I bought an acupressure mat (bed of “nails”) a couple of months ago to help with back pain, relaxation and hopefully to help give me a bit more energy.

I used it for half an hour or so a couple of times a week, while listening to music, and it helped with all of those things.

I hadn’t used it for a month, though, due to not feeling well with one thing and another.

Today I fell into a deep sleep after half an hour on it and had to crawl into bed for another ninety minutes. Still feeling groggy.

I celebrated Thanksgiving only once in my life, and it was certainly memorable.

Looking at The Royal Observatory in Greenwich for my space obsessed four year old. No under fives!

(They do have a special “Ted’s Space Adventure” for 4-7 year olds, but it looks naff and he wants to see the real thing.)

[@Denny](https://micro.blog/Denny) [@antonzuiker](https://micro.blog/antonzuiker) my four year old is obsessed with the solar system and Jupiter in particular. He would love this!

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Notionally returned to wfh today.

✅ Made chilli sans carne
✅ Emailed work to say I will try to ease myself back into things, but still feeling exhausted
✅ Declined work meetings on health grounds
✅ Had a three hour nap
✅ Woke just in time for a late lunch
✅ Picked kids up from school

Me: Dinner’s on the table!

Little kid: I’m just painting Mars!

DUA LIPA'S TINY DESK CONCERTS

Dua Lipa’s Tiny Desk concert at home in between covid lockdowns in 2020 is the most watched Tiny Desk concert ever.

Which doesn’t surprise me at all as we must have watched it literally hundreds, if not thousands, of times.

My little boy absolutely loved it, and even me and big kid secretly liked it, too.

Love Again is my favourite.

She’s just performed a new concert at Tiny Desk HQ, and it’s also very watchable and listenable, with These Walls the standout track.

Love this coffee.

Took a couple of weeks to get used to it after the previous regular one they sent me (which was a Columbian " Milk chocolate").

A cup of coffee with frothy milk sits in front of a package of Pact Coffee labeled "Decaf Muungano."

Overcome space and all we have left is here. Overcome time and all we have left is now.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach 📚

ON JOURNALING

I wrote this a week ago.

My last journal was over a week ago, last Saturday.

I’ve had a week off work with a really bad cough, wheezing, shortness of breath. Generally feeling better these last couple of days, but also still coughing. Last two days I had coughing fits in the afternoons leaving me dizzy, and exhausted. I haven’t slept well some nights either, due to coughing, wheezing and breathlessness.

But sitting here right now, I feel as good as I have done in two weeks or more.

Time off from work has allowed me to go through 90 days of journal entries to categorise and summarise them, and then outline or tease out the key themes or ideas in each area of interest. Why? Well, 1) what are all these journal entries for? I mean, I get the process, but am I missing out on something greater? 2) Lots of people publish weekly summaries and some people like reading them. But why?

I think I get it now. Doing this work has made sense of a lot of daily, weekly and monthly events, habits, routines, scenarios, relationships, that otherwise would have remained loosely connected, strung together like the Christmas lights every year when you take them out of the box you left them in in January. In a mess, tangled up, half working. Better than nothing, but a lot of stress.

And another surprising fact. While I started - and soon stopped - journaling in March, then restarted in August, I had wondered if spending the time to write in a private journal would take away from writing for my blog? Actually (and unsurprisingly, really) the opposite has occurred. I have written more than ever, privately and publicly.

I’ve also generally felt better in myself, although I’ve still had my usual ups and downs, and I’m still quite easily uplifted and dragged down.

It’s also made me realise I do a lot more things than I imagined, and do them OK.

It’s helped me to better understand some of my relationships, particularly with family.

I’m reading more, and listening to music more.

It would be useful (although perhaps less fun)to do the same exercise with my work journal. (41 pages, 46 days).

244 pages over 90 days for my personal journal.

Unfortunately, I haven’t journaled since.

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JON BATISTE'S TINY DESK CONCERT

Jon Batiste, like Alicia Keys, is a supremely talented musician and performer. This is another must watch Tiny Desk concert from 2019.

This is another video my little kid enjoyed watching, singing along to (before he could talk), and dancing to with his big brother (before falling asleep).

Don’t it make your soul shake?

ALICIA KEYS' TINY DESK CONCERT

If you haven’t seen and listened to Alicia Keys' Tiny Desk concert (Feb 2020) then I highly recommend that you do, even if - or especially if - you think she’s not your thing.

This is a video my little kid loved to sing along to before falling asleep for a mid-day or afternoon nap.

We all just wanna be shown some love

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My first attempt at a very simple recipe my Mum used to make fifty years ago.

Little kid: “I like onion and cheese [crisps]!”

Me: “Cheese and onion pie?”

Little kid: " Eugh!"

Cheese and onion pie going in the ovenCheese and onion pie out of the oven, cookedSlice of cheese and onion pie on a plate

LIVING AND BREATHING

I have vague memories of seeing Florence + The Machine on the BBC at Glastonbury, possibly in 2009. She was the big new thing, breathlessly jumping around all over the place, climbing up the gantry, as she showcased her debut album Lungs.

Lungs album cover photoshoot stills - Tom Beard 2009

Or maybe it was 2015. Ship To Wreck sounds so familiar and like it would have caught my ear.

All very dramatic, elemental, and possibly not quite my thing more generally at those particular times. I didn’t pay much attention then or since.

