Appreciating blogging.

 How sweet you are, how darling. Thank you for kind words; it is true, much of the pleasure of blogging comes from the feeling of community. 

When a blogging friend of mine, urspo at sporeflections, recently said that he had been blogging for 15 years, I decided to check on my own length of service. Last November I had done12 years. Heavens, you get less for murder, as my dil is wont to say. Mind you, she applies it to marriage rather than blogging.

When I started I was green and young at heart; if I was not, after all, going to become one of the great writers of the age I might as well try the very lowest form of writing, a positive waste of time, as my then writing teacher said. Much better to slog at something serious, she suggested. But she did agree that I had found ‘my voice’, loud and clear. Only much later did I learn what that means.

In spite of feeling shy and very tentative I soon enough mastered the blog format, true,  not gathering any followers, but discovering that writing down my thoughts, however hesitantly, brought a kind of pride. So I carried on, ever more relaxed and confident. I also discovered the joy of photography.

I’ve always had a horror of being deemed mediocre, something to do with kindnesses my parents felt obliged to send my way. “Is there nothing you can do properly?” was one of their favourite expressions. Heigh Ho, it’s a long time ago, yet it still rankles.

Inspiration came easily, Beloved and I had decades of bouncing ideas off each other, stimulation came in the form of plays, concerts, meetings with friends and the heated debates we shared, gardening, walks in the Shropshire countryside, giving a home to dogs. I also delved into my past, my life in a newly liberated Germany, history, bits of geography. Then there were the memes, the communal writing to a subject, often funny. By now I had amassed a respectable number of followers, sadly, Google took several dozen away from me because the bloggers didn’t have a Google account. However, I persevered.

Then Beloved died. It was hard to carry on, nothing made sense, much was pointless. For the last three years there have been huge gaps, my heart just wasn’t in it anymore. Covid made it worse, suddenly there was nothing to say, unless I went back to the writing I had done during the early to middle years, i.e., leave the daily boring grind behind. Skim the surface of life at present and find what gets caught in the sieve. I want to concentrate on being truthful rather than bang on about facts. After all, both in my country of residence and, say, the US, we have recently learnt that facts are easily bent out of shape, invented, and twisted to make ‘alternative facts’, which are fervently believed by millions of people. So, let it be truth, maybe a personal truth rather than a universal one.

I really hope my blog will change a little, set off in a different direction, maybe use some poetry again.

I blame reading poetry in bed for the very late hour, it is now 5.16 in the morning, time to go to bed.