THE REST IS SILENCE…?

In the best “Bob Hale” tradition…

“OF COURSE IT ISN’T!”

He bellowed.

“Ah yes!” I could now imply, “It was all just my little ‘joke’”

But, of course, it wasn’t.

At the time I was in deadly earnest.

At the time I simply couldn’t imagine going on.

At the time… Well, at the time I said what I meant and I meant what I said. The world and I were really not getting on, so I decided that it was better if I got off the world instead of allowing the world to get on top of me.

Instead, I just spent a month talking to myself in “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” that’s all, not that anyone else really knows what “The Lesser Blogfordshire Alternative” is, I suppose, but nevertheless, it sits there, out there somewhere, full of all sorts of introspective nonsense written whilst I was trying to make some kind of sense out of my own sense of futility and despair at the ongoing pointlessness of what I was doing and my almost constant addiction to whether what I was doing did anything for anyone else...

However, when you consider the alternative... Well I went off and wrote the “Alternative”, even though I didn’t like it all that much. Turning the magnifying glass back upon yourself for a while can be a truly humbling and hugely disappointing experience. Unless you’re inclined towards narcissism of course, then I’m sure it’s great. Although the true narcissist would, I suspect, need everyone else to know how ruddy marvellous they thought they were, too…

Food for thought and things to ponder upon. Still, when it comes to the “Alternative” I know exactly where it is, and I’m not saying, and nobody else does.

Which is fair enough. I can’t really blame anyone but myself for that because I’ve not only not said all that much about it to anyone else apart from the old regulars (until today at any rate) but the problem is that there’s very little of what I wrote over there that was actually any good, and there’s certainly an awful lot of it that I probably wouldn’t want anyone else to read anyway, so it’s likely to sit there mouldering away until doomsday…

Not unlike myself, I suspect.

Anyway, the truth is that, after “giving up” blogging, I then spent a month not “giving up” blogging at all. Instead I merely continued doing it but more purposelessly. One or two of the least worst of them may emerge ever so slightly transformed over here eventually, but most of it needs to be forgotten by everyone else except me whenever I need a swift slice of humble pie.

Does any of that make any sense at all…?

Thought not…

But there I go again, already doing precisely the kind of thing that I promised myself that I wouldn’t; talking about this blog as if it deserved to be referred to as being somehow “important” in some way when it patently, absolutely is not.

How arrogant.

How utterly ridiculous.

How stupid…

So, with as little fanfare as is possible, and with as much humbleness as I can muster, and obviously in direct contrast to the mighty Bob Hale, I suppose that I should go into the cellar and whisper quietly into a small receptacle I keep there for just such a requirement: “Lesser Blogfordshire is back…”

Meanwhile, if you can bear to read just a little more introspection, there are still one or two things that I feel that I need to explain. You do, after all, deserve that, dear reader, assuming that you would still want to hear it and indeed are around to do so…

To be honest, towards the end of May I had kind of hit the buffers when it came to my online life, and, I’d also got the impression that the feeling was mutual. I was spending far too long looking for responses that never came, reactions that didn’t happen and expressions of interest where there were few, if any. I had rather stupidly allowed my expectations to exceed the actual reality of my own situation and my place in the great scheme of things. My so-called digital life had become a source of depression and irritation and was doing little to bolster my self-esteem, which is always something sadly lacking in me at the best of times, and these were, most certainly, not feeling like the best of times… I staggered on for as long as I could bear to and then, when the time felt right... Well, you know...

Still, despite all that, there were one or two bits of pieces that poured out of me during my exile with which I am more pleased, so I might go and have a rummage about in the dirt and see if I can pull out the odd potato or two and display my wares to you, if I can actually be bothered.

Actually, in that regard at least, the “Alternative” has proved to be rather a useful “filter” if you like, a rather handy way of getting the worst of the rants out of my mind without me then sitting around fretting that I’ve somehow managed to upset anyone. After all, despite what you might suspect about me, going around upsetting people isn’t one of the things that I most enjoy doing.

Really. It isn’t.

Perhaps the most depressing thing for me was, apart from that initial flurry of worry hereabouts (for which I remain grateful, even if my expressions of gratitude themselves never seemed to appear…), in the great big wide world at large, nobody seemed to notice that I’d gone. Now that’s fine in the whole electronic mish-mashery, I suppose, after all if one light goes out at the fair, do we even notice it? The problem is that it made me think about my real life and how one day I’m going to turn up dead and it’ll only be when the atmosphere starts to get really ripe that anyone will try to work out what’s happened.

And somehow considering how to avoid having that as my ultimate fate seems to matter far more to me now than whether or not I choose to tell the world my latest woes on a semi-regular basis.

So yes, I am a selfish bugger and no, nobody can rely on me to turn up regularly in BlogWorld any more, and we do have a huge mountain to climb to restore our faith in each other, assuming, of course, that anyone is still there, but, for the time-being... Well, as the great petunia bowl once put it…

“Oh no! Not again!”