An Epiphany

It was an epiphany of sorts. I had spent the day away from my computer and reading Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’. Here, I thought to myself, is prose of the highest calibre and I should try to use it to improve my blog. If it takes me eight hours a day, I should only present words that have been sifted by the finest critical methods. My blog's readers should only face words that are meaningful. Not a single superfluous word should appear anywhere in my posts.

They were noble ambitions and I suppose these thought processes were only going through my mind because I’d become aware of the anniversary of this blog’s launch on the 21st of this month. To date, I’ve written over 237,000 words for your edification and amusement. It is only natural that when I’m away that I begin to wonder how it’s going and I make all kinds of vague plan to make it even bigger and better.

And then I come back after twenty four hours away and see that my last post, a troubled little piece about my future career, had all of one comment. Lord James Bigglesworth had written to inform me that ‘I take my yoghurt to the loo’.

‘I take my yoghurt to the loo’...

And that’s when I had my epiphany.

Madeley, I thought, you’re wasting your time. There are TV scripts that I could be writing or meetings I could take with high level TV executives to discuss all my great ideas for new shows. I could be crossing deserts or climbing mountains and making cutting edge TV. I could be doing all these things but instead I choose to blog so a peer of the realm can tell me that he takes his yoghurt to the loo.

In the end, I threw ‘Herzog’ to one side. I don’t know how Saul Bellow, Clive James or Stephen Fry do it.

All I know is that, some days, it's just not worth the effort and that writing just sucks.