Igor Clark

A bright, crisp, late March morning. Slinking my way work-ward through Liverpool Street railway station, my attention was snared by an amorphous yet authoritative yellowy blob. My mind cast back by this shade and style of stance to a May Day gathering in exactly the same location some years previously, which culminated in some plastic punks indulging in wannabe anarchy and eventually engaging in largely police-led "incidents" down by the river, I ducked behind a column, the better-guarded to draw my photographic weapon, point, and shoot. I took down seven of them with one shot and escaped, unscathed.

I'm starting one of these darned "weblog" things, right now. Everyone's doing it, you know.

I dislike immensely the term "weblog", and "blog" is evidently many times worse. However what's happening is that I'm falling prey to what seems an inevitable sequence of events; one ages a little, and one starts to realise that it would be helpful to keep the occasional record of things that happen, and one's reactions to them. The encyclopædic memory of youth - horrific a thought though this may be - begins (albeit almost imperceptibly at first) to fade, leaving one prey to the ghastly realisation that one's recollections of a given incident, its time or place, or the list of participants in its occurrence may be faulty, and that one's connection with it is no longer mediated simply by the mire of perception but also by that of time and distance along that axis.

Thus: this.

I'm aware that a personal diary published on the public Internet is a grotesque conceit. I shall attempt to diminish the scale of that conceit firstly by claiming - in part truthfully - that it's for my benefit rather than for the myriad web-surfers whose attention one presumes the standard "blogger" aims to attract. After all, if I refrain from embarking on a submission spree or lobbying for links to my lines, surely few will stumble across them? (This attempt will, of course, be negated should I resolve to recant this intention and make moves towards publicity, rendering my first defence worthless and therefore myself more conceited, by at least half.)

My second conceit-diminishment mechanism will be a simple one of recognition; "I know it's conceited, but I'll do it anyway". Through that act of recognition I implicitly accept all the criticisms which could be levelled against me, and thus attempt, with a pretension to an authorial intention loftier than I could ever justly claim, to engage in the activity itself without indulging in the attendant vanity. "I'm just doing it for its own sake", I shall say. "I'm not aching for approbation, neither am I following fame. My wish is merely to write".

This will convince few, I'll warrant. Nevertheless it's true that I take pleasure in creative activity, the production and the polish of artifacts (though in my case they are more often digitised and thus abstract or "artificial"); as engagement in writing has for me been for some years largely constrained to technical matters, documentation, proposals and the like, I certainly relish the thought of pandering to my verbose inclinations.

I'll make some passing semblance of an effort to forebear from indulging in the excessive navel-gazing which appears to be the wont of most "bloggers", but I can't guarantee that my indulgence shall not stretch to ranting, bemoaning or bewailing. Neither, of course, can I guarantee that I shan't be so susceptible to such moments of seniority as gestured towards above that I shall ever remember to add any more thoughts to this initial one. What I shall guarantee, however, is that those words which I do commit to electrical pulses will be only those which please me; they will by virtue of their existence be only those which address subjects which have moved me to express my thoughts in this somewhat nebulous and obscure manner; and, to conclude, will almost certainly be expressed in my preferred convoluted and verbose idiom. Like it, or lump it.