I was saying to my wife, the other day, you know, Eddie Vedder, the guy who did the song we like, Society, from that great film we saw again recently, Into the Wild – he’s got this nice Ukelele songs album too, and it got me thinking, that Eddie Vedder makes songs, puts them out into the world, and it makes people happy. And I’m sure it makes him really happy to keep writing songs too.
We’d been having a Stevie Wonder moment – one of us had been in a bad mood that morning, had come across Stevie Wonder singing Dylan’s Blowing in the Wind with complete joy and abandon, and it had bought an instant smile to our faces.
We phoned my Stevie Wonder-loving sister and said, hey, we’re listening to SW and smiling, and remembering a great time we had in your flat in London once listening to him and dancing, can you recommend a Stevie album for us? Yes! She said, you have to listen to Songs in the Key of Life – and listen to ‘As’, it’s fantastic!
So we did (we were in the car) and we smiled more and got home in an incredibly good mood. And had that chat about Eddie V, and Stevie, and how that’s what they do – they make songs, put them out into the world. They are happy, the listeners are smiling – it’s all good!
I’ve been missing putting stuff out into the world. I’ve been missing blogging. I love blogging, love podcasting, I’m not Eddie or Stevie, but these things make me happy, and make other people happy sometimes too. So here’s a blog post! And some photos! Blogs are wonderful, still are despite all that ‘blogging is dead’ crap we went through years ago. (I’m waiting for social media is dead! – won’t be long! Oh wait, there are over 10 million results for “Social media is dead” on Google. Good – About time!)
I’ve been getting back into photography too. I started when I was about 8, with some kind of plastic film camera that make the most basic ‘click’ when you pressed the shutter and I absolutely loved. My dad taught me photography, and now my son is learning from me, and that’s wonderful. Now instead of my dad and I sitting in the bathroom-converted-into-darkroom swishing trays of developer, stop and fixer around, bathed in deep red light, my son and I wifi photos from the super-duper Lumix camera or the phone onto the iPad and edit them there. The photos in this post are from a recent photo walk in the Madrid Sierra, and the summer in the Pyrenees. All of these were in fact taken on Apple’s ‘cheap’ 2nd gen iPhone SE. It’s an incredible camera (and the very best camera in the world is the one that’s always with you – There’s all this debate about what camera Henri Cartier Bresson would use these days instead of his trusty Leica – I’m betting he’d use an iPhone).
So, there you go, a blog post. I got up this morning unable to do a thing for our wonderful Notes in Spanish (where we make people happy making ourselves happy making podcasts and making a living to boot). ‘Get out on your bike’, said my wife. Out on my bike I thought, ‘If I can’t do work work today, do an Eddie or a Stevie. Just go home and write anything on the Notes from Ben blog!’ And here it is.
P.S. A friend said to me recently, “[keep sharing nice stuff in the world and] you’ll have skipped midlife crisis without notice”. I said, I’ll take that! I’ve had a mid-20’s crisis, mid-30’s crisis, early-40’s crisis – I’m done with them!
Time to smile:
Notes from Ben 