I MUSTN'T GRUMBLE

I'm conscious that it has been a few days since my last posting and that always makes me feel slightly unsettled. I worry on two fronts. Firstly, if I let too long drift by between postings then I will have to break the agreement that I have with myself to blog regularly. Until this year I kept a diary, scribbling pertinent facts and feelings down each day in a long line of A5 notebooks. However, after much soul searching, I decided that I really didn't have time for both that and this and so I dropped the handwritten diary in favour of my blog. So if I drop this one as well...You see what I'm saying.

Secondly, I do seem to have regular readers and I fret that if they log on once too often with nothing new to read then they will find something else to fill their time. Simple vanity really but it's as good a motivator as any.

My difficulty this weekend, as is often the case, has been thinking of a subject to write about. This was not because life has been quiet. Far from it. The last two weeks have been particularly busy in what is a fairly packed programme in any event. No, the problem this weekend has been a question of attitude more than anything else. My attitude to be specific.

I tend to think that a blog should truly represent the thoughts of the writer and whilst I have toyed with writing as an alter ego, fundamentally what is on these pages is just me, soul bared for all to see. But this tends to clash with my other strongly held belief that no one wants to read about someone else's gripes. There is nothing entertaining in listening to someone complain about what is fundamentally a blessed life. A soul in torment might perhaps appeal to a particularly empathetic reader. Likewise, genuine despair is worthy of column inches. But just being a bit hacked off? Not really.

 Only a really close friend can sit and listen to a liturgy of grumbles and be genuinely sympathetic. No one else really cares. And they are right. The chances are they have their own irritations which may well be worse. We all have to deal with the day to day difficulties of life with varying degrees of success. My view is that there is nothing amiss with having a little moan at your own predicaments but I do try to do it with a smattering of gentle humour so that people can empathise and reciprocate with a little moan of their own. That way we can all understand that the vicissitudes of life throw spanners into everyone's works.

And so to that end, I have kept my counsel this weekend, although I do own up to bleating a little bit on facebook. If I can't manage to tweak the nose of adversity and raise a wry smile at the situation then it's really not worthy of note here. I suspect this week will be less demanding than the previous two and really in comparison to a great many others, I have nothing to moan about. And so I won't.