 12 months, then broadly speaking they’ve erred on the side of nothing - or at least creating space for nothing. We moved from East London (busy, helicopters, property boom, shoreditch leisure pirates) to Lewes (real ale, south downs, cottage, not much driving). I changed my work from software development firm (large opportunity doing something I had no affinity for) to marketing agency startup (good opportunity, lucrative, more respect for the work, more time spent cogitating on problems I enjoy).

I’m still working hard, of course, but between Lucas, Lewes, a weekend in Spain and some long conversations with Gerry, I know that quality (of life and of work) has absolutely no correlation with quantity or speed (of either).

So, rather than carving out opportunities to do more busy stuff, I’m convinced I’ll do better fatherhood/work/husbandry by dedicating time to pursuing the ‘nothingness’ in life.

Next up: thoughts about attention spans and software.

Footnote:

My Netvibes account is down to x2 tabs. I’ve slashed my magazine subscriptions from around eight to x1 weekly magazine, x1 monthly and x1 quarterly. I’m working from home one day a week. I’m reading one non-business at any one time. I don’t carry a smartphone on weekends. I’m spending a lot of time calendaring domestic events and activities. I’m taking baths. I’m booking a camping holiday in July with the Warner clan. I’ve falling in love with my wife again.

Sweet potatoes! Animoto just did this to my Flickr stream!

How’s that for blogging video for dummies?

Firstly, I’m now the proud owner of a pair of knitted, woollen slippers…courtesy of Mrs W. They’re truly great and extremely comfortable, if a little slippery.

Secondly, I learned how to break into a car yesterday, courtesy of my neighbour Steve (he’s in security, so he’s qualified to advise on this kind of thing).

Trouble was, my friend had locked his keys in the ignition of his ‘vintage’ BMW, with the engine running, and no spare set to hand.

The solution came in the shape of a cable tidy, some dental floss and a bit of patience.

As directed by Steve, if you get locked out of your car, and if it has an old style lock that you manually flick up and down when inside, then there’s no need to panic. (Well, so long as you floss regularly, are up tight about general cable mess, and tend to keep this kind of stuff on your person at all times.)

See below for an overview.

Bore a hole in the end of the cable tidy. Thread the dental floss through the hole and tie it in a loop. Shove the contraption through the gap at the side of your car door (a crowbar may help create one). Jiggle the floss around until it lassoos the lock, pull it sharply towards you and bingo you’re back in!

This took us all of 60 minutes on a cold afternoon. On a sunny day, without the wobbly hands, I reckon you could get it down to at least 45 mins. Don’t use cotton though, it’ll break. Has to be dental floss - or something else that’s tough and up to the job.