looking back through the bilge archives, i notice with a shudder that i’ve still not written the second [and hopefully concluding] part of my whitby 2004 entry. the thought of having to do so empties me of enthusiasm with each passing day, as the memories fade and the events pass further into history. as if that wasn’t bad enough, looking back further reveals that the magnificent record of my travels in ireland during the summer is still languishing in the archives, with only the first day and night preserved for posterity.
when it comes to my writing, t’was ever thus! even way back in primary school i remember beginning to write my essays [or 'compositions' as we called them then] full of enthusiasm, my mind filled with all the great things that were going to happen and the marvels i was going to describe, only to run out of steam after about a page or so – at which point i would usually employ my own pet ‘get out of jail free card’ and abort the narrative with a hurried “….. then i woke up and found i had been dreaming”. my childhood diaries [a regular - and asked for! - pressie from santa claus] would be filled with microscopic writing, detailing the minutiae of my humdrum existence for two or three weeks into january, before deteriorating into a repeated “nothing much happened today…” by february and then petering out completely by the ‘ides of march’.
at school they called me lazy, but i prefer to think of it as having a butterfly mind – ‘done that – got the Tshirt – what’s next?’. and of course the fact that, to my knowledge bilge – sook my stupid brain! has a readership of one kind of acts as a disincentive to burrow back into the archives to finish pieces off, when even the current up to date ones are only ever read by their esteemed author!
