A GUIDE TO LESSER BLOGFORDSHIRE (PART ONE, BOOK TWO)

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE BLOG

BOOK TWO – THE BLOG (NEARLY) GOES WEST

And so the tale of the continuing quest for bewilderment continues where it left off at the dawn of November following a schism in the shire. The “Writers” were “treated” to two more parts of the ongoing tales of Caterina, the opening quarter of an unperformed stage play written for the previous bonfire night, and my first proper (and amazingly downbeat) poem, and that was pretty much “it” as far as it was concerned, and it staggered along without any further nourishment apart from the occasional, probably accidental, visit until February, when a sudden desire to write a couple of poems overwhelmed me and I threw a couple at it for it to chew the meat off and then suck at the bones.

Meanwhile things were livening up over here in Lesser Blogfordshire. The “every couple of days” plan of October had worked out rather well and so I set myself a new target. “This month” I decided, “I shall try to write something new every single day!”

What an idiot! Suddenly I had created a rod for my own back, a stick to beat myself with, and an all-round commitment bound eventually to turn into an obsession, a worry and an ultimate failure and completely suck any “fun” that I might be having from the sheer joy of my writing.

So, what precisely was so fascinating about my little life in November that I thought it worthy of sharing with the world at large? What was so bloody unique about me that I thought it important enough that anyone else would be at all interested in it? Well, much like I am now, I began with a recap, “the story so far” as it were, as I was already becoming aware of those little statistical numbers that told so much and yet so very little at the same time. Wiser heads than me tell me that you really shouldn’t care about the numbers game, you should just write it all for yourself, and I’m sure that they’re right, but it still has a tendency to gnaw at the edges of my mind from time to time.

Themes were already starting to develop and it is with some surprise that I discover that I was already finding it necessary to apologise for some of the darker corners of my psyche that I had dragged my readers into, and this was before the great darknesses of the soul that December brought into my life. After taking a brief opportunity to remind everyone of the summer just passed on those dark winter mornings, I entered one of the very few periods that I consider to be “golden” patches of my own writing, where I was actually quite pleased with a number of the pieces I had written, even if nobody else was. Sitting alongside some of my less than original observations upon internet privacy and time passing was a nice little pastiche of film noir and a spoof blog about the events of “The Empire Strikes Back” that I still like even now. More popular with the wider world, however, were a serious piece about remembrance and a rallying cry to embrace those small special moments of life.

After this, the need to try to write something every day seemed to take its toll and, to my mind at least, the so-called “quality” of the stuff I was churning out crashed through the floor as a series of pieces of forgettable guff about my student days, various holidays and films I was watching on TV were put out simply because I couldn’t think of anything else to write about. Not for the first time I considered ending the whole sorry exercise and getting on with something more useful instead. Bizarre insights into the deeper idiocies of my mind when it came to things like odd and even numbers only helped to compound the madness as I suspected that I was giving out too much information. Things were kind of rescued by the strange tales of the Hickory Cat which popped into my head one Saturday morning, and a slightly spoofy pastiche of Children in Need that I seriously put myself through the wringer about before publishing it (“and be damned!”) anyway. Luckily, the later part of November was full of anniversaries and beginnings of things that I already had an interest in, and so I was able to put some pieces together about JFK, “Dr. Who”, the Ashes and my sister’s birthday which kept things bubbling along without too much difficulty, although my planned “History of the Everything in 100 Blogs” has never (yet) resurfaced. Never, ever say “never”. I even fell back on that old TV standby the “clip show” when things started to look as if they were going to get too far behind the production schedule.

November ended with a personal crisis, one that nearly blew my finely tuned plans out of the water, but also, had I not by this stage not acquired a certain amount of bloody-mindedness about the entire exercise, might very well have found me giving up on the whole thing and made the whole world of Lesser Blogfordshire go west and sink into oblivion.

Luckily there was a plan in place. It wasn’t necessarily a very good plan, nor, in the end did it lead to a month filled with the finest quality literature, but, because it had already been set in motion and there really was nothing else to be told (and I still hate the very notion of “dead air”), I decided to persevere with it to the bitter end. The idea was to tell one complete story in 25 separate parts and from several points of view as a kind of literary “advent calendar” leading up to the payoff on Christmas morning. Those days were days of worry, sleeplessness and anxiety in my “real” life and so it was quite a relief to have an escape route, and that whole Blogfordshire experiment was saved when I was inspired to use the structure and tunes of some of the better known Christmas carols to help to tell my story, which both lightened it up and made the necessary word count much more manageable. Whilst they might not have been great poetry, they certainly made life a lot easier.

I don’t think I’ll be trying that again any time soon though.

Of course, with everything being “held up” by the immovable object of that Christmassy tale, other stories were brewing up and failing to be shared with the world, but the first four insights into that whole sorry saga were unveiled between Christmas and New Year in a less that cheery festive burst of angst, as were some of the deeper, darker revelations of my own youthful experiences of a traditionally difficult time of year for me. More happily received were some thoughts on Charles Dickens and some significant dates, so, all-in-all, December wasn’t the complete raft of misery it could have turned out to be.

And so the year ended with 82 separate and distinct pieces of writing of various quality ranging from the not bad to the truly dreadful, all kicked out into the harsh, unyielding and uncaring light of the big wide world beyond the keyboard, with, at that time, a further dozen to be found over in the companion site which was still hanging around like a bad smell and trying to suck in whatever air that it still could.

The blog, it seemed, was here to stay.