Travelling Gadgetman | 2215

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Coming home on the train I felt a bit like a ‘travelling gadgetman’. A condition that has crept up on me in the last decade.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2022/04/16/301-2215-travelling-gadgetman/

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Websitehttps://www.thejaymo.net/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo



Travelling Gadgetman

I’m currently at home in Kent, staying with my parents for Easter, back on the chalk. Super nice to be here. The weather is lovely and the sun is shining. Love a late easter.

I can’t say I’m the biggest fan of packing to come home though. Here’s some of the things I put in my bag on Wednesday morning. 

My Clothes, a Microphone, a Laptop, my Kindle, a pair of Noise Cancelling Headphones, my Smart Phone, my E-Cigarette plus mains battery charger, and my Nintendo Switch. But packing my Sony ZV-1 camera seemed a little excessive? Then again, that camera is a tool I use to make and create this show. Yet I decided to leave it at home. Now I’m here actually making the episode, I wish I’d brought it with me.

So if you are one of the handful of people who watches 301 on YouTube – I apologise there’s no video version this week. 

I’ve decided that my decision not to bring the camera is a useful insight into my internal priorities. Something that I’m going to have to make time to sit with.

Coming home on the train I felt a bit like a ‘travelling gadgetman’. A condition that has crept up on me in the last decade. One minute I was in my early 20’s, living life in the pre-smart phone era. No desktop computer or laptop. Just one man and his Nintendo DS and cassette playing walkman. Now I’m in my mid 30’s and I’m packing up thousands of pounds worth of technology for a 5 night trip. It is – I suppose, a reflection of where life has lead. I am both very lucky and grateful to be a travelling gadgetman at all. Returning to the insight about not packing the camera. All the other gadgets and bits of tech I brought home were packed by me. One by one I made choices about what was and wasn’t going to come home with me.

It makes me think about Saint Kondo (See episode 2009) and what she says about travel and packing in one of her books. Things like travel adapters aren’t items that spark joy in and of themselves but they facilitate it. Sometimes she says a tool is just a tools Again, the camera is a tool too, and I wonder why I decided not to pack it.

Anyways.

A listener emailed in during the week to point out that whilst this is the 5th season of Permanently Moved. Last month was the show’s 4th birthday. He asked why I chose not to mark it. I looked through the archives and the birthday episode had I chosen or remembered to mark it, would have been Episode 2209 – Things (un)finished.

A nice sync or symmetry there in the rhythm of life there I think. The first episode was about wanting to start something, then 4 years later almost to the day, I’m making an episode about wanting to make and do more.

I went back and listened to the first episode, For maybe the 3rd or 4th time since I made it? Which is quite a lot of listens, as I almost never return and listen to an episode again after I’ve hit the upload button. Infact I have to now google my own show to check I haven’t made an episode about a topic already.

Episode 1 is so strange to listen to now. It’s so full of space, full of dead air. I made the initial episodes without a script, so my delivery was far less confident. But all the pauses don’t sound to my ear like their full of uncertainty, but instead possibility. 

You can still hear what 301 is today in that first episode. I don’t think anyone at all would be surprised to learn that the show became a tightly written and edited essay show from that initial episode. An aural periodical as Huw Lemmey once called it. The biggest surprise is that I keep going. There are nearly 1.4 million podcasts out there online that didn’t make it past the 7th episode. I did.

I guess the real reason I didn’t mark 301’s 4th birthday is that I forgot. Making an episode of the show every week is my focus. As I’ve learned to care less and less about download numbers and stats, the body of work this show leaves behind is something that I take more and more satisfaction from. As I said, it’s not that i’ve been doing this now for 4 years, it’s that I have to make another one next week that interests me.

Plus I’ve got into the habit of making a checkin show every 50 episodes. The next retrospective is still some months away. When we’ll be celebrating 200 episodes. I’ll probably say something like: 301 is a show that looked at all the ‘How to Start a Successful Podcast’ articles online, and then ignored every single bullet point and piece of advice. So until then, I’ll continue to do my own thing and reflect on all that in about 18 episodes time. 

I will however say today that between now and then, expect news about a subscriber perk for folks supporting the show at the £5 a month or £100 a year levels. As a hint, If you feel like you’d like to receive something from me in the post, via IRL snail 4 times a year as a sort of thank you, then head over to www.thejaymo.net/support and sign up today.

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The script above is the original script written for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the edit.

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