Make It Tea - public:blog

Becoming Teetotal

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 18:39:14 +0000

Becoming Teetotal

My 2nd time → “back to Teetotal”

I first tried a break from alcohol in 2016. For various reasons. I just wanted to stop drinking.

I'd read a few “sober blogs” and had been increasingly unhappy about how much I was drinking and how much mental energy I was expending on thinking about how to moderate it.

So I stopped. Just like that. It was easy, really.

Other people were the problem. Not the not drinking. People. It became obvious that drinkers just don't like a non-drinker - it makes them feel as though they're being judged, or makes them question their own relationship with alcohol. And they get uncomfortable.

I blogged about it for a while at https://makeittea.wordpress.com/ (don't look for it, it's long-gone) and I enjoyed the writing of the blog posts. And I enjoyed the positive feedback I got from the few people who read my posts.

I started drinking again in early 2017 - but regretted it. Regretted giving in.

After a heart-attack in 2018. After developing Rheumatoid Arthritis in 2019. Being on a bucket-load of medications. After the 2020 Covid-lockdown-shielding-wine-o'clock adventure.

After all that….

Enough was enough, and I stopped again in April 2021. Although I didn't do it in any ceremonial way. There was no “Today I stop drinking” watershed moment.

I decided to not drink one day, and then the next day I did the same… until after a few days I thought “I'm just going to keep this going….”. It took a few more days to realize that this was my chance to do it “properly”. I had sympathy and support this time. There wouldn't be the silent (and not-so-silent) peer-pressure.

This time, unlike the first time in 2016 (when I was doing it for no obvious reason and thus I was an annoyance to everyone around me) I was doing it with good, medical reasons.

And everyone forgave me now for being a teetotaler. I wasn't judging them after all, and I wasn't just being a martyr, wasn't being holier-than-thou….

If anything I was a poor victim.

“Health Reasons?”

“Can't drink because of your medications?”

“You poor thing!”

But if I'm honest, I gave up this time, in 2021, for the same reasons as my first try, 5 years earlier.

I wanted to stop & I enjoyed the peace and freedom of not drinking.

The new “Day One” was April 23^rd 2021, but I only know this because I've just checked back in my diary. I've had 5 sober Christmases, 5 sober Birthdays, 5 sober Wedding Anniversaries. 5 sober New Year's Eves.

Anyway…. back to blogging….

I found on the *Wayback Machine* one archived capture from my old long-deleted makeittea.wordpress.com blog and the capture has several of my posts.

I might make some new posts out the the recovered material from Wayback Machine and published them here….

makeittea

Blogging Platforms

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:44:38 +0000

Blogging Platforms

I've recently been playing with self-hosted blogging platforms.

It started with revisiting the Blog plugin for Dokuwiki and deciding that I wanted to use a purpose made blog platform instead.

This brought me back to re-visit Chyrp-Lite which I found easy to set up and to use.

Then I found Pure Blog which seemed even more light-weight and more akin to what I was looking for.

Then I found I was updating wiki-pages here in Dokuwiki and updating Blog pages in Pure Blog. Both are running on the same web-server.

And although I found it annoying to have to mentally flip between forms of Markdown, I got on with it, as I thought there was a benefit in separating wiki-like pages from blog-like posts.

Pure Blog drawbacks

Pure Blog is hard-coded to run in the root directory of a web-server. Not in a sub-directory. I tried it that way, and it doesn't work. This didn't pose too many problems at first.

My two instances of dokuwiki (home and work-related) ran in their own sub-directories, as does my old vintage 2001 website. So far so good.

Today I used the Pure Blog in-built update function to update the code to the latest version, and I found before pressing the GO button that the script wanted to clean out the webserver root directory of anything that wasn't part of Pure Blog.

That meant my sub-directories containing dokuwiki etc.

Well, that's not going to happen…

Instead it's “Bye Bye Pure Blog”

Back to Dokuwiki

I've re-instated the Dokuwiki Blog plugin and will go back to using it for the occasional blog-like post - something that doesn't fit in my existing structure for the wiki itself. I've copied across a few articles from the Pure Blog, fortunately there aren't many that I feel the need to drag across, and to correct the markdown & move the images etc.

I might continue to pull across a few more, as the mood takes me, but I'll basically just start afresh, from here.

pure, blog

Comparison - The Thief Of Joy

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:04:20 +0000

Comparison - The Thief Of Joy

As I mentioned in another post, I've rekindled my interest in playing musical instruments….

I'm learning the Alto recorder and I've got my mandolin down off of its hanger.

I haven't (yet) exhumed my D/G melodeon from its case, hiding on top of the bookshelf, but that's only a matter of time, surely?

I've dipped in and out of playing music all my life and never got to the stage where I feel I'm any good at it.

