James Proclaims!

Assuming that I finish writing this post and deem it worthy of publication (and the quality control on my blog is such that if I finish writing something I instantly deem it worthy of publication on these pages, irrespective of whether it’s actually any good), then it will be my 33rd post in as many consecutive days. I’ve achieved longer blogging streaks than this, but I always see a 30+ daily blogging streak as a pretty good indication that I’ve got my blogging mojo back, particularly after a lengthy period of not writing much at all.

It’s slightly disingenuous on this occasion because the first 24 posts of the 33 were my annual advent calendar of Christmas films and I wrote most of those in 2021. But while those posts were appearing on the blog, I was secretly working on watching and writing about other films for future versions of my Christmas countdown. 2024 and 2025 are already in the bag, and 2026 is taking shape too, so the blogosphere can relax in the knowledge that, irrespective of whatever else I might write, the statistically least popular section of my blog will continue for years to come.

The next eight posts all had a Christmas theme too, what with that being the time of year, and traditionally, even during my most fallow blogging periods, I’ve always been quite prolific at Christmas.

But I do feel like I might like to start writing at other times of the year again. This does need to be tempered with the reality that time is rarely a commodity I have much of, even when I seemingly do have quite a lot of it, because my children do occupy a lot of the time I used to regard as mine. They do provide quite a lot of blogworthy material in that time, but I’m generally too exhausted to commit to writing any of it down.

This post, for example, is being produced on New Year’s Day, when Mini Proclaims is taking a nap and Little Proclaims is doing a fairly good impression of a zombie in front of the TV. This window will last a maximum of an hour and is largely only available because it’s cold outside and lots of places we’d normally go are closed for the holiday. Tomorrow, when this post is ‘live’ we’ll be on the motorway en route to visit my parents and the following day has already been mainly put aside for haircuts and shoe purchasing (because hair and feet continue to grow, irrespective of the pressures that such inconsiderate growth places on my wallet). A few more days of soft-play and park visits will ensue, and might yield the odd window of blogging time, before the end of the school holidays will oblige me to try and fit in a full-time job alongside my eldest daughters’ various extra-curricular activities.

Still it does feel like I could do a bit better than I have managed in the last two years and the way to achieve this is to possibly lower my ambitions with regards to quality and quantity. I’ve never strived for both quality and quantity on this blog – generally when I’ve been prolific, it has been at the expense of any kind of quality control, but when I post less regularly, I always think that I should strive to produce something that is quite good. But two years of hardly posting anything is testament to the fact that the threshold has shifted. And so I either need to let this blog die a dignified death, or start consciously producing dross on a semi-regular basis. Even at its worst, I like to think that my blog is far from being the least worthy thing on the internet so I’m loath to make a dignified exit. Instead, I’m going to try and be a more regular blogger from here on in, by adopting a filter-free approach to posting. This may mean several weeks at a time of nothing but bad haikus but I’m not planning on plumbing those depths in the foreseeable future.

I expect there will be quite a lot of poetry though. I’d like to think my poetry will hold a mirror up to society, but some of it will be about such era-defining issues as ‘an old towel’, ‘those biscuits that I quite like’ and ‘that weird mark on the wall’. Perhaps because I have absolutely no understanding of what makes for a good poem, I find poetry quite easy to write. I prefer writing prose but this generally takes more time, even when inspiration is everywhere. There has been a lot of great source material for prose over the past two years, but very little has made it onto the blog. This has to change because if I don’t owe it to myself, then I certainly owe it to my children to ensure that all of their most embarrassing adventures are recorded on here for me to torture them with as they get older.

Both sisters combined on New Year’s Eve, for example, to give me some fantastic material that mainly focuses on their bowel movements. Surely neither of my daughters would forgive me if I don’t manage to record that story for the sake of posterity.

And so this post serves as both an indication that I am now well and truly back in the blogosphere and also as proof that I am quite happy to post any old crap. And that very soon I will be posting a story that is quite literally about crap.