This is still my stuff.

Earlier, I was upstairs. It was inside a building that the stairs I was up were in, and I'd been being up them; now I wanted to be down them, but I couldn't be bothered to walk down them, so I caught the lift. I went up to the panel next to the closed lift doors and pressed the button to go down. The lift came, I got inside it and pressed the button which makes the lift go to the ground floor, so that I'd be at the bottom of (or "down") the stairs. It did. I got out. The thing that I had wanted to happen had happened. I made it happen with my mind. I was down the stairs. I choose! I act!

The other day, right, I was walking along the street and there was this tree. I was in a city and it was in a country. The tree that I saw had branches, leaves, a trunk, the whole shebang. That's a little bit of nature right there now, isn't it? So I took a picture of it, and here it is. Look at it. Go on, use your eyes. You know, those holes in your head with white goo in them. Have some of THAT, voyeurs!

I've decided, as is presumably evidenced to some degree by my total failure to post anything here recently, that "blogging" really is a load of arrogant, conceited tosh if one doesn't have anything objectively interesting to write about. At a friend's exhortation, I took briefly to searching and browsing through technorati in order to find cutting-edge opinion and points of view on fascinating, topical issues and blow me, what I found was dreadful. Some of the people who write (for example) technical or travel journals are interesting - indeed, some of them appear able even to string together the occasional sentence whose construction doesn't quite make me shudder - but in general, it's eye-wateringly narcissistic drivel, written by people who feel empowered by the simple fact of the technology powering this "blogging" phenomenon to expose their inner lives to all and sundry. "So", the reader will presumably say, "don't read it". Well, I won't, and I won't add to it. Instead, I might just post deliberately trite, ludicrously detailed minutiae of my life in a no doubt vain effort to point towards the meaninglessness of even an honest attempt to impart any value in an all-encompassing sea of self-obsessed trivialisations. To that end, here's a photo of what I ate last night. Have at you, sir.

Two days after the UK general election, I lay in bed on a Saturday afternoon wishing the sun would refrain from poking through the slits in my bedroom windows' shutters and snaking its sharpness into the fug of my simultaneously Friday night- and heavy cold-addled consciousness. While drifting gratefully into and irritably out of sweaty dreamworlds, I was suddenly made aware of a blaring noise, sat bolt upright and, looking through the window, was presented with the shiny pate of George Galloway on an open-top bus, his colleagues shouting through an enormous PA system "WE WON! YEAH! WE WON, RIGHT? WE WON! HA!" or some such. So I took this photo. "That'll show the opportunistic self-publicist", I thought. "Let's see how loudly you shout when everyone's staring at your bald patch."

I bet he's quaking in his boots.

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.