I’m back up in Aime2000 (probably “A2k” here in the future). I arrived, via a visit to an impressive service for people with addictive or impulse control problems in Lyon on Monday, up here Tuesday evening. Wednesday included a lovely meeting with CA, former colleague in Nottingham and her partner in Champagny; Thursday I shot down the mountain hairpins to be in Aime well before 10.00 to watch the Tour de France shoot through … then I crawled back up all those hairpins; Friday, as I feared, I didn’t get the landline and broadband fixed; yesterday was mostly sorting things out to be back to work properly by Monday; same today.
There’s so much there that merited blog posts in just seven days and the three weeks before that were also full on with the SPR meeting in Amsterdam, a few days back with the family in London, the EPCA conference in Edinburgh, a few days with my parents in Wales, back to London to see the family again briefly, join the anti-Trump march, catch three exhibitions and then the trip to Lyon and back here. I have a least ten things that I’ve wanted to blog about in that time but, and this has always been my problem with blogging, when things are full on there is much to blog about but there’s no time, but when things settle I don’t write them.
Part of the problem is, of course, that even when I’m not scuttling around and seeing things, I’m still more or less desperately trying to catch up with a backlog of work and more personal communications than the blog route supports. |However, another issue is that there feels to be a tension between the immediacy of focus that seems typical of blogging (“specious present” anyone?!) with the clarity that what I’m wanting to write about still is now firmly in the past. For a long time I’ve found the calendar on the right (on a full screen) of the blog posts rather limited as you can’t jump around in it and it only shows posts.
So, finally, I used some time yesterday and today to choose and install a calendar plugin on the site. It’s a horrible long URL:
https://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/ecwd_calendar/calendar/
but it’s there in the top menu of all the pages on the site now as CE diary. One big advantage of this is that I can put events into the diary and crosslink them to calendar. One of those coming up in a minute. What I’m hoping to do over the next weeks and months is to protect a bit of time every week to blog not just about the present but about events from the past, and link them into that calendar. One thing this will help me do is reprise the ride that started all this two years ago. Better late than never and perhaps an opportunity to broaden out from the excessive immediacy of most of my blogging so far? We’ll see.