Talking Myself Into It

I’m only a few weeks away from being able to restart the blog in a brand new year, but I couldn’t keep away. There have been a few times since that one-off July entry when I was tempted to come back. One was when I read this comment by Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s A Tour to the Hebrides (in the entry of Monday, 16th August):

I remember I was once on a visit at the house of a lady for whom I had high respect. There was a good deal of company in the room. When they were gone, I said to this lady, ‘What foolish talking we have had!’—‘Yes, (said she,) but while they talked, you said nothing.’—I was struck with the reproof. How much better is the man who does any thing that is innocent, than he who does nothing. Besides, I love anecdotes. I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically, except in narrative; grow weary of preparation, and connection, and illustration, and all those arts by which a big book is made.—If a man is to wait till he weaves anecdotes into a system, we may be long in getting them, and get but few, in comparison of what we might get.

How very apt, sir.

That Was the Year That Wasn’t

Hello, and welcome to this false dawn of a non-blog-entry. I figure I owe some sort of explanation to the dwindling number of visitors to this cryogenic URL for why there hasn’t been anything here in almost a year, and thought I might as well use this banner I made back when I was hoping to get it up and running again any day now.