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Polite enquiry

Is anyone still reading this blog? I've always assumed that the words I type slip away into the ether, gathering dust like so many pasta twirls dropped down the back of the kitchen cupboard of life. Lately, for one reason and another, I've had time to sit at the PC and nose about in other people's blogs. And, quite frankly, chaps, you leave me impressed at your skill, your bravery, your variety and your committment. Whereas I bash out self-conscious tosh at irregular intervals before clamming up and chastising myself for not using the time for something less creative but somehow more 'important' (such as clearing dusty pasta twirls (fusilli! That's the word I was looking for. I think) from the back of the kitchen cupboard). This cannot go on. Either I've got to stop wishing I could be some sort of writer and get on with some sort of writing, or I've got to shut up and go back to my cupboard. So how does one become a serious blogger? Any tips? Please?

The first cut is the daftest

I can't remember when it first happened. I was slumped in front of the telly, probably knitting (depending on the pattern, this can make TV like radio, only with inferior pictures). I glanced up. On screen was a Moderately Well Known Actor. I paused. I peered. I may have dropped a stitch. I turned to the Electric Landlady. "Here," I said, "has he had a nose job?"

The Electric Landlady made a cursory inspection. "Yes," she said eventually. "Think so."

"But!" I spluttered. "But! He had a perfectly good nose before."

The Electric Landlady shrugged and went back to her crossword. I gazed intently at the screen, willing them to show a close-up, and, if at all possible, a profile shot.

Since then, whenever the Moderately Well Known Actor appears, I scrutinise his nasal area. I try to judge the distance between his septum and upper lip. If the Electric Landlady is about I irritate her beyond human endurance by canvassing her opinion even though I know it hasn't changed. I am now 95% convinced he's had his profile tweaked. And this makes me wild. Not wild as in an OMG-you-sexy-moderately-well-known-actor. Wild as in what-the-hell-did-you-do-that-for-you-silly-man?

It's not just MWKA and his profile. It's not even just Very Famous Actor and his missing wrinkles. It isn't the aging actresses (all of twenty-four) being sliced and diced because no-one will employ them beyond thirty unless they're Judi Dench or Helen Mirren. It's not the identikit pop tarts writhing around MTV in their scanties. (It's not titillating because being told to strip off by a record company exec is empowering, OK?) It's you. It's me. It's all of us.

There's a secret the entertainment, cosmetic and fashion industries and all their myriad fellow travellers don't want us to know. However, fearless tweedy plain monobrowed spinster that I am, here and now I am going to blow it wide open. It is this:

You are all right as you are.

You don't need to be sexy 24/7. You don't need to be hot. You don't need to change yourself to fit in with a committee's expectations.

And if your nose is a little longer than you'd like, if your eyes disappear when you smile, don't be upset. We don't hate you for it. We may even like you more.

Just be you.

Fleeting appearance

Some of the things I've learnt in my sabbatical:

1. Be careful what you wish for.

Virginia Woolf said that for a woman to write she needed money and a room of her own. Having neither, I had a ready-made excuse not to write. Now I have a small desk in the spare room with the laptop upon it. Theoretically, this is an improvement on sitting on the floor with the laptop on my knees. In practice, there is so much junk in this room that the impact of my fingers on the keys makes the adjacent tottering miscellany wobble alarmingly and I cannot get my knees under the desk. The folding chair is too low for comfort so I am sitting on a cushion. A hundred and twenty-six words into this, I have twinges in my shoulder muscles that are advising me to give up.

2. The worst limitations are those we place on ourselves.

When I bought the Folly last year, friends and family were delighted. "It's freedom!" they said. "You'll be able to drive yourself to all sorts of places. You'll love it." The Folly sits outside, admonishing me fiercely about the lack of miles on the clock. It needs a clean. It needs exercise. It also needs a little paint work on the bumper after I bounced it gently off a protruding brick wall last week.

