Walking up the slope from the back gate to the main foyer, I can already hear dischordant piano chords as I pass the back doors of the lecture theatre. How happy it makes me to hear them!

Ever since we put an unlocked piano there, at different times of day there’s students banging on it - sometimes alone, sometimes with friends, sometimes performing a piece with great intention, sometimes just noodling away some melody lines or chord sequences. The person playing isn’t always one of our sound and music students, either: plenty of people had piano lessons inflicted on them in their misspent youth. There’s no rules, no guidelines, just an available piano in the foyer, a space that pretty much everyone passes through during the day.

The music isn’t planned, or organised, or even always pleasant. One afternoon, while teaching in a room nearby, I heard someone clearly trying to master a sequence of chords, playing them over and over. That struck me as both human and creative (skills mastery and practice are part of creativity - and, astonishingly, are the things that AI robs us of) and while it isn’t necessarily good listening, it’s necessary for the development of the musician (or other creative - the general principles apply). This is a school after all.

Same reasons I write, really: stay in practice, keep the mind nimble, have a little fun. I noodle around and write long-winded diary entries, edit and fix them up (the paragraphs above took me a few goes) and then voila! Newsletter! At least I’m not sitting in the foyer of a design school in an institute of higher learning doing all that publicly. It would be terribly boring to watch, even if you could.

(For another, somewhat different piece of writing about writing, you could read this, although you might regret it afterwards. If you (correctly!) identify that it indicts itself at the same time as it points out problems, then you’re in good company.)

As I’m listening to the piano and trying to figure out if there’s a tune hiding in there, I’m also thinking about how nice it would be to only carry a briefcase to school with me every day, instead of lugging a backpack. I tried it once, transferred all my things into my black Longchamp Le Pliage Original large tote bag (oh, I know I got that wrong) and it was so full with my laptop and the plethora of things I bring that when I carried it my arm stuck out, away from my body.

Not only would a briefcase not contain all my stuff, it would also be unwieldy to carry. I wouldn’t be carrying it on my shoulder and tucked under my arm, like the Le Pliage tote, but maybe it could work if I used a strap. I need something bigger than a briefcase, with a little more space.

And then it occurs to me that I own such a bag: a coffee brown leather carryall (pictured) which I got on clearance for a substantial discount. I never considered carrying it as a work bag. The best part is that I’ve been trying to think of when I could use it, because it’s such a well-made beautiful thing.

My shower head, however, it turns out is not well made. It’s supposed to release a mist. Having a shower is like being a vegetable in a chiller in the supermarket, moistened by a cool cloud of microdroplets. This is my shower mode of choice, as it is both calming and water-saving. Something has gone wrong: nNow the spray is concentrated and ferocious, a stream fit to put out far away fires, so forceful that I have to brace my feet against the edges of the shower tray so I’m not pushed off balance. I want to be clever and say it’s caused by lime scale, but I don’t really know what that is so I won’t. I need a new shower head, is what it is.

I’m meandering, on purpose - deliberately avoiding the elephant in the room. I mentioned I was considering taking a break from Facebook because reading it was making me grumpy, and then someone asked me why.

Why.

I have over twenty reasons.

Simply thinking about the current media landscape hurts me, let alone attempting to articulate why that should be the case. But I did, with the aid of a pad and pen. No one specific reason, it turns out, and some of the others are interconnected. Even if I group things together and glom them together into broad categories, there are still so many reasons I don’t know quite where to begin.

Every morning when I get to work, I climb the slope and sometimes hear the piano and every time that reminds me that I should be coming up with Devin’s Grand Theory of Why the Internet Sucks (which will, no doubt, include sections on how everything is (a) commercial, how AI slop will one day crowd out everything human, how authenticity and intimacy are illusions cultivated by so-called influencers aka everything is staged, and how social media has been co-opted by the surveillance state.

Then I listen to the music with no small delight, and think maybe I’ll write about all that misery some other time.