“That was the last day of June but this is the first of July”
From First of July, written by Jules Maxwell, performed by Foy Vance
On Thursday night I was sitting on a London Overground train from Whitechapel to Crystal Palace, homeward-bound. The train had just stopped at Surrey Quays. Filling all sonic space in my head was the magnificent Vesterhavet by Tobias Hellkvist, a huge ambient piece that I can’t stop listening to since I was introduced to it a few months ago. The summer sky was a darkening grey, a far cry from the delicious deep blue warmth of the week before.
There and then I made the decision to quit social media for the rest of 2017, since I’ve realised it makes me feel bad more than good at a low level. If the truth be told I think it makes most people feel like that but they cling on to it anyway; as a (real) friend put it in a Facebook comment when I announced I was packing it in for a while, “This is the sensible thing to do, but i can’t take my eyes off civilisation collapsing.”
Having seen a number of completely fake narratives presented there, I know some of those über-cool lives and goings-on are often complete fiction. I also see sides of people that I really don’t like, and that’s upsetting. I just don’t want that noise any more, so I’m going to write this blog instead.
I always have a wobble at the start, feeling it’s just too narcissistic, but I’m hoping the vibe won’t be like that. I was inspired to reignite it by my friend Foy Vance after visiting him recently. He said he used to love my old blog as it was just a diverse ramble through everything I love about life. Well, I’m converting those old posts into a form where they can be read again, for what it’s worth.
I started the original blog in Australia in 2003 when we were living in Sydney. Life was very different then. Living in Sydney for starters. Not married. No kids. Putting the finishing touches to my first album Angels in Drag. Wow. Just thinking about that makes my head spin. I remember starting the blog. I threw a textfield on the screen in Flash (remember Flash? Probably not!), wrote something in it. I had a whole day to figure out how I could write day two’s entry and navigate back to the first one. Then another day to be able to navigate any number of days. Then months. And so on, just building it myself – it was a lot of fun. Now I’m just left with a bunch of XML data files that are no use to man nor beast in their current form. The plan is to write an importer so I can bring them all into WordPress and archive them in this blog.
I’m sitting in my bed downstairs at home, listening to Vesterhavet 4 (glorious!!!) with a cup of Yorkshire Gold in hand, typing this last line before the mad flurry of geeky activity as I get the blog online. By tomorrow I’ll have figured out how to get the old stuff up and we’ll take it from there.