SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 30TH

I'm testing out the mobile blogger app today. I thought maybe I could write on the go.

07:50. Carols at the garden centre in less than three hours. Currently we have no carol sheets. Um...

08:42 Showered and dressed. Here's the plan: I'm going to print them out from an old copy of a carol sheet I made in 2006. It just might work. Though it does involve two computers, one USB drive, a wireless printer and an uncertain amount of ink. What could go wrong, right?

09:02 Usually by this point in the stress cycle I would have thrown the printer across the room. However, the trial run of the three page booklet of carols has printed perfectly. One down, twenty to go...

09:34 Half way through. Turned the paper round, it's chewed some of the pages but I think it's still in the right order. I hope it's still in the right order.

10:04 Done. OK, some of them are in a very peculiar order, but this is not a major problem. Now to pack up the piano.

10:33 There aren't many people here...

11:20 Sung. The team did really well. Santa arrived on a bright yellow motorbike. At least we timed the end of Jingle Bells to fade out as the Harleys rolled in.

11:46 Waiting for the Intrepids who have been distracted by the garden centre. I think there's some invisible field that draws people over 50 towards a garden centre. They love it.

12:04 Home. Lunch. Pack away printer.

13:05. Weird thing just happened. I was listening to a song about a friend of mine. I wrote it in 2004 and haven't heard it for years. I haven't spoken to him for ages either, at least for most of this year. Then, just as the melody faded out, he texted me. He said I was 'on [his] mind' and he invited me to go and stay with him and his wife for a weekend. How random is that? Perhaps not random at all.

14:23. Washing is in and spinning.

16:05. This is just Twitter isn't it?

16:06. I'm boring myself now.

COMET ISON UPDATE

Comet ISON is alive and well then. A portion of it survived its trip around the sun and might give us a little sky-sparkle after all. Just goes to show that there's always hope.

What's even more exciting (I read today) is another project, Rosetta, which is aiming to do something incredible. Rosetta has been chasing a comet called 67P (Churyumov-Gerasimenko) for the last few years, using Jupiter as a kind of slingshot. Next November, Rosetta will actually land a probe on the surface of the comet in a daring attempt to investigate its composition.

Comets like ISON and 67P emerge from the rocky edge of the Solar System known as the Oort Cloud. Lumps of icy rock get dislodged from the Oort Cloud from time-to-time and are slowly sucked into orbit by the gravity of the sun. As they get closer, the radiation burns off some of that icy material, pushing it out into that characteristic tail.

Considering that the comet will be moving at several thousand miles an hour, the idea of catching this unpredictable space-bullet and then clinging on to it like a barnacle is kind of extraordinary.

It makes my pedantry about technical documentation seem quite insignificant.

TYCHO BRAHE

In 1572, Tycho Brahe looked up at the night sky and saw something odd. He lived in a time when people believed that the stars were fixed points of light, rotating like pinholes in giant invisible rolling spheres beyond the moon and the wandering planets.

While I've never quite known how to pronounce his name, I quite like Tycho Brahe. He was Danish, impossibly wealthy, prone to the odd duel with a sword and he looked rather like a walrus. He was a meticulous observer of the stars and he even had his own island observatory in the middle of a lake. Most scientists and engineers I know would love that.

What he saw in 1572 was a brand new star. We call them supernovas now, but he just called it the nova stella ('new star') when he wrote about it in 1573.  It must have been incredible: some say, when it first exploded into life, the supernova was so bright you could see it during the daylight hours. It's still there but it's now called SN-1572 if you want to look it up. It's in Cassiopeia.

I mention it today because the Intrepids (my parents) have been going on about Comet ISON - the latest astronomical spectacle.

I love standing and looking at the stars. There's something about the silence, the distance, the permanence and the promise that they hold. When you see them, you're looking at the furthest things you will probably ever lay eyes upon. Photons have streamed from those tiny points of light for millions of years, bursting out of the fiery hearts of gigantic nuclear reactors, speeding through the vast empty chasm of space towards you and only you, for this exact moment. I think there's something quite awesome about that.

Today was another one of those rare opportunities when something big and astronomical was supposed to happen. The comet, two kilometres wide and rather like an enormous snowball, has been hurtling towards the sun on its long, long orbit. There were two possible outcomes for Comet ISON: one, that it would spin around the sun and be flung back out into space in a spectacular light show we'd all enjoy for weeks... or two, that it would break up miserably as the colossal heat melted its icy core like an ice-cube at a bonfire party.

