Last week I made the first post here, my grandly titled manifesto. It was written quite fast, the day after the BMT concert, and I posted it more or less the way I wrote it. I didn’t worry much about the principles behind the items in it or about the completeness of either the list or the individual items.

omissions

Some things I plan to do were omitted: mainly, it didn’t mention my BMT shows. This was because in my mind they went without saying. We have Beauty and the Beast with the adults in February and then Matilda with the Juniors in April. I’ll be doing whatever I can for those behind the scenes.

I didn’t mention any plans to get a new job or to prepare myself for one, because I don’t have those plans yet. The software world is being turned upside down and jobs like the one I had a year ago don’t exist. In the next few months things will keep changing. Thinking about my future paid work is a background task not a foreground one.

incompleteness

The individual items were each incomplete. They mixed day-to-day plans with end-of-year targets, and didn’t include any element of trackability or accountability. I don’t want to be so strict with my targets that I have to feel like a loser if I don’t hit them all, but I want to have targets and make my progress visible.

So, the music: when I say guitar, I mean both electric and acoustic, and yes, I do plan to write things that are public. And yes, I do plan to upload videos.

The house: this is one where I’ve actually made progress in the first week. I’ve re-sown my lawn and fitted new seals to the front door and film to the front window. Today I’ve removed the bathroom radiator ready to fit a new one.

The making clothes: this is both a learning process and a challenging but achievable target. There are lots of elements and there is lots to learn. Again, I would like to make both the progress and the results visible. But if you’d like me to make you something but don’t want to be visible, that’s fine. Just ask me.

The books: I don’t want to start tracking and counting off books and treating them like a tick-list. I’ll write about what I’ve read if I think I have anything to say about it.

The Wurlitzer: this is a big target and if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing publicly. But it is also a learning exercise and I will have to figure things out as I go. So I plan to make videos of it, and of any other audio electronics I do while I’m engaged in the process.

principles

The principles were held back to the end, not as a design intention but because they emerged to me as a summary after I wrote it. But really they are the important bit: I want to be helpful and I want to be visible. I hope that those two things go together. Helpful to whom? To anyone I know that I can be helpful to. More widely, to people I don’t know or don’t know yet - it all counts. And more narrowly, to my ten humans - the ten people I feel differently bonded to, not my ten closest friends but just the ten humans who are that bit more important to me in their various ways than the other eight billion or so on the planet, or even than the other few hundred I know.

changes

There are clarifications here but I am not changing it. I don’t regret writing it the way I did. I feel like part of the point is to stick to it now I’ve written it and I still plan to do that. If I can be helpful to you, then you can ask me and I will do my best.