Life Less Literary

I received this email today from Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.

After suffering your web site I can only assume that you are the biggest bore that walked this earth.

Are you a serial complainer??

And who gives a flip if you are drunk??

Leaving aside the fact that somebody who of their own free will “suffers” my website, and then goes to the trouble of complaining to me about it, obviously has issues, Peter’s right. Things have been both boring and moany here of late. Not that I’m unduly concerned: I know who I write this stuff for, I know they give a flip that I was (not am, was) drunk, and if somebody comes surfing in here from Never Never Land to complain about the quality of my writing then that’s their problem.

But it did give me cause for thought. I started this blog, over five years ago now, as a place to air my thoughts, express myself, and cut down on repetition in multiple emails to multiple friends. Previously whenever I’d tried to write anything for publication, I had always got bogged down with ideas of perfection; hence I decided to allow myself complete freedom to be crap. Hence the title, “Life Less Literary”, it was a reminder to myself as much as anything: the “Life” part comes from the photo-blog idea which started with Guy and which a number of us then copied (and of which my Life page is, I think, the only one still active). I wanted to start a written version of Life, but I was more interested in making sure I wrote something than in making sure I wrote something perfect, hence I had to remind myself that, although written and published, it was “Less Literary”.

Ironically, once I’d given myself this freedom, my writing flourished and I think (or at least, I’ve been told by people whose opinion I respect, i.e. people who praise me) that a lot of those early posts worked very well as interesting stand-alone pieces of writing. But recently… well, over the last year or two it feels like this blog has become more workaday, it still does what I originally set out to do, which is to give my various friends and associates some idea of what I’ve been doing and thinking, what’s uppermost in my mind at the moment, but I think it’s lost some of the sparkle which made it, on occasion, a damn fine read.

Erm. That’s it. Sorry, you weren’t expecting any revelations, were you?