The quality of discourse on Have Your Say, hosted by the BBC, has hit a new low. In a discussion entitled ‘Should reparations for slavery be paid?’, one poster actually wrote that because the British were the first nation to denounce slavery then -
“No, we should not apologise. In fact, a “thank you” from a large part of Africa would be in order. “
What is even more ridiculous is that as at the time of writing, it was top of the ‘Readers Recommend’ list, with 623 votes supporting it.
One of the recent changes in my life concerns my attempts to study (part time) at home, using distance learning, for a university degree. It’s been going on for two or three years, and whilst I’ve enjoyed the studying/reading part very much, I have not cared for the essay writing/exam parts at all.
Partly because I find that with a full time job, part time studying and other commitments, I just don’t have time to read or write, I decided to not study, but just work, read and write. However, I am working on a plan where I can get all the pleasures of part time study (reading, research, finding out stuff), without the pain (exams, essays). It mainly involves buying textbooks and reading them – not much of a plan but enough I hope.
Is this enough? After all, the actual qualification doesn’t matter to me (it was only ever a pride thing), so surely I can just self educate myself anyway?
It’s probably so obvious to most people reading this, but when you have spent the last three years studying hard (I have at least another four years to go – it’s part time remember) and 10 years before that being obsessed with obtaining a degree, sometimes it’s difficult to see the obvious.
Where was I?
Not much has happened.
I have just been busy and not writing and being distracted too much. Yet I continue to return to writing. I have made some changes in my life, of which more, perhaps, later – I am simplifying things, returning to basics if you will.
Always waiting for something to happen.
It’s time for a few words about my writing life before we go much further with this adventure. Back in the days when the drudgery of 9to5 office life had not yet crushed my soul, I thought I wanted to write. Well, more than that, I did write. I even had a couple of poems published in a small press magazine. That was a decade or so ago.
Go back further, another decade perhaps, and I was the typical bookish kid – read continuously, wrote a little, but writing was not really something people I knew did – for a living, or a hobby. It would be considered very pretentious, even if these people knew what that mean’t. But who cared? For me, reading was all that mattered.
Then in the next decade, as I grew older, I dared to consider writing as something I would/could do without fear of embarrassment. So I did, for a while. And then I stopped. Now, a decade later, I don’t remember why I stopped – it seems ridiculous now, but it must have been that I thought it was pretentious and I persuaded myself that this somehow mattered.
That’s all fine, but the thing is that I recently started again and now I can’t stop. I wish I could remember where I read it, but someone somewhere once said that he was told that he would never be quite satisfied in life, unless he was writing. Anything else would not be quite good enough.
It’s like having to scratch an itch that never quite went away.
So this is it, Hello World!
Quite a relevant start because I am in the I.T industry and Hello World is about as far as my programming skills reach. Anyway, this blog isn’t/won’t be about that. Well maybe some of the time..
Mostly it’ll be about books, writing and stuff like that. This is writing exercise to me – some place to come and work out my flabby brain once in a while. This guy is my inspiration – I’ve been reading his blog for a year or so and am full of admiration for a man who pumps out quality material every day.
Go read his blog, don’t stay here…Go on, you won’t be disappointed.
