It's Where I Am, Now...

OK - I was in my usual quandary about what to write about tonight, up until about forty seconds ago, when I put some more chicken - cf. last night's post - into the air-fryer. The thing I want to pass on, for what it's worth, is that I started this faintly odd exercise four-and-a-bit years ago for no reason in particular; but in retrospect might have been as a result of the pandemic's reality kicking in, and my subconscious telling me that I had almost never recorded anything that I had ever thought or done. To that date, I had only succeeded in keeping a diary for a few months, when I first fell in love, aged sixteen. Prior and subsequently to that period I tried, and failed, on numerous occasions to record my life and experience in written form.

I guess that part of this failure was due to that singular characteristic of youth; particularly of our generation: invulnerability. We none of us felt at that stage in our lives that anything would ever alter; that we would always be in the same state and position, and that, ergo, recording our lives was a fatuous and basically unnecessary exercise. We were kind of right in one sense of course, in that we just got on with living our lives, rather than weirdly - at that young age - wanting to record our every action for posterity, or at least social media; which is not quite the same thing. The corollary to this, is that we are largely - and I think I've touched on this more than once in these pages - a largely personally unrecorded generation. We just didn't know any different at the time.

When I started this blog, therefore, I was in the position of someone who had led a pretty much un-journaled life for sixty-six years - that one short period aside - and now I find myself having even started a fairly conventional day-book on top of this daily scribble and numerous other little books of notes, not to mention The Twenty [blog posts passim] which I started this last year to help me, if not exactly organise my thoughts, at least to prod me into action when inaction seemed to be where I was destined to be stuck. In short, writing this daily 'thing' has been both a self-imposed chore and a revelation: I've written over a million words since I started this little backwater - which it still is - of personal reflection; and I still care not what my actual readership is - I still suspect small, although it's very nice that people take the time at all to read these ramblings - and revel only in the fact that I have found the discipline in myself to actually do this thing, day in and day out...