Needling

I’m quite excited. I just have to sew this project up and then I can start on the next one. When I have time. What is time? I barely know any more. However, hopefully, expect photos, though not before the recipient has recieved and I can post them up.

The thing about knitting I find is that I don’t like to have more than one project on the go at once. However this does then mean that I’m halfway through one project when I decide what the next one will be, and then I am impatient to finish the one and move onto the next. I shall enjoy my next project – when that goes up, with any luck, you’ll recognise it, by the way – but I’m already thinking about the two projects that will follow it.

That said those are two very different projects. One is massive and lacy, the other is massive and very, very simple. So I may have to do those both simultaneously because otherwise I will get bored of lace work, or bored of dead simple, and either way I shall go slightly mad.

I’ve also taken a lot of photos recently. Some are people, so you don’t get to see those, I’m afraid, but some are plants and stuff and I’m quite pleased with those too. And I’ve discovered some things about my camera that I didn’t know before which if you ask me is quite exciting. Not that you get to see that yet because I haven’t done anything worth doing.

The main problem with this blogging lark is that I’m absolutely bloody hopeless at ever turning on my laptop at the moment. It’s all work and sleep I’m afraid…!

Although there’s a bit of me that wants to get all domestic-bliss-blogger on you and start taking photos of the things we’re making for dinner and post those every day. But I won’t because I’m 22 and that’s silly.

This Is Not A Brilliant Or World-Changing Observation

However I thought you should all know. I was going to try and think of a way to write this post which would make it genuinely interesting from the perspective of any passing reader – the ones who seem to keep coming back to this blog despite not knowing me presumably due to my perspicacious, witty thoughts on the world and my place in it and not through some bizarre vicarious admiration of my brilliant life…. Yes. Anyway.

No, I have news. So this post is specifically for those of you who know me IRL or have read this for long enough to have built up some kind of semblance of a relationship with me. This makes me feel like a terrible blogger except, screw it, this blog is what I make of it and I choose to hardly ever post, come on here and witter frantically about someone most of you will never meet in the direction of a select few who possibly will, and then shamble away and not post until I have revision to do or a dreadful cold and still have nothing to say, then so be it.

His name, this news of mine, at least for the purposes of this blog, is S. I have just about stopped (sometimes) being surprised by how happy I am. And according to the prompting I got when I typed in my URL to get here just now on his computer, he’s already got this on his RSS feed. Hello :).

My Heart On My…Arm?

There are a lot of things I would like to say to you. I’d like to explain some things, lay out all the cards, talk about where I think I went wrong and what I would have liked to have done instead, how I wish I’d reacted. There are things I want to apologise for and things I want to ask. And perhaps a few years ago I would have done just that. I would have given out bare truths and asked for the same in return but the coinage of human relationships is not honesty. In many ways thank goodness we know the rules of the game now. I know you know I know you know I know and so we talk about what’s on telly and how much we drank last night and if I owe you an apology I buy you a drink and if there’s something you’re not telling me I probably know it already and so actually none of these are conversations we need to have. And everything works brilliantly and the wheels of society are well-oiled and everyone’s having a brilliant time except that once in a while you forget that honesty, actually, I suppose, it’s like water or acid or something. Things rust, things grind to a halt and everyone turns around. You don’t need to know the things I sometimes wish you know and I don’t need the answers to my questions because I know the answers already or I simply function better without them and you are not a person and really in this moment nor am I, we’re just examples, we all play a part in this machine and if we stick to the script (don’t worry, there’s a lot of room for comic ad-libbing) then everyone is happy because we’re not seventeen any more. Because it’s not about honesty, it’s about stating the bleeding obvious.

Articulate

I’d forgotten the joy I used to find in writing. Not joy, perhaps, too visceral, but the quiet love for crafting something. I don’t expect that I’m a good writer and nor really is that why I do (or have done) it; I don’t even consider myself a writer – which is silly when you think this blog, in its various forms, has been Something I Do for nearly six years now. But I had nothing to say for a while recently because I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, not because I couldn’t have written about it if I had thought of an ‘it’.

I just went linkhopping, however, and found in various places some examples of really good writing – descriptive, witty, beautiful. Blogs that found the beautiful in the ordinary, the sad in the mundane, and even some that made real and enjoyable to me something that in real life I would never consider doing. I’m afraid I’m too old and tired now for all this incestuous, back-handedly self-aggrandising link-spewing, the better to get more hits. Obviously if I was going to pick up a thread or an argument from a blog, or draw heavily upon a piece of writing for inspiration, of course I’d link to it.

I remembered the pleasure of tasting words in my mouth and taking care to construct images carefully. I was going to talk about painting with words but it’s more than that. It’s more than just using words to reconstruct the world and convey it to others because there are so many dimensions to cover, all the ways in which we take information in, all the different ways we understand it – intellectually, emotionally, viscerally – and the weight we each personally put on all of those things. Writing done well is to play with perception in a way no other medium does, which is not to say that making art or music are any less multifaceted or complex, merely that these are different approaches to the same problem. And somehow, despite all the novels I read and the people I talk to, I’d forgotten that. It’s trite to say that words have power, but I will say it, because I have remembered that being allowed to play with them in a space like this is an opportunity like nothing else. It’s as if someone gave you the keys to Picasso’s studio, or whipped a Stradivarius out of their car boot. I’d forgotten, I suppose, that words are there are much to be enjoyed and crafted with as they are to record experience.

Which is as well, because if I was to simply record experiences at this point you’d get a smattering of silly drunk anecdotes, an overwhelming sense of shame with a fair helping of self-pity, some ranting about fairly common and tedious experiences, some raving about take-aways, whisky and recent television, an account of my work at the Chaplaincy and an awful lot of blather about quality control of protein formation and folding in and around the endoplasmic reticulum, which I personally am really enjoying but I can completely understand if that’s not what you come to read when you visit my blog.

This isn’t a promise that my writing will get better, or be good, or enjoyable, or any of those things. I’m not saying I’m going to write more often. This might not be much more than a place-holder. To be honest, dear reader, this post has almost nothing to do with you at all. I like writing. I now remember why. This might mean I post more often. But really I don’t suppose either of us minds particularly whether I do or not, and that’s not why I’m here.