I’ve just started picking up a newspaper instead of my phone to get my intake of news. I think it’s a good alternative to the 10 “top articles” that you’ll get on many news apps and websites (which are sometimes tailored to you specifically, filtering out some stuff which the news app deems not to be of interest to you).

One pattern I continue to see is a failing of public services and public transport having dire knock-on effects within communities. No one reading this in the UK will be surprised to hear this, our public services – here I’m including water, energy, education, and transport; even though they are privatised, they’re still backed by government investment – are in a terrible state across the board.

One story I’ve read follows a motorist who knocked down and killed an 8 year-old girl near Belfast. Now I don’t think the motorist did this maliciously, it’s pretty plain this was a terrible accident and heartbreaking for everyone involved, including the driver. Previously, the driver had a totally clear record of driving and handed in his license immediately following the incident. He had been driving for 72 years without incident. He was 92 years old, had a myriad of complex health issues, and is reported to have a remaining life expectancy of nine months to a year.

This story and the point I am trying to make is clearly analogous. This is obviously a very complex issue and a more effective public transport system would help, it would not totally solve these issues.

Independence

Expecting elderly people to abandon driving based solely on their age is an atrocious idea, especially in the absence of alternative infrastructure. We live in a society that (although aging) emphasises independence, sometimes from community and family. Increasingly we are offered services and suggestions coaxing us towards living for ourselves above anyone else.

This has led, overwhelmingly, to an increased reliance on care homes. It should be noted here that the life expectancy of those admitted to care homes is significantly lower than those not in care homes (1).

For those not in care homes, there are many that rely on either family or public transport to get around. For those relying on family, the families involved are put under pressure. I’ve seen in my own life where care of a family member can take up a significant amount of time.

As someone who values family and community, this to me is expected. No one lives alone and independent of those around them. To rely on a community and to provide help to your community is to be human; we’re social creatures. Without this kind of support and help I think we become quickly isolated. The problem at present is that our society does not provide communities and families with the support they need to participate in both society and community. Society expects us to choose, often to either our detriment or the detriment of others.

When people choose society (or themselves, and I’m not saying this is the wrong choice, far from it) then those who most need the support either become isolated or independent. Some don’t have a choice, and for others it’s choosing the lesser of two evils. Such is the case in a news story like this.

Public Transport for Independence

There are places in the world where public transport infrastructure enables greater independence. London for example has a huge and complex network of public transport, and if you’ve ever spent any time there you’ll actually find yourself navigating by the TfL (Transport for London) maps rather than a traditional map. Manchester too offers a wide bus network (recently with a cap on a single ticket) with two free buses for getting around the City Center.

Without these, especially in a bustling city, many would be left behind and forgotten. Even with this infrastructure in place, if it’s not done right, people still can. This was the case for wheelchair user and 11-time Paralympian gold medallist Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson in London’s King’s Cross train station (2).

Good public transport allows society to benefit from a working population who can navigate a city easily and contribute to wider public benefits through tax and through spending the money they make from working. Those workers have family and dependents, which (if society expects workers to contribute through working and paying taxes) also need taking care of. Few people can juggle everything, so to take care of families (young and old) is to take care of tax-payers. Independence for the elderly is also independence for your workers.

The Story

Going back to our original analogous example of the recent tragic incident in Carrickfergus, we look at a possible cause. It is clear to anyone who follows this story that the motorist who caused the accident should not have been driving. I think that even he knew that he shouldn’t have been driving, as he handed over his license willingly after the incident. The question might arise as to why he drove in the first place, if he knew he was not safe to do so.

There is one bus route which services Carrickfergus. It operates from 9:40 – 14:52 on weekdays, with four runs. The Saturday schedule is more complex, but starts at 11:30 and runs until 14:55, so operates for an even shorter period of time. Looking at the route the motorist would have had to take on the bus to where the incident took place, it would have taken roughly half an hour. The drive was 4 minutes.

Conclusions

Belfast and the surrounding areas have been suffering for years from a lack of robust public transport, scarce local and regional links, and serious congestion. I don’t think the recent decisions to allow taxis and cyclists into bus lanes help, as now you put cyclists (cleanist form of travel) in danger and cause more congestion for public transport.

It’s not just a case of pumping money into further funding for local public transport, it’s about rethinking how we approach and care for these services. Travelling on the Glider nowadays is to be confronted with a spree of anti-social behaviour, travelling on buses (if you can get one) is to be stuck in traffic, and travelling on trains is barely an option for many.

This is just another symptom of how we approach organisation and funding of our public services. Of course we can do a full overhaul, but oftentimes this is expensive, time-consuming, and slow (where society moves fast). Smaller changes need to be considered, incremental improvements, and a cultural coaxing needs to take place to encourage more use of public transport.