Guess what happened.

I'd have loved to have seen something spectacular like that. There's always clouds though. Whenever there's a lunar eclipse? Raining. Whenever the Earth passes through a meteor belt? In rolls the fog. Whenever there's a spectacular comet on the horizon? Smashed into the sun.

Also, unlike Tycho, we live in a world where most of the sky seems to be illuminated by other people. He wouldn't have coped with 21st-Century England. Though we'd have made him a better prosthetic nose perhaps.

-

I don't think life should be disappointing. I read an article last week about happiness being the difference between your reality and your expectation. If the reality was greater than the expectation, you could be defined as happy, I suppose. Disappointment awaited those whose expectations outweighed their reality. I don't think it's that simple, but I do understand that sometimes life promises you brilliant comets that stream past your window... and then gives you nothing but a disintegrated lump of old ice.

I believe you can surpass your expectation in so many surprising ways. I believe life should be interspersed with moments that take your breath away, with wonder-ful, awe-inspiring views of oceans and sunsets and mountains and galaxies and planets, with people who are so beautiful in every way, that they just make you feel alive when you're around them.

Like the fated comet, we don't have a lot of time on our journey through the solar system. We can make it spectacular by doing just a few small simple things - like course corrections if you will: little acts of fun, kindness, goodness and unexpected generosity. I'd like to be the kind of person who knows how to do that - to make life so excellent for other people, to so enjoy the journey that it's kind of infectious, and to light up the night sky along the way.

REVIEW COMMENTS

More tension today. Today's tension came directly from review comments, which present a fine opportunity for people to review my work and tell me how far I've missed the mark.

Six pages into one highly annotated document and I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, got up and made myself a glass of juice in the kitchen.

The kitchen is the place for mindless chit-chat. I expect a lot of work kitchens are like it: you can have the same conversations with the same people over and over again and no-one seems to notice. In fact, if anything they enjoy it.

"Alright?"

"I'll be glad when it's Friday."

[insert laugh]

"Yeah me too."

"See you later."

"See you later."

I really want to shake it up, throw in a little seasoning to make it different, but I've realised that this is a kind of religious ritual now. It can't be altered without someone thinking you're a bit strange. That did happen to a guy, Joseph, who used to work in our company. He was like a conversational quantum leaper - you'd think you were talking about the seaside, and then suddenly it's a discussion about Will Self's vocabulary and the best way to cook a chicken in twenty minutes. Before long he was ostracised and considered just a bit too wacky for most people's linear expectation of kitchen-chit-chat.

I really miss Joseph.

The review comments felt like volleys of criticism, scrawled across documents and lobbed into battle from all and sundry. It felt like people who knew what they were talking about had finally twigged that I know very little about what I'm writing about. I know that almost certainly isn't the case, but that is how it felt for a while. What a useless moron, I heard them say inside my head. He wouldn't know his LDAP from his NTLM if it came up and authenticated him on the Exchange Server!

A little later I got an email asking for some wording advice. Someone was trying to write an alarm that would be raised if something called the Transaction Log Export failed. Transaction Log Export (unsurprisingly) tries to export transaction logs. If it fails it writes a line to another log to inform you what might have happened. I was suddenly being asked whether it was OK to log that the transaction log export log had failed.

I looked outside the window at the guy blowing leaves with a back-strapped leaf-blower. He knows what he's doing, I sighed to myself.

TENSION

I feel a tension deep inside me today. It's a niggling, nagging, itching discord that faintly scratches somewhere I can't reach. The worst of it is that I have no idea what it's about.

It's that feeling that you get when you can't be sure whether or not you've left a tap running or the hobs on, or you've said something to someone that you shouldn't have and it only lodged with you subconsciously when it was far too late to do anything about. I do try to be careful to think about what I say, but I haven't always got it right. I don't think I've done that, any of that; but that's the feeling I've got.

I believe tension can be useful. You can make a basic telephone out of yoghurt pots, a suspension bridge or a guitar; you can pull heavy weights to impossible heights or stop children falling from dangerous ones; you can ring out church bells across the land or fire particles around a collider until they explode - you can do all sorts with a little tension.

But this is not the creative tension between opposing ideas, pulling out a glorious solution. This is not the harmonic generated by pinching a string at both ends and giving it a twang. This feels much less musical - like it's me being stretched, catgut pulled impossibly tightly by opposing forces that I don't understand. This is tension and it's hugely personal and confusing.

Hmm. I'll revisit this.