By then, I’d fallen out of love with life, not just music. In recent years, I’ve rediscovered music, and life, and this week Florence + The Machine.

My little kid is 4 ½ years old. He’s obsessed with space at the moment. When he was younger, and still napping in the day, we found that he enjoyed falling asleep to a variety of music videos on YouTube. Mostly videos of music I liked. I don’t know how that happened!

At one time he really enjoyed some of the NPR Tiny Desk concerts - bands playing stripped down acoustic or semi-acoustic fifteen minute sets on a tiny office stage in front of a small audience.

Two he really liked were Alicia Keys and Jon Batiste - which weren’t my choices (well, they were my choices, but now I had permission to choose them), but I grew to love them, too. It’s hard not love such amazing musicianship, singing and songs, all performed with unconfined joy in the moment. My son got it. So did I.

One he wasn’t so keen on, but I enjoyed, was Florence + The Machine’s Tiny Desk performance. Usually so full of bombast, almost over-produced, and perfect for rocking out stadium tours, this was vulnerable and exposed. Two voices, a harp, acoustic guitar and keyboard. Three perfect songs.

I really tried to listen to more, the album versions, but I still couldn’t get into them.

This week, with my focus on my own personal breathlessness and lung history, and still thinking about another Machine entirely, I tried again. I still couldn’t do it, not fully. I now liked the album versions of the Tiny Desk songs, but the rest washed over me. I read more about the band, the albums, reviews, trying to understand why people like them so much.

Then last night, I finally got it. I cant explain why, exactly. Maybe it’s just familiarity. Probably it’s paying attention. As with many things in life, you sometimes have to make an effort to learn to appreciate things and develop a taste (or ear) for them.

Each breath screaming / ‘We are all too young to die,'” Welch sings in the chorus of “Between Two Lungs"

I do wonder also, though, if sometimes songs speak to me even when I’m not actively listening? I’ve always been useless at remembering lyrics. Not great for singing songs in a band. But the songs I love for the music, the energy, the tunes… When I do pay attention to the words, sometimes years later, they do carry meaning for me (even if that’s not necessarily what the sing is actually about). They just needed to be heard. That’s the beauty of it.

No more gasping for a breath
The air has filled me head-to-toe
And I can see the ground far below
I have this breath and I hold it tight
And I keep it in my chest with all my might
I pray to god this breath will last

I recently read: How to Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy (of the band Wilco) 📚.

It’s full of practical if fairly obvious tips on how to write and get your creative muscles going.

Here’s a poem I wrote based on two books I regularly read to my little kid at bedtime.

Handwritten text of a poem titled "Astral Bodies" explores cosmic and anatomical themes.

Three days of feeling relatively well. Today I’m coughing, wheezing, short of breath again. Feel shot.

This went down well with the missus!

Chilli salmon on a mound of boiled rice surrounded by egg noodles and stir fried vegetables in a soy and ginger sauce

This lovely tree by the bridge over the canal near my kids' school at Toplocks is gone.

A tall tree with a textured trunk is surrounded by branches and leaves, against a backdrop of blue sky and clouds.A tall tree stands beside a house, surrounded by greenery and a cloudy sky.

The air outside is thick with the smell of tar and vehicle emissions.

Not doing my cough any good.

It’s so cold this morning, when I got back from dropping the kids at school I had to do the washing up just to warm my hands up.

Starmer is proving to be every bit as reckless and depraved as Johnson.

Yesterday’s Mac* ‘n’ Cheese went down well with me and big kid. It’s one of his favourites.

*Penne

A casserole dish filled with creamy baked macaroni and cheese.A baked casserole topped with melted cheese in a rectangular dish.A plate of cheesy penne pasta is garnished with parsley.A handwritten recipe for mac 'n' cheese includes steps for cooking macaroni, making a cheese sauce, and baking it.

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Wife reckons she has kidney failure due to her high blood pressure. She says her kidneys are due to expire in 2074.

SAUSAGES

Lincolnshire sausages are the finest sausages you can get.

I remember as a boy, fifty years ago, my grandmother making sausages at home for the local butcher. Sometimes, she would let me feed the sausage meat into the machine and then turn the handle to push it through into the skins.

A special treat then was boiled sausages for breakfast. The skins would fall off, and we ate them with white bread soaked in the soup or broth they created in the pan along with a dash of English mustard.

In later years, my Mum would travel to Boston in south Lincolnshire from her home in north Lincolnshire specially to buy sausages from the butcher who made the best Lincolnshire sausages.

She would freeze them and pack me off with ten or twelve wrapped in old newspaper whenever I came back to visit from university or when I first moved to Manchester and then London.

I haven’t had a proper Lincolnshire sausage for many years now. The ones we get now are made in Hampshire. They’re nice enough, better than any other variety of supermarket sausage I’ve tried, but you wouldn’t want to boil them.

They’re pretty versatile. They’re great with mashed potatoes and gravy, in a special Valentine’s casserole, in a Yorkshire pudding, with xmas dinner wrapped in bacon, in a bread finger roll with (or without) onions and ketchup, in a sandwich or, as my kids like to eat them, cold on their own in the bath after school.

Six cooked Lincolnshire sausages sizzling on a baking tray

Wife is making plans for my imminent demise.

Always look as far ahead as possible