Melbourne Cup Day is an anniversary of sorts for me: exactly two years since I started blogging. Which makes me sad and frustrated, because, despite my best efforts, including stooping to facebook, my basic audience has barely increased.
But it makes me happy and satisfied too. This time a year ago, I wrote:
‘A year on, the best thing my blog has done for me is provide a regular deadline. It has forced me to write something most weeks.’ Amen to that.
My first ever post was about a visit to the Forum to listen to Clare Bowditch. Clare B appeared in the blog again in August 2011, when I wrote about attending her tribute to Eva Cassidy. And, a bit of a theme happening here, in a couple of weeks my daughters and I will go to hear her yet again.
Another local artist I have long admired had a great quote in the weekend mag I was reading yesterday. Helen Garner, in extracts from her diaries has this to say: ‘Someone has published a biography of Muriel Spark… Apparently her letters make no reference whatever to current events. So?’
Thank you Helen. My blog could be accused of the very same thing. I do think about current events a lot. Right now I am sitting on the verandah of my family shack at Anglesea and it’s warm but not too hot and my feet are bare and I’m in my favourite, raggedy soft old dress; my little dog is sitting beside me, quietly panting as she shifts into the shade. I tap away on my dinky little computer that I don’t have to share with anyone else, and I’ve just had a perfectly good cup of tea and I think about the people in America who have lost everything in Hurricane Sandy, and about asylum seekers, and Pacific Islands disappearing under the rising seas and the seeming pure self-interest and short-sightedness of our politicians.
I seldom write about such things, however, because I have nothing helpful to say. I’m peculiarly dense about politics; anything analytical is completely beyond me. I know what makes me angry (narrow-mindedness, fundamentalism, entitlement) but can no more muster coherent arguments against such things than fly to the moon.
As a writer, mine is a very domestic canvas, because people and relationships and observed, small details are what I know about. So I am relieved to hear someone as august as Helen Garner saying that’s okay.
Cup Day always seems to come as an extra treat, an undeserved blessing. A mini-holiday before the plethora of public holidays around Christmas and New Year that mean you can have a fortnight off simply by taking a few days of annual leave. It’s the warm up, or maybe the cool down, for summer.
This year it feels more underserved than ever in my case, as I’m only recently back from seven weeks of leave, and although work has been busy and our social life slightly nuts, it hardly merits four days off.
I’m at the beach by myself this time; my husband has to work in New Zealand and the kids are elsewhere. I haven’t had so much time by myself in ages, and I fill it doing some of my favourite things – not talking, walking many kilometres along beach and bush tracks and reading detective stories. It’s almost warm enough for a swim – maybe tomorrow. I sleep longer than usual at night and get up after a long lie in. I nap after lunch. I do a bit of tidying up around the house but mostly I am utterly lazy. In the evenings I cook exactly what I want and gaze into the fire. I connect to my kids on the phone and look forward to my husband coming home on Wednesday.
I read the weekend papers from cover to cover – every trashy bit of them and I send out thoughts to the thousands of people I read about in dire situations. I fail, once again, to write about current events. I think about blogging and if it’s worth the effort and I decide that, for the moment at least, it is.