Category: Blog

… this recording a chapter and blogging while it uploads thing. You’ve probably realised this by now. I do intend to, but some days life runs away with me. I’m tired, I need a bath, I get distracted. Quite often, it’s ChatGPT who distracts me – or, rather, I distract myself with it. Just now,…

The hamburger menu, on Android. The result of some theme upgrade, I suspect. Some weary questions come to mind, assuming it was an upgrade. ChatGPT is telling me what to do about it. Clear caches. Change themes. I don’t know what else: my brain glazed over halfway down the page. Its final suggestion was, “Pay…

I’ve just asked ChatGPT what it thinks I should be doing with the next 20 years of my life. A crucial time period for me, since it takes me up to my mid seventies. It’s come up with a list of things I don’t currently have time to do, so I evidently need to remind…

I’ve just recorded chapter 10 of book 2 for Audible and it is a spooky one. Teaser: book 2 does go a little dark, and chapter 10 is one of the darker ones. I had goosebumps up my arms just reading it out loud – and I wrote it! Albeit a few years ago. Someone…

I have been Alexa-fying the house. She is in most rooms, quietly waiting to be needed. We have the already archaic versions of her, the old white boxes you plug straight in: Echo Flex. You can’t even buy them from Amazon any more: it’s all about Echo Dot now, the black spheres that look like…

I’m up to chapter 8 of the second book, recording the Audible version but pushed for time this morning. I need to have breakfast and do various other things to get ready for work, for which I have to leave at 7am. Stayed up too late last night, so had to drag myself out of…

The problem with autobiographical content is that it always involves other people. In the early days of the internet, when it felt like nobody was reading and those who did quickly became friends somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. The nefarious side of things, or the naturally accompanying sensitivity about privacy, hadn’t yet emerged. When…

Life as a single mum did not, needless to say, involve a scuzzy high rise with a broken lift. It was fine, really, with equal amounts of benefits and drawbacks like everything else in this world. Advantages included: Disadvantages included: If I could turn the clock back… I wouldn’t. I’m something of a fatalist, so…

Is the end of a marriage interesting? That time in a relationship where trust has broken and mutual irritation set in? When “us -v- the world” becomes “us -v- each other”? I never wanted to be in that situation and fought hard to avoid it, but it happened. Maybe it was because I wasn’t ever…

Fast forward eight months. I’m running a pub of my own now, having moved in with its landlord and overnight becoming a landlady. A chance to start putting all of those business management textbooks to some use. I think I was pretty good at it, notwithstanding some glaringly obvious errors like: I learned! I wore…