It's weird starting a journal from scratch. Knowing where to start the slice of life. What does a reader need to know to begin the relationship that will make the writing warm and meaningful for them?
I wrote an almost daily journal from 2007 until 2011, covering the period I moved from my home city, Dublin, to begin life with my partner at the time in rural Sligo on the Atlantic coast. I was in my mid 20s. You know what, rather than try to write what I wrote then, I might go dig it up...
I have just reread it and my god that was a trip. I was 25, so that was just under 20 years ago. It was like time travelling, I feel slightly dizzy after it. There are phrases in there that I haven't heard myself say since I was 25, details of plans I had completely forgotten.
It reminded me of what I'm really good at writing, and it's writing about things that actually happened to me, but in a slightly fictional style. That's a useful reminder. And no-one is doing that right now, in my inbox. All my newsletters are fundamentally in service of sales or services, 10 things to make your spring more sprung. Maybe people do still blog in the way we did, that merry band of old timers and me (all my internet friends were middle-aged or elderly back then). Maybe the voice in my head that says no-one wants to read that sort of stuff anymore is correct. And yet, here I am, wanting to do it again.
I made the blog private years ago, but you might enjoy an excerpt, a flavour of who I was before I've even written much of anything about who I am now. Those of you who joined from the Clear Channels course probably received the welcome email draft I had up from when I ordained last year and thought this letter and my website were going to be primarily a ministry offering. I will be rewriting the welcome email properly, I'm looking forward to getting over this virus so I can sit down to write it. Thank you for your patience.
Here's a section from the About Page of that first blog. The scene, a Christmas morning in St. Petersburg in Russia and some vulnerable sharing between 25 year old me and my partner at the time.
The big breakthrough came in our favourite café Idealnaya Chashka (Ideal Cup) on Sadovaya, sitting in the smoking section at the bar that runs along the window, (possibly the most fun people-watching spot ever in our opinion). We had been out the previous two nights on the trot, consuming copious amounts of Golden Pheasant and chucking stones in the frozen canals, and we were both suffering that nasty after effect of all-day travel coupled with two consecutive rounds of most-of-the-night drinking – a really shitty mood swing.
It was time to start being honest. You know that horribly honest where you don’t know when you start talking if the other person is going to understand, or even if you’ll understand it enough yourself to get any kind of resolution between the two of you? That icky ‘I’m opening a can of worms here aren’t I’ sensation, knowing that if you keep it bottled it’s just going to get worse but if you let it out you could get lost in it and not find your way out. Scary, uncomfortable stuff.
The conversation in Idealnaya Chashka was only the start of what we spent the rest of the week working out but it was the start we needed – sometimes you have to reach the bottom to find the way to push yourself back to the top and I had reached mine, to the point where I was holding head in hands repeating I hate my fucking life, I hate the buses, I hate the customers, I hate Dublin, I hate paying through the nose for fucking everything, I hate living in that tiny messy fucking bedroom, I hate constantly not knowing what I want in life. It was nothing I hadn’t said before, nothing new to either of us, nothing that we hadn’t both whinged constantly on and on about for the past few months but something in the absolute despair of it triggered something in my head, and in his.
We talked about Russia, about my growing concerns on coming back to Dublin penniless and unanchored and he agreed, we hadn’t gotten any further in two months of looking into moving over than we had in the first two weeks and it had become clear that this shared concern, silently eating away at us in the background, was a large part of what had caused the idea to have gone stale for both of us. So there we sat, swilling the last of our lattes around the crusty foam on the inside of the cup, gazing out at the mad rush of the street, surrounded by Russians, oblivious to our words and our worries. Our utter lack of purpose and their intensity of purpose, cars four lanes deep, horns blaring, neon lights flickering, everybody moving in one big tangled heaving rush simultaneously chaotic and ordered, us alone, static, physically and emotionally. Christmas songs played quietly in the background.
Distance and time, between us, between us and home, between us and the Russians. The glass we were looking out of, the past the future, the noise the silence, all of the lovely extremes and symbols. The impasse had been reached, ‘We know what we don’t want and what we can’t have. We have to figure out what we want’. We looked at each other blankly. The Christmas music whispered in my ear, I studied my new walking boots. I thought of the cats. Of how I’d like another coffee but would prefer my own mug. I felt fat and wanted to go for a walk to feel less fat. I thought about the fireplace in the song I could faintly make out, John Bailey’s words about the fire toasting his toes and a good book and a cat and the countryside. I thought, like I have done a thousand times before of how I would love to have that life. And then I realised I already knew what I wanted, sitting there like a gobshite racking my brains trying to think of what I wanted in life and I nearly didn’t notice that my mind was immediately returning to what it has dwelt on for months now, that daydream, that life of quiet and comfort and nature and homeliness that I had been escaping to every day in work for a year. I had said it so often in those last few weeks of work that if it weren’t for being able to read John’s blog-journal archives every day in between calls to escape, to find the calm and happiness I needed to combat the aggression and negativity that surrounded me, I would never have been able to stick it out for so long. I had even written a letter to John thanking him for that very thing in the month before we left.
The floodgates were opened, the dialogue began, we were soon talking about how all of the happiest times in our relationship had been spent down the country, going for walks, coming home to cook together, lighting the fire and snuggling up with coffee, books, music, talking until the small hours together, in my mother’s home place in Cavan, my Dad’s bungalow in Kilkenny, his mother’s house in the rural hinterland of Dublin when we were minding it for her, our first holiday together in Sligo. The vision we had shared in one of our long conversations at the very start of our relationship, of sitting in a small pub with a black flagstone floor and a roaring fire drying off after a long walk, a premonition of the day we got soaked to the bone walking on the beach in Rosses Point and of how we spent that afternoon in Austie Gillon’s drying off in front of the same fire we had seen in our mind’s eyes. We had talked when we were down there of how it would be a wonderful place to live but it was so soon into our relationship at the time it was still in the realm of fantasy. That evening in Idealnaya Chashka, in the magical supercharged neon unreality of St. Petersburg, it found a way to translate itself into our reality. The team was getting back on track.
