Write, right?

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  It has been two years and eight days since my last blog post.

Having no actual audience for my writing at the moment, this is not world-ending news.  No tearful fans are barely restrained behind police lines outside my front door, their faces streaked with fresh tears over old tear tracks and an anguished, ‘Why, God, why?’ on their lips.  Still, if you wish to earn trust you must be transparent (are you listening, government ministers?) so here is my explanation for my absence.

First of all, for the longest time it felt like the only thing worth writing about was Brexit. 

I tried several times to do this justice – including one long attempt to blame all of it on Paloma Faith – but I failed to finish a single piece.  There are a number of reasons for this, chiefly that literally every single day that passed brought a new calamity.  I would begin writing a piece, and the next day felt it was rendered obsolete by fresh news, a plump new steaming turd of outrage that needed to be assessed and weighed in to the argument.  This will not come as any serious surprise to anyone living in the UK or America right now as, if anything, our modern world continues that trend with seemingly breakneck abandon: you can be fed a scandal at breakfast and have it eclipsed by lunchtime.

I truly gained an appreciation for paid journalists during this time.  The ability to distil the piss from the pomp and do it to a deadline whilst offering insight or context deserves major kudos.

The other real truth about Brexit was I really wasn’t writer enough for the job.

Too many players, too many moving parts, too much fact-checking to make sure I wasn’t regurgitating fake news; too much anger, so many lies to debunk, and probably an inability to see the Big Picture.  My contribution to standing against Brexit was a steady stream of Facebook article shares and a few venting posts (where I used the best lines from my failed articles).

My second major obstacle to writing was the death of my mother.  It cast a long shadow not just over the time she was ill and eventually passed, but my entire life thereafter.  I tried writing about her, too, and I think I still will.  Time, contrary to the conventionally held wisdom, does not heal all wounds, but it does offer perspective.

So for a long time I felt I couldn’t write.  The ideas I had were trivial, and the stronger ideas were difficult to nail down, nothing felt worthy.  I assured myself that it would pass, when what I should have done was write anyway.

I watched my daughter grow and my son start school, but I did not write one word.

My waistline yo-yo’d like most men of my age, the same ten pounds on or off again, and I still did not write.

Friends began having their 40^th birthdays, keen to remind me mine wasn’t far off, and still I did not write.

A global pandemic hit us, I got furloughed for the best part of three months, my COVID haircut took on an aspect not unlike Donald Trump’s (to paraphrase Radiohead, my Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill), and still I DID NOT WRITE A FUCKING WORD.

It’s unforgiveable. 

I have many friends with the same real-life situation as me – wife, mortgage, job, kids – and they still make a space in their life for the one thing that makes their life a tiny bit creative.  They release EPs, paint portraits of dogs, cook Insta-worthy meals, brew beer and I can’t sit down an hour a night and try to fill up a white page with black squiggles? 

Adventure?  Excitement?  A Jedi craves not these things.  My friends create because it is infinitely better than to not create.

I’ve had a long sabbatical.  I’ve gained a lot of perspective and unwelcome life experience.  I’ve stopped worrying about the worthiness of a blog very few people ever read.  All I should worry about is the letter following this one, leading to the word following that one, leading to the sentence after that.

Or as Monsieur Blanc said all the way back in 1998: Write, right?

I took the liberty of revisiting my old blog entries before I sat down at the keyboard tonight.  I can’t call it a body of work as it’s only eight entries long, which is less a body and more of a limb, or maybe even just a fist.  I wanted to see if I ever wrote anything worth writing in the first instance, and to reintroduce myself – and perhaps, one day, you – to me.

It’s a mixed bag.  The stuff about kids cartoons is unadulterated overthinking and the piece about memes about as self-indulgent as any blog can be.  I think I wrote well about my Dad and slightly rushed my piece about conspiracy theories.  I loved writing about music and can gladly report that I went on a mission of self-improvement after that, and now own several new albums by contemporary artists.  That blog made me challenge myself.

Speaking of challenging, the piece I struggle with most is my post about trans non-binary people. 

I worked harder on that one than most, and the TL;DR version would have read ‘I have no problem with trans people, but two specific trans people pissed me off and made me doubt my moral foundations’. 

The image I chose to put up as the title for that piece was tone deaf and ignorant, it spoke to the worst of my sarcastic tendencies.

Almost immediately after I posted my hot take I watched an excellent video representing perspectives from across the trans spectrum and yeah, there were more militant dilettantes like Fox and Owl, but there were also genuinely progressive speakers who made me check myself.  It helps that trans issues have been more visible ever since, and other issues that make me painfully aware of my straight, white privilege: I knew about it back in 2017 and even reference it in my writing, but things like the current Black Lives Matter campaign put everything in stark relief.

I suppose that piece bothers me because the writing wasn’t always strong enough, and I could be misunderstood. I protest in that article – almost to the point of the lady doth protest too much – that I struggled to reconcile my dislike of that couple and their language with my Good Guy self-image, and that still bothers me now. I had no right to be offended.

I still struggle with some of the language of the trans movement: JK Rowling’s current issues with that community saw her labelled a TERF. This stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist and I’m sorry, but that’s right at the tipping point for me between needing some nomenclature and opening yourself up to being lampooned. But I’ve read more, I’ve educated myself.

Needless to say, I’ve taken that piece down.

And finally, the deep dive revealed to me that the things I’m obsessed with now were nascent in my old writing.  Hopefully I’ll be able to explain those ideas better now that I can identify them better in myself.  My issues with the Brexit campaign that left me unable to write about it, my issues with memes, some of my problems with my memory and even my issues with Fox and Owl: it was all about narratives. 

Without further ado, it’s time to get back to work.  Write, right?