SIXTY-SIX

M'funky FizzBok page unreliably informed me that a former colleague o'mine was sixty-six years old this week. I don't suppose that I ought to have been surprised, just as I'm sure that those of you who know me you won't be at all surprised either to find that I chose not to comment upon it at the time in those pages.

After all, I don't really "do" birthdays...

And I'm not really a fan of using that kind of venue for the passing on of greetings and good wishes. Apart from the fact that it seems too public, and far too open to ridicule, mostly it just seems to lack that personal touch and sincerity that I would like to try to achieve for myself and perceive in others.

But reading that reminder did set me thinking…

Way back in the so-called when, I was but an earnest-faced youngish boy artist, not quite fresh out of Art School, but not so very far away from that. The intervening year-and-a-half since being kicked out into the great big and rather uncaring world hadn't been too kind to my non-burgeoning non-career and so, at the second attempt (for I found a long-forgotten rejection letter once…), I took a job at the blunt end of advertising, hoping that six months or so of that would give me the experience to move on to bigger and better things.

Then, as is often the way with such things, I stuck with that job for more than a decade.

There is a point to all of this back-story, I assure you, so do bear with me.

As you may already be aware, I've always been an early bird and, one February day, a little over six weeks into my sparkling new career, I arrived at the office in Didsbury to find jolly japes and pranks were afoot, and that the office was in the process of being "decorated" in a mildly unkindly manner in preparation for the arrival of this self-same colleague upon the occasion of his fortieth birthday…

The image bank had been raided for pictures of old men in wheelchairs with plastered limbs, and suchlike, and these had all been blown up to A3 size on the office photocopier and stuck all around the room in places prominent enough to be entirely noticeable upon his arrival. There was much giggling and hilarity from my new colleagues, some of whom I had hardly got to know yet (On the whole, it takes me a good long while to even talk to anyone new to me, and this was still very early days…), and one of whom might have been my manager, although I don't recall the object of their light-hearted derision being too pleased about it all when he did finally arrive.

I think the pictures disappeared fairly quickly but I'm also aware that, if he is anything like me, he was probably quietly chuffed to be remembered like that, even if he never would have admitted it at the time...

Can that be over a quarter of a century ago already…?

Could I really have been only twenty-three years old on that day…?

Could we really have believed that turning forty was so very old…?

I stayed for that decade, and left when that same person was now a fifty-year old, (which kind of passed unremarked upon, as we'd become a much less frivolous outfit by then…) and, I think, we'd become friends and allies over those years because, despite not appearing to have all that much in common (and me still being referred to as"the prat in the hat" because of what I wore to my first interview), we both had a cynical streak that the other appeared, at least, to appreciate. He was certainly an appreciative audience to some of my cartoonery and scribbling, and featured in a fair few of them in that gently mocking way I used to have back in those days when I still tried.

As is the nature of such things, I seldom went back afterwards, despite the possibility cropping up, from time-to-time, that my "new career" wasn't quite working out as planned and my hope that I might still have a "safety net" of a kind if things went too wrong, and "office life" in the old place moved on and new people came and went and my own small role in the great history of the company became little more than a dusty, forgotten footnote to what was happening right then.

Years passed and, sadly, that company finally bit the dust, at around the time I first started writing these blog postings, and I attended the party which was organised to mark its passing and was surprised to find that m'colleague still had a lot of my old drawings stashed away, some of which were used to decorate the venue on that sad but glorious evening three-and-a-half years ago.

Which just goes to show, really, that none of us are ever really truly forgotten whilst there are still people who remember us, even if we sometimes think that nobody was paying any attention at the time, although, when the history of my old Art School is written, I somehow doubt that anyone will recall the ghost who flitted around in the shadows trying not to draw attention to himself, but that's another story...

