MAWH - In a dark corner of Lesser Blogfordshire

->spark<- splutter ->SPARK<- ->SPARK<- FIZZZZZZZZZZZ owowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowowow I told you he’d never manage it, I heard her say... and she was, of course, quite right, damn her eyes… owowowowowowowowowowow So… Where exactly were we...?

Christmas turned out to be a bit of a washout as first, on Christmas Eve, the beloved, and then, on New Year’s Eve myself, both got struck down by the kind of debilitating lurgy that makes everything seem a little bit rubbish, so much so that, despite a few wonderful contributions to the various movie-based hashtag games that sometimes occupy far too much of my brainspace (about which you are going to be hearing a lot more in the next few weeks I fear…) when I dally with TwitWorld, I decided that I really, really needed to jack in all of my writing nonsense for a while, perhaps with a view towards the other nonsense of writing a new play, but, in all honesty, more because I really didn’t feel that I had anything else left to say and also because what I was still saying didn’t seem to be triggering very much of a response in anyone else either...

And then Jack Klugman died, just as I was still ploughing my way through the last of those “Twilight Zone” DVDs in which he featured so significantly, DVDs of a show that was over and done with a full calendar month before I was even born...

And then Gerry Anderson, the puppet master who shaped the imagination of a generation also died... They buried him in the second week of January. There was a “Thunderbird Two” wreath, but I was mildly disappointed that nobody was able to provide him with a self-burying coffin based upon the design of the “Mole” machine, if that’s not too irreverent. Strangely, I took delivery of an old DVD which showed him alive and well twenty years ago, being interviewed with his son who was, of course, the man tasked with telling the world about the passing of his father, which was a bit of a mental leap for me to take.

That’s odd in itself, given that I often go a couple of decades without seeing people, only to then be surprised by how much they’ve changed…

And then Tony Greig died...

And then CMJ from TMS died...

Cricket, or at least my perception of cricket from both the wireless and the highlights programmes, was never likely to ever be quite the same again, and that made me feel really quite sad.

It seemed that so many those iconic figures who had helped make my sad little life seem slightly more bearable were popping off in droves...

Any and all of these people I might normally have written blog pieces about, but my brain simply wasn’t able to fire like it normally did. Maybe it was the lurgy, or maybe it was just me coming to the end of my personal rope when it came to matters of word-wrangling, but really, for the first time in ages, I was struggling to string together even the most simple of thoughts and ideas and, to be honest, the energy and the drive had simply vanished...

Instead I tried to plot a new play, but even that proved impossible, as did even writing the simplest of emails to anyone...

The words, it seemed, were simply not going to come any more...

Even my plan to write a few new rules for the New Year came to naught when none would spring to mind...

And so it seemed far better to just fade away without any particular fanfare and just stop, much as the year itself had stopped...

But then…

Well, a few people said some nice things about missing me, and I started to realise that it didn’t actually matter whether people read this stuff or not because that’s not what it is all about. The world failed to stop turning just because I hadn’t spouted off another irrelevant observation upon it, but that didn’t really matter.

Nor does it matter if the words won’t come. There are no “quality control” issues to worry about hereabouts. If I write utter drivvle, it really doesn’t matter very much, just as it doesn’t matter if anyone reading it thinks that it’s utter drivvle.

Whether I pause for a while to try and write a play, or to come up with something (anything) to contribute to another evening of “new writing” (which seems very unlikely as I’m churning this out…), might just prevent me from blogging for a while, but it’s always here for me to come crashing back to if the spirit moves me, and that, as they say, should be all that really matters…

Stuff happens.

Sometimes I write about it, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes the darker corners of my mind tell me that nobody else really cares whether I do or I don’t, and sometimes my inner self is screaming at me to tell me that I’m ridiculous to even imagine that anything I have to say might be worthy of putting down “on the record” as it were, and there are far more people who have much more intellect and much more reason to share their thoughts than I do, but who choose not to.

What makes me think that I’m so important anyway…?

Of course, the really, really ironic thing is that I don’t think I’m important at all. In fact, most days I consider myself to be so very unimportant that nobody pays me the slightest attention, which is why all of those thoughts and words and ideas that churn around in my mind have to go somewhere and this is usually where they end up, bubbling away for some passing stranger to pour scorn upon…

Or not…

None of it really matters, none of it.

But the burbling is back, at least for a while and it’s up to you to make of it what you will.

Or not, obviously…