Personal Blogs

I am spending 60 hours in front of a screen a week - at least. This is Monday to Saturday. I try to stay off screens all day Sunday but may end up doing a coupe of hours before I can ditch it (expect for the weather, taking photos and taking phone calls).

This 60 hours is not spent at my desk - where I stand. It is spent at my desk on a two screen iMac, on a sofa (or in bed) with a laptop, all of these places and out and about with an iPad and iPhone.

Yes, I work in the bath. Yes, I work in cafés. Yes, I might even dismay our dog by dealing with things on a park bench out somewhere. 

But I get stuff done.

What I DO NOT MISS is time wasted commuting. It isn't just the time spent in the car, in traffic and getting parked (getting petrol), it is the time spent getting ready to go out > get washed, shaved and dressed (appropriately). 

I am not fit. Damage to my knee on a walk a few months ago testifies to that. But I do eat healthily. Just two meals a day. Nor do I drink (or not for the last 11 weeks). I drink far too much coffee. 

Seventeen weeks into a twenty two week course H807, Innovations in E-learning, I decide that I have to get a desk - flat-pack and cheap, as I can't work effectively with a broken laptop (screen gone) perched on the end of the bed leaning on a toy 'trolley compute console' thingey with printers and files in stacks on the floor. No cupboards, no shelves. The house still has that 'just moved in' feeling ... or rather, just emptied the removal van.

We've been here for nearly 3 years.

Life, eh? I've learnt that if you don't sort a place out in the first few weeks you never do, we never have. Though there is a lovely hedge around the garden. Pity you can't grew furniture too.

So why am I still perched on the end of the bed peering at a screen between a stack of ring-binders?

Lovely desk, but my son has it. He has homework to do too.

Does it matter?

For me, I've always liked a desk, shelves and desk space ... somewhere to spread out. I've always liked a 'room of my own,' as Virginia Woolf put it and was ok until the assemblages of family pressed in and the need to relocate out of the country and into a town for schools and easier commutability to London led to a series of compacting exercises.

Excuses?

I think I'll take the dog for a walk on the South Downs.

As Nietzsche said, 'how can anyone become a thinker, if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?'

Or is the dog a passion?

And the South Downs?

Try High Barn to Hope Gap and the River Cuckmere with the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head in the distance and the English Channel Horizon 15 miles or so away.

Where I think.

(I think !?)