Goodbye to all that

“Don’t ana­lyse it to death. It’s only blogging.”

It was 11.00am this morn­ing when I sat down in front of my laptop and put those four words into the title field of this entry. As I write these open­ing lines, It’s now just past 9.00pm at night. No, obvi­ously I haven’t spent ten hours typ­ing away at my key­board, try­ing to form per­fectly phrased para­graphs instead of the shape­less and non­sensical ramble that is undoubtedly about to fol­low. First, I had to turn pro­cras­tin­a­tion into an art form, into an achieve­ment so impress­ive that the organ­isers of the Lon­don 2012 Olympics have just been on the phone ask­ing me to lead the team charged with mak­ing it a demon­stra­tion event in six years time.

So I had to to send those two emails that I’ve been mean­ing to send for weeks, because they sud­denly attained a new level of urgency this after­noon. I had to go to lunch with my mother. I had to sweep my car­pets — some­thing which never usu­ally gets done until I can no longer see the pat­tern on the floors. I had to do some online bank­ing. I had to down­load some MP3s. I had to sort through my laun­dry to check, check and check again that there were no black socks lurk­ing amongst the light col­ours. I had to watch Top Gear, even though I hate motor­ists, abhor the pol­lu­tion being spur­ted out into the atmo­sphere by motor vehicles, have never owned a car, and have never so much as taken one single driv­ing les­son. I had to fin­ish the last chapter of a Jeanette Win­ter­son novel — even though I’ve been find­ing the book immensely tedi­ous — because it would simply have made no sense to fin­ish it tomor­row. I had to stare out the win­dow at the dull, rainy and over­cast skies and sigh to myself, “Oh, isn’t it a dull, rainy and over­cast day? Can this really be May?” Things to do, things to do, so many import­ant things to do.

In short, I had to pro­cras­tin­ate because as soon as I tried to type these words, I froze. I was scared wit­less of put­ting elec­tronic pen to vir­tual paper.

I can hear it again: “Don’t ana­lyse it to death. It’s only blog­ging, for heaven’s sake.”

That’s what the voices in my head are telling me. Of course, none of these par­tic­u­lar voices are my own. They all belong to the reas­on­able, level-headed people (of whom I who don’t know many, if I’m per­fectly hon­est). They are the people who think blog­ging is more or less a waste of time: self-indulgent, self-important, navel-gazing whin­ing of the highest order. In other words, if you’re read­ing this you can relax, because it’s unlikely that any of the voices are yours — unless you’ve got as much self-hatred as I some­times pos­sess. And if that’s the case, I can only sympathise.

The voices, how­ever, do have a point. It is only blog­ging, and nobody has exactly been hold­ing a gun to my head and telling me that I have to come back (well, apart from those who peti­tioned me to do so on a reg­u­lar basis, and those who threatened emo­tional black­mail or viol­ence). For a long time, I didn’t want to return. I didn’t miss blog­ging at all. I didn’t even miss writ­ing, which was the most wor­ry­ing aspect of all. I’m not even sure I miss it now, truth be told, but I do know that if I don’t get back to writ­ing on a semi-regular basis, I might not do so ever again. That scares me, because the writ­ten word has always been and remains my primary means of com­mu­nic­a­tion; it’s where I feel most con­fid­ent and where I feel I have some skill. So yes, in a sense I’ve returned to the fray for one Excep­tion­ally Wrong Reason — fear.

“Don’t ana­lyse it to death. It’s only blog­ging, you know.”

I hear you; oh, I really do hear you. Thank you for your reas­sur­ance. But when did I get so extremely depend­ent on bring­ing words into being? Maybe it was at some point over the last eight months, when I real­ised that I seemed to have lost that depend­ency. Yes, that would make per­fect sense — even though we’re so often told in life not to be depend­ent on any­thing or anyone.

[There now fol­lows a digression.]

You’re going to have to work with me here. In the­at­rical and lit­er­ary terms, I’m going to ask you to employ your sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Many of you will know who I am, the iden­tity of the per­son behind this site, because I’ve left enough clues scattered around here, and even encour­aged you to email me to find out more via a mes­sage placed prom­in­ently in my former vir­tual abode — the old place that I main­tained for a few days over five years. Some of you have been even more unfor­tu­nate, becom­ing the recip­i­ents of irreg­u­lar updates about the hes­it­ant pro­gress of An Unre­li­able Wit­ness over the past couple of months. You’ve had to hear every tedi­ous detail — from the moment I bought the domain name, through the big ideas about what I wanted to do online (which invari­ably came to me late at night in a bout of hyper­act­ive back and forth email­ing — ah, the joys of brief bouts of mania), and on to the last few days when I’ve been sleep­lessly mess­ing about with Word­Press and hack­ing this tem­plate des­pite a pro­longed migraine. Most of the time you’ve been very patient, even though you prob­ably got fed up to the back teeth with the seem­ingly never-ending saga and just wanted to grab me by the neck, shake me vig­or­ously and shout, “Just stop talk­ing about it and do some­thing!” Well, I’ve done some­thing. Finally.

So it’s not exactly a secret who I am. For now, how­ever — though I may relent later — there’s no name, no num­ber, no detailed bio­graphy accom­pan­ied by fam­ily hol­i­day snaps from 1983. It was when I began to find that typ­ing my name into Google yiel­ded page upon page of res­ults, almost stretch­ing into double fig­ures, that I thought it might be time to become rather more anonym­ous. Plus, there’s that dreaded fear which has often chilled my soul whilst lying awake at two in the morn­ing, that one day some­body whom I really don’t want to read my online emo­tional purges — and there are more names on that list than I’d prob­ably care to admit — will spy my name dur­ing an idle web search, click on it, and have their eyes opened once and for all.

