I’m a member of the Church of England and occasionally lead the people in my church in what are called ‘Intercessionary Prayers’ – sometimes also called the ‘Prayers of the people’. These are prayers written and led by church members each week, and cover a variety of topics – prayers for the church, our leaders and governments (OK…I appreciate that can sometimes be difficult), for the health of people, etc. If you’re interested in further details, take a look at what the Church of England itself says about these prayers.

I find these prayers can often resonate with people, and I might be approached by people after prayers to thank me for some particular part of the prayers that made a lot of difference to them. This happened to me recently, after I’d included the following:

Where people feel lonely or overlooked, make us attentive and kind.

A member of the congregation spoke with me at the end of the service and said how much they had needed to hear this at that time. It had clearly been helpful to them, and I felt incredibly humbled. And it started me thinking…

I was gobsmacked at the extent of loneliness in the UK. Some statistics state that over a quarter of people in the UK experience loneliness at some time, with 7% saying it’s a chronic experience for them. This site – Campaign Against Loneliness – has a lot of valuable information and support on it.

I do want to make a difference between the experience of being alone and being lonely. I’m an only child and my parents were approaching 40 when they had me in 1961. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be the start of a blues song) I grew up quite used to entertaining myself, never considered myself to be a lonely child and have enjoyed my ‘alone time’ throughout my life. I have spent a lot of time working as a freelancer, will happily socialise but don’t feel the urgent need to always be sociable, and once spent several weeks in Alaska on my own with a tent. (And the local wildlife….)

My church role means that people will sometimes approach me when they are lonely, and I’ve met quite a few folks over the years who’ve expressed their sense of loneliness to me.

I guess we often associate loneliness with older people, perhaps those bereaved or separated from loved ones in any way. Many cultures have attempted to ‘fix’ this – through mixed communities where young and old are encouraged to spend more time together, social groups, church and community groups, etc. And they no doubt work to a great degree.

And then we can always fall back on technology. We might think that things like phones, Zoom, Teams, video calling, online communities, etc. might make an impact on the problem of loneliness. In the last couple of years AIs have given rise to ‘artificial personalities’ that would definitely pass a Turing Test and that have provided a lot of entertainment and even, in some cases, emotional attachment to people. We’ve also heard of the people whose mental health has suffered from involvement with AI chatbots.

About 25 years ago I envisaged a piece of software that I called ‘Companion’ that would interact in a realistic manner with people. I took a crack at it – but my knowledge and the technology of the day weren’t up to the job. (Anyone interested, I was attempting to do this with AIML in a framework provided by PHP). I guess I was inspired by Robert Browning…

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

Obviously, modern LLMs – especially when they use tools to allow access to other resources on the Internet and use speech interaction can go along way to meeting this need.

So – I started getting hopeful (and still am to some degree) that a communicative, knowledgeable, Companion type simulated intelligence might make a great thing to have around the house.

But I recently read something that pulled me up short:

“Technologists want us to focus on loneliness, not depersonalisation. “

Alison Pugh

Basically, tech bros feel that they can probably use loneliness as a marketing opportunity to make money by selling artificially simulated humanity to people missing humanity in a world of 8 billion human beings….

I’m not sure what the answer is – I do think that there is a role for some sort of AI companion in the world, but we also need to start looking at how we can make the world more friendly to people, and create a world in which human interaction is easier to pursue.

As Fred Rogers said:

Won’t you please, won’t you please, won’t you be my neighbour?

Perhaps that’s where we need to start our personal war on loneliness around us, even if we don’t feel lonely ourselves. By making it easier for people who do feel lonely and overlooked to find neighbours in this world.

“The new year arrived and I realized i lived past my relevance…”

A few weeks ago I came across the above quotation. Much to my embarrassment I didn’t note where it came from, but I get the feeling that it was the first line of a poem. The second part of this line – ‘…but not my usefulness’ is somewhat more hopeful, but it’s not what I want to talk about here. Be prepared – this is going to be a whiny old man post…

It resonated with me; I’m now 64 years old and it’s safe to say that my age has somewhat caught up with me in the last year or so, especially in matters of mobility. Nothing says ‘You’re getting old’ louder than the fusillade of cracks and grinding noises that come from my knees when I get up from a seated position!

