PLACEHOLDER

I had other plans for today’s posting.

In fact, the words I was intending to post today were written, completed and tied up with a great big shiny bow before being scheduled for release this morning quite a few days ago, all made ready for their moment in the sun as they were to make their debut and be put out to sink or swim in the mudslide of words which is an average day’s internettery.

However, when I read them back, I took a moment and had a pause for thought. Whilst I really don’t believe that there’s nothing inconsiderate or offensive in the words themselves, somehow, given my own mood this morning, it just didn’t seem to be the right time to be saying those things and I believed that, perhaps, I ought to have a bit of a rethink and hold them back for a few days.

Somehow, under the circumstances, they didn’t seem to be quite appropriate to the mood of the moment and the sensitivities of one or two of the people orbiting around my world and what they might be thinking at the moment, so I decided to revert that piece back into it’s “draft” state and try and come up with something else for this morning instead.

Save it for another day, eh?

This isn’t to say that the same words won’t seem insensitive or ill-judged, or ill-timed to somebody else on a completely different morning, of course, but I’m less likely to run into this mysterious “them” than I am to certain other people.

Mind you, there are still those people who might just randomly pick up on something else written two years ago and scream “foul” but that’s a whole different ball game (croquet, perhaps?) and you really can’t go forward by worrying about every word you’ve once written, and, even if you may have believed it at the time, that doesn’t mean you mean it right now.

And it is, quite naturally, the “right now” which is the problem. If we maintain that publishing “today” means that those thoughts are my “current” ones (which, incidentally, is not always the case) then the accusation of “insensitive brute” may be levelled even if the words and the thoughts themselves pre-date the events of life’s roller-coaster by several days.

This is the difficulty of preparing these things a few days in advance and perhaps ought to be a lesson in just keeping the blog in the “now” rather than trying, in the best tradition of the scout movement, to “be prepared…”

Mind you, if I did just burble out my current thinking with little forethought or planning, that way chaos, and no doubt far deeper opportunities to cause offence, doth lie.

Contrary to some people’s popular belief, I am actually quite capable of being sensitive to the world around me and what they might think about something that, in all innocence, is not about them, but which might just jar with what they’re feeling at the moment. If I know about it, I will do my very best to avoid upsetting them, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, especially as so many of the “I reckon” crowd now guiding our culture are so quick to condemn these days.

I remember a tale of someone bouncing joyfully into a room full of sombre-looking people and asking jauntily “Who’s died?” only to receive the reply “Her Grandfather…” and somehow being blamed by everyone for not knowing.

This might explain why I enter every room with the assumption that it has recently become a house of pain, just in case.

Well, that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.

There are those who believe that punches should not be pulled, that you can’t walk on eggshells all of the time, or that you should just “publish and be damned” but those are the professionals working in a field for which I have little empathy and, to be honest, they seldom have to look people in the eye and explain themselves.

My thinking is no different to television stations changing the schedules because of a real world helicopter crash meaning that their fictional helicopter crash might seem inappropriate for broadcast, or their story about a child going missing might be resemble a similar story headlining the ten o’clock news, although what difference it really makes has always troubled me, given that the people it is affecting are less than likely to give a damn about some silly drama unless prodded and provoked for a reaction, and that most of us can actually separate fact from fiction.

But then, some people will fall over themselves to scream “inappropriate” just because they need to be seen to be appalled on everyone else’s behalf, or because they’ve got their own axe to grind, or another agenda which means that they profit by such visible outrage.

Of course, in life as in publishing, even at this most basic and seldom-read level, you cannot predict how your words will be read, or by whom, so perhaps it’s not worth all of this introspection, doubt, and worry about something that will eventually get posted and read anyway.

And because some days there’s just nothing that pops into the brain, you can be certain that it will escape out into the world, simply because there’ll be nothing else in place to fill that space.

So here, in the meantime, we are left with an article that is little more than a placeholder until I can think of anything else to write about…

Perhaps what I really need to write about is “placeholders” – after all, that was the headline at the top of the page, and that might be what you want to read about and what brought you here in the first place.

Blah! Blah! Oscar ceremony, seats need to appear full for television crowd shots…

I tell you, it’s a bloody minefield, this…

(Cue news story breaking about bloody minefields.)