A blog in the making. It’s been a long time coming, but the things in my head must, finally, have a voice. I call them things, because they’re not words yet, nor even thoughts. Rather feelings, drifting shapes in the dark spaces around the edges of my conscious mind, waiting for me to name them and mould them into shapes in ink on a page.
Why am I writing this now? I’ve wanted to write since I knew what words were, what books were. Why have so many indifferent jobs that were never exactly what I wanted to do, stopped me from doing the one thing I was sure I did want to do? Why not any time in the last year as I’ve ploughed through a life time of sad memories and tried to rebuild my motherless world, full of thoughts and feelings to express? Why now?
Because of two men. One, a neighbour who was slowly becoming a good friend, who died suddenly a few weeks ago. I thought we had years ahead to chat about all the many things we had in common, watching our kids grow up, running in and out of each other’s houses, but sadly it wasn’t to be. The other, a boss I worked for fifteen years ago, whose blog detailing his battle with cancer I discovered this week. His writing, determined, stark and funny in equal measure, reminds me that we all have words that need to be heard.
There have been times when sitting down to write has felt like trying to build a cathedral out of individual grains of sand. The sheer enormity of it has made me slink away from the task defeated before I’ve even begun. So I need to start small. Just words on a page. And these first words are dedicated to two men: our much missed neighbour and friend, and a thoughtful, principled former boss who gave me opportunities and taught me a lot, who I’ll probably never see again as we live in different parts of the country, whose journey I can only read about from afar. Both have helped me realise that writing can’t wait any longer. I can’t keep putting it off as too difficult, waiting until some mythical moment when the time is right. Time is, after all, limited, and we never know when we’ve missed our last chance.
So this is me, now, taking a stand against procrastination, against the fear of failure, against the indifferent dead end jobs, the cleaning up after the kids, and the ironing, the crap telly and the pointless arsing about on Facebook. This is it. I write.
kirstwrites 
I like your blogs – very thoughtful and moving. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon have also inspired me to read more about the First World War – fiction, as well as personal accounts. I wonder if you’ve read the autobiography of Harry Patch, who died aged 110 about three years ago.
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Thank you for the follow and your positive feedback! I haven’t read Harry Patch’s autobiography but would really like to, I was reading an article about him recently and he sounded really interesting in many ways, not just that he lived so long.
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