Why I am Bothering Your Brain With This Blog...

Last Saturday

So.  Intro.  I want it quite clear I was nagged into this.  I lost a blinking contest and fell victim to some reverse psychology.  The thing is, you can’t go about the place ardently telling your friends you ‘want to be a writer’ for a very long time, occasionally show some of them your stuff (to mixed reaction), without someone piping up and asking you why you don’t blog.

To these friends (and one in particular), it doesn’t matter that a blog is more like a public diary entry, or an email, in tone, than a novel or a short story (which is what I write).  (Heh, heh, lets more accurately say – short stories, is what I write; a novel is what I want to write when I (a) get an idea that’s both long enough and I don’t get bored with after Chapter 6, and (b) when I get more than half an hour a day to myself to concentrate.)  (I am further aware, that many people will sniff and say, ‘excuses, excuses, my Uncle Popple wrote a huge, massive book with two minutes a day in 1941 while being bombed, in a shelter’ etc etc.  That’s as maybe – as my partner Alias Stanley Kubrick [SK, or Stan] would say.  But I’m not Uncle Popple.)

The person who irritated me into this will soon see the error of his ways, I am sure.  In the meantime, I will bore you – all, er…2 or 3 of you who may pop by to see what I am waffling about on any given day.

I wish it known, I shall be waffling about myself (oh, there’s plenty of irritating introspection to come, fear not).  Also about Things That Annoy Me and Things That Please Me.  I shall waffle about things I am into (e.g. modern neo-paganism – I shall be wonderfully vague about this), or things that worry me, like established religion (I have strict views on the necessary vagueness of this).  Food, animals, astronomy, history, books, music, pub quizzes, TV, films, philosophy, psychology, and my feeble beginner attempts at gardening.  If I have help, I shall not disgrace myself discussing science sporadically.  My arguments with grammar will on occasion be covered.  My disagreement at having it pointed out to me that the word ‘alot’ doesn’t exist. (Piffle – words change, and I say it, write it, and prefer it to the two-worded boring version.)  I really like words.  Not necessarily long or rare ones.  I quite like having lots of them in a sentence; I have a great fondness for adjectives and adverbs, and probably not always in the currently considered correct places.  Stuff will be spoken of.  You know, the usual. 

This is not to say that I know with any degree of certainty or teacherliness, anything about any of these subjects.  It’s all, ‘like, my opinion, man’.  You probably shouldn’t let anyone, ever, lecture-ise you and tell you in a Certain and Concrete Type Way, about anything.  (Except things like: ‘That’s hot!  Don’t touch it; you’ll get burned/scalded!’  Etc.  Then you put your hand near it, to check, and it would likely be giving off heat, so you proved that to yourself anyway, without having to get burned.  But you know what I mean.)  I’ll say what I say, if you haven’t gotten bored and wandered off; and you’ll read it, think about it and then…wander off.  And check for yourself.  Make up your own mind.

This is the main point, really.  Why I said it was a daft idea for me to blog.  I don’t have set in stone opinions on much at all.  Quite a few bloggers seem to.  It seems to be a very opinionated game, from what I’ve seen for the last few years.  Whereas I like for new information to come in and annoy the old information and embellish it or rout it.  (For instance, I had a long and well-cherished notion – we’ll get to ‘notions’ at a later date – that I liked the idea of the Loch Ness Monster.  Why not?  That wasn’t a literal question.  I have partner Stanley for telling me exactly why not for 3 hours, thankyou very much.  I had, after those 3 hours, to regretfully let go of the original idea of the Loch Ness Monster as a possible as yet undiscovered dinosaur, due to some incontrovertible logic.  I was a bit sad, as I didn’t have an idea to put in the place of this.  So I mourned my old idea, and made scrunchy-eyed faces at Stanley for a few days. Then I saw Men Who Stare at Goats [1].  And was cured!  Of course, it’s a GHOST of a dinosaur!!!  How can I possibly be argued with now?!  I am currently unassailable on that one issue.  Then again…it’s still not set in stone.  I may be all wrong about my ideas about ghosts, or imprints, or manifestations of universal consciousness or collective unconscious or whatever we shall call them….plus, yes, it could all be my big wishful imagination.  But I like the idea.  And I will defend it as far as to say – ‘yes, I may be wrong, tell me a better story, I’m listening’.)

