A Mostly Failed Day.

It’s been one of those failed blog post days today. I get them sometimes and fall out with myself because I wonder whether it’s all due to a chronic lack of self-worth.

‘What’s the point of writing a blog post?’ I mutter. ‘What I’ve got to say isn’t worth saying.’

So who are you going to talk to if not the blog?

‘Nobody, but then nobody who might read this blog would be any more interested in what I’m saying than I am.’

How do you know?

‘I just do.’

Does it matter?

‘I don’t know. Why shouldn’t it?’

Because you’ve often said that you only write the blog for yourself, not for an audience.

‘Oh, yes. I did, didn’t I?’

But what you’re now saying is a bit like: ‘In space, nobody can hear you scream.’

‘No it isn’t. It’s nothing like that at all.’

So what is it like?

‘I don’t know. Go away.’

And so I wrote most of quite a long post on why I so dislike TV cookery shows, but I lost interest just as I was getting to the end and put it away. I decided it was turgid and dry and terminally boring.

Then there was the post on the irony contained within the accusation of ‘Scrooge!’ which is frequently hurled at me when I tell people I don’t celebrate Christmas, and my frustration at the fact that most people misunderstand, or miss altogether, the most important bits of the story. But I’m sure I’ve done that one before – probably more than once – and I wasn’t in the mood for repeating myself.

So then we come to the post I nearly wrote, about the woman in the charity shop who occasionally stares at me in an unsmiling sort of way. You might recall me mentioning her a week ago. I quite liked that one, but subsequently decided that it goes into areas I’d rather keep under wraps for the time being. I could tell you the first bit though, if you like. It goes like this:

You might remember me mentioning the woman in one of the Uttoxeter charity shops, the one with a pale complexion and no make up who stares at me in an unsmiling sort of way and seems to want to turn me into a frog. You might further remember that I resolved to smile at her during my next visit to see what would happen.

Well, today I did. I engineered a plausible excuse to talk to her and smiled occasionally in the course of my opening gambit. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it. And do you know what she did? She smiled back. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her smile, and what a pleasant smile it was. All the appearance of severity normally engendered by her staring-in-an-unsmiling-sort-of-way habit dissolved into a light radiance, albeit with serious undertones. And when I pointed out to her that whoever wrote the notice on the door got their verb and adjectival forms mixed up, she said ‘thank you’ without any trace of sarcasm or passive aggression.

She’s very polite, you know. She is. But in a serious sort of way, you understand. I’ve come to an early, tentative conclusion that she wouldn’t appreciate my sense of humour even if I got the chance to express it, which I don’t suppose I ever shall. I also came to another early, tentative conclusion: that she would be admirably suited to the name Abigail, although I expect it’s actually something very much more prosaic. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know that either.

So that’s the first part of the post. If ever I get to write the next part I’ll probably do it in retrospect. It all depends on whether I proceed with my cunning plan or drop it as a lost cause. I do have this driving urge to discover people, you see, but sometimes I just can’t be bothered.