Just Blogging

2 April

Just Blogging

It's not as easy as I thought it was going to be, writing a fictional blog. Over on "I Beatrice", the line between fiction and fact has become rather blurred, so I have decided to transfer some of the material from that page to this, in the hope of keeping the two worlds more sharply separate. Here, I shall simply experiment, and have fun once in a while...





25 March

Whistling down the wind
Blogwise, I’m still blundering about a good deal. I had made up my mind not to write again in this vein; having received what I thought very sound advice from that established and very successful blogger, Wife in the North, who was kind enough to take an interest in me. “Don’t dwell too much on technicalities” she told me; “Just get on with the blog.” It’s excellent advice of course. Generous, too – since what profit could there possibly be, for her, in linking herself with so new and obscure a site as mine? Especially since the very fact of my being in contact with her at all arose from my own blog-incompetence – ie my not understanding the protocol of the Comment page, and sending her an email instead!

She has been kind enough to make a link with me, for all that. And now I don’t know what to do with it! I've read all the instruction pages, and I still don't know how to display my links. If I were Wife herself of course, I would not be required to sit here agonising about what to do – I would immediately have forty three people writing in to my Comments page to tell me. That seems to be the thing about blogging: when once you have won people’s hearts and minds, you are never quite on your own again. Wife has had her problems lately, of course, and they have been of the most distressing sort. There can be few things in life more painful for a mother than to have to watch her child suffer. I’m a grandmother, and I know all about that. I would go further, if I thought it would be the least helpful to Wife … I would tell her that the problems don’t get smaller as the children themselves get larger – they only grow in magnitude accordingly.

Take me, for example. I have weathered the eleven plus, and the O levels and the A levels. I have worried about university places, and whether or not the First at Part One will go on to become a First at Finals. I have watched two sons struggle to become lawyers – and make no mistake, there is an agony about waiting for a pupillage, and then a place in chambers, which is every bit as severe as that associated with the 11+ results! Now, it has become my secret maternal anxiety to wonder if they will sometime be in a position to ‘take silk’…. ? (I’m told not to worry too much about that one, as a matter of fact. My sons have gone so very far beyond me now, as to be able with perfect assurance to declare that it is not always ‘in one’s own best interests’ to bother to take silk at all! So that's telling Mum, then.)
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All of which is a very long way, of course, from my inconsequential little blogging dilemmas. Still, I’d like to know what to do with Wife’s generous link with me? Just to know how, and where to put it on the page, would be a start…. I’d like, too, to know how I can organise my ‘archive list’ so as to reflect my daily titles; and whether or not I can edit back entries to reflect a better choice of word, or a more elegant syntax?

For me though, with my still-empty comments box and my little following confined almost entirely to family and friends, all this is pretty much whistling down the wind. That self-appointed blog-editor of mine, my brother Bill, has already looked at this entry, and advised me that it’s a serious mistake. How would it have been for him, he wants to know, if instead of delivering the news from the front one day, he’d opted to embark on a little philosophical treatise instead? He’d have been fired on the spot, he says; and rightly. The matter in hand is what counts, he tells me: the rest is hot air and self indulgence.

He’s right, of course. And tomorrow, I will return to the main theme. Which is of course that of my struggle to make myself known in this pretty place. ( Already, for example, I have learnt a little more about the old lady and her daughter who live in the big house at the end of the footpath. From my window cleaner no less…)

Today though, well if there’s anyone ‘out there’ who can advise me ( I wouldn’t dream of importuning Wife again!), they would have my unending and most heartfelt gratitude...