“Well, I’m Back,” She Said

Disclaimer: have not been to Mordor (one does not just walk in) nor destroyed any occult jewellery as far as I can recall.
It’s been eleven weeks, more or less, since I vanished on my blog sabbatical, and I have, in that time, discovered a number of things.

Discovery the First: Months of radio silence do not appear to have had a negative effect on my blog stats. If anything, quite the opposite.
Moreover, the old blog – which was mothballed in October 2017 – has done even better. At this rate it won’t be long before I can make a comfortable living being paid not to write, electrifying the world with the richness of my mysterious silences.

Discovery the Second: Farthingales are overdue for a revival. Introverts have been secretly certain of this for a long time; now everyone else is catching on.

Farthingale 2 (PSF)
Keep your social distance, or I’ll smack you silly with my fan!

Discovery the Third: We could all do with a bit of cheering up. A merry heart does good like a medicine (disclaimer: check with medical professional before attempting to replace any prescriptions with merriness). I hope the unshuttering of this blog will be of some small use in that regard. Possibly that was the point all along, and I didn’t quite realize it.

Discovery the Fourth: I’m tired of dogging my steps with blogging ‘shoulds’. I’m going to blog to no fixed schedule, about whatever takes my fancy, and hopefully even if the subject is not of particular interest to you, the rendition will be sufficiently entertaining, heartening or respiteful (respising? respitionary?) to be worth your read.

Discovery the Fifth: Tatting is most enjoyable, and a great way to avoid touching your face, that hitherto unnoticed human obsession. Dr Sarah Cowie, behavioural psychologist from the University of Auckland, suggests knitting or fidget spinners, but tatting combines the pocketability of one with the creativity of the other, and is therefore a clear winner.

Occhi Schiffchen

Discovery the Sixth: Better a slightly later better book than a rushed one sooner. My apparently unfounded fear that The Wound of Words is not so good a book as Restoration Day is beginning to ease, and I mean to send the book off into the world properly.

Discovery the Seventh: A rendition of the refrain of the Taizé chant “Bless the Lord, My Soul” clocks in at just over 20 seconds, thus making it an excellent accompaniment to hand-washing. Combine the hygiene of the hands with the recalibrating of the soul while taking advantage of bathroom acoustics. Win win.

As for what I was doing for these past eleven weeks… I stacked firewood, shifted gravel, began learning to tat, ate things out of the garden, set goals and foci and plans, read a great many books, did a great deal of proofreading, preached a sermon, went to a five hour meeting which turned out to mercifully be a four hour meeting (with chocolate cake), read the news, applied for a couple of ISBNs, tried to contain anxiety when chainsaws deployed in neighbourhood, washed my hands, sang… lived.

What have you been up to these past eleven weeks?

4 Replies to ““Well, I’m Back,” She Said”

  1. Welcome back! You have been sorely missed – how much I only fully realised as I read this blog post, and laughed out loud – a lot! Thank you! If that’s your aim for future posts, then more power to your elbow (and fingers, and mind, and …) Sanity is definitely in short supply, along with the pasta, toilet paper and so on. So much more merriment please.

    1. Thank you! It’s lovely to be back. I hadn’t realized how much fun writing blog posts can be until I started doing it again. Level of fun severely affected by Technical Issues, but This Too Shall Pass. It may pass like a kidney stone, but it will pass.

  2. I’ve had a big spike in blog traffic this year so far too – March so far has already had 38% more page views than November 2019 (my biggest month last year). Wonder if it’s a Google algorithm thing – possibly sites that aren’t running advertising are faster and it’s favouring that?

    1. Could be!
      There’s nothing so annoying as sites that load the ads before they load the content – unless it’s sites with pesky popups and auto-play videos.

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