-

In the meantime, Christmas draws ever nearer. A great number of people it seems, are stubbornly refusing to think about, mention or have anything to do with Christmas until the first day in December. They say November is too early, that the season loses its magic if it begins barely a minute before midnight on that hallowed day, and that all who enter into Novembermas should be merrily ashamed of themselves for spoiling it for the rest of us.

I think it's odd logic, but I'm not going to knock those First Day Adventists. For those of us who play an active part in Christmas preparation, like rehearsing carols or writing Christmas music, 'tis the season from about October onwards. And for many people, the festivities spill out from the twelfth month where there really is no room at the inn for those extra events and traditions, and flood in to the end of the eleventh. We're even singing carols at a garden centre on Saturday (30th).

One tradition my sister and I have is the Christmas hamper. Every year, Dad's old work send us a hamper stocked with goodies: mince pies, sauces, wine, preserves, puddings, crisps, chocolates, wafers, condiments and compliments of the season. And every year since we were small, my sister and I have maintained the tradition of unpacking the hamper in a gloriously messy fashion.

She came round especially tonight for the Unpacking Of The Hamper. Who cares that it's November? It was great fun. There was packing foam everywhere (just as there is every year) and Mum pretended to get cross (just like she does every year) and the tins and jars and bottles are now lined up on the side, ready for the season (just like they are every year). Fun.

Oh! Maybe fun is supposed to be a kind of natural tension-relief. I think perhaps I need to have a think about that.

THE ASTONISHING POWER OF FRIENDS

A friend of mine did something really nice for me today. I'm not at all sure what prompted it, but it was a lovely thing to do. She just said thank you to me for being there for her.

I'm not sure how I did that. If anything, this friend has helped me out! I can't talk about it particularly, but some time ago she put herself on the line to rescue me from an awful situation. I don't think even she knows what she did, though I did thank her. She's quite awesome like that.

That's the power of friends though. Many of mine are like superheroes to me: lifting me up when I feel a bit down, invisibly listening when I'm a bit grumpy and able to see my situation with the kind of laser-focus I sorely lack when I'm right in the middle of it. Some join in with my quizzes and humour my quirky love of the English language; some risk enormous frustration to do some songwriting with me, and some just have the courage to tell me when I'm being a flippant hypocrite on facebook. And they know (I hope) that I would do exactly the same for any of them.

They're very important to me. I expect I'll mention them a lot.

Anyway, in the spirit of superhero chums, I've constructed a poem about friendship. Enjoy:

The Fantastic Four

I've got a friend called Sci-Fi Nick
He travels through time on a pogo stick
I met him at the zoo on an afternoon
But he didn't meet me till the following June

I've got a friend called Batman Stan
He dresses up in costume whenever he can
I met him by the swings at the local park
But he rushed off home 'cos he didn't like the dark

I've got a friend called Invisible Jo
She has to be the funniest of friends I know
She suddenly appeared during Freshers' Week
And it turns out she's a champion at hide and seek

Together we're spotted everywhere we go
Me, Nick and Stan and Invisible Jo
Some people tell us we are the Fantastic Four
But we're just happy knowing that's what friends are for.

THE DAY I FELT ALIVE AGAIN

I had tears running down my face and I couldn't sing. This used to happen a lot and I'd forgotten it. I tilted my head away from the microphone in that angled way that let me keep playing the chords I needed. After a while playing the piano, you get to feel like your hands are sort of disconnected from you, almost operating subconsciously. While the rest of me was quietly bawling, my fingers were hard at work at the keys.

This was the day I felt alive again.

I'd received a text message early this morning. As my room glowed an unnatural blue, I reached across and glared at my phone:

Hey Matt, Ruth not well and going to the doctors, could you lead worship?

I was expecting today to be less of a deep-end to be honest. The plan was that Ruth was going to lead, Rory would be there on guitar and I'd play keys. I was alright with that. After all, I've not been part of the worship band for eighteen months; I was hoping for a gentle reintroduction, with someone else in charge. Now, Ruth (our team leader) was out of action and it was apparently down to me.

Oh! I'm sorry to hear that! Hope she's OK. Yep, I can cover. Catch you later.

I've often thought that there's a special kind of grace for those short-notice moments. You can prepare for weeks in advance and not be as blessed as you can when you find out it's the eleventh hour and you're up next. I think we must have had a bucket-load of Short Notice Grace from God today, because the little bit of musical worship we did went really well. And I was in tears. That's the thing about God - he's always better than you could ever have imagined.