This isn't false modesty. I just haven't ever got past the “advanced-beginner-early-intermediate” stage, got to the point where I'm comfortable playing (in public/with an audience etc), to where I make few mistakes, where I can get through a tune if not artistically, then at least competently.

I've tried, over the years:

Recorder
Guitar
Piano
Mandolin
Bodhran
Tin Whistle
Melodoen

![mandolin1](/content/images/comparison-the-thief-of-joy/mandolin1.jpg)

I played recorder at primary school, and learned to read music. I had piano lessons at age 12, or so. I never liked it, never practiced, abandoned it as soon as my parents realized it was a waste of their hard-earned money. I've tinkered with other instruments on and off ever since.

Why do I fail to reach “competency” each time?

#### How long is long enough?

How long should I try an instrument before deciding I'm just not going to become acceptably good enough? How many hours of noodling, of targeted exercises, of repetitive tune mangling?

It's never got to the point where I'd be comfortable to say publicly “I play the (Insert instrument of choice here)”.

How many hours….? Is it the mythical 10,000 hours? That seems like, on one hand *an awful long time* and on the other hand *fairly reasonable*. 3 hours a day (if you're serious, you'll spend the time) is 3333 days. Let's call that 10 years. Seems a long time. I've been tinkering with music since I was a child. I'm 60 years old now. That's plenty of 10,000 hour opportunities to get good enough.

Of course it isn't a simple as “spend 10 years at something and you'll be good at it”. The 10,000 hour magic number has largely been debunked now, anyway.

But undeniably *time spent doing the thing* is a major factor in how good you become *at the thing*.

#### Talent or Commitment?

Failed amateur musicians often point at successful amateur musicians and say *“but they've got talent, and I must have none”*.

And the successful amateur musicians reply *“no… I practiced hard, for many hours, many days, weeks and years, to get this good. It's not talent, it's commitment”*

But the failed musician might have started out just as keen, just as motivated, spending just as much time and energy as the successful one. Who can say? Why was one successful and the other a dispirited *failure*? What happened in the first year or two that made the successful player *keep playing*? Were they actually improving more rapidly, and the feedback kept them keen and motivated?

Did the failures (I count myself in this group) improve much more slowly, if at all, and give up because of a pragmatic realization that they can't devote *even more* time and energy than they already are doing, and therefore it looks like they aren't going to improve to any significant degree?

The successful player uses the positive feedback of early progress to fuel their hard work, the failure uses the negative feedback of their lack of early progress to justify giving up.

I spent years at the melodeon.

I played for hours and hours and hours and hours. I took it to work with me. I took it everywhere. I played alone though, with no tuition. I learned tune after tune after tune. None of them done particularly well. I just never made that longed-for breakthrough where I suddenly felt like I *was* a melodeon player. I can't count the hours I've spent at it.

I was in my mid-late 30s and early 40s. I wasn't a kid, I understood that things took time and effort and commitment. Yet still I wasn't good enough. And again, that's not false modesty. I *really wasn't good enough*.

I saw other people take it up, on forums etc. and within months were posting really competent You Tube videos of their progress. Much, much better than anything I could do.

Did they *really* spend so much more time playing and practicing than I did?

*Really?*

I truly think there is such a thing as *talent* which decides whether you're going to become good at an instrument. The *talented* people will spend time getting better, and better. The *un-talented, but keen* people (myself?) will spend the same amount of time initially, muddling along, but getting slowly, inexorably disenchanted at their progress, then the time spent dwindles until they just give it up.

Yes, the *talented* people commit *huge* amounts of time, hours upon hours upon hours of practice.

And they improve.

They attain competency.

They become musicians.

And they put it all down to the time spent.

They tell the failures *“if you'd spent as much time as me practicing you'd be just as good”*. They believe it's all down to their undeniably hard work. They spend more and more time at it as they progress, because the positive feedback makes them feel the investment of time and effort is justified.

Failures gradually spend less and less time at it, for the same reason; the time invested isn't justified.

Go and find something else to spend all those wasted hours on.

#### A new beginning

From this negative-sounding introduction, I'm now feeling positive about playing again.

Yes, I still haven't got the talent, but now I'm comfortable with that.

But I *do* have more talent than a lot of other people. It's a sliding scale. There are some people who, no matter *how many hours* they spend they just aren't going to become musical.

I am at least capable of making some musical noises on my instruments. I *can* play in an *ok* way most of the time.

That's the realization I've had recently. I don't need to get to be a good musician, I just need to enjoy spending the time actually doing it. If I can get to that stage, where my amateur squeaks and plucks and squeezes are enjoyable to me, *and me alone* then that's a worthwhile use of my time.