A few years ago I realised that I was no longer ‘bleeding edge’ in what I did for work or hobbies. In fat, I wasn’t even cutting edge…in fact, I was as edgy as a wooden spoon. I was behind the trends in technology, and it didn’t even bother me.

I was always interested in technology – electronics and even home made simple computers – as a kid and a teenager in the 1960s and 1970s. I had a little workshop, a load of science hobbies, and on leaving university in 1982 hit the home computer craze in the 1980s and wrote a lot of articles, did a lot of trade shows, wrote books, was exposed to a lot of real leading edge stuff and generally worked at what I wanted to do. Looking back, pretty much peaked in my professional relevance in the late 1980s / early 1990s. By the time the first dot-com boom came along I was starting to lag behind. By the early 2000s I was working at what paid the bills rather than what ‘floated my boat’, so to say.

My wider ‘cultural’ life seemed to follow a similar trajectory. More than once I have been heard to grumble in the middle of the night ‘I could have been a contender’.

And this is how I’ve allowed myself to settle in to life through my 50s and in to my 60s. My spiritual / religious life has stayed strong, but I’ve increasingly felt irrelevant in all other aspects of my life. For several years I allowed myself to think that the reason for this slippage was ‘time’ – I didn’t have enough time to do the stuff that I wanted to do. The COVID pandemic knocked that on the head – I had several months of paid furlough with no expectations from the outside world at all, but still just frittered the time away.

I’m not even sure that I want to be ‘relevant’ – it does somewhat depend upon your definition of the word, I guess. One definition I came across was:

the degree to which something is related or useful to what is happening or being talked about. 

Once I started looking at it in this way, my perceived lack of relevance immediately made me ask the question “Relevant to what?” Am I wanting to be relevant to the times in which I live? My work? Can relevance apply to relationships? Is relevance actually by it’s nature a fleeting thing? Is it actually a natural progression that our ‘relevance’ declines as we age?

One thing that has always made me reach for my Rosary in my spiritual life is when someone suggests that the Church needs to be more ‘relevant’ to appeal to believers. I’ve always had a ‘gut reaction’ against this – at it’s heart the Christian church deals with issues that are, to me, eternal – the relationship of man to God and of people to each other.

Having pondered this afresh in recent weeks, I now begin to wonder whether I need to question what I actually MEAN when I use the word relevance in relation to myself.

I am starting to wonder whether the relevance that I am really worried about is my relevance to my own life. I know this sounds potty. At first glance, how can you become an irrelevancy to yourself?

Perhaps it’s when you allow your priorities to be set by others?

I have a soft spot for the old curmudgeon St Paul. In his letter to the Romans, he says:

“What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do,”

Now – stay with me if we’re not religious. Paul states that it is his sinful nature that drives him like this. We might just as well say that it’s our human nature, and that nature is today influenced strongly by so many external influences that it’s surprising that any of us actually end up doing what we want to do, rather than doing what we must, should or ought to do.

Perhaps we become irrelevant to our own lives when we go through them driven by the needs and desires of others, our mangled dopamine pathways, our addictions, our fear of missing out?

Maybe the relevance I mourn is THIS relevance – the relevance of myself as an active agent in my own life?

OK – another few months have passed….

John Lennon is reputed to have said ‘Life is what happens when you’re making other plans‘. There is also the old saying ‘Man plans, God laughs‘. And then there’s ‘Joe is really an idle, easily distracted procrastinator.‘ You may choose your own reason why I haven’t posted.

Today, in a valiant effort to make this site look something like my favourite writing environment, I sat down with coffee, chatGPT, the WordPress Twenty Twentyfive theme and a vague idea of ‘Make it look like a yellow pad’. I also thought that doing this might encourage me to get back in to the swing of things!

I have to say that I managed a lot of what I wanted to do without too much input from the AI, but when I did need it it delivered the goods.

So….I am rapidly running out of excuses, but not ideas. Wahtch this space…I will publish or this site will be consigned to the dustbin of history!

Well… it’s been a while. In fact, it’s been quite a while. The last time I hit ‘Publish’ on here was back in 2018 — which now feels like several lifetimes ago.

Since then, the world has had a habit of throwing us all a few curveballs (understatement of the century?), and I’ve found myself both full of things to say and yet strangely reluctant to say any of them here. I am probably the only person in the world who has ever blogged but who didn’t comment on COVID, Trump 1, and the the rest of the global craziness that have enveloped us since 2018.

