Today is…

at the time of writing, not what I’d planned it to be.

It was the time of the Great Pandemic and I was furloughed from work on 26 March and as I’m currently living at my parents house we’re in a particularly strong lockdown just to be on the safe side. Deliveries of food once a week, no going to whatever shops are open, minimal contact with anyone outside the house.

So there’s me with a large portion of my wages being paid by the government and free time to work on whatever I want. It should have been glorious, but reality never really plays nicely with expectations. After an initial flurry of activity – I learned enough about Processing to create a midi-controlled sketch (which I need to come back to at some point) and a few other bits and bobs and distractions that petred out as the days continued in their sameness – I went a little stir-crazy with the lack of structure. I developed some back and other issues, I wasn’t sleeping and the general amorphousness of everything on top of being pretty much housebound did me a mischief.

Things came to a bit of a head on Sunday, 19 April. I managed to get the day and/or date wrong on at least three separate occasions and this wasn’t the first day I’d had to think about when I was. I’d clearly come a bit adrift but this time I was just done with being confused and lost. Something had to be done!

‘I’m going to post a photograph on Instagram with the day and date written on it every day for the rest of lockdown,’ I thought. That’ll flex some mental and artistic muscles and it might help anyone else who’s in a similar boat.

And so I took this photo of my rosary vine (Ceropegia woodii) with my phone (OnePlus 6T) and on the following day, after researching the best resolution to upload to Instagram (1080 px square – I know photos don’t have to be square any more, I like the formality) and deciding on the typeface (League Spartan from the open-source type foundry League of Moveable Type), I set up a template in Inkscape.

I very scientifically decided the text position and size for the series using the maximum width that the date can ever be + two em quads, raised an em above the bottom of the image and with 5% leading between the two lines (don’t @ me, I think it works well for this).

Slapped the photo and the text together and posted it to Instagram the following morning.

That was how it started and I’ve done the same thing every day since then (Instagram crossposts it to FacePest, I have an IFTTT recipe that autoposts from Instagram to my Twitter feed, and I manually upload it to an album Flickr).

‘So what? You’ve just discovered how to do a “post-a-day” on Insta grandad.’

Sure, that’s very true and that’s pretty much exactly what it is but it’s the developments that have gone with it that I think are interesting. What started as ‘post a random picture taken the day before from around the house/garden’ now includes a daily 10 kilometre walk in the woods around where I live, learning about the subject of each photograph so I can post info about it in comments, learning about my local area