So, a belated happy birthday, you old curmudgeon, and many more of them, old sport… :-)

EIGHT-OH

Eighty years is a long, long time or, from a certain point of view, just the blink of an eye. If you’re sitting in an armchair looking back upon eighty years of life it probably seems all to brief and seems to have passed far too quickly, but that seems to be true for all of us once we plunge into those strange and murky swamplands we call adulthood. Becoming sixteen seems such a vivid memory that it could have been yesterday, and yet the last two decades seem to have come and gone in an instant when I try to think about it, even though they probably passed at an almost geological pace to some of you, and sometimes I find it hard to believe that they ever happened at all.

My mother was just over thirty-two years old when I was born and my father died when I was twenty-one, and I’m sure that both of those events seem like five minutes ago sometimes when looked at from the strange present we now unexpectedly all find ourselves lurking in. Yet thirty-two is far, far younger than I now am, and the relatively youthful age my father attained seems mere moments away, which is all rather troubling from the point of view of genetic inheritance.

I have a sister who’s rather surprisingly (not least to herself, I’m certain...) approaching whatever it once was that we used to call retirement age and her daughters are now in their mid-twenties despite it being merely a blink since either of them popped into the world. Time, whilst managing to be a great healer, is still the fire in which we burn, and the most sentimental of us can still be brought up short when we realise how much time has actually passed since this or that or the other and how little actual useful use we feel like we have put it to. Memories fade until we are sharply reminded of them and suddenly nothing has really faded at all and it’s all horrendously vivid and real and very much of the now...

And yet...

Sometimes everything seems so long ago that it happened to another person, and sometimes you find yourself wishing that it had.

So why does eighty years seem to be a particular concern this merry morning?

Well...

Today is my mother’s eightieth birthday, a not, I am reliably informed, insignificant number, and certainly one I suspect that I’m unlikely to reach myself if those genetics and a certain amount of destiny have their way. To me, numbers are just numbers, and, whilst certain numbers can seem more significant than others, birthdays are, to me at least, matters best avoided. Nevertheless, I am told that this is a cause for some celebration even if the circumstances of our lives make it less of an extravaganza than some would no doubt prefer. How the day unfolds is, of course, still to be determined. Some of the significant players are unable to appear due to matters fiscal or of a more permanent and unchangeable state of unbeing, so the celebration of this particular life on this particular day is likely to be a quite muted affair, although I’m rather sure that this is likely to create an air of long-lasting disappointment in the celebratee, who has already made many pointed remarks about wondering whether any of her friends will decide to inflict a surprise luncheon upon her and other utterances with an air of expectation within them. However, real-life remains a brutish foe, and in matters of a more fundamental health-related nature is also very difficult to predict, which means that any pre-planning of events or venues was an impossible thing to organise, and, on top of all this real and imagined angst, there is also the tricksy little matter that you all know how difficult it is to get me to commit to anything of a social nature.

“But, it’s not about you, is it?” I hear my detractors cry (in my fetid imagination, because no-one really actually gives a damn...), but in many ways it is. Would that I had the kind of so-called “normal” situation to be dealing with here, but, as ever, things are always far more simple and yet far, far more complicated that they at first might appear. Happily for you, I’m not currently in a state of mind (or grace) to plunge once more into those murky waters, even if they are currently threatening to drown me, not least in the anticipation of the months of retribution ahead of me and the unknowable price yet to be paid.

So, I’m dreadful. Deal with it.

Ah, I know that this lack of effort on my part and my resentment of this sense of responsibility makes me a wicked, wicked person.

Those eighty years take us back to times that seem like a million years ago to us now. Times when horses were still a common sight on the streets of our towns, a time before what we now think of as the “Second World War”. This was an era when, if my Grandfather wanted to go out and take pictures of machines, the ones which he saw looked like these pictured on the right that are from an old lined exercise book of his that I still have, taken in a time when the image of a motorbike or a car or an aeroplane conjured up in the mind something very different to what it might do nowadays. All less than a lifetime ago, and it is probably no wonder the modern world can seem a scary and unusual place if it is so very different to the one you spent your own childhood in.

But then the past has a nasty habit of vanishing far too easily, despite the fact that I have a lot of his photographs in boxes around the place, rotting away, all full of anonymous faces and unknown places that were once his memories but which fail to be mine. The labels on the boxes of slides are minimal. Sometimes merely the name of the ship they cruised upon and the year they did it is the only clue to the wonders within. Information which told him everything but tells the rest of us nothing much at all. And so they slowly fade away, as I’m sure that a lot of my own images will be one day fade too, as mine suffer from the same (genetically inherited?) lack of labelling comprehensiveness that means future generations would (if at all interested - which I suspect that they won’t be, hence this ridiculous urge to blog things into clarity, I guess...) find themselves looking at obscure little lumps of coastline and wondering just where they might actually be too...

Time passes. Life’s little triumphs and tragedies trouble us along the way, and the echoes we leave behind are for others to interpret as they will, and how they are interpreted has precious little to do with us. My holiday snaps are memories to me, but to others they will just be photos of stuff to dispose of as they will. Maybe as I bore you with them (almost as much as I bored myself last weekend) you’ll come to realise that this is all about context and history and explanation so that those little memories that might mean something to me might just manage to cling on and mean something to someone else after all. Incidentally, and apropos of nothing much at all, eighty is about four percent of the rather pointless number of pictures I took on my recent holiday (do not say that you weren’t warned...), and is probably about the number that were half way respectable from my old-fashioned “scatter-gun” approach to snapping the snaps. Tales about them, of course, remain to be shared. Well, what else am I going to write about? Which brings us back, I suppose, to the small matter of significant birthdays and how to deal with them, because the memory of today is something that I’m going to have to find some way of living with, and I’m not quite sure yet precisely what that means.

11-11 SOME ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS

Against all of my expectations, of which, as you’ll already be aware if you’ve been paying attention, there are both very many and very few, November in Lesser Blogfordshire has statistically turned into a bit of a “record” month in terms of hits to this quiet backwater of the internet, for which I can only thank the many visitors from Asia and Eastern Europe. I know that you never stay to actually read any of the words, with most of those hits adding up to a massive “0 seconds” but it keeps that old statcounter a-buzzing, even though I’m pretty sure it’s only due to an erroneous and undeserved listing for two or three of my old entries in some pornography search engine which is obviously mistranslating something harmless into something that sounds far, far more enticing.

For that, I really can only apologise once again, but, in the interest of wider international friendship (notice I thought that the word “relationships” there might cross some sort of line) it was nice to have you all here and, as a consequence, November now sits in the all-time second place in terms of visits after the other anomaly of last March, which I suspect will never be surpassed. Anyway, I don’t really know why I felt the need to comment upon this, but there you go. Lesser Blogfordshire often surprises its author, too.

With that in mind, here’s a quick “A, B, C” of things I really should mention but none of which are really “full-length blogworthy” in themselves.

A is for Advent. We are just a couple of days away from this year’s advent experiment. My thoughts upon this are already mixed, but I’m going to persist with it, even at the risk of boring the rest of the world to death with it. I just thought that I’d better warn you, that’s all, but there might just be a few pretty pictures to look at even if the words are less than mesmerising, and I am already sure that November’s number 2 position won’t be in any real danger in December. If you do really tire of it (and why shouldn’t you? I know I am…), you might want to have a look at last year’s “A Story For Advent” (see the link in the margins) which, if you visit it daily might reward you as little as it did those who read it last year.

B is for Birthday. Happy Birthday once again to my Big Sister, who I know to be a regular reader these days despite her preference for remaining anonymous, and who could really blame her…?. Once again I will have forgotten to get the whole “card” thing organised, because of my many shortcomings on the social interaction front, but the thought always remains. She’s had a tough year, my sister, so I can only hope that the next one is a bit better for her. Today also marks the anniversary of my letting her see into the cracks of my mind by sending her the link (which, by the way, you are also quite entitled to do should you ever wish to) to these very pages and both of us finding new insights into the strange being that is her Little Brother, so that’s probably significant in some small way, too.

