Why I am writing this blog
This is a new blog. WordPress say new bloggers should say something in the first post about what their blog is going to be like and what the point of it is.
I live in Portugal. I am retiring from work very soon, and people concerned for my mental welfare are keen that I should keep myself occupied. They fret that I may become depressed if I knock about the house doing nothing. This is nonsense, because of course I don’t get depressed. However I may become:
- bored
- scared
- gloomy
- prone to bouts of staring introspection
- unable to get up in the morning
- a convert to some enthusiastic religion or other
so I have had to give the thing some thought. My partner will not be retiring for a year or two, and likes to assure me that a lot of my time will be taken up with cleaning, changing bed-linen, dealing with laundry, planning meals, sorting out the garden, going to the supermarket, cooking dinner, loading and emptying the dishwasher and so on. She also thinks it would be good for me to have an allotment and to spend more time with the grandchildren.
In the light of this, I have decided to write a blog.
Why a blog?
Two reasons:
- I enjoy writing, and a blog may help the time pass more quickly until I can give everything up without embarrassment, and begin quietly waiting for my final ailment.
- The other week a colleague at work said ‘Well, you could always write a blog’.
What will the blog be like?
- A sort of irregular journal. There will be quite a lot about living in Portugal, language, sport, and what’s on British television. It will mostly aim to be humorous, but not always succeed. It will avoid complex issues like the plague.* It will not be Tolstoyan in its seriousness, ambition and moral scope.
- There will be anecdotal descriptions of incidents, places and so on. The easily-embarrassed reader may wish to give these literary sallies a wide berth, but I enjoy writing them.
- It will be a ragbag of bits and pieces, reminiscences, jokes, other people’s poetry, critical comment on old pop songs nobody cares about any more…
- And so much more.
* I don’t have much to say about the plague.
The First Sign of Madness 
Dear Sofaloafer,
I will be blunt, my default voice when challenged by novelty. I should explain that all I know of blogs is that they exist. I have had no experience at all of blogs therefore I will most certainly, but inadvertently, trample their etiquette underfoot. You sound like a man who has a surfiet of creative imagery and inventive devices, aching for release yet you seem all but turned to salt by the absence of a theme to clothe with the fine fabrics and glinting gems of your thoughts.
But Bravo! for having wrung out the last drop of context from the context; your blank page is at least smudged with your identity. Still dripping with the nutrients of literary ambiotic fluid you have born yourself into the blogging metaworld, no doubt blinded by the as yet unfocused enlightenment and vague yet apparently busy shadows of the world of the living.
A trade union representative, addressing a group of which I was a member, counseled us to “never be embarrassed”. Besides, it would be an act of bad faith; like a waiter who behaves as if he were not a waiter. Irony, taste, even humour, do not trespass here in the domain where beauty is pleasure. So if you find yourself a writer, write. The reader is irrelevant.
best wishes
Malcolm
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