That’s why I’ve become the Unre­li­able Wit­ness of the title. We can all pre­tend together. It’ll be fun, I think. Of course, if you know me, you can still call me ******* in emails. And if you don’t know me, call me whatever you like. Just call me. It’s good to talk. Or something.

[Digres­sion ends.]

I always meant to write a proper “Good­bye to all that” entry on the other site that dare not speak its name, but as the months went on and it became increas­ingly clear that I had no idea what I was doing, I found it much easier to occa­sion­ally update the hiatus page (most of the time whilst wear­ing a cyn­ical grin on my face) and so avoid that awful sense of final­ity. I should prob­ably go and write such a con­clud­ing entry now, but I like the min­im­al­ism of my new digs too much to be bothered with going back there. We must go for­ward, not back, as a soundbite-seeking politi­cian might declaim from the podium.

Besides, whenever I thought about sound­ing — or rather writ­ing — the last post, I found myself think­ing about the ques­tion of why I stopped blog­ging. Indeed, I’ve been asked it enough times since. Why? Oh, reas­ons. Over-work, stress, tired­ness and bore­dom mostly, though some­how that sum­mary sounds like the epi­tome of dull­ness when writ­ten down so bluntly.

“Don’t ana­lyse. It’s only blogging.”

Yes, I know. But in my defence, I did do it — blog, that is, even though I still have a pas­sion­ate loath­ing for the word itself — for over five years. And I’ve never done any­thing for that long in the whole four hun­dred and eight­een months I’ve spent breath­ing this planet’s air. Noth­ing. If blog­ging is the one thing that I’m going to cling to as show­ing that I do have some ded­ic­a­tion and can achieve some­thing in life, then so be it.

(Remark­ably, I didn’t even cry into my sleeve as I reviewed my exist­ence in the pro­cess of typ­ing that last para­graph. I guess that’s the final proof that blog­ging as ther­apy really can be as pos­it­ive as it’s often claimed to be. My former shrink would be proud of me for reach­ing such an import­ant emo­tional milestone.)

I had tired of the old place, though. I had begun to feel that I was say­ing what was expec­ted of me. I had grown weary of being the ‘online me’ — with all the descrip­tions often asso­ci­ated with that site, no mat­ter how kind and gen­er­ous they were — just as much as I have often grown weary of being the ‘real me’. There were too many thoughts and ideas I wanted to explore, words I wanted to write — yes, des­pite seem­ingly grow­ing tired of writ­ing, iron­ic­ally — that I simply felt was no longer pos­sible there. How­ever, because of the sense of con­tinu­ity con­tained in those months and months of archived entries, there were ele­ments of the 29-year-old per­son who had lost his inter­net vir­gin­ity so enthu­si­ast­ic­ally in Octo­ber 2000 which remained in the 34-year-old per­son still tap­ping away at his key­board exactly five years later. Extern­ally, it would be fair to say that not a great deal had changed; the things by which we instantly judge a per­son — such as work, rela­tion­ships and status — hadn’t gone through nearly as much flux and pro­gres­sion as I would have wished. Intern­ally, how­ever, I was very dif­fer­ent. Still not the most bal­anced per­son­al­ity, it’s fair to say, but at least I was unbal­anced in new and poten­tially inter­est­ing ways.

An Unre­li­able Wit­ness is my chance, my attempt, to write out those dif­fer­ent ideas and explore dif­fer­ent con­cerns. Maybe, as well, to be a little more hon­est in my words. I don’t mind admit­ting, even at such an early stage, that such lofty aims are utterly doomed to fail­ure. Give it a fort­night, and both you and I will be detect­ing all the famil­iar phrases and com­mon themes — just with a new lick of paint — because, as has been noted before, I am extremely bad at dis­guising my thoughts and my writ­ing style. But in this case, fail­ure doesn’t sound like such a bad option.

I just need to settle in first. Get my bear­ings. Enjoy writ­ing again. I want to feel the same desire that occu­pied me for five years — the desire to seize on spare minutes or take the indul­gence of hours to sit in front of an open Note­pad file and simply write for the love of writ­ing, for the love of com­mu­nic­at­ing, for the love of shar­ing thoughts and ideas, even just for the love of throw­ing out the words that so often threaten to com­pletely crowd out my mind.

Much like the course of the last five years, which I described a couple of para­graphs back, the last eight months have, extern­ally, not really wit­nessed any seis­mic changes in my life. Intern­ally, how­ever — and maybe because of not hav­ing an out­let like this into which to pour my thoughts on a reg­u­lar basis — a lot has happened. There may be more about that in the fol­low­ing entries. Equally, there may not. I may just talk about annoy­ing people and dif­fer­ent types of cheese instead. Who knows?

“Don’t ana­lyse it to death. It’s only blogging.”

Yes, yes, you said. Believe it or not, O voices in my head, I actu­ally heard you the first time. I just wanted to explain, that’s all. I owed it to myself. I owed it to my many ador­ing fans (and that is irony, by the way) to try and explain where I’ve been. So the fact that it’s now half past eleven at night, mean­ing that I’ve the­or­et­ic­ally spent twelve and a half hours writ­ing this entry, only serves to prove one thing about my return to blogging.

I. Am. Fuck­ing. Terrified.