##### another way of looking at it

I do a bit of sketching - mostly in my diary. A few years ago I forced myself to learn how to do it after a lifetime of being *“unable to draw”*.

![tea1](/content/images/comparison-the-thief-of-joy/tea1.jpg)

And I came to the conclusion that with sketching there is no *right or wrong*. Just whether you like the outcome. I read a quote somewhere which helped me accept my scribblings

They aren't mistakes, they're your style

![eggs1](/content/images/comparison-the-thief-of-joy/eggs1.jpg)

My sketches are sometimes poorly done, nothing like what I was aiming for. But the more time I spend doing it the more I feel the “mark-making” is done with confidence and it's the confidence of the lines that shows, as you do it more and more and more.

It might not look any different to the scribbling of a child, but it *feels* different.

![lft1](/content/images/comparison-the-thief-of-joy/lft1.jpg)

It *feels* right. Good, even, well, good enough anyway.

Another phrase I like

Done is better than perfect

How does this relate to music?

I need to accept that I'll never be note-perfect in my playing, just like my sketches aren't a perfect representation of what I'm trying to draw. My imperfect drawing shows my own particular *style*. In music I'm going to start believing the same thing is possible. As long as I can start to ignore gross mistakes while playing, and just keep going through a tune, I can start accepting that the *“mistakes are my style”* and stop trying to be completely accurate according to the dots on the paper. Especially with folk music. There's no “right or wrong”. There's a basic form for the tune. You have to stick to the skeleton. Listening to different renditions of the same tune on You Tube it's obvious that nobody plays according to the dots. Everybody puts something of themselves into the tune. The dots are just the bare minimum, lowest common denominator representation of a tune that has got many, many different interpretations *in the wild*.

The dots are just a starting point.

![dots1](/content/images/comparison-the-thief-of-joy/dots1.jpg)

This isn't classical music, I'm not playing with an orchestra, I don't need to slavishly follow the score. As long as I interpret the tune in a pleasing way, adding my own variations (sometimes they are done to make a phrase easier to play, sometimes because it sounds better, sometimes to just change it a bit for one-time-around, to add variety).

And ignore mistakes - stop stopping each time there's a wrong note. Push on, get to the end.

Of course you need to spend *some* deliberate time practicing a tune phrase by phrase, working out complicated twiddly bits. And some other time doing drills, scales and exercises. You need to build up muscle memory and mechanical skills.

But stop trying to be perfect.

### Embrace the wonkiness

Don't compare yourself to other people, even those that inspire and motivate you. Find the joy in the act, despite what you see around you.

music, joy

Diaries

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 09:17:52 +0000

Diaries

I write this in the hope that anyone reading it might be inspired to start diary writing if they don't already or to continue, and to discuss their process, if they do.

I like to store memories on paper, for later. Mundane daily life or exciting events….

What is a diary as a rule?

A document useful to the person who keeps it.

Dull to the contemporary who reads it…

…and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Walter Scott

I keep a diary

I started in 1992, my mid-20's but then I let it lapse after a few inconsistent years of intermittent diary writing. Looking back the snatches of life I recorded from those days are (to me) fascinating and I regret not having kept it up.

I started bullet journaling in 2016, a few days before my 50^th birthday.

After about a year of this small A6 format *bullet-points-with-longer-bits-and sketches-every-now-and-again* I started *proper* daily diary writing later in 2017. Bullet-journaling is still one aspect of my practice, but not for task-management - just for remembering what I did.

I've been at it ever since.

I'm 60 now, so that's 10 year's worth of life captured, in 46 A-5 sized Volumes (I'm now on Volume 47)

My general process

I write short bullet points at the beginning of the day, and add others if necessary at other times. These can be quickly scanned when searching for things at a later data.
I do small sketches (usually pen & ink & watercolour) of little things that will jog my memory later

I write a long-form entry each morning telling the story of the previous day, usually between 2-5 pages, after the bullet-sketch-quick-view page(s)
I stick in ephemera
- cinema tickets
- photographs
- till receipts
- bus tickets
- labels & tags from significant purchases
I write longer angsty brain-dumps on whatever topic is on my mind, to try and think-through something that's bothering me

In more bullet-journal style…..

Things I track

I keep track of various regular occurrences
I keep track of purchases, online orders etc
I keep a record of medications and medical treatments and consultations and symptoms

I keep track of the scores of our almost daily chess games

I note the weather each day
I track what days I work (I'm self-employed, so it's a bit variable)
if I've walked the dogs
if I got to bed before 11pm
I track if I cooked tea
if I went swimming
I note the family finances each week
and the electricity meter reading
and heating oil level and when the last delivery was
I note when I last changed the cooker's propane gas bottle
and when I last had a haircut (in the kitchen, by my own hand, with clippers)
and when the dog last had a haircut (at the groomer's for the sum of £60, every roughly 6 weeks)
I note the deaths of *“significant”* celebrities

I get through an A5 Leuchtturm hard-back in around 9 weeks.

