A Disclaimer, of Sorts

Photograph of Faringdon Coffee House, of a table with an orchid, wine bottle, tea pot and menu in
front of a window. 

So I had the first blog post all planned our, written up and even scheduled, it was to be a short opinion piece on one of the ideals from romantic prose. I'm sure at some point soon it will appear, but it felt somehow wrong to start with it - even if it would be starting as I mean to go. The closer I got to the scheduled time, the more anxious I become to justify my decision to write what I write, be it a rant on all the racists nonsense I had to deal with on that day or a scone recipe.

My first blog was a long while ago - when I was a young teenager - and it lasted for several years, had close to a thousands post - all of which were happily written, with no set purpose or audience but simply because I could not, not write. It poured out of me, tumbled onto the pages or keyboard. Still does sometimes - but now I'm have this somewhat crippling thought, several actually - 'is this original?' and 'is this well informed?' and 'is this worth reading?' I didn't stop writing of course, but I stopped publishing.

The are healthy doubts, ones that I suspect every writer faces. And it's worth noting that to a point the fears are justified - some thought occur to million people each day ("What shall I make for dinner?" is a prime example) of course these are mundane thoughts and I'm being rather pedantic (I tend to do that for amusement I'm afraid), but the point stands.

'Is this well informed?'

I'm not a world expert on anything apart from myself and my experiences. True for everyone else if we really think about it. People who are labelled as 'world experts' know more than most expert but don't know everything. No one does, but that doesn't matter in this case - my writing is coloured by the life I inhabit, and in some cases I'll be right, and in others I'll be wrong - but that will rarely be by empirical measures, and I'm always willing to learn.

'Is this worth reading?' That of course is up to you dear reader, but for me this is worth writing.

Another problem I face when it comes to publishing my writing is rather more... deeper I guess. Some of the stuff I pen is on the serious side of things - feminism, activism, racism; other pieces are more fun and frivolous - recipes, and exhibitions etc.

Last time I considered starting a blog, one that combined many things with social activism, a person I then knew wrote an impassioned email about blogs that catered to lifestyle, or beauty interests, ad nauseam., full of expletives. The implication was that those written passages were not worth the webpage they were posted on.

Of course that person was a hypocrite. The majority of people who think so, are. In my mind, we perceive reality in stages, in levels, as if we're living in several parallel worlds. Which is why we can know about the devastation in the world, the horror in which we're living in, and still care about material things, still cry when a TV character dies.

Human beings are not vessels for causes, or ideas. When it happens in fiction and a whole characterisation arises from belief in a cause we can spot it as terrible witting, and yet we somehow can't spot the same in real life. There are people who are truly driven, but few and far in between, for the rest of us that state of existence would prove to be too unhealthy to our minds and bodies to be sustainable. And that's alright. We need to be able to function in the world we live in, we need to be able to carve a niche in which we can live, and still hopefully add to the good in the world. Some people can change the whole world dramatically, I just want to make the world a bit better - even if it's just making it better for one single person, for a short instance in their lives.

I'd love to finish this post with something novel and profound, but I have nothing left to say at the moment and so I simply hope you'll enjoy the upcoming posts, whatever they may be.