HO HMMMM

“No blogs Martin. You okay?”

Just five short words, but they may very well have saved Lesser Blogfordshire from a short trip into the dustbin of history.

Naturally, I fell upon them gratefully, devoured their presumably more innocently intended meaning, and pounced upon the great hope hiding within them before using them as an excuse to trigger my enthusiasm once more for this strange practice of lurking at keyboards at ridiculous times of the day when other, more sensible, folk are still safely ensconced beneath their covers and gratefully accepting the shuteye that doesn’t leave them dozing off during the news and generally proving to be a less than sprightly companion in the great journey of life.

“How come”, I am occasionally quite reasonably asked, “You can find the time to write over four hundred bits of nonsense for the general consumption of people you might not even know, and then allow yourself to be dozing off during the weekend afternoon instead of spending some quality time with your nearest and dearest?”

It is a very good point, but I can only counter that I’m not getting up early to write, but I am writing because I had woken up early and it gives me something to actually do with the time that doesn’t involve making an earth-shattering amount of noise in the way that replastering the living room to the dawn’s early light might do.

In previous years B.L.B. (Before Lesser Blogfordshire) those same hours would not be spent in fevered noble activities like tackling another mountain of washing up, or attempting to relandscape the garden, but instead were passed in less worthy pursuits like stuffing my face with the contents of the fridge or the biscuit box, or working my way through a pile of television on shiny discs, or accumulated on videotape or, occasionally, if I was feeling particularly noble (and had run out of televisual backlogs), curling up with a good book and filling those hours in that way.

Meanwhile, with regards to those five golden words I mentioned earlier, the value of them beyond earthly measure, “I'm fine...” I replied, although, I suspect that I’m palpably not.

Not really.

Not when it comes to the relatively insane pastime of actually burbling on to nobody in particular for no very good reason. I mean, it’s hardly a symptom of inner wellness, is it? Rattling on about all kinds of nonsense that nobody else really gives a flying fig about. It’s hardly the actions of a rational mind now, is it?

As I’ve mentioned recently, perhaps because I’ve had a sudden rush of rationality to what remains of my mind, I just haven't been able to think of anything much to write about this year so far... 

I do suspect that either my interest in doing so has finally waned, or perhaps I have finally sensed that any external interest from other quarters was beginning to fade away too.

Mind you, in that regard, actually the page view figures did seem to remain pretty constant in comparison to what they usually were, despite the fact that, at the time, I was not publishing anything at all which I think might just be significant. In fact, they actually seemed to be increasing so I started to believe that writing nothing at all was actually proving to be more successful that writing anything new which is a rather upsetting truth to have to face, if I’m being totally honest with you.

No doubt it was just those pesky Russian porn-seekers again, but it did still rather cut me to the quick that creating nothing was, if possible, slightly more interesting than choosing to share any of the thoughts I might normally have had.

I don't really know, but the words do seem to be struggling to form at the moment, but I am trying, in my own haphazard way to return to it, although I may still have to just publish a few of those bits and bobs I never bothered sharing with the residents of Lesser Blogfordshire last year, because I'm currently so very tired and so very busy, to be perfectly honest, I am still wondering whether there's anything much I can say at the moment that feels even remotely interesting or relevant, such is the nature of this tortured world we dabble in...


Still, nevertheless, I was eternally grateful to someone for actually noticing my absence and, for what it's worth, in the meantime I was still taking the time to read what other people choose to put out there themselves, even if I sometimes lately haven't felt capable of even stringing any actual coherent words together to make any comment in reply to them, and this despite the fact that, although other people’s efforts remains as entertaining and thoughtful as ever, some of what people choose to write in reply can still exasperate me.

This, I know, is because of the fact that I remain sometimes disappointed at the efforts of some of those who take the time to do such a thing. I know, in the great scheme of things, we should all embrace and encourage the fact that anyone has taken a moment out of their busy lives to engage with someone else at all, but sometimes the one-word reply (with added exclamation marks) just makes me sigh, especially as I sometimes notice that it bears so little in common with the words that it is in reply to, almost as if the respondent were writing out of a sense of duty or loyalty and not because they had read and understood the actual words they were  responding to or actually engaged with or thought about what was actually being said.

It’s that whole “like” on FizzBok thing all over again, or possibly the horrors of predictive text on those funny little keyboards that so many people now have to wrangle. Incidentally, on an unrelated issue, I did enjoy “waste” instead of “waist” in one recent exchange I read, which had me in stitches almost as much as it passed by unnoticed in the entire thread.

Still, this slight sense of disappointment is only from the point of view of a love of language and a loathing of the occasional massacring of it that I sometimes read (Not here, I hasten to add. All of the people who add their thoughts to the rare old vintage that we call Lesser Blogfordshire always seem to be very thoughtful and far more eloquent than I am),  although the comments themselves that I read in other, livelier places are always fun to read through, if sometimes little bit too pithy, unoriginal and terse for my tastes.

“That’s brilliant!”

Ho hum...

“Cheers!”

Hmmmm…

“Brilliant!!!”

Oh… Good grief…

Einstein was “brilliant”. Mozart was “brilliant”. Sometimes a piece of enjoyable writing is just that, enjoyable, and perhaps makes you happy... But brilliant…? Really…?

Sometimes I think we all need to get a bit of perspective and regain a sense of proportion.

Now that would be bril… make a nice change.