Where You Can See My Sky - Justifying Writing

I've wanted to write a blog for years. Lots of my friends keep diaries, something I've always shied away from, partly because they seem too introspective for someone as unashamedly performative as myself and partly because they take so long to write - and, as my friend James observed to me the other day, there's not much romanticism in typing up a diary! Blogs are different, but I've never bothered to actually set one up until now. Why the change of heart?

1) It's a Monday out of term, and I am both bored and anxious about my inability to relax constructively.

2) Several of my friends write excellent blogs, and I am obviously jealous of this.

3) Cynicism about writing is a bad thing. When I was doing research for my coursework (I am a nerd, and proud) I came across this quite encouraging passage from The Worst Journey in the World, a brilliant account of polar exploration coming ever closer to its 100th birthday and written by a man with the silliest name ever to reach a publisher's desk. Apsley Cherry-Garrard's motivation for writing was as follows:

'When I went South I never meant to write a book: I rather despised those who did so as being of an inferior brand to those who did things and said nothing about them. But that they say nothing is too often due to the fact that they have nothing to say, or are too idle or too busy to learn how to say it. Every one who has been through such an extraordinary experience has much to say, and ought to say it if he has any faculty that way.' [Project Gutenberg. Retrieved March 21, 2017, from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14363/14363-h/i.htm#VOLUME_I, Preface]

I don't think my life is necessarily an extraordinary experience, but it is an experience, and there seems no point not to write some of it down.

Anyway, I had intended to explain why the title of this blog is what it is, but I'm literally about to leave on holiday for Malta (!). Hopefully I won't forget that I've started this venture while I'm there.

RJLF