In which I write about absolutely nothing at all

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I don’t know that to write about today. I hate that. I quite often start the blog whilst cleaning my teeth in the morning. (I hear the voice of Bagehot in my head: don’t let the daylight in on the mystery. Because of course my blog is identical to our gracious Queen.) Then I think about it a bit more on the morning walk. Then I obviously have to concentrate on work and other things, but it comes back to me when I am cooking lunch.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if it were a great, gaudy stream of consciousness? Imagine if I just sat down and all the words in the world streamed out. But, unlikely as it may seem, I do think about it. Some days, there is an obvious subject. Sometimes, it is instinctive. I may be feeling an emotion in which you must share. (Oh the poor readers, I think, as I am taken over by a strong force.) There may be a vast political event, although I have found that sometimes I avoid those, because they are too big, and I am too paltry. Some days there is a big, fat nothing, and you get extra Pigeon pictures and I hope nobody notices.

Then there are the days like today: a series of false starts. Hares begin running in my mind, and just as they look promising, they bugger off over the horizon, never to be seen again. I did think of giving you the entire story of the King George, fence by fence, and don’t breathe a sigh of relief, because I shall almost certainly do that before the week is up. But I am quite tired today, in that rather deflated no man’s land that comes between Christmas and the new year, and even half a bottle of iron tonic would not get me up to par for that big post.

There was the huge fuss on Twitter, which has now been called Pandagate, because the BBC put up its twelve female faces of the year, and one of them was the lady panda from China. Yelps of outrage on one side; calm down dear on the other. I wandered vaguely in half way through, and it was rather like coming late to a cocktail party and only getting the tail end of the scandale du jour. (I found it much odder that one of their faces was a woman called ‘Princess Charlene’ who married the bogus Prince Albert of Monaco. Brain could not compute that on any level.) I wondered if I might write about that, but then I decided it really wasn’t that interesting.

Then I thought I could do my own women of the year, but that needs thought and care and a great many visits to The Google, and I am still on holiday, and really want to return to my secret indulgence of catching up with my favourite American political programmes on the MSNBC website. (Rachel Maddow might go on my women of the year list.)

Finally, I just opened my fingers and began to type. And this is what came out. It’s not marvellous, is it? It’s what the pundits would call a process story. It’s a faint wander round the rather desultory functioning of my post-Christmas brain. But there must be blog. The fingers must tap tap tap on the keyboard. Sentences must form, and paragraphs be created. I still feel slightly angsty that I gave you only pictures yesterday. There must be prose. That’s my mysterious imperative.

The winds are getting up outside my window. The sky is the colour of aquamarines. My house is quite silent. The Pigeon is curled up like an apostrophe on her bed. I have made some watercress soup for strength. Later, for a real treat, I shall watch the King George again, and read my special Christmas copy of The Banned List by John Rentoul, which I gave to myself. I love it so much I have to read it very, very slowly, to make it last. Then, who knows, I might go back to Twitter and see if people are still cross about lady pandas.

 

Raining now, so cannot take the camera out. Here are a few pictures from the last days:

Lovely Younger Niece, on our Christmas day walk, with the wind in her hair:

Can't resist another picture of The Pigeon in her Christmas bow:

And with her Grace Kelly face on:

And the lovely, glimmering hill: