More about the Beta move

As I said before, I've moved over to Beta. It involves a lot of administrative work, which is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it means you don't have to be creative if you don't want to. On the other hand, it is grindingly boring when it involves a lot of click and point and click again on the laptop.

Also, my aching wrist/ elbow/ shoulder joints which are getting really bad again are not able for more than an hour of tagging old posts. And then typing for another thirty minutes is out of the question.

But I have 150 posts done.

I'd have more done, but I keep stopping to read old posts.

I was quite witty and interesting for a while back last winter wasn't I?

I wonder what happened to me?

le's have a liddel look at what we is blogging about...

Politics (47)
Work (30)

AHAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!! Methinks.

All the same, 24 themes is pretty good. Well rounded.

Scatty probably. Not able to settle on anything as usual.

I'm reading a very strange book at the moment.

Little Chapel on the River, by Gwendolyn Bounds.

It's strange for a number of reasons.

It's about a woman who had a very high flying career as a journalist with the Wall St. Journal. Admittedly she was the fashion correspondent, but fashion is big business and she had the designer clothes/ girlfriend/ apartment on Wall St./ hectic glamorous lifestyle us over-achieving thirty somethings aspire to.

Then 9/11 happened and she took stock.

She was out house-hunting north of New York, her apartment having been very badly damaged by the explosions, and happened upon a little town called Garrison Landing, in which there is a pub run by a man called Jim Guinan, who used to live beside the golf course in Springtown, which is of course my hometown.

And he reminds me of someone in the photos of him that scatter the book.

And the pub sounds just like my favourite pub ever, Smoothies (moment with head bowed in memory of Smoothies and all its memories), just a little bar below the house, with flexible opening hours and a laconic owner.

So she fell in love with the pub and the family that ran it, and the people who drank in it, and the town in which it was situated, and all of that, and moved to Garrison Landing and took a leave of absence from her job to work in the pub.

Which is of course what I did a year and a half ago, except the job in the pub never quite materialised. And I had nothing that I had fallen in love with apart from an idea of a place which turned out to be wrong, but in a good way.

And the book is structured very like my blog. A bit of narrative about my life. Some pen pictures of other people. Snippets of introspection and memories. Descriptions of the surrounding countryside.

No politics but. Just the occasional mention of Donatella. Or Tommy. Or other random rich people.

And a severe case of the attachments to a manky old camp that she spent summers in at an impressionable age. the fact that she was nine and I am thirty six is irrelevant.

So the parallels exist but are a bit bendy, not truly straight as parallels should be.

The existence of which mean that I have many emotions concerning this book and the woman who wrote it.

Firstly, the emotion I always have when I read a book.

Someone sat down and wrote this. So why don't I? Because I'm a lazy cow, that's why.

This one is getting annoying and is what stopped me reading before so I have to just get through it and get over myself as someone would say.

Secondly, a kind of patronising pity - if she were Irish, she would have been able to blend the glamorous life with having a nice little local. I mean, look at Bertie! Or Bono!

Thirdly, a kind of vicious hatred masquerading as pity. Effing Yank! She was ar muin na muice (I'm taking the piss here now because she keeps quoting 'charming Gaelic phrases' that Jim Guinan taught her), on the pig's back with her nice life and then it all went awfully wrong when her apartment was in the line of disaster from the Twin Towers destruction. And I'm halfway through and she still hasn't mentioned the fact that they brought it on themselves.

Fourthly, huge shame: why am being so uncharitable about what appears to be a thoughtful intelligent woman who has used the tragedy of 9/11 to figure out what is important in life?

WHICH ACTIVITY I TRY TO ENGAGE IN CONSTANTLY AND CONSEQUENTLY SHOULD ADMIRE IN OTHERS.

If I was to be brutally honest, I suppose the vicious hatred masquerading as pity is just jealousy.

Fifthly, a kind of smugness: I have done the same as her (changed my life to figure out what the important stuff is) and I haven't felt the need to write a book about it. And get an agent and get it published and write a gushy acknowledgement to just about everyone on the planet.

Sixthly - well you can imagine - a blog is just a book without a plot or an editor now isn't it, yes sirree bob, so get off your high horse MADAM.

More shame, in other words.

Maybe if I apologise to the woman I will be able to get over myself and finish the book and get over myself.

Sorry, Gwendolyn. I am enjoying the book despite my horrid little black soul.