As I sit here, I am supposed to be working on the slides for a presentation summarising the progress of one particular project I am working on. Somehow, though, as soon as I open my laptop and start trying to work on it, nothing puts itself on the pages, and my mind goes completely blank.
There is something about standing up in front of a room of people who are all watching you expectantly that engenders a mortal terror, a sense of dread far outweighing the actual gravity of the situation. Even when the people in question are colleagues and friends who I have worked with for many years, it is still impossible to have any sense of perspective. I love my work, and the project I am working on is fascinating, but still, trying to express that fascination in a formal setting seems almost impossible for me.
Well. This hasn’t exactly gone to plan, has it…
When I set out to create this blog, I promised myself that I would make at least one post per day, and sometimes more, depending on how the mood took me. As things have turned out, it has been 5 months since my last post. Life took me in some interesting directions, and it turns out that tiredness, of a kind less favourable than that spoken about in my last post, took me by the horns and forced me into a state of apathy in all of my spare time for much of the time since that post. Finding the will to do anything beyond what is necessary for daily life has been a major struggle, and the energy I have had has felt more sefully employed in persuing my other hobbies than writing here.
Tiredness is a strange beast. It raises its head in so many different guises that it is hard, sometimes, to determine its nature or intentions.
There is the tiredness at the end of a long day spent well in hard physical work outdoors: a clean, all encompassing tiredness that says “You have done well. You may now sleep.”
This is very different from the tiredness resulting from a day spent sitting at a desk, or on a sofa, staring at a computer screen and trying to write a report, or produce computer code. That tiredness is not clean, and does not reassure you. Instead it says “Well that is a day you will never get back. Maybe you will make more of tomorrow. Best sleep now and see what it brings.” But so often sleep does not come.
I’m always amazed by how little there is to say to people who you haven’t seen for a while, compared to those you see every day. Yes, if it has been years, and they were a good friend, there are the major events of the intervening time to catch up on, but a month, or two months seems to be a low point on the conversation scale.
When you see someone every day, they are closely entwined with your life. Their trials are, to some extent, your trials, as are yours to them; you discuss the things that annoyed you in the office, or out collecting data, or washing the dishes, and somehow these little things are enough to keep you amused for hours.
I had forgotten how nice the seats on mainline trains are compared to the local commuter trains I travel on every week.
For the first time in far too long, I took a long train journey to see a friend on the other side of the country, and was blown away by the comparative luxury.
To have enough leg room to sit without one’s knees digging into the seat in front felt like heaven, and there was even enough room that I could have my laptop on the coffee table and get some work done along the way.
I didn’t think that there’d be anything to say on the housekeeping front so early in the life of this blog, but a lot has changed over the last couple of days.
The chances are that no one will have noticed the changes, as things are still in their early days, and it is unlikely that there have been any visitors yet. But for the single person reading this in 10 years time, this blog started its life on Blogger, before moving to its current home.
