Diarising - and why things go wrong

Is "diarising" a real word? I mean it to mean "keeping a diary"; documenting the days as they whizz past. Is this something you do? Does it take you away from living in the moment? And does it capture the moments you want to remember? These are questions that might concern us as we get older and our brains fill up (well, it feels like the brain is completely full up, sometimes).

My diarising is via the camera. I still carry the little notebook and try not to be lazy, to get it out at odd moments and write odd things down, but the camera - now smaller than ever, in my phone - gets the action. And from the phone the photos are magically sent to the computer and stored without any effort on my part ... though I really do miss "being in control" - I still haven't figured out how to get to certain older photos quickly, or how to transfer a selection of photos to the computer's storage. (it's on my list.) Possibly making Albums would help with this.

So let's look at some photos from yesterday. After a lazy morning I had a two-hour journey to Ham, thanks to believing that the Overground wasn't running. Duh, and double-duh - I'd seen on Saturday that the Gospel Oak-Barking line wasn't running, and when Citymapper, the getting-around-london app, didn't show the Overground on its selection of routes, I put 2 and 2 together and got 55. The "full" brain became a downright silly brain. Note to self: Think, and Check.

Never mind, plenty to do while on the move, thanks to the wonderful phone - here's the podcast I was listening to, on the future of artificial intelligence (AI) -
http://www.radiolab.org/story/137407-talking-to-machines/

("We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.")

What my little brainstorm meant, though, was finding a way back home that would be quicker, and again it was Duh and Double-Duh - taking the train to Victoria - from the station that the Overground uses ... did I think to check its platform? No, I was fixated on catching the 16.27 and in was 16.23 and, well, I just never thought of it, I'd ruled out the Overground on the basis of my own false assumptions. Note to self: Keep questioning those assumptions!! 

On the bus on the way to the train station, I saw the river glinting in the distance and of course had to get a photo or two while the bus stopped -

The day promised - and delivered - rain

Ah, that mirror - let's get a photo and think about the perspective
 it shows; could that be something to use later...

Terrible photo (reflective bus window, for one thing) but how
homely and sentimental is that fantasy of the family bike ride...

My final example of how we can lead ourselves astray by false, or inadequate, thinking, concerns the train back to Victoria. It stopped at Vauxhall, the station before Victoria, which has an interchange with the Victoria line, which gets me home. So off I jumped - only to find something I should have known, as I'd used the Vic line on Saturday: the stations south of Victoria were closed this weekend. 

Every cloud has a silver lining. It wasn't raining yet, and I needed another 6,000 steps to hit my daily target, so I walked, doesn't take long - especially if you don't stop to take photos! But along the grimness of Vauxhall Bridge Road I couldn't resist these -

"Former premises" of "makers and sellers of paint"

"A job carefully done"

"A rural idyll"

The quotes are from this site, a delightful discovery - it details overlooked English buildings, " breweries, prefabs, power stations, corrugated-iron barns and the occasional parish church ". Definitely a blog to bookmark.

And the upshot of this tale of travel-gone-wrong, and making the best of it, and reflecting on why things go wrong, is the chance to take new opportunities and find new things. Of course the downside of finding new things is that they need to fight for brain-space, which is already in short supply. Note to self: Investigate current thinking on ageing brains.

At the end of the day, from my desk, a final photo of the sun streaming straight down the street before it dips over Crouch Hill -

Capture the moment