Commitment issues

leaving London on a Friday night - should do this more often!

So, since this new blogging space remains temporary and ambivalent, and I’m not especially happy about that; and since I always feel more real, more centred, more purposeful, when I’ve written or photographed something; and since Udge made me aware that as well as NaNoWriMo there’s now November National Blog Posting Month: why not give it a go?

There’s a major reason why not: because I’m such a raving commitment-phobe. The very thought of saying I’ll post something every day for a month is enough to put me completely off blogging for the duration.

And am I happy to be a commitment-phobe? Resoundingly NO. I guess I’m signing up, then. And if it turns out to be a really bad idea, there’s always, as a fall-back, National Sweater Knitting Month (I have one I started earlier – a wide, simple shape in grey-blue cotton-silk mixture by Rowan). Hoping, then, to produce something in November; perhaps even two things, but that’s probably pushing it.

Here in London, it grows chilly, the soft Autumn light still breaking out, but more and more fleetingly. In recent days, a renewed flurry of tourists clogging the footpaths – school half-term holidays in England, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe. The film festival is almost over, but still more films, plays and exhibitions than I can ever hope to see, or even to be aware of before they’ve come and gone. Too much to see, too much to miss. Better to just savour what comes my way, look out for certain things, but also leave it to serendipity. I’m tired, from too much work and some hard stuff to deal with – the usual hard stuff everyone meets from time to time. Social engagements find me tempted to cancel and go to bed, but afterwards very glad I didn’t, needing always the reminder that people and activity are nurturing as well as draining.

Recent pleasures in between the sad, tiring bits: reading Sebald, whose work did not appeal when last I tried it several years ago, but now delights me; Depardieu’s return to form in The Singer – capitivating, troubling, light but touching something deep; snatches of orquesta típica (click on 'photo gallery', also for audio links) from Peru, evoking a long-ago, never forgotten visit to a country that still, all these years later, calls me back.