Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Out of the habit
Like one of my favourite bloggers, SimplyClare, I seem to have got out of the habit of blogging. I have been pondering this for a while. It is not that I'm bored with it, nor even really that I don't have anything to blog about- I have a whole series of posts I have imagined making whilst in non-blog-accessible locations. I also no longer make a point of reading my favourite blogs regularly but when I do, I still find what others have to say intriguing and thought-provoking or sometimes just downright funny. I thought for a while it might be part of a wider malaise with things electronic- I am much less often in the study at home in the evenings just messing about on the PC, I don't email or reply to emails or use Skype anything like as much- but actually I am still perfectly okay with email etc at work or on the laptop in front of the telly. There is an element of what I think of as five-year diary syndrome- you remember when you got a diary and began to keep it every day, then you missed a day or so and all those blank pages made you feel bad but you couldn't face either catching up or missing out a span of time and then restarting? (Or was that just me?) but actually I don't think that is the big thing as at least here there is no actual physical gap. Ultimately I think it is a subtle shift in how I spend my time- over the past year somehow I seem to want to spend the evenings cooking sensibly, then chilling in front of the TV for a bit, then trying to get more sleep so I can get up and go to the gym. All PC stuff that needs this big machine and all its accoutrements is thus sidelined, and so my iPod goes on without new music, the video I'm meant to be burning to DVD of the Swiss wedding sits on the hard drive uncopied, online shopping gets done at the last minute, photos remain unedited and the bearpit remains unoccupied. .
Maybe this entry will get me going again. We'll see. And unlike SimplyClare, I can't even end with a quiz about broken metacarpals. I can say that I am going somewhere very unusual for a conference next week - a country that is big on apples and horses, that has a currency you can only get once you arrive and that is the sort of word that is in cryptic crosswords, and where the weather- this week in the mid 20s and looking very nice thank you- is set to plummet to 10 degrees and cloudy as I fly out. I'll leave Birmingham on Sunday morning and arrive there around midnight their time after changing at Frankfurt and flying for another 8 hours or so. Anyone ready to guess? Okay, one more clue. There is a recent film I shan't be mentioning while I'm there..
Like one of my favourite bloggers, SimplyClare, I seem to have got out of the habit of blogging. I have been pondering this for a while. It is not that I'm bored with it, nor even really that I don't have anything to blog about- I have a whole series of posts I have imagined making whilst in non-blog-accessible locations. I also no longer make a point of reading my favourite blogs regularly but when I do, I still find what others have to say intriguing and thought-provoking or sometimes just downright funny. I thought for a while it might be part of a wider malaise with things electronic- I am much less often in the study at home in the evenings just messing about on the PC, I don't email or reply to emails or use Skype anything like as much- but actually I am still perfectly okay with email etc at work or on the laptop in front of the telly. There is an element of what I think of as five-year diary syndrome- you remember when you got a diary and began to keep it every day, then you missed a day or so and all those blank pages made you feel bad but you couldn't face either catching up or missing out a span of time and then restarting? (Or was that just me?) but actually I don't think that is the big thing as at least here there is no actual physical gap. Ultimately I think it is a subtle shift in how I spend my time- over the past year somehow I seem to want to spend the evenings cooking sensibly, then chilling in front of the TV for a bit, then trying to get more sleep so I can get up and go to the gym. All PC stuff that needs this big machine and all its accoutrements is thus sidelined, and so my iPod goes on without new music, the video I'm meant to be burning to DVD of the Swiss wedding sits on the hard drive uncopied, online shopping gets done at the last minute, photos remain unedited and the bearpit remains unoccupied. .
Maybe this entry will get me going again. We'll see. And unlike SimplyClare, I can't even end with a quiz about broken metacarpals. I can say that I am going somewhere very unusual for a conference next week - a country that is big on apples and horses, that has a currency you can only get once you arrive and that is the sort of word that is in cryptic crosswords, and where the weather- this week in the mid 20s and looking very nice thank you- is set to plummet to 10 degrees and cloudy as I fly out. I'll leave Birmingham on Sunday morning and arrive there around midnight their time after changing at Frankfurt and flying for another 8 hours or so. Anyone ready to guess? Okay, one more clue. There is a recent film I shan't be mentioning while I'm there..
