Recursive Words

After a ridiculously late night – or rather early morning – binge-watching “For All Mankind”, and then baby-sitting the youngest member of our household for an hour, I somehow scraped myself back out of bed a little after 8am this morning.

After a shower and a shave I briefly entertained thoughts of wandering into town for breakfast – but then remembered bacon in the fridge, and a sour dough load in the bread bin. It came as no surprise that the smell of bacon conjured two of my daughters to the kitchen.

The rest of the morning was spent falling down and entirely predictable rabbit hole.

A friend on the other side of the world sent me a message overnight, in response to encouraging her to take a look at Substack (her blog is at WordPress). It got me thinking – always a dangerous thing – and within an hour or so the WordPress incarnation of “Recursive Words” had resurrected itself once more.

I’m telling myself that it’s a good idea – that Substack is yet another walled garden – that I should really have a “proper” place for my journal anyway, even if I love scrolling the wall at Substack. We’ll see, I suppose. I’m just wary about spreading myself too thin. I suppose I’m also aware that lots of people (that don’t use Substack) don’t like Substack – because of it’s increasingly invasive nature.

Maybe having the most basic version of my journal possible sitting out on the web is a good idea. I hesitate to call it a “blog” any more, because the word has been stolen by influencers and marketers. When I started emptying my head – twenty-odd years ago – all blogs were diaries – journals. Machine generated advertorial nonsense hadn’t been invented.

As you might imagine, I have a rather large chip on my shoulder about the commercialisation of everything.

For a time last year my blog left the “internet at large”, sank beneath the waves, and survived only within the my computer. A proper, private diary. I tried out “Bear”, “Day One” and “Journal” on the Mac – and decided I didn’t really like any of them. I returned to a folder full of plain text files with my tail between my legs.

Of course then I confounded myself, and re-surfaced the blog.

It’s been… a journey.

What else happened today?

I cut the hedge!

Our driveway is bordered by two tall hedges – which seem to not grow an inch for the greater part of the year, but then put on a massive growth spurt during the summer – I suspect purposely to annoy me. Lifting the hedge trimmer up and down the hedge a few hundred times is torture. My arms were reduced to rubber for quite some time afterwards.

There are murmurings about going out for breakfast tomorrow, and then on to Church. Before you fall off your chair, I’ll just be doing the breakfast bit – not the Church bit. When I was younger, when challenged I would say I was agnostic. Over the years I’ve become far more comfortable telling people that I “don’t believe in any of that”.

To be fair, none of my close friends have ever pushed the subject with me. One old friend did years ago – even the local vicar did. He tried to get me to go on an “Alpha course” – while having dinner with him he explained that having somebody on the course to challenge the views around the table would be useful. He then realised just how much chaos I might delight in causing, and quietly rescinded the invitation.

Anyway.

How on earth did I get on to this?

Just count yourself lucky I haven’t started emptying my head about UFOs and aliens. Oh my word, the books I read about all of that when I was younger and more impressionable.

On about books – Amazon delivered more books this weekend. More of the Dorling Kindersley “Big Ideas” collection. They’re kind of wonderful. I spent an hour this afternoon (after cutting the hedge) with a cup of coffee and a book about Anthropology.

Oh crikey. It’s gone 1am already. I need to stop writing, copy this into the interwebs, and click the publish button.