Inadvertently, I have spent the last few weeks looking at the fucking flowers. I'd like to say everything's coming up roses, but that would be premature.
I love this time of year - the way there are little green shoots pushing their way through the decomposing mussel shells in our bizarrely organic flower bed. And every day the sun sets just a little later. Today, 1611, before long, it will be ten o'clock at night.
Ever the optimist, the glass is half full, I know it's time to make a new start. The delights of having a birthday in early February is the transitional period from New Year when there is time for a reappraisal or reflection on life.
This is beginning to sound like a valedictory speech. Hold that sigh of relief, it isn't...!
I have been blogging just short of two years. It has been one of the most positive experiences in my life. For very many reasons. The second most important reason is you. You have made it what it is. Look at my blogroll - it's impressively large. And generally, it's read - every post. Not always all of them in detail, but definitely read.
The single most important thing that blogging has done for me is about me. I'm sorry that Meg dropped Not So Soft, especially for the tagline "Life unfolding". I won't presume to guess what Meg intended by that, but for a while I interpreted it as a contemporary commentary on life.
Then I began to realise that for me that blogging was a way of making life unfold. In my early days, I was inspired by Hg to get out and do things. You see the things as photographs, for me it's about becoming more rounded as a person. Time went by, and I found more of you, and you inspired to do more things. Some of you, amongst you some of my very earliest reads, have also inspired me to understand it's okay to be different and be proud of my uniqueness. (Each of us is unique, I'm not claiming to be special...).
Karen's discovery of her teenage diaries sent me on a journey. I thought it was only to the cupboard in my bedroom where my own teenage diaries are lovingly filed, but it became a longer journey into the essence of who I am. It sparked off remembrance of whom I wanted to be when I grew up when I was fifteen.
More prosaically, I have a hectic week ahead, which involves some time in a 'trendy luxury hotel', which is cheaper than the usual bog-standard-but-full-hotel. January holds other time away, and for the first time in years the television pulls me in.
Earlier this year I was struggling. Normally I walk around with half-formed blog posts in my head. I kept thinking - I could blog about that, no. What shall I blog? And suddenly, of course, you get this urge and you have to write something, and you can't understand why twenty four hours earlier you were struggling for inspiration.
This is a very long ramble of self-indulgent navel gazing and mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa to exculpate my guilt at being nearly incapable of paying you the courtesy of reading your - no doubt - fine words. I can't see much chance of me doing much for most of January.
So, I want each and everyone of you to leave with me at least one link to a post of yours that you want me to read. I will read that, I promise. I would hope for one a week for the remainder of January, but these rules are not prescriptive. I've asked for this before but in your modesty you have declined. I am serious this time.
