On Monday, I blew some of the cobwebs off the site and actually posted something of length that wasn’t a link to another site. I blamed the urge to write on reading The Guardian on my flight to Finland, and that might be relevant, but I suspect it’s also something to do with the current state of the blogs I read.
At various times on this site, I have tried to avoid the term ‘blog’. I don’t really like it. Some people don’t like the word ‘moist’. It makes them feel a bit, well, icky (is that a word?). The term ‘blog’ does the same for me, but I shall have to seek therapy because these days everybody from the aforementioned Guardian to the BBC via The Telegraph and The Economist seems to have a blog of some description. I am now embracing the word from this point on. Bloggety blog blog (see, cured).
Anyway, at last count (about 5 seconds ago), Bloglines had a feed of 124 subscriptions for my account (not all of them public). Take off the 15 I read for work (well, I subscribe, then delete all the items when they get to about 100), and that’s still well over 100 things I am ‘watching’. But only a few of them are things I read. I listed some of them in 2002, although that list is dated with a good number of dead links. But few people are writing any more, and those that are penning words are doing so at such a rate that I have a scary back catalogue of entries to read: Steve, that includes you. So, either I have too much to read that I’m scared to wade in, or I have reams of other people’s links that I don’t want to follow.
Anyway, in need of something better, I decided that I should start writing once again. I once said that I only did this for my own amusement (and when I used to look at Listen To Musak’s logs, I would have said that was very true), so I’ve decided to add a few more entries and see how we go. And I bet I’ve said this before, but I can’t be bothered to check; this time it will be different.
When I started this (for my own amusement, remember), I enjoyed the act of sitting down and writing. Truthfully, I am not sure I ever wrote a word that was very interesting to others (although Happy Birthday in Russian seems to keep bringing people to the site – twice), but it’s a record of my life that isn’t captured anywhere else. There’s a reason the ‘on this day’ links are at the end of every entry. I click. I find it interesting to place myself back a few years. Last Monday’s entry had four back years for that day, and I was fascinated to see that I referenced Blur, traffic congestion, spam, and Big Brother in the preceding years; I guess they are still topics of conversation now. And you don’t really get that sense of personal history from a list of links to other things (which become dead links by the time you’re nostalgic enough to check them).
After a while, however, a blog becomes like a pair of concrete shoes. It weighs you down, and you begin to sink. I don’t blog about work, family or my boyfriend (hey, Dave, you’re not the only one) and sometimes I ask what am I doing it for? I wonder if you can get treatment for some kind of non-blogging depression? That’s what happened here. I wanted to post daily. I wanted to build that sense of personal history. But I couldn’t. It was too much so it faded.
And now I’m starting again. Less concerned about tracking life, and probably with not much more to say, but with a heightened sense of why I am doing it.
I wanted to end with a triumphant ‘read on,’ but you can’t do that until I write the next piece. And who knows when that will be?
On this day…
2005: Manchester United Legend Is Close To Death2005: Change Your Coffee Shop Now
2004: Regent Street, London
2003: Bye Bye Bush Baby