In that time I’ve experienced bereavement, depression, getting old, failing knees, the passing of my feline friends and the arrival of a new cat at Pritchard Towers. And, despite my comments in Gutterdamerung…. I did, in fact, finally replace the gutters….

Lately, I’ve been feeling that old itch again — the urge to share thoughts, amusements, frustrations, the odd half-formed rant, and maybe the occasional story about half-forgotten curiosities that no one else seems to care about. In other words… back to normal service.

I’ve missed the way blogging lets me ramble, reflect, and connect with anyone who happens to stumble in. Over the years, this place has been part soapbox, part notebook, part midnight musings — and I’d like it to be that again.

So, this is just a little note to say hello if you’re still out there, thank you if you’ve ever read any of this, and brace yourself — because I have no idea where this will go next, but it’s probably going to involve books, films, music, random dreams I feel compelled to jot down, occasional rants about whatever passes for technology these days, and a fair sprinkling of nostalgia. And, as Ben Elton used to say ‘A little bit of politics’

If you’ve stuck around this long, you’re either wonderfully patient or just forgot to delete the bookmark — either way, I’m glad you’re here.

Normal Service, whatever that may be, will hopefully be resumed… soon.

My biggest personal productivity shortcoming – and trust me, I have a few – is probably my ability to get easily distracted.  It used be procrastination, but I gradually managed to get that at least a little under control.  But focus is definitely an issue. I guess part of it is that I have something of a butterfly mind,  (oops…just flicked away briefly from here because a Skype message popped up) and I probably do have a low boredom threshold.

There’s a saying ‘Started is half done’ which I think I’ve misunderstood and turned in to ‘Started is finished, it just needs tidying up, and tidying up can wait…’.  The number of half finished projects around here is still pretty big – but again, not as big as it used to be, thank goodness.

I call my moments of lost focus and distractedness ‘Oooh….squirrel’ moments. Let me share the reason for this. Many years ago, our neighbours over the back wall used to have a gigantic tree in their garden. I was huge – thicker than a telegraph pole, visible from a mile and a half away, and as far as I was concerned it was poised to come crashing down through our back bedroom every winter.  When the wind blew, the tree added it’s own ‘Dodgy Horror Film’ sound effects, and it blotted out half the sky.

But the one benefit of this tree was squirrels. Dozens of the times a day we’d see squirrels running up and down it, popping on to the bird table, running around the garden, chasing our cats (Marvin, I’m talking about you….) On at least one occasion one popped up on the back window ledge and looked in whilst I was working at the dining room table.

Whenever one of these little chaps came in to view, I’d take a look.  There were occasions when my wife and I would be talking and the person with the view of the yard would suddenly stop what they were saying and doing and utter the words ‘Oooh….squirrel!’ to indicate that a ‘tree-rat’ was doing something cute.  OK – or to indicate that a squirrel was doing something….squirrelish.

It eventually became something of a code-word in household conversations for when one of us became momentarily distracted and lost the thread.

The tree was eventually removed – I love not having it there but miss the squirrels enormously, although in the last year the odd one has shown up on the edge of the garden near other trees.  But the phrase has stayed with us.

And it’s now become the code word for one of us being distracted, or losing focus. In fact, I now use it deliberately when I can feel my attention slipping – no squirrel in sight; just uttering the words makes me at least aware that I’ve temporarily lost the plot.  It’s become something of a standing joke in Pritchard towers, and I even have a daft expression on my face – a sort of quizzical look.

It’s become a helpful tool in my attempts to stay on focus. As soon as I say ‘Oooh…squirrel’, I tend to stop what I’m attempting to do and deliberately break from it. I look around the room and my head for the squirrel; was it an outside distraction, social media, boredom? When I’ve acknowledged my squirrel I’ll often review what I’m doing to see whether I’ve totally blown it in some way, but more often than not I can soon get back to the planned activity with that ‘mind break’ done.

Just admitting the presence in the room of that virtual squirrel acknowledges that I’ve been distracted, and I’ve dealt with it.

Of course, sometimes the squirrel just sits there being cute and I have to break off what I’m doing altogether – that’s often when I know I’m bored or distracted beyond saving and need to go and mentally watch the cute little bugger do what it will for a while.

And on that note…ooooh….SQUIRREL!