C is for Christmas. I’m struggling with it this year, I really am. My mind is almost refusing to plan for it which is making my nearest and dearest very frustrated I know, especially as in previous years I have always been such a meticulous planner for that occasion. I had a bit of a revelation the other day, though, which clearly explained what is happening. Well, it did to me at any rate. For various reasons, my last two Christmases have not gone according to plan and I think that psychologically this quite simply means that my brain is refusing to make any plans because, deep down, I believe that whatever plans I make are bound to go wrong. So, if that is the reason, I am truly sorry for any disappointments that I might cause you over the festive period, not least for the, as yet unfinished, offerings in this year’s advent experiment (see “A” above – see what I did there? I’ve created a potential programming loop. Cool!), which may yet fizzle out before it even begins.

As ever, many apologies for any of my failings and shortcomings, of which I know there are many. Any forthcoming errors are down to me alone, but then, weren’t they always?

See you on the other side.

A STICKY LITTLE DAY

I guess I’m a backwards looking kind of a guy. I’m never convinced that this is the healthiest way to be, but I struggle so much with coping with the ‘here and now’ that it’s almost impossible for me to look forward to something until I’ve got the stuff I’ve got to do now dealt with and cleared away. This means that, despite the fact I know that I’ve got the holiday actually booked, it can still surprise me when I realise that it’s actually tomorrow that its booked for.

Not this year, of course, there’s nothing at all planned for this year. This year so far, it’s been impossible to commit to the slightest thing ‘just in case’. This year it’s been unwise to even buy green bananas. This year, even removing something from the freezer for that evening’s meal has proved to be something of a lottery with soggy boxes having to be thrown for the landfill and a quick bedtime slice of toast keeping the calorie intake level up.

Which brings us to March the 7th, which has crept up on me with a suddenness that is truly shocking. Where on Earth has this year been vanishing off to so very, very quickly? I’m barely prepared for last Christmas and I’m freefalling towards Easter…? How did that happen? March the 7th seems to have become one of those dates in my calendar, one of those tricky, sticky little days that accumulates a lot of significance without being a particularly ‘special’ day in itself. I start to wonder about it? Maybe the fates are flagging it up for me as a day to keep a weather eye on, a date to be cautious around, a date to be wary of. Maybe, one year, all my destinies will come to fruition on this very date and so the subconscious is telling me to keep a look out and be on my guard. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence (“I don’t believe in coincidences…” The Gospel according to Gil Grissom or maybe it was Buffy the Vampire Slayer…?) and dates are just random numbers based on a human construct.

Most importantly, it is one of only four birthdays in the year that I actually mark by remembering (when I can) to send an actual card to someone. Given that two of these are my mother and t’beloved, you can hopefully realise why I give myself such a hard time in making sure I remember to get the card and actually send it off in time each and every year.

Today is also the third anniversary of my departure from the building of my previous job for the very last time to begin my exile from the world. Is it three years already? It seems like only yesterday when I was having the kind of emotional outburstings that a stiff-upper-lipped kind of a chap would have frowned upon.

I knew I should have grown that moustache. That would have helped me to keep things in check, I’m sure. If only it didn’t make me look like a car salesman, the really rubbish sort of stick-up guy in American crime dramas, or that kind of rat-faced bloke that hangs around betting shops wearing sportswear that has seen better days.

I did actually have a moustache once, for literally one night. It was a cocktail party and I shaved off my various other sproutings and slicked back my then copious hair to acquire a kind of cheap “Ronald Coleman” look for the evening. When I eventually surfaced the next morning, I staggered off to the newsagents for reviving fizzy drinks whilst wearing my scruffiest clothes and with a baseball cap holding the greasy strands of hair under some sort of control. I returned home, only then glancing at the mirror in the hallway, realised why the newsagent had been looking at me so nervously, and climbed the stairs two at a time in order to hit the bathroom, find my razor and consign the thing to history.

