Blog archive May 2023
18.05.23 / 01 / retrospective blogging
Ever since the blog has been reestablished here I have been very conscious of the large gaps between 2016 and 2021. In fact I was always writing blog entries, but they were in the form of emails to friends or notes on my phone. The Typepad blog had died and the new one had not yet begun, so there was no obvious place to put them.
Just post them on the old blog you could say, but the narrative thread had been broken - there is a narrative thread, no matter how tenuous - some kind of continuity of thought or intention - and I couldn’t restart it at the time. One of the big inhibitors was the need to post things in chronological order, so if I was stuck on something I couldn't post the rest. It became a mountain of backlog that I couldn't climb.
But the advantage of hosting your own blog is the ability to post things in the places they should always have been - regardless of the order in which they were actually written. Since the blog is in some sense an autobiography or external memory, this feels like a recovery of personal narrative, however edited and partial. It's good to get it out of my head into visible form.
So I've spent the last couple of weeks blogging mid-2018 to mid-2021 - if you check the archive you will find much that is new. Or you may find some that is familiar, if I based it on an email I sent you, or notes on Flickr. I've posted some lockdown experiences and thoughts, and more about my work/health debacle. There's probably a bit more to come in that period. There is still a gap from early 2016 to early 2018 - in fact there is nothing at all for 2017 yet, but I do have material that will appear soon.
