• We generally have the radio on in the car, but on long journeys we find an audio book or podcast to while away the long hours.

    I have a bedside radio. My wonderful wife gave it to me a few years ago, unaware that I had moved over to podcasts.

    It looks lovely, but I’ve barely listened to it since she gave it to me.

    Here in the UK the main speech radio channel is BBC Radio 4. It had been the constant background to my life, entertaining, informing and educating me to fit in with classic British, middle-class values.

    But somewhere around the time of the Great Financial Crash – which is around when the iPhone was launched (yes I had an iPhone 1 and many models since) I fell out of love with Radio 4. It had begun to sound smug and dated.

    There were a few great programmes, particularly Melvin Bragg’s In Our Time which is like a weekly university course in history, philosophy, literature and science – a wonder of the modern world. But I found I could cherry pick those programmes as podcasts – The BBC, it turned out, was actually ahead of the pack when it came to online broadcasting.

    So I would go to sleep with earbuds teaching me all about neutrinos, Shakespeare or the Spanish Inquisition. Podcasts had a wonderful calming effect on the internal chatter that kept me awake for hours. I found I could get to sleep easily.

    In time I subscribed to more and more podcasts – enough to keep playing through the whole night – every night.

    Earbuds proved a big problem medically and I discovered over-the-ear headphones, learning to change ears in my sleep as I rolled over.

    Yesterday, I explained that I was going to leave my phone out of the bedroom and learn to sleep properly again. No phone, no temptation to check email at 4 in the morning, as I wake to advance the podcast beyond the endless adverts for online mental health counselling – I wonder if they only serve those adverts to people listening in the middle of the night… like they know something?

    I went to bed with my new alarm clock, a clock being the only real reason I could give for having a phone in the bedroom. This one does not tick and does the absolute bare minimum needed in a bedside clock. I’m going to have to open it up to try and dim the light a bit though. Bright blue light for checking the time? Who had that brilliant idea?

    So, I got to sleep, but I woke around 12.30. I’d been preparing for this. Practicing body scan mindfulness techniques and reminding myself that this is a seventeen year old habit I’m trying to break. It will take time and patience.

    Oh my goodness! My life flashed before my eyes, reviewing rights and wrongs, woulda, coulda, shoulda beens and eventually reassessing the playlist I put together for my wife’s retirement party – I really should have added Springfield’s Born to Run along with all the Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Spice Girls and Sugar Babes that got the young nurses dancing on the first night we were allowed a party after the lockdowns. (It was a great night!)

    At around 3:50, I found myself analysing the lyrics

    Girls comb their hair in rearview mirrors
    And the boys try to look so hard

    It was time to go downstairs and have a bowl of crunchy nut cornflakes, my infallible cure for insomnia.

    It worked. I woke, slightly confused around 8:50 expecting to feel terrible, but I didn’t feel too bad. I’d prepared and had stayed relaxed all night – no tossing or turning or deep sighs!

    But all was silent. I didn’t feel ready to leap out of bed. I had no phone. I needed some noise.

    The Radio!

    It hasn’t been plugged in for at least five years!

    I scaled around in my bedside drawer, found the plug and managed to switch it on.

    The familiar, smug tones of BBC Radio 4 filled the room in warm, comforting Roberts’ Radio tones – Roberts Radio is an iconic brand loved by the BBC – if a radio is required in a BBC TV production, it’s always a Roberts Radio – comfortingly retro and aligned with BBC values – I love the BBC really!)

    What emerged from the speakers was Tweet of the Day, a two minute nod to the BBC’s mission to Inform, entertain and educate. Possibly the most self-referential and knowingly smug, two minute daily show on the BBC.

    It was closely followed by Broadcasting House, the Sunday news magazine show – even more self-referential and smug than it used to be when I last heard it five years ago, or so. It was one of the programmes that turned me off BBC Radio 4 – second only to the turgid Saturday Live.

    It was no good – I had to leap out of bed and find my phone, check the email and Youtube stats and have breakfast listening to an audible crime fiction reading – after all, the TV news was full of the daily horror roundup and every other channel was filled with Sunday dross.

    The medium is no longer the message. The medium has become a brown gloopy soup. You have to work hard to find a little blob of something of substance floating to the top.

    Even the BBC is full of intrusive adverts – advertising their own programmes. Even the news has become an advert for their longer investigative programmes.

    Quality is still available. Gems are still to be found but, they are not being served up by the algorithms.

    Well… that’s day one of the big experiment! Can I hold out?

  • Is it possible to ignore social media and yet be part of it?

    Social media is the obvious place to let your potential audience know that you are alive and well and being creative. But it’s not as obvious as it was.

    The social media platforms are now in total control of your watch time, and your watch time is all that they are interested in. The more you watch, the more you are likely to click on an advertisement that makes the platform richer sell.

    They don’t care about you as a viewer, they don’t care that they are stealing your time and attention, that they are filling your brain with dross, that you are hooked and can’t leave, because of all the perceived connections you have made, but that are now made less use to you, because they might distract you from watching.

    Social media is not for us any more. We are the meat in the mincer.

    I cannot think of anything positive that social media provides me.

    As a children’s author, I should be using social media to sell my books, but that means selling to the adults in children’s lives. It doesn’t make sense to me.

    The platform will be using me as a free content creator, adding a few more eyeballs for clicks. They don’t offer me anything in return for my hard work.

    In fact they are probably using my work to train artificial intelligences to make me redundant – and I’m giving it all to them for free!

    In truth, I’m not going to get my posts in front of real children’s book buyers. not like it was once possible. I’m certainly not going to be able to influence kids.

    Having a “professional” instagram account means that my feed is filled with how-to-hack instagram marketing reels, as well as the usual dross that I really don’t want to watch but get drawn towards, like a fish chasing a wriggly worm on a hook.

    To really get in front of potential buyers, I should be advertising on Amazon, Google and Meta. But that is a whole other rabbit hole. Advertising works on ROI, return on investment. Again, this is a full-time job that takes masses of brain bandwidth, leaving little time for writing.

    Eyeballs, watch-time, clicks, likes and analytics, they run our lives.

    Once, publishers did all the marketing, allowing writers to write. Now, they won’t take you on without you having already built a significant online presence.

    It’s all gone wrong!

    I look back to the old days and remember how there was time, less anxiety, less everyone talking about mental health, more real interaction with real people in the moment, in the present, in real time, in real life.

    We had fewer sensationalist news reports, because mobile phone footage didn’t exist. Yes, it’s great that injustice is filmed and spread, but we don’t all need to have our heads filled with every disaster that happens anywhere in the world, minute by minute.

    As the old philosophical question goes: “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?”

    It may do. It may not. You don’t need to know. You have better things to worry about. Better things to take up your time.

    I have a silent alarm clock coming today, the start of the fight back, The start of no phone in the bedroom. It won’t be easy. That’s a 17 year habit – but it’s a start – baby steps!

  • I think this will be the cover for Book two of Generation Moon – First Kid in Space

    A trilogy will often have very similar covers changing the colours to differentiate them. But it doesn’t seem right to move away from a blue theme, so I’m going to make each book get darker instead.