Fifteen years ago on this very morning, the aircraft wheels touched down on the tarmac ending my first ever solo holiday having finally decided that it was time that I saw a little more of the world and, after spending half a decade alone at that point, it really wasn’t worth waiting any longer for someone to come along and share the adventure with me (although when I think about the look I was sporting back then an awful lot becomes clear...). That morning, a decade and a half ago now, I’d just spent three weeks travelling alone (mostly) up and down the west coast of the USA, my first ever visit to that beautiful and spectacular country. At the time I made copious notes about it I meant to write about it at the time but never quite got around to it, and what would I have done with it even if I had? These kinds of writing outlets just didn’t exist back then for people like me to burble on about our ‘cool’ experiences to anyone who’d listen. That particular joy fell upon the ears of my colleagues when I got back home, which is one of the reasons, I imagine, that I’m writing these various musings nowadays. I’ve no immediate colleagues to harangue with my latest thoughts and notions on just about everything. I do so miss some of our little chats.

But I still have fond, fond memories of nudging into Seattle traffic in a brand new Mustang after having flown for eighteen hours, then, after a tour of Seattle provided by some friends of my mother whom she’d met on a cruise, a mere thirty six hours later roaring along the icy roads to Mount St Helens in that very same Mustang. So many memories; the horrors of Portland traffic and the rainstorm from hell that found me bursting through the doors of an Oregon McDonalds in frustration at the public phone that had just swallowed the last of my change, then feeling very fortunate that no-one decided to shoot me. There are even some good ones: My first view of the Pacific Ocean… Writing a stack of postcards as the sun sank behind the statue of a fisherman at Eureka… The hospitality of my friend Lynn’s mother Nancy and her husband George… Mendocino Whale Festival… Beautiful San Francisco… The Monterey aquarium… The magnificent and spectacular scenery of Yosemite in winter… and a splendid sunset catching the water sprinkling over the vineyards of Napa valley… I’m feeling wistful now. Maybe I will write about all that another day after all. I guess I do look backwards. It seems I'm a "looking backwards" kind of a guy...

Last year, I was also on holiday on March the 7th and it turned out to be the anniversary of a rather fabulous couple who were among those we were sharing our table with at dinner, and a rather lovely evening was enjoyed by us all. Like I said, March 7th. It’s a ‘sticky’ kind of a day for me.

I wonder what will happen this year? 

SIGNIFICANT DATES

As I get older the number of “significant dates” in my life seems to increase astoundingly.

When you’re about 5, the only dates you seem to care about are your own birthday and maybe Christmas day but, the more years that pass and the more people you have known, the more complicated it seems to get to remember all those birthdays of relatives, who might then become breeding relatives and add to the list, or get married to (or at least very involved with) people who have their own significant dates to add to the collection. The years pass and you meet ever more colleagues and friends, all of whom have their own birthdays and anniversaries and whatnot. Before you know it there’s not a month, a week or maybe even a single solitary day when there’s not something going on to distract your attention or give you something that you really should remember.

Once you start to add in all the other dates that you have to remember – weddings to go to, interviews to attend, examinations to do, appointments with your Doctor, Dentist or Hair Stylist it can all start to get really worrying if you are the kind of person who does fret about such things. If you then have to take into consideration all those business meetings that are unavoidable, and those significant national events that we’re expected to ring on our calendars, those World Cups and Royal Splicings etc., then that way madness lies. There are also all those dates of devastating news events like September 11^th, or just those silly ones like April Fool’s day (Be careful what you believe) and Halloween Night (Must remember to have some sweets available) and personal ones like when your holidays are due to begin (Is the passport still valid?) – or all those tragic ones that you don’t want to remember but still resonate deeply in your memories, like bereavements that might only be significant to you and mean nothing to anyone else on a bright and breezy morning.

