The Elephant In The Room

Hello people of the blogosphere. I’m back after something of an unplanned hiatus from the world of blogging. I wasn’t sure what to write about for this post – on the one hand my first post in a while ought to be a spectacular affair, both witty and profound, irreverent yet informative, offering reassurances to my regular readers that I’ve not lost any of my trademark humour while ensuring any new readers who happen upon my blog might want to stick around and read more of my ramblings.

On the other hand, sometimes you can put a bit too much pressure on yourself, and when you’re out of practice, sometimes it’s better just to post something – anything – even if it’s a bit rubbish just to ‘get back on the blogging horse’ so to speak.

I’ve got a few posts in the works, some of which will see the light of day on these very pages soon, but for this post I’d thought that the best thing I could do was to address the elephant in the room.

Because it’s not often you see an elephant in your front room.

But today I did, and, even though I hadn’t invited him, I’m generally a hospitable host and I thought it rude to ignore him.

So, address him I did.

His name was Gerald by the way, which I thought an odd name of an elephant, but as he pointed out to me, he was an anthropomorphic elephant who had somehow managed to get into my smallish terraced house without causing much of a stir, so perhaps his name was not the oddest thing about him.

Gerald and I had a frank conversation and discussed many issues, not least the latest developments surrounding the implications of Brexit on the free movement of people and the largely inconsistent messages coming out of government. We also discussed the impact social media is having on politics and our consumption of news and whether this is a trend likely to continue and if, indeed there continues to be a place for mainstream media, particularly printed media, in the modern world.

We also touched upon the current economic climate, with Gerald expressing significant concerns about the price of peanuts.

I won’t bore you with the full details of our conversation now though, but suffice it to say that Gerald and I will remain firm friends and plan on hanging out regularly. I haven’t yet introduced him to Mrs Proclaims though, because he is largely a figment of my imagination.

Gerald did ask me one question which, I suppose, is pertinent to this post. He was curious to know why I haven’t posted anything for a while.

I explained to Gerald that there really isn’t a specific reason for my absence from the blogosphere. Sadly, the boring answer is that life got in the way. Mainly that was through demands from my day job. As a rule, I do actually find my job to be interesting in the main, albeit some of the paperwork can be soul-destroying, but I wouldn’t really expect it to be fascinating to anyone reading this blog, so I won’t go into detail about what exactly it is that I’ve been doing.

I am though, on holiday, for the next few weeks.

So expect this blog to come back to life in a very real sense for the month of August.

And probably peter out again slowly in the ensuing months before another prolonged absence, necessitating another of these slightly weird ‘elephant in the room posts’.

But let’s cross that bridge when we get to it.

For now, rest assured that I’ll be back on Wednesday with a fairly bad poem, there’ll be a slightly surreal drawing posted on Friday and, for the next few weeks at least, regular postings ranging from mediocre to very poor in quality.

Yes, people of the blogosphere, I’m back and the general indifference of the world at this news is almost palpable…