I talked last year about the ‘blank slate’ approach to minimalism: instead of reducing what you have, start by imagining you have nothing, and then figure out the things you would want. Add from 0% rather than subtract from 100%.
I’m attempting to apply the same approach to how I use my time and energy, borrowing from the Descartes apple basket analogy …
Continue reading Being minimalist in time as well as spaceI still remember the pain of moving, so even although cladding work on the building means a move is likely a year or so away, my plan is to be fully prepared ahead of time. That means having everything I want for my new home, and not having anything I don’t want.
There are two fundamentally different approaches to preparing for minimalism, and I’m taking the second of these …
Continue reading MMHP #2: The two approaches to minimalism, and my early prepThere are things we want to do in life, and things we have to do. In the best of cases, these coincide. Such is the case with me and minimalism, when it comes to my next move.
In this first post, I’m going to lay out the two reasons I want to create a minimalist micro-home in the first place …
Continue reading The minimalist micro-home project part 1: Why?I said last time that I’m generally a fast learner, so I always viewed my painfully slow and limited progress with languages as a sign that I simply don’t have the language-learning gene. However, it may be that, where languages are concerned, I’m simply a normal-speed learner …
Continue reading Perhaps my issue with languages was around expectations?I’m generally a fast learner, and have picked up a fair number of skills in my life, but language learning has been one area where I appear to have pretty much zero ability to learn.
It’s a somewhat ironic deficit, given how much I’ve gotten to travel over the years (82 countries and counting). But a concerted multi-year attempt at German, with very limited results, persuaded me that languages really weren’t my thing.
However, I’m conducting one final experiment …
Continue reading Spanish: The triumph of optimism over experience, or a far more modest goalMy record of good fortune on the COVID front finally ran out on 17th December 2021.
Steph had a presumptive diagnosis way back in March 2020 (based on symptoms in those pre-test days), and it was assumed it would be impossible for me to avoid it, but it appears I did. I maintained that record for more than 18 months, and also had zero reaction to any of the three vaccinations.
I’m using this blog to record my experience of the infection. Please don’t expect entertaining writing: my exhaustion is mental as well as physical. Mostly I’m writing it as a warning against complacency on the COVID front …
Continue reading A COVID-19 diary
I’ve tried a few virtual reality (VR) experiences over the years, from headsets to full-motion simulators seating a dozen people. All had struck me as fun, but none had tempted me to invest in my own kit.
But let’s face it, actual reality isn’t much cop at present, so if there ever were a time to dip a toe into the virtual variety, this has got to be it, right … ?
It feels wrong to begin any upbeat piece about the coronavirus crisis without first acknowledging the terrible tragedy of it. The lives cut short. The family and friends left grieving. The healthcare professionals working long hours in trying conditions without the support they deserve. Those who have lost their jobs or been left struggling financially.
But in any loss, there is also opportunity. An opportunity not to try to return to normal as quickly as possible, but to invent a new normal …
Continue reading The lockdown is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent London
It feels like there will come a time when future generations will look back on this time and ask ‘What was it like?’. I feel like I should be keeping some kind of diary – and yet, in truth, I have little to say.
A front-line medic would. A doctor, a nurse, a paramedic, a care worker. Other key workers too; those so recently dismissed by the government as earning too little to justify their place in the UK: the shop workers, the delivery staff, the refuse collectors and all the millions of people needed to keep the country running …
Nobody who knows me needs to be told that I am not a morning person. Not even I believed me when I claimed I was going to get up at 6.45am on a Sunday morning to go cycling.
But the allure of being able to experience a London without people did, amazingly, do the trick …
Continue reading London in Lockdown at 6.45am on a Sunday morning
We did it. Somehow, an entire nation lost its mind. Or 52% of it. Or 26% of it. But however we do the maths, 100% of the UK left the EU.
I wanted to write an upbeat post, about how this was day one of the campaign to rejoin the EU. That’s who I am. I’ve always been an optimist, and at those times I could view the world in one of two ways, I’ve always aimed to choose the more empowering one.
But I’m not there yet with Brexit …
Continue reading It’s not yet day one of the campaign to rejoin the EU; not for me
I suspect hundreds of thousands of words of analysis have been written on what went so terribly wrong in the recent election, most of them by people better qualified than I to make sense of it all. But I guess we each have to come to terms with it in our own way, and my process inevitably involves writing about it …
How a very short-lived Apple News+ trial subscription had me abandon BBB News as my primary news source, and come home to The Guardian.
There are lots of cities I love to visit, a few I could happily live in for a year or two but none that, to me, compare to London.
It’s a city that has everything. Amazing archicture, old and new. Eateries at every level, from Michelin-starred restaurants to greasy spoons. An unbelievable array of theatres, with enough fantastic performances to visit every week (or, er, more often <cough>). Shopping has everything to offer from Harrods to market stalls. There are green spaces everywhere. Cinema. Art. It’s all here …
Continue reading London: an illustrated life-long love affair
I’ve had a blog since long before the term was first coined.
benlovejoy.com began in 1997 as a few hand-coded pages. Yep, in those days you had to use a text editor to create each webpage, and you’d begin something like this:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″>
<title>Wot I dun in my summer holidays</title>
Over the years, the site has evolved in various ways, but a combination of factors has made it harder work to update – and these days, blogging sites make it super-easy.
I did abandon plans to transfer the whole existing site over to WordPress, so am now using this for my very occasional random posts. Travel blogs will remain here on the main site, and my tango blog can be found here.
Ben Lovejoy 