Ignore everything I have just said

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

My morning editing conference is cancelled. I am all ready to whip that puppy into shape, but the world intervenes. The Co-Writer has to go and do something, with real life people. Instead, I write 679 desultory words, and ponder the nature of perfection. (My conclusion: just say no.)

It is fifteen days to go now. My world shrinks and shrinks. It is as if I am looking down a long, shiny, well-lit tunnel at midnight, the road slick with rain, the headlamps of the cars dazzling as they all go in one direction. (The fact that I imagine it as glittering and lit up seems to me a Good Sign.) Everything outside the tunnel is blurred and indistinct.

I just have to hurl myself down it for another fifteen days, and then I shall emerge into the world again and there will be daylight and trees and flowers and vistas and people and news.

Well, I'm not sure if any of that made any sense.

Warning now for the next few paragraphs: those of you who have no interest in blogging might like to go and make a nice cup of tea. Imagine it as an advertisement break in the middle of your favourite television show. But I must, for some reason no one can explain, share with the group.

So: the Tumblr experiment. FINISHED. It only took 36 hours. I hate it. It's annoying and recalcitrant and won't bloody do what I want. One of the Dear Readers who kindly went to have a look said it demanded that she sign up with it, before she could leave a comment.

I find it limited and limiting. I can see that for a certain kind of person it would be perfect, but not for me. Still, for some reason my current favoured displacement activity, for when I want to give my harried mind a rest, is the setting up of this thing I imagine in my head as a lovely virtual commonplace book. There will be a link here, a picture there, a moment of YouTube, a line of poetry. I need a magpie place, which is not here.

I have no idea where this imperative comes from, but it must be met.

So I have trudged back to dear old Blogger, which does have its own irritations and limitations, but does allow me to do more of what I want. It also lets me to use Live Writer, which is by far the best and most useful blogging software I have ever discovered. Pictures go up in a flash; formatting is easy; everything is clear and clean.

The only fly in an otherwise restorative ointment is that the templates here are not nearly as delightful as the Tumblr ones. That is the only place Tumblr wins for me: it looks better. But for God's sake, it's only a blog, not the roof of the Sistine Chapel.

So now, madly, there are two blogs. (Why? Why? What is wrong with me?) There is this one, which shall continue to ramble about dogs and food and politics and life and whimsy. And there is the other one, which will have a picture or two and interesting things I want to preserve from around the web, and whatever clever thing Andrew Sullivan has unearthed that day.

It is called, with blinding brilliance and originality and no expense spared: Tania Kindersley. And you all have my full permission to ignore it, because it's not as if I don't make enough demands on your busy lives.

(But, you know, if you do like it: tell all your friends. So sorry, there is something about finishing a book which brings out all my competitive spirit in its most gaudy, shameless glory.)

 

No time to take the camera out today; too much to do. So here is a small selection of pictures from this week:

It's the time of year when I start taking a lot of pictures of fallen leaves. I'm afraid there will also quite soon be lichen:

My little roses are still blooming away, proving astonishing value for money:

Because of the indoor light, they have come out rather blurred here, but I quite like the effect, as if they are out of a painting from 1923:

Pigeon gets her now statutory three pictures or more, on account of the raging beauty:

She's been making that last face quite a lot lately, and it is my absolute favourite, so I'm afraid you may become quite familiar with it. I think it is her most dignified and grand face, the one to which she clearly imagines her age entitles her. And so it does.

The hill is actually today's hill, because it was looking so blue and pretty at breakfast that I took a quick snap of it before I had  my bacon sandwich:

So sorry this has been all rather rambly and unfocused lately. It's crazed brain overload. Thank you all so much for sticking with.