More than ten years after I left school, my old secondary headteacher rang my parents and asked for me. She had a painting of mine. Back in that odd time halfway through GCSEs, fifteen years old, after mock exams, after the older children had left school entirely, but before the summer holiday, the school had arranged a week of “activities” rather than lessons. I chose to spend the whole week doing art....
After I wrote a little essay about life being better without planning, one of those fortunate coincidences occurred, and I found a book called “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned”. I recommend the book. It may not convince you, but it presents a perspective that even sceptics could usefully consider. It makes the case, from a technical and practical base, that no ground-breaking achievement can ever be achieved by deciding on the steps to get there and working through them....
Here’s my immediate goal: to write an easy-to-read article about the downsides of planning. The correct thing to do is to gather my facts and the points I want to make, organise them. Come to that, given that this is my personal blog, I should fit the whole thing into my priorities for this week. Instead, here I am, just writing it. Which is how I do more things than we’re told is good....
We live cheaply. By choice. I don’t talk about it, usually, because it’s difficult to say anything and walk the tightrope between people’s pity if they get the impression we have to, and them thinking we’re holier-than-thou if they don’t. But sometimes I wish I could explain, so I’m going to give it a try. When we got married, I was used to spending whatever I felt I needed and not looking too far ahead....
Looking back at my music purchases of 2022, there’s some current, but a whole lot from the 70s and early 80s. One of which, weirdly, is “Plastic Love”, by Mariya Takeuchi. I can’t remember, now, why I heard it and bought it. Now, though, I know that it was suddenly everywhere in the world starting a few years before I noticed it. I know this because my wife went on a Japaneses Disco deep dive one night, because somebody has made a new video for a song of the same era called “Sparkle”, by Tatsuro Yamashita....