Intentions

Hello, dear blog, I am sorry I have neglected you of late. I have thought of you quite often. I have pretended that lack of time has prevented me from visiting you, but actually I've been beset by a feeling that the whole business of blogging involves a rather despicable element of look-at-me performance.

But, on further reflection, it occurs to me that performance does not necessarily have to be a bad thing. Provided you do not start writing merely in the hope of pleasing, it may even be a force for good. Knowing someone might read what I am writing prods me into trying a bit harder than I might have in the pre-blog days. Back then I would scribble my half-formed thoughts on the back of old envelopes and in the margins of bus tickets. I never actually did anything with these scrawls. They were never destined for any actual reader - not even myself, given that I could rarely read my own writing a week later.

So it's actually laziness that has caused the days of silence here, if I'm absolutely honest. It is so much easier, after all, to have a vague idea and then to do nothing with it. Trying to work out what you really think by writing is dreadfully hard work, (wah, I have to think; it makes my head hurt). But it is worth it, because in the end it is a kind of play and by the finish I've usually ended up having fun and, occasionally, I've even come to understand things better.

Thus I have decided, reluctantly, with some hesitation, (groan, moan, whinge), to arise from my torpor. Not quite yet though, whimper - not till the New Year at least, (please, please, just a tiny bit longer to wallow in lovely sloth). Then, (no, not exactly at the stroke of midnight, but sometime soon after - keep it vague Z, don't get carried away with mad promises), I will return to this blog with renewed energy. I will dig out all those bus tickets, I will squint at them closely and I may be able to work out what I wrote on one in twenty and, among those, I might find one in twenty that will reward further thought. These I will pursue with a dogged vigour, (can vigour be dogged? I shall soon, I suppose find out), filling 2015 with my ravings.

You have been warned.

(It should be noted, in the interests of accuracy and not creating either fear in the community or false expectations, that I have never kept a New Year's resolution in my life).