New Start for 2021

Some of you may have picked up on a slightly more light-hearted approach to how I write to accompany the pictures posted here over the last few posts.

Previously, I have tried to adopt a more neutral and serious type of fairly minimal commentary style for this site –posts still run away with me sometimes–but I also write in a more umm… humorous, deadpan and possibly dark and ironic style (ultimately that’s for readers to decide, but that is what it’s meant to be) on another blog.

Some readers are aware of both sites (and personalities) already, and I know some have found the delivery style changes very noticeable when going from one to the other.

As regulars here probably know, I have MS, and a lot of my writing is affected by how much energy I have that day. Low energy days are days when the creative imagination is often first to go, when my fairly small capacity battery is depleted, so those tend to be ‘post a picture on the photo blog and don’t say that much’ days.

More energetic days have the synapses doing all sorts of sparking, so they tend to be days where I create something mad, normally in verse or a short, for the humour blog.

Insert picture to break up wall of text here. Boxing Day ghosts at the beach.

Strangely though, I spend more time on creating posts for that site about three times a week (currently 90 followers, a regular 9 or 10 views!) than I do on this one (lucky to do more than one a month and currently 1020 ish followers, a regular 40 or 50 views per post).

Possibly some sort of lesson there, but probably not one I’ll like, so I’ll ignore it.

Anyway, I think it is taking me more energy to suppress the humour and madcap voice for this site, and to try to concentrate on creating the ‘serious artist’ tone, than it is just to get on and let it flow in whatever mood comes out on the day.

And, to be absolutely honest, I enjoy creating the humour posts more. It’s the more ‘real me’. And most of those days, I can’t actually be bothered to come down and adopt the less whacky tone again for a post here.

So, this is effectively my ‘coming out’ post, where I let go of all pretence of being sensible and stop trying to keep the silly from leaking out. Hopefully, not having to change gear will result in more posts here.

As I have mentioned to a friend before, it increasingly takes energy I haven’t got to pretend or try to present these different voices as separate aspects of me, and I’m now officially too old to care what anyone else thinks of me–and I now can’t remember why that seemed important for so long anyway–so bollocks to it.

The other blog is at scribblans.com if you want to take a look at that. I won’t be hurt if you don’t like it at all, but I’d much appreciate it if you can spare some time (especially while locked in with nothing better to do) having a nose at it before running away screaming.

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Ah, some pictures at last.

I have good reason recently to thank my friend Ida Swearingen–and I have, profusely, but this is more publicly–partner of (also friend) Ellen Hawley who blogs here. She knows why, so I won’t go into the detail here, save to mention that in future my photographs should damn well be good quality.

Ellen posted some starling murmuration photos on Christmas Day, taken up at Roughtor by Ida. It set off my memory about some of my own, and I thought I had already posted them here before, but it turns out that was on an older and now gone version of this blog.

So here are my additions to the Roughtor Starling and murmuration event photos (with one of a Starling in my garden to get an idea of the close-up brilliance of the birds–and I’ve thrown in a gratuitous sunset one I took on the way there too).

Hopefully the complicated tier lockdowns level rules might allow Ida and I to get up to Roughtor together again soon, to add to our portfolios of this stunning spectacle.

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Thanks for checking in today, and if you got this far, well done. Happy New Year.