Category: Latest entries

The Hutong Bagel Co, Plymouth #art

I seem to be on a bit of a run with my art at the moment as I managed to grab half an hour this morning to quickly paint a little ink and watercolour picture of one of Plymouth’s most popular cafes, The Hutong Bagel Co, located right next to the entrance of the Royal William Yard. (Ironically, being off sick from work with a streaming cold has had the benefit of giving me a bit of extra time to myself even though I still ended up doing work tasks during most of the day).

These little ink and watercolour sketches, which are approximately 7cm x 4cm in size, work best when there is some kind of building or solid structure in them to provide some hard edges and a clear focal point. In addition, I’m deliberately playing with the idea of producing pictures of the premises of various local cafes and shops.

I’m also trying to be brave and sprinkle a few people into my pictures when I can and although I am absolutely hopeless if I try to include any details I’m quite pleased that I seem to have found a way to capture the crowd of people standing outside the cafe without having to stray into the territory of their hands, noses, eyes and ears!

So here it is, my quick mini-watercolour of The Hutong Bagel Co.

Back on the Blog

After a long absence I have found myself drawn back to this blog with a strong desire to get back into the groove of writing entries on a fairly regular basis. Much of the drive to do that has come from another area of writing activity that I have indulged in over the last few months, namely my entry into the world of poetry. This was all entirely unexpected but has now reached the point where I have written a good number of poems and set up a new website to give myself a place to publish them. If you are interested in looking at that site and reading my poems you can find it here: andapoet.blog.

I suppose that having set up my new poetry blog I started to think about other writing and I remember how much I used to enjoy rattling out little pieces for this blog even though I always knew that pretty much no-one ever read them. In addition, I have changed quite a lot over the last couple of years (something that I am sure I will write about here soon), and I am now much more comfortable with throwing my thoughts ‘out there’ without worrying about how that might be judged by anyone (or, probably more importantly, by myself).

So here I am, back on the blog. To help draw myself back in I have changed the design theme of the blog (it now matches my poetry site), simplified some of content being shown and begun to work my way back through past entries. I have been tidying them up, correcting obvious typographic errors etc. and in one or two cases removing them from view if I felt they didn’t fit anymore. I’ve done this tidying process back to the beginning of 2018 and intend to go further back over the next few weeks. I’m also going to add some comments to some of the posts to give a little update on what happened next where this feels relevant.

If you have stumbled on this blog for some reason then I hope you will find something here that you enjoy or find interesting. I’m planning on adding a page that links back to some of my favourite past entries and I am hoping that I might be able to add a new entry on a regular, perhaps near-daily, basis.

Finally, please don’t be shy – leave a comment on a post to let me know what you are thinking etc. I can see from the blog stats that random people do visit this site every now and again and it would be brilliant if sometimes a visitor stopped to actually say hello!

Reading the Back Catalogue

Obviously I have not been writing entries on this blog recently. I had a little burst of writing activity in May 2020 but since then I’ve not added anything more despite constantly thinking that I’d like to get back into the habit of writing more regularly. However, that doesn’t mean that I’ve been ignoring this blog completely. In fact, over the last month or two, I’ve been enjoying looking back through old entries to see the kinds of things that were on my mind and enjoying the occasional nuggets of wisdom or glimpses of humour that I have found. I think this may be a prelude to me getting stuck in to writing here again.

Much more surprising than the fact that I have been digging into my ‘back catalogue’ is the fact that someone else has too. I write ‘someone‘ but I don’t actually know for sure that it is one person, it could be multiple people, but my instinct is that it is one person. I base this view on the observation that the stats for this site are showing between one and three reads per day, always of random old entries (just as I have been dipping in but not, I hasten to add, to the same entries – that would be truly weird) and always from somewhere in the USA. I think I actually prefer the idea that these reads all come from one person as that suggests that there is at least one person who finds my writing sufficiently interesting to keep coming back for more, and on an almost daily basis too. It’s like they are coming to this site for a little piece of daily wisdom, entertainment or distraction. The picture below shows the weekly viewing stats over the last three or so months. You can see that the engagement starts about six weeks ago. The visitor (or visitors) never leave a comment and so apart from knowing that they are viewing from the USA I have absolutely no other information about them.

