A Post About Not Blogging With A Brief Interlude About Vaccines

As I write this, it has been just under a month since I last posted anything on this blog. By the time this actually hits the blogosphere, it will have been just over a month. I’m writing this on Friday but I intend for my ‘comeback’ to be on Monday. According to the Gods of WordPress, Monday has tended to be my most prolific day for blogging. I like to think that’s because I often choose to post on Mondays, but maybe I only do that because WordPress is influencing me. Is it a ‘chicken and egg’ situation, or am I overthinking it?

I don’t know.

But this post is scheduled for Monday.

Or it will be if I finish writing it.

If you are reading it, I probably did finish writing it.

Or maybe I didn’t really finish writing it, but at the point I decided to give up, I was happy to post the incoherent mess I’d produced in the expectation that no-one would really notice anyway.

It’s always hard to write a ‘comeback’ post. It obviously presupposes that anyone actually cared that I disappeared for a month, which is highly unlikely to be true, and there always seems to be an obligation to produce something that is relatively good because, in the event that anyone did miss my ramblings, it would be something of a let down if my return to blogging failed to live up to their expectations.

Such is the pressure of trying to write a high-quality ‘comeback post’ that, in the end, procrastination wins out and the hitherto absent blogger continues in their absence, rather than risk producing underwhelming content.

Fortunately ‘underwhelming content’ is very much ‘on brand’ for me, so I had no difficulty producing this. I didn’t mean to ‘not blog’ for a month, but I’ve had much longer absences from my blog before. This may come as a surprise to anyone who has discovered the joys of James Proclaims during the pandemic, as, the past month notwithstanding, I have been a rather prolific blogger during corona-times. Which is not a coincidence. But, despite rumours of a ‘third wave’ looming in the UK, everything does appear to be heading back towards a kind of normality and one which doesn’t need to be qualified by vapid terminology like ‘The New Normal’. Because ‘normal’ is increasingly starting to look quite a lot like ‘The Old Normal’. The Old Normal was a bit rubbish, but it does seem mildly preferable to a pandemic so I’m not entirely sorry to see it returning.

Of course the return to a more familiar existence is thanks, in part, to a relatively successful vaccine program. Mrs Proclaims had her first jab yesterday and, in the vaccine lottery, she was very much a winner, walking away with a side-effect free dose of Pfizer.

Despite having been eligible for over a month, I had my first jab only a few days prior to my wife. It is much harder to get an appointment than the government would have you believe. I took the first one I could get and had to make do with the much lamented AstraZeneca. Of course I was happy enough to have AstraZeneca, much as I’m happy to buy my groceries from discount supermarkets. But if money was no object, I’d probably always shop in Waitrose and I’m sure the connoisseur’s vaccine of choice is Pfizer so I’m a little jealous of my wife. Also I had side effects. Nothing too horrendous, but I was under the weather for a few days. Probably less ill than if I actually had Covid though, so it’s all about perspective.

None of this has anything to do with me not blogging for a month. I think that is mainly due to blogging fatigue. I blogged daily for an entire year mainly to see if I could, but I am not a daily blogger by nature and frankly the whole endeavour took its toll and resulted in far too many haikus. Nonetheless, it’s a shame that I couldn’t have persevered for a couple more posts before my recent absence. My last post, on May 5th, was the 997th since I started this blog. May 10th was the sixth anniversary of my very first post. So it wouldn’t have taken much for me to have been celebrating my 1000th post on that date.

As it stands, the post after my next post, whenever it arrives, will be my 1000th ever post.

It will be quite the milestone.

If I ever reach it.

Obviously it would be a much greater achievement if the preceding 999 posts had all been good.

But a lot of them were not.