Phil Bowell

Matthew Smith is sharing the photos he took on his recent trip to Japan and there are some lovely shots that capture both the people and the place. Well worth a scroll if you’ve any interest in Japan and it’s culture.

Last week Cheltenham hosted it’s annual literature festival and I was able to make it a long to a couple of events. First up was a discussion on Agatha Christie featuring Poirot himself, David Suchet.

It was a fun evening hearing about the efforts Mr Suchet went to in order to portray Hercule Poirot consistently over a period of 25 years. I would’ve loved to have seen the notes he made after reading all of the Poirot books that culminated in a list of 92 things he would need to bring his character to life. The most famous one for me…

Poirot doesn’t run.

The second event I made it to was to see the wonderful Charlie Mackesy. He has a new book out, but hearing about his creative process was both inspiring and humbling.

I’ve come across many artists and designers in my life. Most have a common trait, they are generally very self effacing, preferring for their work and others to be in the spotlight. Charlie takes this to a whole new level. As far as he is concerned he is just a man who like to draw and made a book.

The fact people enjoy his work so much speaks to it’s quality, but also it’s message. I first came across Charlie just before the pandemic when he released his first book, I had been through a difficult time and his work was comforting and encouraging. It seems I was not alone in finding that.

Finished reading: Always Remember by Charlie Mackesy 📚

We always like to imagine mastery as a kind of arrival. You work and work and work, you practice something for 10,000 hours or – in the case of the violin – even longer, and then, one day, you’re there. You’ve reached the peak, the struggle is over. You can lean back and enjoy. But it’s not really like that, is it? And wouldn’t it be a bit boring as well? The gift of mastery is that it sharpens your senses. The cost is that you never again hear things the same. Because you care.

Matthias Ott writing about the true meaning of mastery and its impact on your life. I would add one thing, true masters require great humility. The ability to understand their current limits and to honestly look at themselves and figure out where they can get better.

Blogtober is forcing me to put more thought and effort into posting to my blog each day. I haven’t managed to post as often as I wanted so far — last week I managed two in a row, and then things ran away from me. I posted yesterday, though, so here’s to a new streak.

I’ve noticed a new pattern of behaviour is starting to establish itself. I’m using Obsidian more than I have for a long time and with it the new unique note function. When I realise I haven’t written for the day I hit Cmd-N which triggers a new unique note that sets the title to YYYY-MM-DD HHmm and I start typing. That’s how I ended up posting yesterday’s post They’re home at last.

At the very least, it gets me writing and I keep going until I’ve formed some kind of idea. If I can’t make anything coherent I leave it and come back to it another time. Once I’ve written something I’m ok with I will give it a title and publish it to my blog and then file it into my blog posts folder. If it doesn’t get that far, then I leave it in the root of my vault and I can come back to it when I’m ready.

I’ve always been conscious of not posting for the sake of it and I hope that this pattern of behaviour that I’m developing will help that. It gives me a space for ideas to incubate and I expect that if I can’t formulate a post from today’s writing, I can revisit one from another and see how that evolves.

It takes time to find what you want to say, and allowing the space for that to happen is important. In the past, I’ve not allowed that space and have consequently lost the initial post idea to the black hole of the rubbish bin. Equally, I’ve often rushed something and posted before a thought was fully formed—putting it out into the ether and then failing to return to give it the attention it deserves. I would like to change both of those things which is the aim behind making a belated start to Blogtober. I want my blog to be a place to share thoughts and ideas as well as events and activities. In order to achieve that I need to give myself the space to ruminate on things.

Apple renamed Apple TV+ to Apple TV and everyone is up in arms. They’re just reflecting reality, no one outside of the Apple nerds calls it Apple TV+ it’s just Apple TV to them. The new F1 Movie is coming to Apple TV in December is much simpler.

Whilst I worked this morning I had on in the background a live stream of the news. I don’t normally watch the news, I prefer to read it after things have happened but this morning I wanted to know what was happening as things unfolded.

I’m talking about the release of the Israeli hostages who have spent 736 days in captivity. Held by Hamas, in underground tunnels, starved of food, daylight, and many other things we take for granted.

I cannot imagine the relief their families must be feeling.

I cannot imagine the grief the families of the remaining 28 hostages whose remains they are waiting to be returned.

Two years it has taken for all the hostages to be released. A war which could’ve ended at any time in that time by Hamas releasing them. For now a fragile peace is in place. I can only pray that it continues.

Already there are talks on going for the second stage of the ceasefire. The disarmament of Hamas and their stepping down from any form of control in Gaza. This will be the biggest obstacle for those involved to over come.

There are already reports of Hamas attacking rival tribes and executing “collaborators” in Gaza City. It does not look promising. How do you persuade a group whose sole existence is founded on the distraction of a group of people? I can only pray.

There’s nothing quite like it. The click of a lid as it pops off, the scratch of the nib on the page, and the slow progress made through a notebook. Over the summer I’ve turned more and more toward the analogue than I have the digital and I’ve come to the realisation that what they say is true. It really is easier to think on paper than it is on screen.

I’ve always had a notebook with me since my later years at school, back then it was called a sketchbook, but it equated to the same thing. I used it to explore ideas and to work out problems, since then my use of it has evolved and it now includes a journal like element as well. In fact I’m slowly developing my own version of the bullet journal, but that’s for another post.

What I wanted to talk about today is how using my fountain pen and notebook make me feel. There’s a steadiness about it that I find difficult to put in to words. A feeling that I am creating something more lasting, even if most of what goes into my notebooks is fleeting, it feels like a body of work is building. Like I’m part of something bigger.

One of my favourite artists I Leonardo Da Vinci, not for his paintings, but for his notebooks. I first came across them in senior school and I’ve been fascinated by them ever since. How he used them to explore ideas, to think, to draw, to document, to do keep a record of everything he did astounds me. I think in some way that is what draws me to the idea of keeping a notebook. It’s why each day I turn to a fresh page, write the date, and begin using it throughout the day. Almost every day something gets written down, and on the rare days nothing gets written, that’s ok, tomorrow is another day and there will be something to go in it then.

I discovered this morning that there is a thing called Blogtober and it got me thinking, perhaps I should try and take part this year. I might be a week late in finding out about it, but if I can take part for the rest of October then why not?

One of the things I seem to struggle with regularly, is a desire to blog but never actually doing it. Most days pass by with me thinking I should write for my blog today, but then I never do. I don’t know what the block is, whether it’s a feeling of not knowing what to write, thinking that what I have to write is a bit bland and meaningless, or simply hiding from what I want to say. Whichever one it is, I don’t think it’s worth while.

I’ve been blogging in some form or another for roughly 20 years now, in fact I think my very first blog would’ve been setup in the summer of 2005. That means I missed an anniversary this summer. The first post I have a record of is from 2006 I know I was posting long before that, I’m sure somewhere I have a proper archive of those early posts which I should try and dig out. It would be fun to look back on.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that I plan to try and post every day for the rest of October in the hope that it will help me build something of a habit again. When I first started blogging I used to post multiple times a day, that tailed off when I left university and social media took over, but now that I’m largely off all the major networks I’m more interested in reviving old habits and seeing where things go.

Manu hits on something that I often struggle with, rating books. I rarely do, and most of the books I rate are 4/4.5 stars, I agree with him when he says

I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books?

I also don’t know the difference between a 3 and 3.5 star or 3 and 2 star book. If I didn’t like a book enough to give it a low rating, chances are I haven’t finished it and never will. That says enough to me. I either liked it and finished it, or I didn’t and I abandoned it.