Some dates remain distinct in the memory despite it no longer being necessary. The birthday of an ex-partner can still resonate on that particular date even though you no longer should really care. Significant birth dates of childhood friends you’ve not seen or heard of in twenty years or more can still ting a little bell in the mind as that day rolls around, or that of any friend you’ve somehow lost touch with. Even those you never really knew at all, but were aware of their birthday for other reasons might still strike a chord; I still remember December 20^th as being the birthday of someone on my college course despite them not having ever really being a personal friend as such (but oh how they did used to go on about it every Autumn term…).

Those birthdays of long lost friends and acquaintances can still bring on a slight twinge of guilt even if I have absolutely no way of knowing where they even are living nowadays. December 23^rd used to be the birthday of someone I wasted a lot of time running around after but lost touch with eons ago. I can’t phone or even send a card as I have no contact details at all any more. Oddly, that very same date has now become personally significant again as one of my sister’s children just had her own first child on that very date, which is another thing that sometimes happens – one quite important date being “trumped” by something of “greater” importance. My birthday got hijacked by a wedding once, and a very good friend’s birthday became another friend’s anniversary, but both were beaten back into the shadows when a member of the family chose that same date to spring into being. July 29^th still reminds me of a long defunct Royal wedding because it was so close to my own birthday and drew much of the attention. January 4^th is the date I started my first ever “proper” job and still gets a minor mental nod even after all these years.

The worst ones I find are the dates when you wake up, look at the calendar and think, “there’s something about today that’s important” but you can’t think of what it is. It might well be one of those significant dates you tucked away in the back of your mind years ago – the date of your driving test, or an exam, or even just a visit to the dentist - but the numbers resonate and leave you skulking around throughout the whole day feeling slightly troubled that you’ve forgotten something terribly important.

Of course there are also the forgotten dates. Everyone can manage to forget an anniversary or a birthday once in a while as many of us are never quite as central to everyone else’s lives as we sometimes like to think we are, but there are so many other dates that I sometimes think I should remember but they’ve managed to somehow slip away from me. The date of that driving test or those once vital exam results, and even the day I first went to college or school, the first day I set eyes on the woman destined to become the beloved. Somehow they’ve managed to slip away unremembered when they deserved to be nurtured.

Today is significant as it is the birthday of one of the parents of my significant other and better half, so it has a certain importance in our household despite being one of those dates that rarely gains much attention as it has so many more glamorous ones surrounding it every year. It does occasionally, like this year, get elevated to “Bank Holiday” status so it’s not one of those “neverdays” like some, but it’s always going to be something of a bridesmaid to its immediate predecessors in the calendar.

Still, that’s really the point, I suppose. Every day is important to someone, somewhere, and every day can also have a deeply sad personal memory for someone else. Maybe, if we take the time to remember this if and when we decide to tell someone to “cheer up and stop being to miserable” on a day when we ourselves have not a care in the world, the world might perhaps be a more understanding and tolerant place.

Have the best day today that you can. If it’s a sad one, you have my sympathies. If it’s a happy one, well done! Embrace the joy of it today, after all there’s another day coming along tomorrow and none of us yet know what it might bring.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIG SIS

Big Sis and friend, a million years ago...

Today is my big sister’s birthday. I do occasionally remember such things even though birthdays to me have generally become something to which I don’t pay a lot of attention. It used to be quite difficult when I worked in a building with people as I think some people like to make a big deal of such things and don’t understand that there are people in the world that simply don’t want to. Still, I think Big Sis and me have come to understand this over the years, so I’m pretty sure it’s not an issue that we don’t usually recognise such things or pay them too much heed. Like a lot of things, we know that they’re there, but we choose not to remark upon them.