I quite enjoy driving. I loathe owning a car. It's a nice car. It goes vroom and it's a fair sight more comfortable to sit in than hunching over this desk on this chair. But it's a millstone. I might hurt someone with it. I might cause an accident. And if I hadn't bought it I'd have a little more money each month that I could put towards my escape fund.Having a car hasn't given me freedom because the biggest restrictions on my life are those I've made for myself. Given the choice between a day out pootling around country lanes with Black Box Recorder in the CD player or skulking indoors binning my undergrad notes, I'll take the latter every time. I must deal with the impedimenta of a life lived cautiously, finally reading then recycling the years-old magazines I bought then hung onto in the hope that I'd get round to reading them eventually, shredding the letters from friends I never hear from now. I've got into the habit of Being Good, which is less about disposing of sentimentally hoarded memorabilia than feeling terrible guilt at the lack of anything to show for the last twelve years of my life. The cheerful face in the student photos is not the one that looms pallidly in the mirror. I have become mentally incapable of having fun, which makes for dreary blog posts and drearier company.

3. Occasionally, I get things round the right way.

Boucing gently off a brick wall at under 5 mph was silly. Not colliding in any way with the loose horse in the road was not. Given the choice of first prang, I know I got it right. And there are worse ways to spend a sunny spring evening than teaming up with two coppers, two passers –by and a dog to persuade said horse back into its field instead of heading for the dual carriageway.

4. Some things do not improve with time.

Reading back this drivel, I see that the break has not sharpened my pen or loosened the block. I still have nothing of interest to say, just self-absorbed maunderings. And so I shall stop again. Ta ta.

Cameo appearance

In a flagrant breach of my not-writing-any-more policy, I've written a guest post for a friend's blog. Normal lack of service will now be resumed.

Laying down my pen

Well, I tried. For a while now I've been crafting witty, wise blog entries with liberal dashes of self-deprecating humour and a quirky slant on the world. The snag is that I haven't posted any of them. Some lurk as drafts, condemned to walk the battlements of cyberspace like the ghost of Hamlet's father. The rest squat inside my head while their topicality dribbles away with their potential. I can't believe in any of it enough to have the burning conviction that I must share it with other people. This one is different in that it will see the light of day. If you're reading this, I'm right, and I've managed to bring myself to publish it. I have tried. This is the second blog I've launched. I think this one has lasted a little longer, though I can't be sure. I do know that I tried to give up blogging once before and came back. This might be a boring rehash of all that has gone before, but right now I don't think I can do this any more. Thank you for bearing with me this far. Adieu. (Or possibly, just possibly, au revoir.)

WLTM knight in shining armour, must have GSOH

It's taken thirty-odd* years to reach this point, but after decades of pootling along nicely, fixing dodgy wardrobe doors, taking fax machines apart "because it's interesting, no, look, it is working now, well, all I did was read the manual" and colliding with male colleagues in attempts to out-polite each other through doorways, this evening I realised I want a knight in shining armour to gallop along and save me from dragons. Not that I've anything against dragons, in fact some of my best friends are dragons. I'm speaking metaphorically, since there are no legends about knights, armoured or otherwise, galloping up to relag a condenser pipe on a broken boiler. I don't know if there's a term for accumulated aggravation, but I seem to have spent the last decade using up my inner resources and now I would quite like someone to take the pressure off. So is this it? Is this what it's all about when the romantic balderdash is stripped away? When it all comes down to it, do people lash themselves to other people less out of a sense of communing souls and more from a fierce desire not to be the one outside trying to unfreeze the pipes with a hairdryer while the hood of your parka fills with snow? In the past, when women had no status outside marriage, it's hardly surprising that they'd hitch themselves to the best available protector. But now, when fully functioning spinsterdom is a very real option, are we willing to cling to our independence while knowing it's always going to be down to us when the boiler breaks down or the roof leaks? I'm not saying these are the province of men, simply that when life throws grey slush at us, sometimes it would be very nice to let someone else deal with it. I don't think I'm about to settle down and pop out a few sprogs. I prefer animals to children on almost every count and I've done my share of communal living. (Why do men have so many toiletries? Why do they leave the empty bottles in the bathroom cupboard? And X should be aware that I haven't forgotten the state she used to leave the kitchen in.) And I don't really think I'm even looking for someone on a white charger, or even on a donkey or a pushbike. Just right nownI would like a fairy godmother to give me a break for a while. But I'm curious if this sense of semi-permanent mid-thirties exhaustion is just my bad luck or if there's some weird genetic thing going on, trying to make me mix my chromosomes with the first available knight in the vain hope that this will make everything All Right. Because happy ever after is all very well but ever after is a long time to be stuck with someone. Now if you'll excuse me I've got to go and fiddle with the thermostat and prod the boiler. * Some would say very odd.

