Contradictions
It's almost half past seven in the evening, dinner is finished, the washing up is done, the kitchen is clean, the washing machine is on, and I'm in the dark of the study tapping away at the keyboard while the Spotify 'Favourite Coffee House' playlist fills the room.
Miss thirteen didn't go to football practice tonight – she is claiming a clearly non-existent injury. We think it has an awful lot to do with the coaches of her team splitting away from the club in order to run the teams as they see fit, rather than abide by any goals such as inclusivity, or development in mind. We won't talk about any of the other things they have done that I shouldn't perhaps know about.
So – the evening is my own. Hence this blog post. Finally a few minutes to sit down and empty my head into the keyboard. Of course now I have the opportunity, I have nothing to write about. Or perhaps I do?
I've been thinking about this whole blogging thing recently. I swing from wanting to go all-in and write more regularly, to closing the lid on the whole thing. One day I wake up, and I'm enthused to share some idiotic though or other with the wider world – the next day I wake up, and think 'what's the point'. Sometimes I want to hide the entire blog under a huge stone where nobody will find it – then a little later I wonder what I was so worried about.
I'm full of contradictions. I probably always will be.
Late last night I watched the movie 'The Post', about the 1971 government papers scandal that engulfed the New York Times and Washington Post. Something struck me in particular while watching it – the old-school journalists working in the background of many of the scenes – the click-clack of their typewriters echoing around the room – their words being stamped into the paper as it scrolled through their typewriters.
There's something romantic about typewriters, and something noble about the work required to press the keys. Hammering ink into the paper is somehow more permanent than typing on a computer, where a few keypresses can re-work a sentence. Is there more truth in a type-written or hand-written page? I suspect there might be.
I don't really know where I'm going with this. Maybe it's about truth – honesty – transparency. Maybe those journalists hunched over their typewriters spoke to me in some way about the romance of the written word – and maybe that's why I haven't stopped publishing these blog posts yet.