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....

As a child, for some reason I really really wanted to make the best paper plane possible. I tried a lot of fancy designs, most of which were worse than the classic pointy “dart”. Nothing was better than one of the early ones I found, which in the classic form I learnt is made like like this. Fold a sheet of A4 paper lengthways, then unfold it again. With the valley side of the folded paper up, fold the corners of one end to the centre line created by the fold, so that they create triangles at 45 degrees....

We’re all tired of takes on working from home, back to the office, and remote working, aren’t we? So now seems a good time to bore everybody even more with my thoughts after four years of exclusively remote working. Remote working works Here I am. I’ve worked from home for four years, and business has been good. Satisfaction levels have been high all round, mine and the clients’. I’ve also worked for long stretches from different time zones far afield....

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....