My motivation?

Everything can be interesting when viewed later, from the future, even my own humdrum life.

I can now look back at almost 10 years of my “middle-age” life, in my 50s.

When I see the first frog spawn of the year…

When the car broke down, how often I've agitated the septic-tank to break up fat-blockages (yes, indeed, the joys of isolated rural living). I can find that time when we kept pigs, or the dog had a cruciate ligament rupture (and the subsequent repair & recovery).

And there's the strange blank period of a couple of months in mid-2018, when I'd had a heart-attack and I seemed unable to write anything in my diary about it (or anything else). Until I was back to normal again. I think I felt that I would remember everything anyway, without writing it down. I'm glad I did write a quick precis of the events of those weeks, even if it took a few months to get it down on paper.

I'm inspired by Mass Observation, the diaries of Alan Bennet, the writings of Simon Garfield, the passionate call-to arms in Irving Finkel's video (see below).

Indexing

In December 2023 I decided that I need a way of finding old entries/events/facts etc. so I started an Index…. more later in a blog post…

Finding Things In A Diary

Influences

Alan Bennet

Writing Home
Keeping on Keeping on
House Arrest

Simon Garfield

Wartime Mass-Observation diary collections
A Notable Woman. The diary of Jean Lucey Pratt.
- Jean was one of the Mass Observation diarists in the Wartime collections above (anonymized as “Maggie Joy Blunt”), but Jean also kept a separate diary covering her whole life, starting in 1925 aged 15 until she died in 1986.

The Great Diary Project

The wonderful Irving Finkel mini lecture on You Tube Rescuing unwanted diaries gives a feel of why I think capturing everyday life, in ordinary peoples' diaries, is important.

The result of Irving's discovery of the importance of diaries is the The Great Diary Project

The Man Who Saves Life Stories

The American Diary Project

There is a similar project in the USA The American Diary Project

Anne Lister

Now well known after the BBC dramatization as “Gentleman Jack” - Anne Lister lived in the 18th Century, was a land-owning woman (unusual) and most famously, gay.

Her diaries were written partly in a “secret” code, to hide the more personal aspects.

They were researched and sections published in 2 volumes by Helena Whitbread.

Anne Lister

I've read the first volume, and it's a fascinating insight into life in the 1820s - leaving aside the sexual aspects - just the practicalities of life, the leeches and quack medical treatments. The amount of walking needed to get anywhere, the poor diets (even for the wealthy). The physical discomfort tolerated (even by the wealthy).

John Gadd

I recently discovered John Gadd and his diary.

He seems to have kept a very similar style of journal to mine - writing daily in one book storing EVERYTHING, writing, photos, tickets, labels…. and a record of his day, his thoughts and only touching on “world news” if it particularly meant something to him.

He called it his “Omnium Gatherum”.

He died aged 90 on 2020, after keeping his diary consistently since 1947, really settling on its eventual format in the early 1970s. His diary was a memory-aid, as is mine, but of course it also captures lots of other things, mundane at the time but over a lifetime the mundane becomes the historical, and illustrate how life changes.

I'd love to see the books and look through the pages, and see how he indexed everything to make it searchable and to find anything within a few minutes.

My Diaries

Book of choice: Leuchtturm1917 A5 Hardback Dot Grid
Pen(s) of choice : Lamy Safari EF nib, TWSBI Eco and Pigma Micron 02
Fountain Pen Inks of choice : Diamine Eau de Nil & Platinum Carbon Black
Watercolours of choice : Winsor & Newton Cotman Sketcher Pocket Set with the China White swapped for some Payne's Grey instead.
Shop of Choice : Cult Pens

Some pics:

More Pics

Bloods

Fairphone6 Screen

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 18:01:50 +0000

Fairphone6 Screen

I dropped my relatively new Fairphone6, face down, on a pavement….

I was on the way into a supermarket in the run up to Christmas - going in to do the annual Christmas-battle-trolleys food shop. I picked it up, fearing the worst and found just a small chipped/cracked area at the bottom left of the screen. Just where the *back* arrow softkey is. It worked, but the cracks extended across the screen, and the focal point of the break was slowly crumbling into glass-dust. And every time I swiped my thumb across the *back* softkey I was worried it'd start depositing slivers of glass in my flesh.

I waited a couple of months, trying to ignore it.

I know one of the major reasons for owning a Fairphone is that they are user-repairable, with parts easily available and easily replaceable. But I wanted to wait until the desire to fix it overcame my reluctance to spend money. (I'm on a no-buy. Spending money to fix things *is* acceptable in my self-imposed rules, but somehow I now find it difficult to spend *any* money that isn't strictly necessary. The phone still worked, so it took some mental bullying to force myself to spend to fix it.)

