Some readers have asked how I could possibly be celebrating summer in Bangkok one day, drinking coffee in Buenos Aires the next, and savouring the freshest seafood in Brussels the day after that.
This they have gleaned from the dates of my blog posts, assuming they are in chronological order. Assuming that, yes.
Clearly they aren’t, of course. Where Life for Beginners is concerned, I confess I have a somewhat scatterbrained approach where time and space are concerned. Geography and the calendar are suggestions, if you will, rather than guarantees.
In short, I am all over the place.
Consider this a diary of moods and memories. Whatever surfaces on a particular day has its own reason and rhythms.
You might also notice, perhaps, how there the posts are dated on the front page or when you do a search but the same isn’t true were you to come across them individually. It’s a small detail, sure, an affectation I won’t deny, but it helps remind me that these experiences ought to be timeless too.
That this feeling I had in one specific place, at one specific time, can be a feeling I savour again, if only by reading about it.
Isn’t that the point of diaries?
WHEN IS A BLOG NOT A BLOG?
The hope, however, is to return to writing this blog as a diary. Daily posts from all over the world (even if I stay put in one place or only travel to a few destinations; the pandemic still raging as I write this).
This is in part a delayed response to my Great Blog Clean Up some years ago, when I optimistically (more like foolishly, as we shall learn) put most of my posts in private mode. I imagined that I would address the inconsistencies in formatting, revise some posts so they’d flow more smoothly; basically Make Everything Better.
Those posts never came back, as you might have guessed by now.
So rather than return to the aborted Great Blog Clean Up, I’m going to do the sensible thing and just Move On. I will write and do my best to write regularly, more frequently.
One day I could be walking on water and on another I could be serenading salted eggs. (As the great Bob Dylan sang, I’m a man of contradictions, I’m a man of many moods. I contain multitudes.)
The difference, the challenge, is to do it every single day. We shall see if I succeed.
This will be a map made up of the years in my life, an experiment in gathering all my adventures (and misadventures) in one place. We shall see whether the sum makes more sense than the parts.
And if it doesn’t? So be it. At least it will be one hell of a ride. What fun.