In the beginning

This blog started life on the back of a till receipt. I kid you not.

We were staying one weekend with some relatives of my Other Half, for some form of family gathering. It was Sunday afternoon, and my young son, after a few difficulties due to the unfamiliar location, had finally been persuaded to take his afternoon nap. I think the older cousins were playing a card game or watching TV. OH was taken up interacting with seldom-seen relatives. I was subject to that special kind of boredom that comes when staying with in-laws – not your house, not really your family, not your place to initiate anything.

I don’t know why I hadn’t taken a book to read and make the most of an extremely rare opportunity. In the end, I finished up piddling around with my smartphone. In the absence of a wifi connection, I used up precious subscription megabytes browsing the internet via the mobile network, and this was how I encountered a new blog by one of my facebook acquaintances.

It’s amazing how facebook has changed the nature of our human relationships. Friends of friends, that I met once in a pub, or distant relatives I would only otherwise encounter at selected weddings and funerals, have somehow become “friends” on facebook. I can learn more about them than I otherwise would have done, and often more than I want to know, and all in a sort of voyeuristic way without ever being obliged to exchange with them directly.

I’m not completely denigrating the experience, however. In my personal situation, living at a significant distance from many friends and a large part of my family, facebook has often made a positive contribution to my life. For example, it was by facebookian means that I was able to discover that this particular acquaintance, or more strictly a relative of a relative-by-marriage, whom I’ve probably met only three times, is an eloquent and witty blogger.

I had been toying with the idea of a blog as a release for my writing urges for a while, and already spend several frustrating online sessions searching for a blog name and pseudonym. The thematic idea was in place, but finding a name or title that had not already been thought up and registered or otherwise become Googleable proved more difficult than I ever would have imagined. I attached far more importance (and time) to the exercise that an as-yet-unwritten, and unlikely to be widely-read blog by an anonymous wannabe writer really warranted (but then, everything is relative: it was probably a fraction of the time some people spend online gaming or aimlessly browsing, for example).

But I hadn’t actually written anything, and wasn’t entirely sure ever to get around to it. That chance encounter via a 2” by 3” screen was the catalyst that got the ball rolling (to mix metaphors slightly). If they could do it, I could do it; more to the point, if they allowed themselves to do it, then surely I could be forgiven for some bandwagon-jumping.

So there and then the urge to write became irrepressible. I managed to locate a pen, but learned that the only usable paper in the house was in the same room as my sleeping son. Not wishing to risk waking him (equaling immediate termination of any writing opportunity), I instead located an improbably long supermarket till receipt from my wallet. I hid myself at the foot of the stairs, ostensibly to listen for my son waking. And I wrote. These notes were later transcribed, first into a notebook and then typed, to become the first entry for this blog.

But I was on borrowed time. My son, always a good sleeper, had already gone down for nearly two hours (a naptime that I know could make many parents heartily jealous). Sure enough, he woke before my three-inch-wide strip of paper was full. But at least it was a start, and one that, albeit some weeks later, and in several painful stages, actually became something readable (if not, well, read).