Last week I ordered the screen and a Torx-5 screwdriver from the Fairphone website. Today it arrived. It took me less than 10 minutes to take the phone apart, replace the screen and put it back together again.

The hardest part was unclicking the plastic locking tabs on the top-rear cover. Using a guitar plectrum. But it wasn't *that* difficult.

Once back together the phone booted up and the screen is perfect.

Finding Things In A Diary

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:48:07 +0000

Finding Things In A Diary

I've been keeping a diary now almost daily since 2017. A few days are missing, but to the best of my knowledge the are no missing days since mid-2022….

I don't (generally) write about current affairs, news, politics etc. unless it has particular and direct relevance to my own life. I want to capture the stuff that would be lost to history, stuff that I might want to remember at some point in the future, stuff about my day-to-day life. News and current affairs and politics and world events are already well-recorded by the media and a whole host of bloggers and journal writers. Nobody is documenting the specifics of *my* life, except me. And nobody is generally interested in any of the details, except me.

But what's the point of writing it down if I can't find it again later?

Ideally I'd like to be able to answer any question like “When did we get the new car?” or “When did I start playing the recorder again?”

an example

I was swimming with a friend and his 9 year old daughter on Sunday, something I've been doing on an off for a few years. We started swimming with his two little girls - now 9 and 13 - some years ago. How many years ago….? Can't be sure. The older 13-year old “E” is now a teenager and therefore much too cool to come out on a Sunday morning with her old man. So it's just 3 of us. Me, “T” and his younger daughter “B”

The question was raised by younger sibling *“What age was E when she swam a length underwater first?”*

The younger daughter is now 9 and wants to match her older sibling.

I couldn't remember. Her dad couldn't remember.

In fact between us we couldn't even remember when we'd started this regular Sunday morning swim.

Was is pre-covid? post-covid? Two years, three years…?

“I'm sure that Samuel Pepys here will find it in his dairy”

Hmm… but will I? I've tried to keep an index - in a separate book - just a topic and page-number for reference to allow things to be found. But did I have this particular thing in my index?

In the end it wasn't in my index-book, but I did find it in my dairy itself. It took some searching. I write around 4 diary books per year - each covers roughly 3 months. I had to do a binary search to pin point the date we started the regular swims (Sunday 9th January 2022) and then a slow search forward looking to see if I'd noted down “E swam a length under water”… And I did find that entry, too, on Sunday 1st May 2022.

I can answer the question….. posed by a 9 year old.

It's an example of little consequence - if I'd been unable to find it we'd have just said “she was about your age” and left it at that. But the ability to be certain of something - anything - after any number of years. That's more powerful, when it applies to something more important to you.

My Current Index

My index looks like

It gets more and more complicated and messy as new things are added - you can't always leave enough space when adding entries to be sure there's room for something new later on, so it becomes harder to add new entries, and harder to quickly find them when they aren't in a logical order on the page.

Thoughts on better indexing

I thought about starting again - use the current index as a starting point and get a new blank A5 notebook, and re-create the same layout - but now with so many entries to work with I could make a better stab at laying it out in a better manner - more space between entries to allow new ones to fit. But the same problem will still occur, in time. I'll run out of space to add new topics in the correct places and then they'll get added willy-nilly all over the place.

I'd thought about, and even tried a small experiment, using a 5×3 card index. Each “topic” can have its own card. Space to record many diary entries for each topic on its own card. New topics get a new card that can be slipped into the correct alphabetical position. If a topic needs to be split into sub-topics it's a simple matter to take the existing card, and make new ones that follow any sub-divisions I think are necessary. Then just copy across the existing diary references to the new card(s) and insert them in their proper place(s) in the index box. No worries about squeezing things into a full page in a book, just shuffle a few cards and job's done.

So I'm now rebuilding my index in a 5×3 card index box. I've got everything from my book-form index done on 5×3 card. I'm now able to add any new things wherever they need to go. This includes indexing things I've written about in older diaries, but have so far neglected to add to the index.

I plan on slowly working through the old diaries and indexing anything I feel has been overlooked. And in addition anything I look up in the future will get added to the index (if it's not already there). The swimming examples above are just the sort of thing I mean. If I have to search through the diaries for something once, then I'll index it to make sure I don't have to do it again.

diary

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:45:07 +0000

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

date: 2026-03-02 14:52

I used to play a lot of music - by this I mean actually play it myself, on instruments like mandolin, bodhran, guitar….

I first fiddled with guitar as a teenager. Badly. I had a cheap nylon strung “classical” guitar, and even for a while a very cheap and very, very nasty electric guitar.

