Genesis MkII

I guess that, now I’ve put a couple of links to this blog out there in the wild, and traffic is just beginning to drift by, I ought to give a bit of background as to what it’s all about.

I began blogging over seven years ago, and for the early part of that time I really thought I’d found a new direction in life. I’d always enjoyed language and appreciated good writing – but hey, I was an engineer, not a writer, and it took a while before I grudgingly accepted that I had a need for the kind of self-expression and dialogue best satisfied through the more measured pace of the written word. And I was totally taken by surprise by the positive reception my words got.

It wasn’t long before I had an active blog, lots of blogging friends and found the kind of relationships that bypass all that up front trivial stuff and plunge straight to the heart of the matter. And, rather to my own disbelief, I felt I was actually progressing as a writer. Hardly anyone in the UK had even heard of blogs, let alone actually had one, so although I blogged under my own name, I was as good as anonymous. It was like moving to a new town where nobody knows you; you’re still the same person, but freed of all those pre-existing perceptions which others have about you, you no longer have to fit into the mould of the person they think you are and can grow in all sorts of unlikely directions. Hence that first blog started out in life titled by a quote from the psychologist Carl Rogers – "Older and Growing”.

What happened next is still a mystery to me. You know how you can be having a dream, in a quite specific context, and somehow the dream morphs into somewhere completely different, yet you weren’t aware – at least in your dream-state perception – of any break? It was something like that with me, albeit that it didn’t happen overnight. It was as though I woke up one day and realised that all of that hope and promise had dissipated, as the path I thought I was on had morphed into something different.

Wind the clock forward a few years, almost to the present. That old blog is as good as dead; the friends and the once mutually supportive relationships now (to my shame) mostly abandoned, albeit for a few friendships still active on Facebook; and writing of any kind is almost non-existent – bar that which can be reduced to the 140 characters of a Tweet.

But now the metaphorical dream has morphed once again, and, as unexpectedly as it left, I find the energy for writing - so long departed - seems to be returning. Yet not as a resuscitation of what had gone before, not merely a few breaths attempting to give life to something that was already dead; I tried that before, and it manifestly didn't work. So this is a fresh start, deserving of a fresh look - and here it is.