The infrequent blogger
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It's been a while since I've blogged and I'm afraid my witterings are set to remain infrequent, at least for the time being. After almost five and a half years of more or less managing two blogs a month, I have allowed my pattern to lapse. I was sad for it to happen, but I knew it must at some point. It's difficult to keep coming up with enough to write about, especially when life is keen to interrupt. I should, however, apologise to my regular reader(s) for this outage. I hope it will be temporary, but at this time I cannot say.
So what have I been up to? Good question. I'm engaged and, for better or worse, richer or poorer, wedding plans continue unabated. This could be reason enough in itself but in truth, my involvement thus far has been minimal. We have a date, we have a venue and, so I'm told, we have a dress (not for me, I hasten to add). We, or certainly I, have done little beyond that, short of picking the very best of best men—a woman. It's unlikely I'll be picking the table decorations at least. I cannot then claim that the wedding, just over a year away, has much part to play in my absence from this site.
Summer has arrived and, as temperatures are able to attest, lingers still, even amidst the overcast and sometimes rainy days. I can certainly vouch for its presence today while a dear friend took me on a reminiscence tour of the university I once frequented during a year-long writing course I did there a few years ago. The season's presence in recent months has, on occasion, impacted my routine. Several weeks of high intensity hay fever left me sneezing and blowing my nose a lot initially, before attacking my eyes with a vengeance for several weeks afterwards, robbing me of my vision for the majority of my evenings. Thankfully this assault has abated and I find myself free to enjoy what's left of the season. The heat, however, has made locking myself indoors to write articles I lacked the inspiration to write somewhat less than appealing.
Reading moved up my list of priorities. The release of several books, not least Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the end of the Lane, has kept me occupied for no small amount of time. Typically I used to get through books at breakneck speed, but that has lapsed in the last couple of years, and especially since I moved house. I still read quite often, but not as much as I perhaps should or would like. I have attempted to make up for that. And with a weekend at a writing event on the horizon in a couple of months, I feel all the more compelled to make sure I'm as up to date as possible on my reading list—not least any books by those authors I expect to be in attendance.
In truth, I could cite any number of reasons for my lack of output in the last couple of months. Any of them could be valid. But I feel all would be but part of the excuse. The reality is that I have allowed myself a break from it. Perhaps not intentionally. Sometimes life has a habit of throwing lots of things in your direction at once and it takes time for your brain to process them. Sometimes my way to process things is to write about them. But not all things are there to be written about. Some things need to be dealt with where they stand. Life is busy. Life is changeable. It is a writer's job to write it down. But it is a person's job to live it. For the time being, dear reader, I hope you'll permit me the grace to do that.