I hope you are safe and well on this Tuesday evening, at a time when news of a possible vaccination might finally enable us to see some light at the end of the Covid tunnel.
I do wonder if the news has broken too soon, though. It seems there are many ifs, buts and maybes to be addressed before any mass roll-out, and scientists don’t yet know how the vaccine affects the asymptomatic.
Nevertheless, it does offer hope and I’m daring to dream that I’ll be able to return to the coast next year.
Anyway, I hope you’re sitting comfortably as I’ve got a fair few things to share with you. Broadly speaking, here are the topics:
- WELLBEING
- JACKLOWE dot COM
- OTHER TASKS IN HAND
- ONE MORE THING: THE LSP SOCIETY
WELLBEING
I consider myself to be among friends here, so I’d like to share a little bit of personal information with you as I feel it’s appropriate in the context of making my work.
Back in December, I became pretty ill. I’d never known anything like it and I was absolutely laid out for weeks, as were Kath (my wife) and Jude (our youngest son).
At the time, there were little windows in which we felt better. Thankfully, one of those windows coincided with visiting my Granny in January to celebrate her 90th birthday.
However, I was completely laid out once again after the 750 mile round trip from Newcastle to Southampton.
I finally felt like I’d recovered by the start of February — some 7 weeks after falling ill — but I still wasn’t ‘quite right’.In truth, when I hit the road at the start of March on Mission 20, I was absolutely exhausted before I’d even started. I didn’t feel ready.
That seemed ridiculous on the face of it because I hadn’t been away since my trip to Northern Ireland and Scotland the previous September. I should have felt rested and reenergised.But the logistical preparations — even the packing of Neena alone — felt like they’d already wiped me out.
Still, I got on with it but I was shattered at the end of each day and wondered how I could complete another 11 lifeboat stations over the course of a whole month on the road.
In the event, we’re all too familiar with how it panned out and, in hindsight, perhaps I was saved from some kind of terrible repeat burnout.
Fast forward to September before heading to Norfolk and I was conscious that I still wasn’t right.
I had a consultation with the doctor who agreed and I had a blood test a day or two before setting off.
When I got back, I was wiped out yet again but this time for a full fortnight. In the meantime, my blood results came back and the pennies began to drop.
It transpires that I (and therefore the rest of the household) have had a significant bout of Epstein-Barr Virus (EBV) and now I’m suffering from post-viral chronic fatigue.
Both EBV and chronic fatigue are quite common. The latter is one of the four main conditions associated with Long Covid and I feel very familiar with the listed symptoms of that!
Anyway, I’m telling you this because it sure as hell explains a lot about my wellbeing this year. In particular, why I’ve had to massively reduce my expectations of what I can achieve in any given day.
Normally, I can work like a machine all day long on a myriad of tasks but for the moment I’m aiming to achieve just one productive task per day.
For example, this post will be today’s task. More involved posts like Dunbar Dialogue are taking longer than usual because the concentration required to edit something like that simply takes it out of me — one of the many reasons I’ve been so grateful that Jetstream’s risen to the occasion lately!
It comes and goes too, and I find it quite difficult to judge. I felt able to go kayaking on Sunday for the first time in some 6 weeks but, again, that finished me off in such a disproportionate way.
The condition is pretty hard to describe unless you’ve personally experienced it (which I know many of you will have done). When it descends, it’s like a cloak of fatigue that suddenly gets draped over my head, instantly consuming every fibre in my body.
All I want to do is lie down in those moments and the doctor tells me that’s exactly what I should do — the more I fight it, the longer the recovery will take.So, that’s what I do and she tells me it may take as much as a year to recover, which should mean that I’m better again in good time for the spring.
That should also tie in nicely with the glimmer of hope on the horizon that I might be able to start making new work again.
I think this period may have been an unexpected blessing for me in so many ways and, ultimately, I feel relieved that I have an understanding of what’s going on and very fortunate that it shall pass.
JACKLOWE dot COM
Moving on to other things, prompted by some print sales of Kielder Moon, I’ve lifted the dust sheets from a website I first published in 2012.
At a time when online communication is key, it’s another way for me to enable people to find The Lifeboat Station Project, as well as illustrating the path that lead me to this point in greater detail.
I’ve kicked things off with a blog post called That’s the Spirit. There are lots of older blog posts as well as photographs stretching back to 1996, which you might like to peruse including the first glass plate I successfully made under my own steam — the foot of the Castle Keep here in Newcastle (you can see more in the Early Wet Plates gallery):
OTHER TASKS IN HAND
As much as the glass plates are the obvious physical archive of The Lifeboat Station Project, this website is very much an immediate record and part of the archive too.
The LSP website was first created in 2014 and I’m sure you’ll appreciate that 6 years is a long time in the lifespan of any site.
Over the last year or two, I’ve been very conscious that some aspects are starting to look a little dated with some old code lurking ‘under the hood’ too.
