Bear Faced Bloggery

 The year is turning... 2023 becomes 2024 in a single tick of the clock... yet nothing changes, for all our drunken resolutions and best intentions. Everything that occupies our hearts and minds on December 31st will still be foremost in our thoughts on January 1st. The same wars will rage, the same injustices perpetrated. Joy and sorrow, violence and frustration, love and loss, depression and anguish... they will all run on from one day into the next, across the dateline that separates the old year from the new.  Jolly little soul aren't I? January is, of course, named for the two-faced god Janus - not two-faced in our modern sense, but able to see simultaneously forward and backward, and so it is natural that New Year's Eve should be a time of both reflection and anticipation. For those that know me, or follow this intermittent blog, you will understand that 2023 has been a year that I am all too happy to put behind me, and any reflection that I may be engaged in as the world

  My last post on this blog was in March, and was pretty optimistic and upbeat in tone. Well, what a difference a month makes... for in April my world crashed and burned. Before I continue, I want to say that I have not written what follows out of any sense of self-pity, neither do I seek to elicit pity from others, nor to justify these words by hoping that others in a similar position may find comfort in them (though should that prove to be the case, I wish you well, fellow traveller along this darkest of roads - you are not alone). Rather I am writing as nothing more than a form of therapy for myself, to try to express a little of what I have been holding inside over these last few months. Nothing more, nothing less. So what's it all about?  For those that don't know, April was when I lost my best friend, my soulmate, and the love of my life... and the darkness closed in. Since then, I have been struggling to make sense of a life which seems directionless and empty. One of th

  "We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener." Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot. The last time I visited this blog, I was dwelling  (perhaps a little overmuch?) on the speed with which life was hurtling by. Well, it will come as no surprise that it hasn't slowed down any. If anything, it seems to be accelerating, like my foot is to the floor and there's no way of lifting it off.  I can't believe that it has been ten years since I made the decision to 'take my writing more seriously'... ten years since I won a writing competition which led to the publication of my first short story, and which gave me the confidence to try to establish myself as an author. Over that time I have, like most writers, been trying to fit my writing around work and family commitments, meaning that there have been whole swathes of time when I haven't managed to put any words down on paper at all. I have also, over this period, got ma