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

The Wise Men didn't have this trouble. They didn't have to pop into town and queue up with the masses at the Babylon branch of Argos for a tin of Frankincense.

While I love Christmas, I don't think I've ever been fully on-board with the whole gift-giving thing. Now, you'd better hear me out, lest you think I need a visit from three ghosts overnight. I actually enjoy giving presents to people I love; I also enjoy receiving presents from people who love me! The connection is a very special one, a tangible way of understanding that you are plugged into a network, a family, a group of people who have made an active decision to prove what love looks like.

What I can't get my head around is how it went from finding a nice little something for somebody special - to this whole pressure of a stupidly busy town-centre filled with frantic parents and arguing children in shops that are like a row of plastic ovens along the high street.

Here's how it works in our family:

We do a 'secret santa'. One Sunday afternoon in November (last Sunday in fact), the whole family gets together, each with a list of items they'd like as Christmas gifts up to a specified value. My Mum fetches my top hat (that I bought for a choir performance) and all the lists go in. Then, one by one, all the lists come out again and away we go.

So this year I've got somebody who has populated their list with items which are impossible to find. I mean they may as well have asked for a hairbrush made out of unicorn hair or a signed photograph of Genghis Khan. I like the challenge, but really? So my gift to you is dragon's teeth and your gift to me is a massively stressful medieval quest to find them?

Why should we have to write lists anyway? That's stressful enough. My mind goes blank whenever I'm asked to think about what I'd like. "Come on, come on, hurry up!" says someone, "We haven't got all day." We should know each other well enough by now. After all, we are actually supposed to be related.

In the end I wrote two words on my list in massive letters. AMAZON VOUCHERS. I don't think my Mum is impressed: she seems to think I should be a bit more creative. When I pointed out that my choice not only gave my secret santa an easy time, but actually maximised my ability to be creative, she was placated, but only for a little while, and only in that one eyebrow raised, Mum way.

"What if we all just wrote that?" she asked (it wasn't really a question).

Well, it would be fine. We'd essentially be buying ourselves a token gift which we can all spend on ourselves at a later date.

And that's my point I suppose. Trading a handful of Amazon Vouchers would all still be well within the 'rules' of the secret santa, and that nebulous thing we all call the 'spirit of Christmas' would be preserved, just as my Grandma would have wanted. It would just all be rather soulless; and I don't want Christmas to lose its soul!

Mind you I did scrawl the words AMAZON VOUCHERS in capital letters on my Christmas list to make a point, so perhaps I'm not really in a position to protest.

-

One thing I did do today was to start to look for little gifts for people who aren't expecting me to bless them with anything. There's another booby trap at the end of this idea: the guilty look they give you when they realise they've nothing to give you in return. However, I still think this idea is worth it, and perhaps closer to the idea of 'secret' santa than the actual secret santa that we do. I found myself in shops and departments I've never been in before, thinking about those people and asking myself how well I know them.

It turns out that that's quite a challenging question too. Have I spent enough time with that person to know, without a list, what would really float their boat? Maybe Christmas starts much earlier than I realised.

SONNET

It's been quite wintry today. As the crowd of software developers ambled out of the building and headed to The Bull, I thrust my hands into my pockets and took a sharp intake of breath. The lunchtime air was icy cold; a gust of freezing wind swept about the car park, blowing crispy brown leaves around our feet. The developers broke into a purposeful stride and we were off down the High Street.

We do this most weeks, this little trip to The Bull. It's a remarkable exercise in cognitive dissonance: everyone looks forward to it, emails go round at 11:30 with subject lines like Pub at 12? and Bull? and there's a sense of relief when we throw on our coats and head out of the door. However, all that ever happens at this event is a lot of shop-talk (moaning) and comment on how poor the service and food is at the aforementioned establishment. What exactly was there to look forward to?

This is the idea of cognitive dissonance: holding two opposite thoughts in your head at the same time, creating a kind of tension. As Aesop noted, the fox believes the grapes are for him but cannot reach them and so decides that he didn't want them in the first place. Nothing could sum up #LunchWithDevelopers more succinctly, in my opinion.

-

On a different note, I wrote a sonnet* today. Perhaps it was the weather that inspired this, perhaps it was something else. I'll leave that mystery open.

The Beautiful Heart

The beautiful heart lies captured and cold,    
Encased in the ice of the lady fair,
It shimmers with light in silver and gold,
Fragility frozen with love's despair.
Once held in the sun, by her lover's hand, 
Once given so freely in warm desire, 
Yet brittle winter, it now understands,
So broken and smashed by the fleeting fire.
She cradles the heart as it pounds within:
Still scarred with the wounds of a love laid bare.
The beautiful heart beneath icy skin,
Her treasure consigned to be frozen there.
O maidens, the heart let more than this be;
For love must require captured hearts be free

*Typically a Shakespearian sonnet had fourteen lines, each line written in iambic pentameter. I'm not a hundred percent sure what that is, so I've just gone for ten syllables in each line, three stanzas with an ABAB rhyming scheme and the final two lines as AA. It's not perfect, but it will do.

A CHOIR PRACTICE AND A WANING GIBBOUS PHASE

I stood outside the church and howled at the moon.

I know that sounds a bit weird, but that is exactly what happened. Well, actually, it was more of a 'Nooooo!' and it was more to do with my text messages than the silvery disk hanging between the clouds.

Don't you just hate it when you get invited to the thing you really want to go to, after you've booked a thing you also want to go to on the same night, but not quite as much? For a moment I raced through ways in which I could decline my first invitation. There were none. Could I lie and say I was ill? Absolutely not! Could I just not turn up? No.

Annoyingly, my conscience was showering me with lightning bolts of truth and shattering each despicable excuse as I thought of it. No, I realised after a few moments that the right thing to do is to honour my first commitment.

This was how choir ended for me tonight then: howling at the moon.

It hadn't been a bad evening. We had a couple of new people who really enjoyed it and the Christmas tunes didn't sound terrible... after a bit of practice.

"Listen!" I heard myself saying in that teacher-like middle ground between determined and grumpy, "You've got to hear the note in your head." I stabbed a D on the piano. "Hear it, sing it silently, then sing it out!"

I'm not the best choir leader or music teacher. I barely know what I'm doing most of the time, but I know when six people are singing six slightly different notes that they think are all a perfect D.

I also know it's very difficult to remain patient until they get it. It's always been astonishing to me that some people just don't know that a note is out of tune. I don't have perfect pitch, but to me, a flat note is as distracting and as incongruous as Mickey Mouse ears painted onto the Mona Lisa. Imagine staring at that hallowed painting with somebody who couldn't actually see a giant pair of Disney ears stuck carelessly, absurdly and horrendously onto Lisa Geradhini's head.

I'm ranting a bit. I can already see Future Me getting a bit restless at my immature lack of patience and good humour. Choir is full of nice people - I love all of them and we got somewhere nice today. It's just that it can be hard hard work, and despite people's best efforts to point out otherwise, I'm not exactly Calcot's answer to Gareth Malone.

For a start, I bet he never howls at the moon.

POTATO

You know how some people just miss the point?

Today as I was thinking about the whole sadness of divorces and breakups and children caught in the crossfire, I found myself thinking about marriage itself; what it means to people and how easy it must be to just miss the point.

I don't want to get all theological about it. Other people have far more eloquent things to say about what marriage is and what it isn't. As a single man and distant observer of marriage, I think of myself as much more of an astronomer than an astronaut. I know what I know, but some things you can only work out by going there for yourself.

Nonetheless, on my travels through the Internet, I found a story which might just be the strangest case of missing the point that I have ever seen. I should point out two things: 1. I am not suggesting that the point of marriage is sex. 2. The last sentence is a special kind of odd.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: probably the weirdest thing you'll read today.

TIDAL WAVES AND CHAMPAGNE MOMENTS

He ran a record shop. She was a healthcare worker at her local hospital, looking after sick children. They sounded like a very pleasant couple, you know, nice average people struggling to make ends meet.

"We have lived within our means," she said, "and we've been comfortable, but we have been like ships in the night to earn the income we needed."

Then one day, they won the lottery. And I mean they really won the lottery: £148 million.

You have to stop and imagine what that's like: a tidal wave of wealth, suddenly rushing over you, unexpectedly sweeping away everything you know, demolishing your life in the blinking of an eye. Champagne corks burst, cameras flash, the ridiculous numbers are printed on an impossibly big cheque, there are smiles, teeth, suits and smart ties everwhere and it feels like time is somehow elapsing around you.

And perhaps you don't know how to feel. Deep down you feel sort of... guilty. There's no time for that niggling feeling though. The tsunami pours through your mind, opening all the doors, bursting through each impenetrable barrier to your happiness and success. There's so much you could do.

