Ongoing Cabin Fever Thoughts/Proposal

Hello there

I’m currently sat outside a coffee shop waiting for the garage to phone me to tell me there’s one less light on my dashboard to bother me.  My phone claims it’s six degrees but I strongly dispute such a claim.  Absolutely freezing mate.

However it does afford me the opportunity to write down a few thoughts I’ve been having about a potential Patreon change.  It doesn’t feel too drastic this end and I’m very much seeing it as an experiment rather than a permanent change necessarily.  I shall run it past you and you can let me know what you think.

So, as mentioned in last Friday’s Cabin Fever, I’ve been thinking a lot about the “winter run” I did.  I shall credit Patron T Trewhella for coming up with that phrase, so it’s on the record, but from now on I am just having it.  Always remember that the content of any comment you leave is officially mine once you’ve left it, like all them big businesses sneak into their small print.  I can’t legally back it up though, so you also have the option to sue.

Anyway, let’s go back to the beginning of the Winter Run (copyright 2023, Infinite Hermit, all rights reserved).  My reasoning for doing it was because I was slightly concerned about myself which sparked consideration for others.  I reckon I’ve always been a bit over-empathetic about the idea of people being alone, whatever the situation but particularly over Christmas. Regardless of how much one tries to ignore it, it’s pretty much impossible to get a clean slate.  I mean, people struggle to do that “Last Christmas” challenge, where you try to avoid hearing that song for the whole holidays, so avoiding the whole thing is an impossibility. I knew I had a potentially lonesome time over the holidays, and didn’t want to add large work commitments into that, where I’d be stressing about hitting deadlines.  Most of the posts on here take quite a while to put together, it’s only posts like – I guess – this one, where I can sit down and get it done in an hour or so. The Cabin Fever podcasts are similar, in that I sit down and record them for – usually – 40 mins, then give them a casual edit and upload them. Very occasionally I sit down and really struggle through them, constantly pausing the recorder and regathering my thoughts, but generally speaking, in my work week, they’re the least stressful thing to do. So the option of having a week of – mostly – just Cabin Fever, was an appealing prospect, and left me a little bit of free time to work on other things without a looming need to get it uploaded by the next day. Hence it taking me two weeks to mould my golden knob.

I also suspected that for folk in the same boat as myself, it would be a daily company that might be of comfort as a routine. As I mentioned last week, I am very keen to not present this as a benevolent thing, this came first and foremost from worry about myself, and you subscribe to this patreon so you don’t need to be “grateful” to me for content you’ve funded.  The funding is all the gratitude taken care of.  I had the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone though; give myself somebody to talk to and give you something to be involved with.  I had reservations that I mentioned loads, as it relied on engagement, and it’s well difficult to get engagement over that particular time period at the best of times.  I was anticipating having to think on my feet and it being a week of me wittering on into the void, but – as we know – that isn’t what transpired.

I shall at this point utilise my legally binding ownership rights of your comments to cut and paste one that I received;

“At the risk of being serious for a moment it seems like a lot of people, many I suspect living alone like me, really enjoyed these Cabin Fever podcasts and are wishing they could continue. I suspect Ian has tapped into “something” for “sometimes” lonely people who would dearly love to have a “no pressure” friend round often for a cuppa and a chat – or better still visit them so they have to make the tea.  Doesn’t matter how trivial the topic because isn’t trivia what people normally chat about? It doesn’t have to change the world , just make it a happier place to live…” Adam Bridge

Now, notwithstanding my resentment at the intimation that I’m not changing the world, this comment particularly nudged me. In fact, it choked me up a little bit and resonated with me in the same way that the podcasts appeared to have resonated with Adam.

I’ve spoken a lot over the last few months about not feeling ‘present’ on patreon.  I’m obviously here, but it’s felt rather detached (which it’s allowed to be, my job is to supply the content not be best mates with everyone).  I think a part of that is my inability to keep up with comment replies quickly, but that’s due to me mainly spending my time doing the actual posts themselves. Oftentimes I’m doing posts ahead of time, so can’t even remember what comments refer to anyway, and I think that’s all okay but from time to time it’s nice to be on here “live”.  Again, as much for me as anyone else. So over a period of time where contact was seriously lacking, to be able to be present and us all have a daily ongoing narrative for a week or so was ace.

Can I also just stress at this point that this isn’t a big declaration of loneliness.  I’ve experienced a lot of “all or nothing” over the past few years, where I’m bombarded with texts and calls and if I don’t engage immediately I get sulky radio silence. As somebody who refuses to be “trained”, I would always choose the silence, so the “no pressure” aspect that Adam mentioned was the bit that hit home. I’d already been thinking about how I’d miss the routine of those podcasts, and said as much in the last few of them, but couldn’t work out how I could have my cake and eat it.  During the lockdown I was doing two posts a day, one of which was a shorter Cabin Fever/Ask Ian podcast in the evening, expressly for folk who may have been on their tod, but I never really thought these took hold.  There were enough messages from people saying they appreciated them, but it wasn’t the same as the winter run, so I quickly abandoned the idea of starting that up again.

I did think though, and this is the experimental plan, that I could allocate one week each month to do what I did in the purgatory period.  Namely, shift the regular posts to an ongoing week of “present” Cabin Fever podcasts, where we can all have that communal discussion/rows/autoharp request/questions.  That way, we are getting what we had at the end of December as well as the regular posts for the other weeks (and the weekly Cabin Fever round up will remain too).  The Cabin Fever week will also be the full seven days too, so I am proposing the last seven days of each month.

From my side, it gives me a bit of wriggle room to catch up on projects without hitting deadlines, whilst also supplying and being involved with a week of blabber and mischief.  As with the last run, it will depend pretty much entirely on there being a group of us who are all chipping in again, and I’ll try to think of some contentious thing to argue like that soup is a drink, and see how many of you I can radicalise around to my opinion.  I really liked the autoharp requests too, and the “blind swing” at trying to play songs I didn’t know on the hoof.  It finally made the autoharp justifiable rather than something to be tolerated. I had a full blown discussion this week about how a new autoharp purchase should be entirely tax deductible for me, but it ended up being irrelevant as they are rare as hens teeth at the minute.

That’s my proposal anyhow, last seven days of each month are consecutive Cabin Fever podcasts with an ongoing narrative?  We can see how it goes, and I’ll pen it in for this month, but do feel free to leave your thoughts of agreement or dissent – both are valid.  I mean, I’ll always just decide for myself like, but that doesn’t mean I wont listen to opinions with interest. 

Hope you have a lovely start to the week 

Much love from here

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