There will be footnotes going on here and there.  I know it’s all the fashion to link to everything you speak of in blogs, but I intend to do some book quoting.  And no, not every book known to man or my little collection is on the web.  Or available as an e-book.  (Which are all very well, but bloody hell, don’t you want to hold your books, smell them??  I have a beautiful copy of Charles de Lint’s Moonheart  that I got from a 2^nd hand bookshop, in the 90’s.  The Orb edition, with the lovely artwork.  It must have come from a really damp house, as the pages were not only the usual tan, but a bit warped too.  But the smell.  It’s a book about a forest, and the book smelled of the forest.  All the way through, every single time I turned a [magical] page, I got this marvellous foresty smell.  Let me say, there may be a million worthy reasons for getting a Kindle or suchlike: larger print for eyestrain, or free classics to name but two…but they will not, as yet, give you surround forest smells.  Just remember that.)  Anyway.  Specific page quoting from books.  I got into this tiresome habit while doing an Open University  MA a few years back.  My thesis drove me bonkers: talk about a game being played, the whole thesis process; but by the end of it, I was wedded to the idea of checkable footnotes.  Also, if you’ve ever read (especially early) Terry Pratchett , you’ll know footnotes are great fun, too; home to many a spurious and tangential aside.  (Almost as good as brackets.  I like those also.)

Oh yes, the obvious.  I live in England.  I’m a girl.  I should probably say woman, being 40 now.  I have two children. The now 20 year old Son Number One; and the now 18 month old Wonderful Fluffhead/Tetchyhead (depending on mood), Second Son.  I’m at home at the moment, looking after The Fluffhead, and attempting to convince him some things really shouldn’t just be randomly grabbed/ torn up and so on, though the world is clearly a marvellous and much curious place.  Stanley K goes and does the bring home money thing, in a weary way.  Thanks to many factors (some our own fault, some not) we aren’t very well off at all at the moment; so I shall likely moan about money here and there (as well as a good moan about many other things). 

And this is actually how I talk.  I’m not putting on a tone here.  Apart from the footnotes, which can’t really be replicated in speech.  I can, however, do brackets, in speech – it’s all a matter of simple hand gestures.  (When Son Number One was tiny, it was also a matter of special bracket noises.  We still do them sometimes, one of many things that really make us laugh.)  I am quite grumpy, even though I think the world is brilliant .2  This will come across in my tone.  Some days I get very sad.  But we’ll see how it goes. 

The reason this blog is called BlackberryJuniper and Sherbet is twofold.  BlackberryJuniper was the result of a conversation with a sadly now lost ex-friend and fellow blogger  who one day changed his facebook page and suddenly had a brilliant nickname he’d decided upon in the middle of his name.  (You know, like American stuntmen being Joe ‘Slugger’ Hawkins or whatever.)  We chatted away about this excellent and silly development and I decided I wanted to give myself a stupid nickname too.  And came up with BlackberryJuniper, which isn’t stuntman-ish or literary (as his was) at all.  But I liked it, and it’s me in a goodish mood.  Sherbet is me in a sad/bad mood.  That just came into my head one day: sherbet is so prickly and unpleasant and immediate on the tongue (to me – you go ahead and like the taste, good for you).  It seemed to me that was how my sad/bad moods felt.  I do feel like these two are almost separate people in my head.  No, not in a scary literal way.  In that when I am in one mood I have very little understanding of the other mood at all.  Each moody me views the other as stupid and deluded. So that explains that.

Anyone who got this far, in this post that really went nowhere and rambled something terrible, I thankyou.  About time I wrote a proper post now, eh?

Which must mean its lunchtime.  It is 1.30 after all.  Nice to meet you.  I really do hope you’ll come by again.

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[1] Apparently, Jeff Bridges films are a major tool of thought provocation.  Try one and see what you think. 

2 I think Paul Whitehouse himself is brilliant, too.  What a versatile comedian.  Apart from those adverts.