When I went to University in 1984 I was already into folk music, as well as heavily into early Mike Oldfield. So I knew of the bodhran. I bought myself a basic model mandolin and found a guy who made bodhrans in a small workshop in Manchester. All I could afford was a very basic calf-skin bodhran but it was enough to get the hang of it.

I listened to a lot of Planxty, Bothy Band, Boys from the Lough, Andy Irvine etc. back then, all on vinyl. I still have the same vinyl albums and play them occasionally even now.

Here's a B&W photo of my stash of instruments from around 1986. I developed & printed it myself, using an enlarger a mate had borrowed & set up in the bathroom in his flat. I recently found the photo again, and put it in a clip frame and hung it in my den.

I later bought a better mandolin, and also got better goatskin bodhran from Hobgoblin Music.

I sold my 1st mandolin, and bodhran to a mate of mine. I think he still has them. I certainly still have my 2nd mandolin and bodhran.

While I was at UMIST, between 1984 and 1988 I used to drink in the Jolly Angler in Ducie Street. It was a backstreet Irish pub, but had no music session. I went to play pool with mates and drink copious quantities of Hyde's Anvil bitter (and at Christmas time their strong Winter Ale from a small barrel on the bar).

The landlord had a niece who at that time was doing her O levels and was struggling with maths. She was a mean piano accordion player too. We started a weekly maths tuition followed by a few tunes. I took my mandolin and she took her PA.

After a few weeks of this a few customers asked

“is this a regular session?”

“no, just us having a few tunes”

“is it ok if we join in next week? There's no good session on a Thursday nearby”

“ Yeah! that'd be fun”

and then it exploded from there.

More and more and more people came on a Thursday night. After only a few weeks I found I was well out of my depth, and stopped playing, or trying to play. I'd learned a few new tunes in the first few weeks of the session but then found all I could do was sit and watch and listen.

But I still played mandolin for my own amusement. I wasn't particularly good, but I enjoyed it.

There have been various instruments over the years since then.

Later, after leaving UMIST and getting a job I bought myself a bouzouki from Hobgoblin too.

My parents had found an old Hohner Double-Ray Black-Dot in B/C at an antiques fair which I later bought by visiting the guy's house in Cramlington (nr. Newcastle) while we were visiting.

The story of this is on my old, old website which I recently uncovered…

https://g4slv.info/website/pages/music.htm

I then bought a 2nd hand Saltarelle “Le Bouebe” melodeon in D/G in around 2002, and later a Castagnari Lilly melodeon for my 40th birthday in 2006. I later sold the Lilly, as I wasn't playing it enough to justify keeping it.

I still have the Saltarelle. But I rarely ever take it out and play it any more.

Here's an old photo of me in the Westings, Shetland.

I got to be “ok” on melodeon - but nothing better then “ok”.

In fact I've never got better than “ok” on anything, in the 45+ years of my trying to play.

I didn't have a guitar for several years and during Covid lockdown in 2020 I bought a cheap classical guitar (Yamaha C40) and spent a lot of time while isolated at home trying to learn proper classical guitar. I followed some of the excellent courses by Bradford Werner https://www.thisisclassicalguitar.com/start-here/. When life returned to normal I stopped studying, but I'd already found some physical problems with my wrists and hands due to the Rheumatoid Arthritis. I still noodle on the guitar, but I can't see me being able to really immerse myself in learning it properly.

I also bought a Treble Recorder last year and then neglected to do anything about it. I'd played Descant Recorder as a primary schoolboy aged 10 or so. That's where I learned to read music. So the Treble Recorder was supposed to be my way of reconnecting with the fun of learning a new (and at face value fairly simple) instrument. Of course the Recorder is a vastly under-rated instrument capable of magical sound when played by an expert.

I recently found some old mp3 recordings I'd done in around 2002, in a zip file which contained the HTML and other files from a website I had back then. There were 4 mp3 files that had me playing mandolin, and bodhran (and guitar, out of tune)

They are badly recorded - from memory I did it by using a pair of cheap stereo headphones as a microphone (!) and recording using grecord on a linux box (an old Gnome app for simple sound recording - probably running on Red Hat 6?)

To multi track I'd play the 1st recording back from the speakers on another linux box while recording the 2nd track (and the playback of the 1st which was audible in the background….) and I'd repeat this again to get a 3rd track.

The are in https://g4slv.info/website/pshed/ and these are the links to the files

The future?

So, now, at 60 years old I'm wondering what to do with myself. What hobby to persue. How to find joy and fun again.

I found myself looking up at my mandolin a few nights ago, thinking *“I wonder if I remember any tunes?”* and I took it down from its hanger. And 2 hours later I forced myself to put it down & go to bed….

