I'm thinking about starting up this blog again.
When I first launched it, back in... 2009? Gosh. When I first launched it THE DECADE BEFORE LAST, I was just about to give up what would turn out to be my last full time permanent job and start freelancing. It was a slightly scary move - I was walking away from a secure job, working with people I really liked and who had come to feel a little like surrogate family (which, when your actual family live half way across the world, is a useful thing to feel.) While I was quite sure it *was* the right decision, I couldn't explain to anyone, let alone to myself, how I knew that, and I realised that, on paper at least, it seemed like... an odd choice, to say the least. Hence the original blog title (and also, although it came a few months later, the ship quote, which I think captures slightly more accurately the essence of what this blog was, and hopefully still is.)
My plans for this new freelance lifestyle were, apparently, to "write, work and study in equal measures" - I say 'apparently' because I have no idea what I thought I might be studying for. (Seriously - no recollection WHATSOEVER that this was even part of the plan. But there it is, in black and white, in an early post. It's super weird.) I definitely was going to try and write things, though. I remember that much. And I was going to have to find some paid work to keep me solvent while I did it.
A blog, I thought, would keep me accountable, and would be a place to capture some of my worries and successes and adventures as I went about trying this new freelancing malarky. And that was how it used it, to begin with. But pretty quickly it morphed into something else entirely - a miscellaneous collection of links and music videos and quotes from books and things I felt like writing about, or had been distracted by, or thought were worth sharing.
Recently, for various reasons, I've started to think it would be nice to have that kind of place again. Or more to the point, the kind of place to put some of the other things I also - less frequently - sometimes used to put here. Stories, and recaps of things, and whatnot. Basically, I've finally (after quite a long hiatus) started to remember what it feels like to be the kind of person who likes to make and write and think about stuff, purely for the sake of making and writing and thinking about it. Which is a nice way to be feeling again.
Do people even still write blogs? Back in 2009, it seemed like something everyone was doing - now not nearly as many people do or, at least, not nearly as often or regularly as they used to. But there definitely still are some of them still kicking around, and maybe this blog will join them again.
Or - let's be honest - maybe it won't. I have, after all, made several attempts to resurrect this blog before. All of which have helpfully, um... been fully documented. Sometimes accountability isn't all its cracked up to be.
Here, for instance is I how began my most recent post in November 2017, after a gap of almost 18 months:
"Been a while since I posted here... Sorry about the dust and tumbleweed. I'll have a good clean up at some point. "
So, yeah. That aged well.
And before that, way back in April 2015 there was this, in a post I optimistically titled 'I'm Back. Maybe':
Gosh. It HAS been a while. I didn't make a deliberate decision to stop writing this blog. But that's sort of what seems to have happened....
And of course it's easy, once you've stopped doing something, to keep not doing it. A few days of not doing something turn into a week, and weeks turn into months, and suddenly it's a year between blog posts, and you're not entirely sure how it happened. So this is me trying not to stop. Or, more to the point, trying to start again. Let's see how it goes.
Which brings me to the apology I need to make. Because, in response to that April 2015 post, someone called Gary Usleman wrote this in the comments:
Now I don't know Gary Usleman in real life, but the fact that I don't - or more to the point, that he doesn't know me - is sort of the important bit. It strikes me, in hindsight, that this was an incredibly kind thing to do - to offer a bit of moral support to a complete stranger, who he had stumbled across by accident.
And how did I repay him?
Well, things started well. Just three days later, I had fulfilled my promise and started blogging again. But let's see how things did go, from there, shall we?
Swimmingly, it seems. After that promised 'fresh start' in April 2015 I managed to produce a grand total of nine more posts. Just under one a month for the rest of that year, and then one a year for the couple of years after that, and then nothing. Until now.
(It's also worth mentioning too, at this point, that they weren't even good posts. Or at least, not the sorts of posts he might have been expecting to see. The three from September and November 2015, which formed an accidental trifecta I ended up naming 'The Bravery Trilogy', were written in the lead up to and aftermath of, having had my heart pretty spectacularly broken. (I am now, I hasten to add, absolutely fine - my heart survived and life moved on, as it inevitably does. It's all good, I promise.) It happened in a slightly weird (but no less painful for that) and complicated way which I didn't - and still don't - really want to go into the details of, but which I did still want to write about. And so I did write about it, but not, I suspect, in a way which was specific enough to make what I was saying useful for, or even interesting to, anybody else.
I still can't quite decide how I feel about those posts. In a weird sort of way I'm actually quite fond of them - or bits of them, at least - but I do also think it's safe to say that they were at the very least, a little self-indulgent. And probably not quite what some poor, kind person who was simply a little curious about Ohio and mackerel, thought they were signing up for.
So yes - sorry, Garry. I don't know if you're still here, or will ever see this, but if you do then please know how much I genuinely mean that, and also how genuinely I meant it when I said thank you, and how much I still mean that now. I'm going to try to do better.
Trying to decide how I feel about the Bravery Trilogy brought up a more general dilemma - a lot of what is written here is now very old, and none of it is perfect. While I definitely remember and recognise the younger version of myself who wrote and thought all of those things, I'm also very aware that there are some big differences between the ways I used to view and interact with the world in 2009 (or even in 2017) and the ways I view and interact with it now. It's very easy to look back with a critical eye, and focus on what I could have done differently (I wish I'd been a little kinder when describing my downstairs neighbour, for one thing). And given how much time has passed, and how much the world has changed in that time, part of me did wonder whether it would be wiser just to start again from scratch. But then I remembered that failure and messiness and being human is all part of the creative process, and aren't we all just works in progress, anyway? So maybe I shouldn't worry so much about any of that.
And besides, I'd have a lot more to worry about if my views, opinions, and interests hadn't changed at all over the last decade or so, wouldn't I?
So yes, some of my opinions have changed - of course they have - and so have some of my interests (I'd definitely forgotten how into learning about wine I once was - it seems to come up a LOT) but my core values haven't. And the people and stories which interested me enough to write about them all those years ago are, for the most part, the kinds of people and stories I still find interesting now. But a lot of other, slightly less frivolous things interest me too, these days, and I suspect I'll find myself writing about some of those as well.
Or you know, maybe I won't. We'll see.
if there is anyone reading this who remembers those very early days of this blog (which seems unlikely, to be honest, but who knows?) they might have guessed by now that there is only one thing missing from this post. And so to finish, here's a quote from - who else? - good old Jules Renard.
It's good to be back. Let's see how it goes this time, shall we?
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