Send In The Clowns

Bit of a diversion tonight, albeit it a brief one, into the realm of the personal. I know, it’s the kind of self-indulgent, solipsistic non-content that I usually wouldn’t choose to strew across this page like so much disgusting, half-eaten McDonald’s almost-food cast aside on Dunfermline High Street late of a Saturday afternoon...but I feel the need to explain the current lengthy gaps between postings.

Life can be a strange learning experience. Sometimes it takes a severe shock to make you realise that, over the course of the last 15 to 20 years, and in a variety of contexts, you’ve slowly subsumed yourself so much into other people’s patterns of behaving and thinking (because it seemed like the best thing to do at the time, or what the assorted ’significant others’ wanted/expected/’needed’ from you, etc) that you’ve pretty much forgotten who ’you’ are. Or, indeed, once were - assuming that you’d ever begun to work it out in the first place.

Now, I appreciate that this is definitely the kind of issue that, (a bit like cancer, if we’re brutally honest - only in an infinitely more trivial and self-pityingly whingeing way, of course) - fits the tag, "Rich Countries’ Disease", perfectly. If you’re having to do a 5-mile round-trip to get to the nearest water supply that’s only partially contaminated with gastric parasites, then, frankly, you’ve got a lot more pressing things to deal with, and we, who sit warm and comfortable in front of our computer screens, moaning about our service provider’s paucity of service provision can’t even begin to imagine what such a life must be like.

Still, being possessed of a cosy modern existence, it’s the reason I’ve been far too self-absorbed, and anywhere-but-in-the-mood to come up with a dollop of vaguely-music-related ’humour’ so far this week.

Sometimes, again, it takes a severe shock to make you fully aware that the person you thought for nearly a decade was going to be your future, has decided instead that you have become part of their past - and did so some time ago.

I received that sort of shock last week. I was probably still partly in denial, trying to protect myself from the full implications of my marriage ending late last year. Now, that’s simply not an option. The disorientation from having a well-worn identity suddenly stripped-away has largely gone, but has left me having to confront my self-concept head-on.

I know who I was. It’s precisely who I am now, and who I might be that are proving more difficult to pin down.

So, sorry for not keeping-up any semblance of blogging regularity. Or gags. Promise I’ll try harder next time.