I've been a little lost recently, not knowing what to do with my spare time. Perhaps this is the answer. Just enjoy playing music for my own amusement again.

music

Privacy ?

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:45:35 +0000

Privacy ?

Private versus Public

I recently got totally fed-up with the state of *the internet*. Mobile phones so tightly tied to *Google* or *Apple* that they track your every move and communicate every action you make online with databrokers that use this to profile you and target ads (and worse?) at you….

Why isn't it possible just to use a phone to make phone calls, send text messages, and to innocently and privately look at websites?

De-Googling etc.

I started *de-googling*[^1] as far as I could. And this included my *desktop* interaction with the web too. I'd already been using adblockers for years, but this time I went further.

And I found it's *impossible to fully de-google*.

Of course I *knew* this - after all, Android *is* Google. And the web *is* Google.

But I made tiny first steps. Why do I need accounts with Google and other major enshitifiers to do the things I still enjoy online? This feeling also tied in with a desire to cut-back on online shopping (I'll do a post on my *no-buy* aspirations another time) so I got rid of other accounts too.

I got rid of my accounts with (at least these, probably others that I've forgotten about):

Google
- My You Tube Channel was deleted too
Microsoft
Amazon
Paypal
eBay
Reddit

I didn't have *Facebook* or *Twitter/X* or *Mastodon* or *Instagram* or *Tik-Tok* or any other *social media* accounts, so there was no FOFOMO[^2] to worry about.

#### A quiet online life?

This still means I can use the internet but reduces the level of *integration* which happens - where everything talks to everything else *via Google*.

#### To properly de-Google?

After doing as much as I could with my stock Android phone I ran into the usual problem of how tightly integrated even the simplest of apps is with the Google eco-system and that it didn't seem possible to use a *normal* Android phone and at the same time to be invisible to Google & to escape its spying.

A fully de-googled-at-source-android was the answer. There are a few options. I won't go into them in detail, I just took the easiest route.

I bought a Fairphone6 pre-installed with /e/OS.

I tried it first *without* running *micro-G* (which spoofs some of the functionality of *Google Play Services* etc. and which gives access to certain Google services anonymously so that the apps that rely on some Google functionality can still be installed and will run).

But that limited my options for apps.

So I enabled *micro-G* and installed a *very small number* of non-FOSS Android apps:

2 Banking apps for my personal and business bank accounts
BBC Sounds - but only because *I can't abide adverts* even in podcasts - and the BBC is the only source I can trust not to shove commercial adverts at me during podcasts
Canon Print - to access my little Canon Selphy printer (yes, it is possible without the Canon Print app, but it's fiddly and error-prone)

And that's all.

Everything else is either the pre-installed version from /e/OS or it's a FOSS version from *f-Droid*

/e/OS has a built in system-level tracking blocker which circumvents the many (many) *phone-home* tracking messages that these non-FOSS apps send to various analytic/tracking providers. It's quite scary to see just how chatty these apps are, and how many external 3++rd++ party tracking services are fed data - quite separately from the actual application's useful and necessary network traffic (this still flows and allows the app to function normally).

#### Privacy - hiding from real people on the internet

I took things a step further - and tried to extract myself from *any online activity* which would involve showing anything of mine to *strangers on the internet*.

I made my [Commonplace Wiki](https://g4slv.info/dokuwiki/) private - nothing was readable by passing strangers.

I'd deleted my You Tube stuff already, as a part of *de-googling* so that had already been taken care of.

I started to delete various accounts that I had on web-forums, and thus my old posts disappeared too (I don't contribute much, and my words are unlikely to be missed by anyone).

I wanted to *disappear* from the online world.

I know it's not possible to remove all traces of your past online life - but I wanted my future involvement with the web to be invisible.

#### The Hypocrisy of this

But I was still reading *other* people's websites and blogs. Watching other people's You Tube videos - but *not-logged-in* and via a browser with an *adblocker* (or more often via `NewPipe` or by downloading the video to my laptop 1++st++ by using `yt-dlp`)

I was *consuming* but not *contributing*

This seems selfish and petty.

So I un-hid my dokuwiki site, and it's now readable by anyone. I don't know if anyone finds any of it useful, it exists mainly for me to have a place to store *useful-to-me* information.

I figure though that it's *good* to share stuff online (even when there are probably very few people that'll ever read it). But, because *I* find other peoples' stuff useful, interesting etc. then should I not let other people make up their own minds about my stuff? By at least making it accessible.

The important thing to me now is that this sharing *must be done without involving the enshitifying platforms* like *Google*, *Meta* etc. etc.

I *can* share my thoughts, experiments, notes etc. with real people on the internet - but only by hosting it myself.

