47 Days

I feel like I should explain the fairly sustained absence of blog posts over the past couple of months. After more than 100 consecutive daily posts BT decided they were sick of me rambling on and took the drastic step of taking away my home's internet, on demand TV and phone line. They claimed it was just a technical fault but if they’d simply asked me to stop posting I would have, there was no need for them to react quite so badly.

As it panned out we were without their services for a good 3 weeks and as a sign of how internet dependent I am, they were painfully long weeks. It started off as the simple frustration of being disconnected, not being up to the date with social or global news, but after a week you start to become aware of all the little things that the internet provides us with. After the 15^th time that you see someone in a TV show that you recognise from something you watched years ago, you begin to truly appreciate the wonder of IMDB and Wikipedia. The same goes for songs and Youtube, it takes surprisingly few days before the question of whether you’ve heard so and so’s latest song becomes incredibly annoying. Then there’s TV; I pretty much never watch a show at the broadcast time, I’m utterly used to watching a show when and where I want after it’s TV showing and the realisation that I had to rearrange my plans around when a show was on came as a bit of a shock.

I’m happy to concede that so far as the blog was concerned I was actually a little glad of the enforced hiatus at first; though I was happy I’d been able to keep up the daily posts for so long it was beginning to feel like a chore rather than something I wanted to do, and until I am being paid for this blog I don’t want to write if I’m not enjoying it. However the delay has stretched beyond the period I didn’t have an internet connection and there are a couple of reasons for that.

After 3 weeks and after watching what felt like every DVD in my house, BT felt they’d punished us enough and internet was restored. However the next day I was offered a paid week at the Derbyshire Times, the paper at which I did a week of work experience at earlier in the summer. The week was great but working a full day’s work after a summer of inaction left me with little energy to restart the blog.

The fortnight or so between the week at the paper and Sunday’s post can be explained by a combination of laziness and uncertainty. The laziness is simply a product of me being me, but the uncertainty is a little more complex. After such a long break I wanted the first post to matter, to be something which stood on its own rather than be either something trivial which seemed to continue where I left off without explanation or this kind of post where I justify the absence without any clear sign I intended to post more.

9/11 and the whole incredibly complex range of thoughts and emotions it triggers was the perfect reason to restart the blog. It was a topic worthy of an isolated post, something I care a great deal about and an ideal way to return to my melodramatic but well meant rambling. So 47 days after the last post, about a music festival in Sheffield, I'm back and though I have no intention of resuming posting every day, I hope to write reasonably frequently from now on.

Today’s song is one I rediscovered my love for during the time away, a song from an album which provided the soundtrack for the majority of the time I was writing my story a couple of years ago.