-

There's a picture of this unfortunate couple in the news today. It's been just over a year since that sunny day in their garden, when the corks popped and the money flowed. It looks like the champagne has gone flat:


"A couple who won £148m on the lottery last year are to divorce, following the "irretrievable" breakdown of their marriage.

Adrian and Gillian Bayford, from Haverhill, Suffolk, bagged Britain's second biggest ever lottery prize with their Euromillions jackpot in August last year.

Jardine Michelson Public Relations issued a statement on Mrs Bayford's behalf confirming the split.

"Gillian Bayford confirms that her marriage to Adrian has broken down irretrievably and they have separated," it said.

"Gillian requests that the media respect her and her children's privacy and that of their wider family at this time."

- Sky News

I don't know these people but I feel really sorry for them. I bet as well, that both of them said cliche things like not letting the money change them, that it can't buy happiness and that they would spend more time with their families and each other. It would be out of place to speculate how such a thing could tumble from such good intentions, but it's OK to be sad for them. Perhaps, the tidal wave of wealth that devastated their home and ruined their lives did so over the course of many months, rather than in that first elated instant.

-

It's sad when people break up, especially when children are left to suffer. I've seen this a few times this year: people whose weddings I went to, played at and for whom I was Best Man. Who could have known on those sunny afternoons with the circus of camera flashes, suits and white smiles, that devastation was only a few years down the road?

I get angry about this kind of thing. I think it undermines the idea of marriage for the rest of us, especially those of us who have wanted to be married for a long time. However, being angry at the participants at the moment their lives are falling apart is less than sensible. The best thing any of us can do is to teach our own children the best way to live, whether that means being honourable people, or simply providing them with a better perspective on how to handle money really well.

That way, if they do win the lottery, they might be much more disposed to find creative ways to thank us.

THE DAY OFF

I've had a few days off from my day job. It's been nice: played a bit of piano, did a little poetry, met up with some people, went for a walk round the village.

A girl jogged past me in the twilight. She smiled at me as she ran by, her pony tail bouncing behind her, matching the rhythm of her trainers. "Hi!" she said, smiling, without missing a beat.

"Hello!" I said, and she was gone.

People are much more friendly in the countryside. It's always been the way. Once, in the Lake District, I passed two hikers in the woods, an older couple. They were arrayed in the standard anoraks, shorts and hiking boots, with matching walking poles. They smiled and commented on the weather as they passed. I agreed with them (because that's what to do with the English Weather Conversation) and then they carried on with their rambling down the path which I had rambled up.

Later, in Kendal, I saw the same couple in the High Street. Kendal is basically a town that's slowly being taken over by camping shops. Brightly coloured mannequins glare from large glass windows, urging you to buy a tent and some thermal socks. This couple ought to have felt right at home, walking down this wide cobbled avenue of anoraks.

It was odd then that they blanked me when I smiled at them. Out in the woods, they'd been gregarious, care-free, hiking types. In the town centre, they clearly trusted no-one.

I think that's really sad. If I meet the Beautiful Girl Who Runs again, will she remember me?

Seems unlikely doesn't it? I suppose life is full of those little encounters. Some last longer than others; some are packed with Instant Chemistry and some are Bound to Change with the years of knowing.

So, it's been a good day off.

THE TROUBLE WITH BLOGGING

I would like to be honest.

I'm not a very good blogger. I go through the loop: blog, stop, forget, remember, delete, blog, stop, forget, remember, delete... which is a depressing little subroutine. It gives full permission for Future Me to nip back to old posts and hate my writing, as he reads it with wide eyes and raised eyebrows.

There are other troubles with blogging. I worry that my life isn't that interesting, that I'll accidentally offend people by writing about them and that I'll be so over the top with my wordy wordiness that you'll think I'm a pretentious twit.

Future Me is all too aware of this. He looks back at me using words like 'vapid' and 'sequacious' and wonders how our paths could be connected. Meanwhile, I think of him as a rather critical part of my audience - the only member who knows what's going on backstage. He's rather an odd barometer to choose to measure the general reaction as he's something of an insider, but that is how it is.

He's probably cringing (somewhere in the future) at me calling you 'my audience'. But for now, while you shuffle into your seat and this paragraph floats across the Internet to your world, that is what you are. You sit with an eclectic group of people - friends, family, colleagues and strangers whose faces flicker in the dark as I look out from behind the curtain. I can't promise that you'll enjoy the show. I can't promise that I'll be interesting or inoffensive, but I'll try to open a little window into my life. If you're alright with that, I'll keep going - but you are free to leave whenever you like. Just don't disturb Future Me on the way out.

M