This can be done with a blog (like this one) or a wiki like [this one](https://g4slv.info/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=start) and even with an old hand-built plain html website from more than 20 years ago, like [this one](https://g4slv.info/website/index.html) which I used to have back in the early 2000's and which has been languishing in a zip file for many years.

#### Blogging in 2026

After deciding that I don't want to hide from *real* people, that the internet is (still) a good thing when used for good reasons. It allows us to share with other *real* people. Enshitification has largely spoiled the *mainstream* web, but there are still lots of personal web sites, blogs, wikis etc.

Let's keep them going.

This is why I'm blogging now. It's been a few years since I last did any blogging, but I think I can enjoy it again (regardless of the number of readers) and create a small corner of the internet out of my own head. It might be self-indulgent twaddle, it might be pointless and meaningless and if *I* get some happiness out of making it, that's enough. But it *has* to be online and *has* to feel like it's a small fight against the enshitification that the major platforms have wrought on the once wonderful web.

[^1]: I use this as a generic term for *cutting out as much surveillance and tracking as possible* [^2]: Is this a new coining? Fear of FOMO The fear that I'll suffer *“Fear of Missing Out”*

Blog

anonymous@undisclosed.example.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 12:28:31 +0000

Blog

Make It Tea

2026:
- April

8 Post(s) for April 2026

Diaries	20/04/26 08:09 BST	John Pumford-Green	diary
Becoming Teetotal	18/04/26 18:57 BST	John Pumford-Green	makeittea
Blogging Platforms	18/04/26 18:35 BST	John Pumford-Green	pure, blog
Music - A Return To An Old Hobby	18/04/26 17:18 BST	John Pumford-Green	music
Privacy ?	18/04/26 13:34 BST	John Pumford-Green
Finding Things In A Diary	18/04/26 13:32 BST	John Pumford-Green	diary
Fairphone6 Screen	18/04/26 13:29 BST	John Pumford-Green
Comparison - The Thief Of Joy	18/04/26 13:24 BST	John Pumford-Green	music, joy

Comments

Page	Date	User
Blog Discussion page	19/04/26 13:27 BST	John Pumford-Green
Becoming Teetotal	19/04/26 13:24 BST	John Pumford-Green

Diaries

I write this in the hope that anyone reading it might be inspired to start diary writing if they don't already or to continue, and to discuss their process, if they do.

I like to store memories on paper, for later. Mundane daily life or exciting events….

What is a diary as a rule?

A document useful to the person who keeps it.

Dull to the contemporary who reads it…

…and invaluable to the student, centuries afterwards, who treasures it.

Walter Scott

→ Read more...

20/04/26 08:09 BST · john

diary

Becoming Teetotal

My 2nd time → “back to Teetotal”

I first tried a break from alcohol in 2016. For various reasons. I just wanted to stop drinking.

I'd read a few “sober blogs” and had been increasingly unhappy about how much I was drinking and how much mental energy I was expending on thinking about how to moderate it.

So I stopped. Just like that. It was easy, really.

→ Read more...

18/04/26 18:57 BST · john

makeittea

Blogging Platforms

I've recently been playing with self-hosted blogging platforms.

It started with revisiting the Blog plugin for Dokuwiki and deciding that I wanted to use a purpose made blog platform instead.

This brought me back to re-visit Chyrp-Lite which I found easy to set up and to use.

Then I found Pure Blog which seemed even more light-weight and more akin to what I was looking for.

→ Read more...

18/04/26 18:35 BST · john

pure, blog

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

date: 2026-03-02 14:52

I used to play a lot of music - by this I mean actually play it myself, on instruments like mandolin, bodhran, guitar….

→ Read more...

18/04/26 17:18 BST · john

music

Privacy ?

Private versus Public

→ Read more...

18/04/26 13:34 BST · john

Older entries >>

Make It Tea - public:blog

Becoming Teetotal

Becoming Teetotal

Blogging Platforms

Blogging Platforms

Pure Blog drawbacks

Back to Dokuwiki

Comparison - The Thief Of Joy

Comparison - The Thief Of Joy

Diaries

Diaries

I keep a diary

My general process

Things I track

My motivation?

Indexing

Influences

Alan Bennet

Simon Garfield

The Great Diary Project

The American Diary Project

Anne Lister

John Gadd

My Diaries

Some pics:

More Pics

Further Reading

On Indexing

General

Fairphone6 Screen

Fairphone6 Screen

Finding Things In A Diary

Finding Things In A Diary

an example

My Current Index

Thoughts on better indexing

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

The future?

Privacy ?

Privacy ?

De-Googling etc.

Blog

Blog

Make It Tea

8 Post(s) for April 2026

Comments

Diaries

Becoming Teetotal

Blogging Platforms

Music - A Return To An Old Hobby

Privacy ?