You don't have this trouble with a slate

I write this in a condition of low-level seethe. My laptop is about eight months old, and, as with all youngsters, there are teething troubles. Having bought a well-known photo editing package, I am continuing to pick up the pieces after it crashed my PC comprehensively. The latest error message is that the webcam isn't working. Tentative investigation suggests this is because the computer can't detect the webcam. Now normally I barely give the webcam a moment's thought. I don't do video conferencing or online chat or flash my mammaries at strange men in Minnesota. But I am peeved that the software is asking me to install a webcam when there is one built in to this machine.

I tried a system restore but that didn't fix it. I restored the system restore back to where I started and it almost decided not to let me open this document.

Now I'm not totally dim. I've got letters after my name and everything, and in a former life I was a scientist and an (inept) engineer. I understand the concept of built-in obsolescence and can see how it drives market forces. But I refuse to accept this as an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Why can't computers work reliably? Why must we view crashing PCs as something to put up with, like late trains or all this damned snow? And please don't sit there smugly and tell me I should have bought a Mac. Some of us are on a budget.

All I want is for PCs to be robust, so that if the user does something inadvertently unhelpful it can shrug it off and brush itself down before going smilingly on its way.

Is that so much to ask?

PS And while I'm having a technical gripe, why is Blogger reformatting my text and dropping all the carriage returns between paragraphs? No wonder I feel like giving up blogging altogether.

Future imperfect

2010 has proved a little disappointing so far. When I woke up on Friday I assumed, perhaps naively, that we'd all be wearing tinfoil jumpsuits and feasting on food pills. Yet here I am digesting a very traditional Sunday roast while wearing a top I think I might have had since the last millennium and jeans that won't stay up since the belt loops are too narrow for the snazzy tartan belt Father Christmas brought me. But this is the Future. Arthur C Clarke wrote a book about it and everything. Shouldn't everything be shiny and fabulous?

Human beings are very keen on progress. They don't like change very much, but progress must be a good thing. In the last decade progress has brought us a technological revolution in the way we communicate. It's now possible to cram hundreds if not thousands of songs into a piece of plastic and metal smaller than a matchbox. One need never go without music ever again. Imagine the joy of never having to be alone with your thoughts, never having to think about anything beyond a superficial level before being distracted by the next track.

It's now possible to spew out every passing notion to a waiting world, no matter how private, hurtful or inane. It's now possible to pretend to have a thriving social life by hunching over a screen and tapping out more inanities to people you never meet, people you have never met. It's now possible to pretend to yourself that you're still friends with people you knew years ago because they clicked yes to your request but have had no contact since. It's now possible to snipe about modern life without going to the trouble of leaving your room to find someone to snipe to.

This is no Star Trek utopia with all races, colours and creeds getting along in perfect harmony (and wearing jumpsuits). This is a fractured world with death, destruction, cruelty, pestilence and harm on every side. This is the future is the present is the past. Human nature does not change. We're still the same selfish apes we ever were.

I don't want to live this way. All right, the sniping in splendid isolation bit is what I'm best at, but not the rest of it. I don't want to cut myself off from birdsong. I don't want to tell the world what I had for breakfast or what goes on behind closed doors. I don't want pretend friendships. If this is progress I'm glad to be a luddite.

So this year I'm striving for change over progress, ears open, looking up. If this is the future, I'm going to meet it on my terms for once.