Blogging for One

I just noticed that I’ve missed my blog’s birthday.  Sorry about that, blog.  Having said that I’m not exactly up on the etiquette of a blog’s birthday, pretty much as I wasn’t up on the occasion that a baby’s first birthday calls for.  I think there is probably a life manual that I missed somewhere along the line.

 It’s been a week of various lurgies in our house, which has depleted all my creative reserves and left a hovel of germ-ridden mess in its wake.  And also 9 pounds less of me, which was very obviously surplus to requirements.  Every cloud.

Anyway … blog birthday is probably as good a time as any to reflect on the meaning of time, the universe, etc.  I did have a hopeful feeling that this post would be no.42 on the blog, & then things really would be a bit spooky*.  But also no, things are rather less poignant and this will be no.44.   Talking of significant dates, looking in my diary I realise that it’s our anniversary today too (21 years), but as OH didn’t comment on it this morning I can probably get away without mentioning that too – that romantic night to end all romantic nights in a Birmingham Hall of Residence. I know.

So, back to my blog musings - nominally I started it to capture all that growing up stuff which I knew would slip through the sieve of my memory.  But there’s really not been so much of that as I expected. Realistically it’s given me an outlet at a time when I knew the Research Centre I worked in would be closing down and the job market’s been grim.  So here I sit a year later, my contract ended at the weekend, and although I’m still tied in ambiguously in various ways I’m not yet feeling the panic I thought I would.  Due in no small part to the huge list I complied of things that I need to do while I’m not tied into to office hours. I’m trying to see this six months or so before Katie goes to school as an opportunity.  Well I have to, don’t I?  

Before I started blogging I read a few ‘how to blog’ idiot's guides, in the way that I find it physically impossible to do anything without reading a book about it first.  And I’m sure that pretty much the main bit of advice they all gave was that blogs needed A Theme.  But as the months have chugged on it feels like this is the last thing that’s happened.  Partly I’ve become about as fascinated in the process of blogging and the blogging community as I am in blogging myself, to the extent that this is something I want (need) to work on in the future.  I wrote an article on it the other day, with a more work hat on, snappily titled‘Blogging: pervasive labour on the margins’.

So as I’ve been pondering this morning what my small thing is this week, through the fuzz of antibiotics and a strong sense of envy that I seem to have completely missed the spring this weekend that lit up everyone’s life, I realised that perhaps actually blogging is it.  The small refuge thing that shines some perspective on the difficult stuff.  That sometimes you start and end up in a quite unexpected place.

*This is a Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy reference, just in case you are not a total spod like me.