On extended absences

It's more than a year since I last blogged. A whole bloody year. That's terrible - and not just because I mention this blog on my 'professional' website, but also because I KNOW I should be making more effort to write for fun, not for profit.

And therein lies a truth: when your job is producing 1,000 words a day for money, it's really, really hard to sit back down and actually write What You Want To Say. At the same time, I now know that this what I really, really need to do.

Because, as lucky as I am to live in this fabulous country, with its wonderful people and glorious weather, and to commute in my pyjamas to my laptop every day, I don't appreciate my good fortune enough. So, come Sunday night, I'm still complaining about the week ahead, as much as I ever did when I was commuting each day from Hackney to the West End to work with a bunch of people who were once good friends but who became completely estranged by money problems and factionalism.

(I hold my hands up in that regards - MEA CULPA big-time. But good stuff came out of that factionalism. Thanks to the people who were 'For' me and those who were 'Against' me, I can write (a bit), or at least support one lovely man, two dogs, two cats and a burgeoning number of farmyard animals with the skills that I learnt during what I now consider to have been one of the more tricky periods of my life.)

And if I've learnt anything at all from that training, I still remember that there's a merit in keeping a Journal of Record, even if it's only for yourself. So if no-one ever visits this page, then all well and good.

But, here and now, I resolve to write here every day - no matter how exhausting or unnecessary - or unprofitable - it all seems. Because I firmly believe that, however tedious it might be for YOU, the reader, this might be my only way to put a tiny little bit of ME on the page. Not someone who's paid for, but someone who's REAL.

(And just for the record, the photo is of me, at our recent Gondelim Festa - our best yet, and the first of many to follow, I hope.) Love and best wishes to all that made it that way (you know who you are.)