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myths and histories of a reluctant blogger

Prudence, one of the Cardinal Virtues, looking into the mirror of reality and holding the snake of wisdom, by Sebastiano Ricci. Fresco, 1706 -7, Palazzo Marucelli-Fenzi, Florence Image: WGA

“For whom is your blog?” I was asked by a beautiful blonde lawyer posing a killer direct question in the gentlest of tones. I was nonplussed. She’d found me out.

I hadn’t thought about a target audience. With unwavering politeness, she filled up my silence by suggesting that “writing to please yourself is probably the best way to start” and, conscious of wasting time umming and erring, too embarrassed to make an emotional declaration (we were in a public bar, not a consulting room), I didn’t dare demur, even though I knew it wasn’t the whole truth.

This is a confession. All the dead queens and dionysian poets who haunt this place, the bugbears and hobbyhorses, the great actors and Master Bettys, all the ghostly performances, some good, some awful; heroines and heroes overthrowing tyranny with witty one-liners; young women bravely stepping out to claim liberty and equality in a new world wearing see-through dresses and pearls, while crowds cheer yet another emperor‘s new clothes (eye-witness accounts being no more or less true than fantasy); all the pleasure gardens and painted illusions, the aching arcs of beauty and the secrets kept between the lines, are for someone in particular, who can’t see or talk about them any more.

I’m continuing the conversation, but now it’s one-sided, just me talking to myself. It’s nuts, in fact. Is all blogging insane? Are we shouting at each other across the void to drown out the sound of our fear?

Once I can get my head round WordPress, please eavesdrop, please interrupt, please comment, if you want to. There are inconsequential posts, pompous posts, rambling posts; you are not going to like all, or, perhaps, any of them. There are pictures, though, masses of pictures, and what is the use of a blog, the modern Alice might think, “without pictures or conversations?”

View of the Gardens at Hever Castle photo by PJR © November 2012