Diary Note No 1 – The blog

A Thursday morning at 10 am, I’m having breakfast in Café Beva in Glanmire. Eating scrambled eggs and sausages, drinking a black Americano.

In front of me the Irish examiner newspaper.

It’s a dry cloudy day, less damp than usual.

I put a vase containing a small bunch of two red roses, one white rose, and three sprigs of lily in the kitchen.

Louis, our English setter, is in the car. I’ll take him for a walk when I finish here.

Thinking back to 2005, when our daughter was born, and we came to Cork, from BathWith baby Grace – that was another age.

I started blogging, often daily. The good old days when blogs sometimes attracted long conversations on text.

In those days I grew new friendships via the blog, by commenting on other people’s blogs and a few times meeting bloggers face-to-face.

I remember JL Pagano, Paige Harrison, John of Dublin, Sinead Gleeson, Conn O Muíneacháin. I’ll remember more later.

The best way to start blogging is to read the blogs of other people, and connect with them on their blog. I left a lot of comments. It didn’t matter very much to me how many people read my blog posts.

I had an audience. I wrote for my daughter knowing that she would not be interested in anything I wrote for maybe 25 or 30 years.

It’s important to have a focus. It was also excellent writing practice.

Today I find it hard to recognise my own writing. Sometimes I say “how did I write that? Where did those words come from?”

Maybe I was a better writer then.

The words came to me as if they were an organic extension of my daily life, and thoughts, and feelings.

Sometimes poems came. sometimes political invective came. Other times observations about this new country I had returned to.

In February 2019, I don’t know what will come out.

We’ll see.