Family can be an odd thing. Generally I don’t think that we’re a fairly typical bunch, but I imagine most people think that about their own family. We certainly don’t resemble the strangely idealised folk that you see in the adverts (although my Mum seems to think otherwise sometimes) and when people tell me tales of their family constantly being in each other’s homes or just “dropping round” to see one another, or (even worse) being “dropped in” on, or spending “special occasions” in rooms full of people that they’re related to, it is all I can do to conceal my abject horror at the prospect. My family can sometimes find it difficult to be in the same county, so that level of intimacy is just something that is beyond me.

There aren’t many of us left and we’re fairly scattered about and I’ve often believed that we get on better because of this. Mum lives about a dozen miles away from me in her little flat, and Big Sis has her own little family in her corner of the country, all living their lives and generally surviving up against the big bad world, and I share my life with my beloved in our own little corner here. Big Sis moved away to the other end of the country around about twenty years ago now so we don’t see that much of each other any more. I tend to take a little comfort from knowing that they’re out there somewhere, I suppose, it’s just that we don’t feel any need to be constantly in each other’s pockets. I know that there have been issues over the years because I don’t make enough effort to keep in touch, but then I do that with everybody. I’m not saying it’s right, of course, it’s just the way I am, but it isn’t personal. I treat everyone equally appallingly.

It wasn’t always been like this. I really don’t remember much that happened to me before the age of twelve. I think I’ve buried most of it, but, when I was a small person I suppose we were the typical (post-)nuclear family. Father, mother, two kids and a dog (a dachshund called “Sheba”), all living in a medium-sized semi-detached house in the commuter belt of a large northern town. Dad would head off to work in the mornings and Mum would care for a number of the neighbourhood children during the day. I tend to think that having that number of other kids around is what made me grow up valuing my privacy more, but I digress. At weekends the quite terrifying surviving pair of Grandparents would come and visit, or come and collect us to go to them, and we would never be as united as a family as when we had them to battle against.

Big Sis was a good few years older than me. It wasn’t planned like that it’s just how it was. I still have the little yellow leather cat she made for me when I was born (I found it during the house turnover I mentioned last week, although I probably couldn’t put my hand in it right now if asked) and have never been massively overchuffed that my parents allowed her to choose my name. We were nearly nine years apart in age, which meant that when I was toddling about and being a generally annoying little brother, my sister was being terribly grown-up and teenagerish.

In many ways we grew up as a pair of “only children” if that’s not too ridiculous a concept. I can honestly say that seeing my parents’ reactions to my sister’s various teenage woes probably shaped in a huge way the slightly strange way I turned out myself, but that’s nobody else’s fault. You see how the world is shaping up for other people and consequently, you choose to shape your own world to fit your own needs. For example, I think that the best Christmas gift I can give to my Big Sis is that she doesn’t have to worry about what my Mum’s going to do for Christmas so she can stay put and enjoy the Christmas she wants. Other people might not think that that’s important, but that’s the way our family functions.

I’ve said in the past that I do think that “friends” and “family” are two worlds that should never collide, certainly not in InterWeb world, but today I’m going to break that rule and, despite everything in what’s left of my soul screaming at me not to, I will send her a link to this page and hope that all this introspection doesn’t alarm her too much.

After all what difference should it make? The entire world could theoretically happen to come across these strange witterings, so what difference should it make if someone I’m  actually related to happens to pop in from time to time? Perhaps one day they might have happened upon it accidentally anyway. If she does choose to explore this little world of mine, I’m sure it will only confirm to her what she already was thinking anyway about her mad little brother.

I hope that it doesn’t change things here, knowing that some of the family may be watching. Sometimes knowing who’s out there reading this stuff changes the way you choose to phrase things. I like to think I witter on in much the same way no matter what, but perhaps I do “self-edit” depending on who I think it is out there watching. So, I hope it won’t change things here in Lesser Blogfordshire, but I guess we’ll just have to see…

Meanwhile, I really should say “Happy Birthday, Big Sis!”

Many happy returns.