Ton up

Hello dear readers!

It’s time for a little positivity, I think.

Those of you that have the dubious pleasure of following these attempts at communicating the flotsam and jetsam that floats through my poor addled brain may have picked up a somber mood to my posts of late. A certain maudlin quality.

This of course has a lot to do with my recent medical diagnosis, (see here if you don’t know what I’m talking about) but while that was less than ideal life does indeed go on, and this week there is a reason not just to be positive, but to celebrate!

On Purpose
So what, you may very well ask, is the reason for such unabashed joyousness? Well this blog post is not just the usual inane ramblings, but is actually the 100th post. Yes, that’s 100 different rambling of various degrees of inanity that I have inflicted on you, my dear readers.

So, how did this all start? Well as with many unfortunate ideas, it started with boredom. The year was 2015 and I had just left my employer of the last twelve years due to them deciding that the job I did for them didn’t need doing, at least not by as many people. This left me, with a boosted bank balance,(due to the redundancy pay out) but a certain lack of purpose.

I had, as mentioned, been in that role for quite some time and as the company in question were a major international stockbroker,(To be clear the company was a stockbroker. I wasn’t. No red braces, no file-o-fax, no champagne) it would have been really quite easy to fall into another job in financial services. The problem with this being that such work, to me, is about as interesting as attending the international cardboard and Styrofoam convention in the Scottish village of Dull (yes, the village is real, look it up).

What's the Catch?
So, with money in the bank and time on my side. I decided that putting a little thought into my next move would be a good idea. I’d always fancied having a go at the whole writing thing, and had dipped my toe into the waters of fan-fiction and short story writing before. As these early attempts were very particular in their subject matter and required a borderline unhealthy obsession with certain television shows, they were not seen by all that many people. This is probably a good thing. 

Still though, I fancied trying my hand at getting some money for this putative hobby. The issue here being, as I soon found out, a lack of formal education, and a lack of that much coveted experience. The latter point being one that Joseph Heller might have an opinion on.

Write Off
The handful of jobs that I applied for then, were, possibly understandably, reluctant to give me a go and the spectre of financial services reared it’s head once more. I raised my concerns regarding this with the lady at the job centre who put me on to a skills clinic at the library, who suggested that I start what would turn out to this very blog in order to be able to showcase my talents.

Since then I have held three jobs. All of these were in financial services of one stripe or another, none involved writing. You could say therefore that the endeavour was not an unqualified success. Nevertheless, if it wasn’t for that job loss, and the advice received by the woman in the library then the blog might never have existed… So blame her. 

 The first attempts at getting words down were, perhaps a little unpolished. I think they made sense, but looking back it’s difficult to see them as part of the same continuum. You can see examples of those first attempts here and here.

On Schedule
Those first few months were faltering to say the least. I had yet to develop the habit of writing, the routine that has led to Sunday being blog day and looking back through four pages of entries I can see that, after an initial flurry of activity (five posts in eight days!) things became a little haphazard. There are a couple of gaps of a month or more where apparently life was boring enough for me to not have anything to say at all. Doesn’t sound like me does it?

Things soon settled down, however to the weekly schedule I now follow. Of course there have been exceptions. I’ve ended up in hospital a couple of times in the last few years and Tina, my wonderful, and at the moment blue haired, wife had her functional stroke just over twelve months ago. These occasions did not afford the time or mental ammunition to get any meaningful words down as you can probably understand. Coupled with the odd spot of technical trouble involving laptops up and dying on me these few examples remain the only ones where a given week has not seen a blog post. I can only apologise. 

Owzat!
So, here we are now, and hopefully here we stay. It is, to steal a cricketing term, a hundred not out, a century of sending the minutiae of my life out into the ether to be examined by whoever has the patience to do so. I can raise my bat to the stands and take a moment of satisfaction in putting such a knock together while realising as Mr Boycott might say, that the work has just begun. I can’t throw away my wicket just yet. 

Having wrung that analogy absolutely bone dry I’ll leave it there. Many thanks to everyone of my readers, both regular and new, for your support in the last couple of years. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this or any other post, or the blog in general in the comments section below, (just underneath the post... Yeah you got it) and to know these words are not just disappearing into the ether. Again thanks for reading, and here’s to the next hundred!

Until next time…