Skip to main content

Back to basics...

... and more navel-gazing as promised. My “mood” hasn’t picked up noticeably, so I’m making a deliberate effort to avoid the tricks and tropes I’d usually employ to make it all dark and perplexing. Clear skies with a sunny outlook – 70% chance of crap.
Plus I’ve had a crack at a book-review type blog (partially thanks to Cari’s Books for the proof that it can be done, although personally I was put off by her impassioned defence of the young adult genre) and so far have a title, URL and a background template. For those of you who enjoy looking at all things unfinished, you could check the work in progress at Metaliterate Musings. Wowed, you may not be. However, I don’t feel at all upset at sending link-love to myself, so I’ll do it again: Metaliterate Musings. With any luck and no small amount of application, it should eventually be the book-related opinion piece that my brain believes it could be. Once the first post is proofed I’ll let you know, and you can go be offended by some more rabid prejudicial hyperbole.
In the meantime, blog-shaping will continue apace here, and as I gaze out on Bute Park during my lunch break through my office windows, I have let go of the fear that vacillating moods will negatively affect the content and style of submissions / emissions, partially I suspect thanks to the sunlight streaming in through the windows and the cute grey squirrels rough-housing in the hedgerow. Maybe I should go back to Baby Led Weaning or Bash the Rich and stop dropping cous cous all over my keyboard...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Rage, rage against the piling up of shite.

It’s Local Election Day in Cardiff, and on my way out with the dog, I am greeted by the smiling faces of the Liberal Democrats’ Plasnewydd Focus Team. I had naively believed that I might go one day without being harassed by the Liberal Democrats, but obviously today was not going to be that day. Nonetheless, it was the final straw for me and my paper-thin patience. A little history, and some contemporaneous comment, would be useful right about now I think. The Lib Dems have led the council in Cardiff since 2004. My sources in the Welsh Conservative Party have indicated that they are about to take a complete pasting in today’s local election, with Labour way out in front, likely to come close to the 50 members they had back in 1999. In my opinion, this is a justified spanking. And yet I am unable to justify this on a political level. According to some of the bombastic nonsense that comes through my door unbidden every single day of the week and often on weekends too,

Stay angry, people.

Ed's dead, baby. Borrowed, with thanks, from the Independent I was unsure whether or not to write a post, post-election, on my post-election blues. For the most part, this was because I'm sure that political commentators, bloggers, activists, and people with far more understanding of the political landscape and the effect that the latest result would have on the lives of those for whom the spectre of a Tory government was only a bad dream, a shade that haunted at night when the lights burned low and the wolves howled at the door, had already used all of the adjectives and metaphors of despair in ways far more eloquent than anything I might come up with. I find however that I must say something, even if it doesn't help matters, to explain to myself more than anyone else why it is I feel so miserable. I will probably have no right to bemoan a Conservative government - my country still has a socialist leader, in theory if not in practice - particularly as I did very littl

Back to you, sir.

It’s all a little bit exciting, if you’re me, which I am, to have revived something so Hanoverian as a literary feud! Such a back and forth brings to mind the savaging of John Rae by Charles Dickens post Franklin expedition (including the publication of Rae’s rejoinder in Household Words ), or the attacks by William Hazlitt on, well everyone. I only wish I had the intellectual vigour of a Hazlitt or indeed any of the great correspondents of the past, to be able to maintain a contiguous train of thought for longer than a lunch time, and to not to be interrupted and thus de-railed by something so mundane as a game of football. Still, to be galvanised at all in this age of short attention spans and antipathy to anything other than apathy is a miracle, and it is to football that, my wife’s scorn notwithstanding, I can give credit on this occasion. Swipe I set myself up for a pretty meaty swipe in retaliation for my retaliation previously . I sort-of lost the plot a little bit in places,