When I finished this blog in February on my 30th birthday, I was both sad and relieved.
I had enjoyed having a place to whitter on about whatever was making me smile or frown or laugh or rant, and I have to admit it gave me a warm fuzzy feeling every time I got a comment from a reader.
But it was also another thing on my ‘to do’ list (not The List, but my day to day list) and after it finished, I found it was nice to just live life for a while without constantly analysing events and anecdotes to see whether they’d make a good post.
However, after almost three months I’ve started itching for a platform where I can once again share my thoughts without having to wait for a commissioning editor to approve my ideas.
And so, I am very pleased to announce that I am in the process of whipping up a new and improved blog, which I hope to launch in May.
In many ways it will be much broader in scope than this one, covering all of my interests from crafts to writing to current affairs to God, and I’m planning on including photos, guest bloggers, interviews and maybe even a bit of video on occasion – are you as excited as I am yet?!
If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see, topics of interest or anything else, do drop me a line via Facebook, Twitter or by leaving a comment here.
I look forward to seeing you all on my new blog in just a few weeks!
4 comments
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April 22, 2010 at 8:44 am
Em
That’s great, I always enjoy your blog!
May 18, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Boz
I’ve just come across your blog here and I can’t resist a comment because your birthdate is the same as mine and the concept of your blog resonates in a way that will become clear by the time you finish reading my comment.
I was wildly ambitious on starting my working life. So I hustled and bustled around something rotten. The minute I got a job, I was looking for the next, but better, one.
I had decided to be a writer at the age of thirteen. By 21 I was a magazine (a minor one) editor and brazenly trying to commission people like Lord Mountbatten (I succeeded) to write for me. My magazine publishing company bought out Richard Branson’s Student magazine and stuck my name in the credits as contributing editor or something. Branson had failed. We hadn’t and were going from strength to strength.
In pursuit of of becoming a newspaper journalist I went downhill a bit to work on a weekly and then a daily provincial newspaper. Then Public Relations lured me with a better salary. I was dazzled by glamour and an unlimited expense account in the golden age of PR when it was new to the UK.
I mingled with the great and good (inc the odd semi minor Royal ) and was even incinerated by the Queen’s laser like glare from five yards as I stumbled backwards in front of her while she was striding up her very own red carpet to open something or other. A memorable moment.
Coming to my senses, I went to work for a news agency in South Africa at the age of 26.
By the age of 28, I had accidentally acquired a restaurant in Johannesburg. It was fun and it was successful, but it was a mistake. It wasn’t being a writer.
Then I made my really big mistake. I got married to a waitress who had worked at my restaurant. I didn’t know it was a mistake until decades later.
But it was getting together with her that put an end to any prospect of having lots more commercial adventures until I eventually hit some sort of jackpot of proper success.
My wife turned out to be a slow motion emotional train crash just waiting to happen. So from the time I first met her most of my time was spent coping with her neediness or doing all the homemaking things for our children that Mothers are supposed to do do while husbands and fathers go out to earn the dosh for the family to spend.
When she finally ran off after nineteen years with a serial family wrecker who specialised in stealing other people’s wives, she announced she had spent most of the marriage, right from the very beginning, deliberately undermining my attempts to do things like a set up a business and generally get on in life.
I am now 62, a full time single parent to an eleven year old boy with no mother in sight – at all. His mother was another train crash. A medical one this time, leaving me the sole carer of our son pretty much from birth nearly twelve years ago.
I never imagined during my twenties that I was successful about anything I did and generally thought all my career efforts were pretty useless and had got me nowhere useful at all. Nothing about any of my jobs impressed me at all at the time.
But, hurtling towards geriatricity as a delinquent full time single parent of 62, fighting extreme poverty, having lost absolutely everything and with no prospect of anyone ever offering me a job again, I view my twenties with wistful regret, wishing I could be there again to take advantage of all those opportunities. And, boy oh boy, would I really take advantage of them right now !
I cannot have those opportunities now. It is annoying to see daily reminders of Richard Branson’s huge success and fortune of hundreds of millions and know I was doing better than him at he start, and could also be modestly comfortable by now instead of totally penniless.
Bad decisions must have been made, but they were not bad at the time, and nor can they be seen as bad in retrospect, either.
It is just the way the dice rolls. If I had married a different wife who didn’t occupy every moment of my life to the complete exclusion of anything else – like a career for instance – things would have been different and better.
So, Watch out. You can be ambushed by life and wake up thirty years later and wonder where the hell your whole life has disappeared to.
May 18, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Boz
psst, you don’t mention where your current blog is.
May 18, 2010 at 1:38 pm
rinsimpson
Hi Boz, sorry to hear about your difficulties. Agree that it’s important not to let your life be ambushed – I guess that’s part of the reason I started my blog, to keep checking in on myself and make sure I’m heading in the direction I really want to go! New blog is at http://www.nowiamthirty.journoblog.net – look forward to seeing you there.