Although its management and upkeep may be the unglamorous side of the project, the site is very much my pride and joy — I find it just as satisfying to see it ticking along perfectly as I do with any other dimension to my work.
Over the last few months, I’ve gradually started rebuilding the parts that need it but I realised I was working quite inefficiently, flitting from page to page rather than working with a more focussed strategy.
I felt the best thing would be to conduct a review of the site, so I created a spreadsheet to help with that and it’s only then that I realised the enormity of the website I’ve quietly created in the background over the years:
There are now over 80 active pages, with each one made up of two elements — in essence, that means there are over 160 pages to maintain!
As you might see from the above screenshot, I’m finding the best way of tackling it is to review each page and give it a score.
As I see it, there are five determining factors that mean a page is entirely up-to-date. A good score is determined by a green box.
So, the ideal situation is a row of five green boxes making a 5/5 score. The spreadsheet enables me to identify and focus on the low-scoring pages (I’m prioritising anything below 3/5).
For example, the Cornwall print page scores 0/5 and, as far as I’m concerned, needs urgent rebuilding. The navigation isn’t up-to-scratch and the Add to Cart buttons now look very dated.
Compare that to a page I’ve recently rebuilt — the Suffolk print page where the project started. Crisper images, faster loading, better navigation and shiny new Add to Cart buttons.
You might also like to take a look at the newly rebuilt RNLI Coxswains and Helms gallery. Again, faster loading with larger, crisper images.
That took me nearly two days to rebuild…imagine the lie down required after that!
It’s not all about making glass plates, is it? To me, the website is a(nother) giant jigsaw puzzle from which I derive enormous satisfaction and I hope this is all interesting to you on some level too.
As you can imagine, I’m so pleased to have developed the skills over the years to manage the bulk of it myself. There’s no way that I’d have been able to afford to pay somebody else for the many thousands of hours that goes into this facet of the project’s upkeep.
Huge thanks must go to Jamie Milnes from Double Underscore who hosts the site, looks after the more complicated bits and helps me out when I run into bother. Thankfully, I don’t need to trouble him too often!
THE LSP SOCIETY
One more thing…
I launched my Patreon page three years ago. What a journey of evolution and discovery that’s been in itself!
I’m sure you know how thankful I am to you for joining me on that journey, whether it’s from the very beginning or very recently.
Part of that evolution for me has been a greater understanding of big online platforms and the context within which they operate.
As you learned here first, I stopped posting on Facebook-owned platforms for a multitude of reasons back in June, and those reasons have subsequently become much clearer and even more pertinent.
Although Patreon is still relatively young, I feel that it’s now falling into that bracket of big online platforms and one thing that’s become perfectly clear to me is how much power they hold over their creators.
If Patreon were to crash and burn, I’d be well and truly scuppered and, with so much invested in my project, I have become increasingly uncomfortable with having such a heavy reliance on the platform.
Not only that, but now that I have over 300 patrons, I’ve become acutely aware of how much Patreon costs every month in the form of platform fees and currency conversion fees.
Furthermore, I feel that the platform can still be quite clunky to use from both of our perspectives. Through no fault of your own, I’m often communicating with many of you about technical and administrative difficulties — issues that I don’t seem to have with the various mechanisms I’ve created on my own site over the years.
SO…
…I have a plan which I’m on the brink of implementing.
I’ve been researching how to create my own membership programme within The LSP website and, last week, I committed to buying the software required to build it.
My plan is to have it up and running by the end of this month and to gradually ask you to make the transition over to it.
Please keep everything as it is for the moment, though! And there’s no hurry to switch — I intend to replicate posts in both places during the transition period so you won’t be missing out on anything.
The working title for my own independent platform is The Lifeboat Station Project Society, or The LSP Society for short and this is how I think the web page could look:
What do you think? I’m all ears in these early stages and a handful of you have already kindly jumped at the chance of being early adopters.
Right, that’s all for now…congratulations if you’ve read this far!
Cheerio and I’ll look forward to your thoughts below.
Keep on keepin’ on,
Jack
Newcastle upon Tyne, Tuesday 10th November 2020
If…
1. If you enjoyed this post, please click the lifeboat orange heart below to say you were here and feel free to share your thoughts by commenting below!
2. This is a members-only blog post — remember, there’s much more to enjoy in the Members’ Area. You can amend or pause your pledge at any time within your account.
3. If you know somebody else who would enjoy being a member, you can now gift them membership via The LSP Society homepage!
4. If you haven’t perused the website for a while, head to the homepage for a fresh look.
5. Head to The LSP Shop for prints, posters, postcards, the famous With Courage Keyring and more.
6. If you happen to stumble across any links to Patreon, please let me know so that I can remove them!
7. Finally, if you have any questions about your membership or my work, feel free to email me.