Mission Statement 2.0

Seven and a half years having elapsed since my original ‘Mission Statement’ I thought that it was perhaps time for me to once again take a moment or two in which to ruminate on the disparate reasons for all of this.  I, in common with the rest of the world, have changed over that time: in 2018 the UK Prime Minister was Theresa May, The U.S. President was Donald J Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping… so, ok, the world has not actually changed that much at all: maybe it just feels more f*cked up than it used to be…

I have changed.  I was approaching my sixtieth birthday back at the start of this and I am comfortably past my sixty-seventh now.  Physically I have changed – hence the new site icon with which I appear to have replaced a smug Kenny Rogers lookalike with a startled Freddie Mercury – I seldom drink and write these days and if I have a peanut butter sandwich I owe it to my teeth to make certain that it isn’t crunchy, but this blog continues to be principally about me and how I fit into the world that surrounds me.

Well, not terribly well as it turns out.  We rub along ok I guess, the world and I, but as I get older, the world is definitely gaining the upper hand.  Since the start of this picaresque narrative we have, in the UK, blundered through Brexit, staggered through Boris Johnson, done God-knows-what through Liz Truss and we are now about to bequeath Nigel Farage to the world (although, let’s be honest, some of you deserve him).  The rest of you have had to endure the age of the three Presidential Marx Brothers: all of them barmy and each with a finger on the nuclear trigger.  Between them they have made the sad descent of each of us into mental and physical decrepitude far less certain – we may well not have the time required to get there.

So, where should I start with blog 2.0?  Writing blog 1.0 sometimes required the kind of attention usually reserved for drunken games of Jenga and cooking risotto – the former being far too fraught with possibility for me to even consider these days and the latter having become so routine a part of my existence that it now requires little conscious thought except in attempting to correctly double the amount of wine stated in the recipe.  Going forward – nonsense phrase of the day as I have yet to find a way of taking my life backwards – I feel that I will have to come up with some kind of agenda which I will pin to the office wall.  If it is anything like as efficient as my medication-taking regime, we may well all find ourselves at a loose end before the year is out.

It occurs to me that I should also probably tackle my tendency towards self-obsession, but I have no idea what that would leave for me to write about.  Even when I write fiction I seldom actually create characters, but rather pick out threads of my own personality – almost always the ones that I would most like to eradicate – and magnify them.  It is the only way I know to find empathy with the bad guys.  It is the only way to give them a third dimension – unless of course they are politicians in which case, having two faces, they each have four dimensions, the fourth being naked, self-serving greed.

I have tried many ways of keeping up to date with WordPress Reader, but setting a few minutes aside before each writing stint seldom works as I always get drawn into the ‘Comments’ boards and either write nothing of my own or do it at 2am fuelled by coffee, chocolate and whisky – a regime which, as I have said, I have endeavoured to leave behind me (a task made much easier by my current lack of deadlines: everything can wait) so I tend to block read on my office laptop which has a screen of sufficient dimensions to ensure that I can see the words without resting my nose on it.  I can lock myself away in my office and shut myself off from the world, but the world doesn’t care for that very much.  It is insidious.  It always finds a way in.

Managing distractions should be easy, but almost anything can get a grip on my attention: raindrops on windows, squirrels on fences, delivery drivers on my driveway, birds on feeders, who sang that, who wrote that, I wonder what time it is in Ulan Bator?  It doesn’t take much.

Now, where was I?

Focus is the thing.  I am really good at focus – compulsive almost – when things must be done, but far less so when completion is merely desirable.  Latitude is something I should never be given – unless, of course, you are attempting to give me directions, in which case it could be very advantageous.  I am capable of drifting off from almost anything and I spend much of my time trying to work out how to get back to where I was – if only I knew where that was.

I am, in truth, a bit of a rambler – except I hardly ever wear shorts and never with a knapsack – and where I go is hardly ever where I intended to go, so maybe detailed planning is not entirely feasible.  I very much hope that this blog can offer a view of the world through the eyes of someone who is beginning to reap the harvest of sixty odd years of life.  I do not want it to be about growing old, but about living with growing old.  I don’t intend to regale you with a list of everything I have that is packing in, but to concentrate on everything on and within my body that is not giving in to the ravages of time.  I can’t think of much at the moment, but leave it with me…

If I’m honest, the plan remains pretty much as it always was, to cock a snook at age and everything it brings with it (although, not with sufficient severity to annoy it to the extent that it buggers off and leaves me).  Over the last few I have learned that I cannot ignore everything I am told (my wife is particularly adamant that I adhere to this particular principle in all my dealings with the medical profession – even when I would dearly like to believe that they don’t know what they’re talking about) but I can choose to not necessarily hear everything.  My age makes that so much more believable.  My mission is to catch old age with its pants down and to take a snapshot for all the world to see.

Your mission – should you choose to accept it – is to come along for the ride.  You might as well.  I mean let’s be honest, how long can it possibly take?