In some ways, I’m happy not to know any more details – that way I can just keep on imagining that there is one person out there enjoying my past writings. But quite a big part of me wants to know more and wants to have my suspicions confirmed or shattered. Mostly I’d just like to know a bit about them and whether they have actually enjoyed and even found useful anything that I have written.

So, go on… if you have read this entry and it’s you that I’m referring to, drop me a comment or a message. It’d be great to hear from you!

Meet Spike

This morning I gave a once-per-year lecture session on ‘Creating a Website’ as part of the ongoing Marine Science Communications module ‘Our Ocean Planet’. In this session I talk about how easy it is to produce a website these days using platforms such as WordPress and I use a few of the websites that I have produced over the years as examples. Amongst those example websites was, of course, this one.

I have written before about how I don’t write the entries on this blog for anyone in particular. I know that there is almost no audience looking at this blog on a regular basis. I am simply using writing these blog posts as a way to maintain a discipline of writing something everyday. Of course, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that I’d like to think there could be an audience, at least for the occasional post that I write that actually says something interesting or useful (if these even exist), but that is different from writing in the expectation that anyone out there is at all interested in what I have to say.

Today though, suddenly, this site has attracted a few readers, as evidenced by the spike in visits and views shown below:

These numbers are still small, but against the background of the visits and views for a ‘normal’ day the spike in activity is huge. It is also, of course, artificial. These visits and views have only occurred because I was using this site as an example in my lecture this morning. They simply show that there were a few students in the audience who were either interested enough, inquisitive enough or perhaps just plain nosey enough to visit and dig a little deeper. They very probably took a quick look and left rapidly never to be seen again which is, of course, absolutely fine because that just returns me back to normality. But who knows, it’s possible one or two might come back again in the future in some random moment when they are at a loss for something to do and wonder what I might be writing about, whether anyone is still sat in a chair, whether beetroot is still on the menu or whether I have finally managed to come to enjoy marking.

It has been nice to see Spike today, but he’s only passing through and will be gone tomorrow.

My Intentions Manifesto

Over the last few years I have been absorbing content from various books and podcasts which has gradually been re-shaping the way that I try to live my life. Amongst this reading and listening has been quite a lot on aspects of productivity, Stoic and eastern philosophy, mindfulness and creativity (to list just the broad topics that come to mind immediately). Recently, I took the step of trying to boil this down to a series of short, simple principles that provide a kind of manifesto for my life. I can’t say that I necessarily always manage to live by these principles, but I have them written down and have them easily accessible so that I can glance through them and remind myself how I want to be. Initially, they changed quite a bit as I iterated them towards a state that I was happy with but the list seemed to settle down at 9 items which I think capture everything I want captured for now. I thought I would share them here. They are expressed not as instructions to myself but as intentions and so I am calling this list my Intentions Manifesto. It goes like this:

I intend to…

… be PRESENT

… be DELIBERATE [1]

… be PLAYFUL [2]

… focus on SINGLE STEPS

… take ACTION

… take the STAIRS [3]

… act with KINDNESS

… keep moving FORWARDS [4]

… leave things BETTER [5]

Notes:
[1] I often come back to the idea that whatever you do you should do it deliberately rather than accidentally.
[2] I loved Mark Rowlands exposition of the importance of play and being playful in his book ‘Running with the Pack’. He (sort of) defined play as being when you deliberately choose to do a task in a manner that makes it harder than it needs to be for no reason other than because you can. I liked that idea.
[3] This comes from Rory Vaden’s book ‘Take the Stairs’ and captures the/his idea that if you tackle the hard stuff now, what follows becomes easier but if you take the easy route now what follows is harder (‘Short-term easy = long-term difficult, short-term difficult = long-term easy’)
[4] I mean keep things/stuff moving forwards at all times not keep physically moving forwards although the latter is also good advice when running a long way!
[5] This comes from a podcast (it might have been The Unmistakable Creative interview with Jim Bunch but I can’t be sure without going back and listening again). Anyway, expressed in a slightly fuller form I mean that it is a good idea to always leave environments in a better state than you find them in. An environment could be the world around me generally but it might also be something small like the bathroom, my office or even my bag.