001: "Hello, World"

This blog finds its origins in the depths of the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. It is difficult to comprehend that such a defining life event lies nearly half a decade in the rearview mirror. Five years on, it has changed many things about the world. One of the things it hasn’t changed, is my love for random “Twenty questions”-type quizzes. Those quizzes that ask questions like, “what is your favourite colour?” and “who are the five guests you would invite for your ultimate dinner date?”. It was on a quiet night during the hard lockdown of 2020 when my wife and I were doing one of them that the quiz delivered an absolute humdinger:

Without missing a beat, I answered:

This might not seem a surprising answer to those who have followed my flirtations with the written word through my social media pages over the last decade, but it surprised me greatly. The thing is, I am a Data Scientist by trade and my love for data is all-pervasive. When I was an 8-year-old boy, I used to play a lot of backyard cricket. Not only did my friends and I play the game, but we also spent ages drawing up the scorecards. We then went to the next level and painstakingly calculated every single run of every game over a summer’s worth of backyard cricket. We would drop players from our sides whose batting averages fell too low. We even had a rule that tailender batsmen had to bat lefthanded to truly reflect their lower averages. I would be the weird kid in class scribbling out team sheets and calculating strike rates. Little did I know that this experience of data capture, management and analysis would inform my career. Today, everything I do possesses a data component. I track my running mileage on Strava. I log my hours at work, monitor how long I expect things to take and constantly scrutinise when things don’t go according to plan. I even have an extensive spreadsheet to track my reading habit, since Goodreads couldn’t cover all my needs.

Given this love for data and the fact that I believe myself to be one of the few people I know who is working in his dream job, I was taken aback by my answer to the quiz question. Why would I want to spend my days writing if I am already where I am supposed to be? In recent years I have undertaken many long and arduous journeys, from writing a master’s dissertation to renovating an old house, running my first ultramarathons, and hiking some of South Africa’s toughest hikes with brilliant people. These adventures have given me a lot of time to reflect. I have often found myself pondering this question.

I have since concluded that writing is - for me - to think. When I am stuck, I turn to pen and paper and I draw up a plan and construct a narrative to get myself unstuck. Only when words need to flow from a pen, do their significance - or insignificance - appear before me. Only through writing do I find what I understand and where I still need to do more work to come to a fuller insight. I am - at best - a nervous verbal communicator, but when I get to think through arguments in writing, I come to be a more actualised human being.

When I met my favourite choral composer, Morten Lauridsen, in Riga, Latvia in 2014, I praised him for his amazing, ethereal, and timeless music. He simply replied:

Now that I know why I write, I need to understand what I hope to change by it. Surely, the point of it cannot simply be for me to put words down and feel good about myself? There must be some higher purpose for this deep-seated conviction. Mustn't there?

The simple answer is that I don’t know…yet.

I recently got some great advice from a friend who is successfully pursuing a career as a professional writer. He said that the first 100 pieces one writes, are going to be bad, regardless of how good a writer you are. It therefore makes sense to get them out of the way as quickly as possible and then get on to writing the good stuff.

With this blog, I endeavour to write 100 pieces. It won’t be a curated and stylistic blog. It will be filled with stories, ideas, descriptions, and concepts. Sometimes it will be composed in English en ander tye sal ek in Afrikaans probeer woordsmit speel. I will ramble on about running and try new and exciting Data Science techniques. It will be an attempt at finding my voice that can change something in the world. Or, perhaps less ambitiously, in my world. Sometimes I will post regularly. Other times, life is bound to get in the way.

When I get to 100 posts, I will be able to raise my bat, like I did all those summers ago as a triumphant backyard cricketer to acknowledge the milestone. I will then analyse the experience like a proper Data Scientist and decide between declaring the innings or soldiering on with pen (and keyboard) in hand. I hope to then know whether my answer to the quiz question from the Covid-19 lockdown was merely due to a romanticised idea of what writing is, or whether the flame of desire to write merely needed the kindling of the first 100 pieces to form a blazing fire.

In the programming world, there is a right of passage to learning a new language. This practice entails the printing of a simple message. This message indicates that the intrepid programmer is now venturing into the unknown:

I end this post – the first post of at least 100 – with that same simple message: