Tuesday 10 July 2018

Swoop

Hi.

It's been a while, eh?

I'm swooping in to say hello and -- maybe -- goodbye.

How strange to reread my most recent post, from the 16th of October 2017. I had just started uni: English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. I'd not quite been there a fortnight. Now I've done my whole first year, read more books than I could have dreamed, found more wonderful friends than I dared hope, learned more about the Lord Jesus than I could have imagined. Written nearly two drafts of a novel (Stay in the City. Corrie's story continues, one familiar presence in my changing life). Co-led a Christian Union. Laughed a lot, cried a bit, fallen in love with a city.

Oxford skyline
[source] // My Oxford.
Drank a lot of tea.

Not blogged.

I have never before been busy the way I am busy in Oxford, and it feels like blogging never stood a chance. Finding time to write my novel is hard enough -- finding time to write about writing about my novel, or about the books I've been reading, seems impossible. And there's the ephemera of blogging, the photographs, the memes, the tags, the commenting back, which I found quite draining towards the end. Gosh, I'm talking like someone's died. But I suppose that, since October, I've vaguely viewed this blog as something I'll come back to one day, and now I'm coming to accept that perhaps I will not be back.

And that's really sad, and maybe, no, I don't want to make that decision!

So let's not call it a goodbye, but an au revoir. I'm swooping in now, and may well swoop in again. Because I miss you guys, and want to know: how are you doing?! What has 2018 served up for you? Do you think football might be coming home?

I am rereading Harry Potter.

I have also started on my uni work for October and am getting well into Renaissance poetic philosophy. You heard it here first ...

Soon, I am going to write the first draft of Some of the Trees (The City and the Trees #3).

Liana Jegers.
[source]

And look how easily I slip back into the ways of talking about myself in serif font, interspersed with pretty things from Pinterest! I miss blogging! Take me back??

[source]
Like many of my essays, I'm not sure this post is going to have much of a conclusion. Can you let a very irresponsible and inconsistent blogger back into your hearts? Should I start posting again? Anyway, update me, talk to me, I miss you. Here is a poem I've been loving recently, by the Scots Makar Jackie Kay.

from Bantam (Picador 2017), p. 6.

~***~

And with that, I swoop away.