In some cases yes, this includes funding more local links in places like Carrickfergus and many other forgotten towns in NI.

Right now, if you can’t drive in Northern Ireland, you can’t have independence.

If we are to expect NI to prosper, then this needs to change.

Some time ago I made the decision to create a blog, a space on the internet I could call my own and blabber on about whatever came to mind. This could be opinions, or technical articles, or hot takes on a theme park, anything that came to mind, anything I enjoyed writing about.

At the time I was an avid follower of the extreme privacy discussion, particularly of the opinions discussed by Michael Bazzell. For a time I withdrew from the internet, trying to avoid adding more to the digital footprint I’d developed over my mere 20 years of existence.

Trying hard to avoid this, but still wanting to express my thoughts on the public internet, I adopted the alias Peritz, and (badly) attempting to remove all ties of it to my real identity, I purchased the domain pardonmynoot.com.

What to do now? According to extreme privacy, I should be self-hosting, using a privacy-friendly tunnelling service such as Cloudflare. I tried, and for a time I built my site using Hugo and served it using an Apache server with a Cloudflare tunnel, but I really disliked writing my content using Markdown. Add into the mix that my old-ass home server was just a 10 year-old run-down desktop running Debian networked to an even older TP-Link powerline adapter and you’ve got a disaster; the tunnel kept dying and I was presented with a Cloudflare error:

A massive PITA. So now I start looking for alternatives. I could go with a hosting site like Wordpress or Medium, but I’m 99% sure I saw some articles a while back about deals with OpenAI or some other such company that would use the content from blogs to train AI. No thanks. Plus they ask a lot of questions and share data with “partners”. I could host it myself in a privacy-friendly cloud, I got a DigitalOcean account easy enough, but now I have to manage a virtual machine and set everything up myself again. Plus, what software do I use and how much do I want to configure? Again I tried wordpress and also Ghost, but I didn’t like that I had to configure so much aesthetics.

I wanted somewhere I could write without distraction, that would be privacy-oriented (or at the very least, privacy respecting), and that would look good out of the box.

Through the Looking Glass

You can see how I spiralled massively. All I wanted was a space to write, and I went down a rabbit hole considering privacy implications, what I could do with the platform in the future, fancy features like comments, and more. The more I thought about it the more my head span. The more my head span the less I wanted to tackle the problem.

Scope creep is a real problem, and it gets worse the busier you are if you can’t keep a lid on it. I’ve just bought a new house that is proving to be much more of a nightmare to renovate that we had first imagined (yes as a first-time buyer you underestimate the effort required to renovate a house, but after talking to parents and beyond, we’ve come to the conclusion that the previous owners did not respect their home whatsoever). Additionally, my manager at work has taken extended sick leave, and whilst I fully support them in their situation, it does also put a little more pressure on me than normal. There’s plenty else going on (I was asked to be a best man to my brother, my big project and the additional heads I needed for my team at work were cut from the latest budget, Christmas is fast approaching, elections elections elections, house = money) which is contributing to the madness up in my head.

I didn’t keep a lid on the scope creep with this project. This was a huge failing and one I’ll be taking forward. Once I put this post up I’ll reflect on the whole process, and realise that I will be much happier for just having chosen a platform. In the future, if I want to continue to pursue a life of extreme privacy, I can export my posts and self-host an instance of WriteFreely if I want.

That’s the main thing from all this. When I’ve had projects in mind and I don’t know 100% what I want (or I do, but I don’t have the resources to pursue the ideal solution) I should be giving myself a solution that provides future options. I’m having to do a lot of this in work; cutting off projects early because I don’t have the resources. If I give myself the space to have options, I can converge later down the line.

So it is in my personal life, so it is with this blog.

write.as, I believe, is a beneficial project to the internet, and it’s one that I support. This post isn’t about them, but I do want to shout it out (since I’m using the platform at the time of writing).

Three steps backwards is still a step forwards if you walk in a circle

I’m back to cloud-hosted blogging. I don’t mind, in fact I’m incredibly relieved. I’ve found a platform that will respect my privacy and provides me with an enjoyable writing experience. I can now noot to my heart’s content.

Don’t ever expect a consistent stream of posts. I’ve given up on the idea that I can be a consistent blogger with meaningful posts, heartfelt opinions, or thorough walkthroughs and analyses. I’ve been writing internal documentation for my company, and I’ve taken personal notes. I’ve now discovered that sometimes I can be quite good at this communication thing and I want to give it a go in a public forum, even if no one is listening.