To blog or not to blog

One of the reasons I had to give up ashtanga yoga was I getting too competitive, which is hardly the point; looking around to see how deep my neighbour’s down dog. My friend Jane has taken to blogging like the proverbial duck to water, while I’m left sounding out blogs in my head but then not getting around to writing them up, and what would be the point of that? Except of course that there is an aspect of blogging that is akin to talking to oneself. Perhaps Stephen Fry feels differently, but for me it is a little like talking to the void, or perhaps talking aloud outdoors, where it is vaguely posible that someone might be listening. I did get a response from someone I actually don’t know telling me that she was enjoying my blogs, and what a boost that was; though of course part of me wonders whether it might have a spam e-mail. I had meant to tell you (whoever you are) about my trip back from Provincetown to London, though what exactly I have now entirely forgotten. I meant to tell you about the talk with Salley Vickers about the book, which took place in Dartington last Sunday, but that is already beginning to move off into the mists. Well here’s a snippet two before it entirely disappears from view. It went well I think, though I was concentrating so hard I couldn’t really tell. The audience were deathly quiet. Was it because they were concentrating – they didn’t laugh at any of my jokes, surely a bad sign – or was it was seething anger? For all I knew they might have been about to rise up as a single body and bludgeon me to death. The best indication that all was well came at question time 15 minutes before the hour was up. I’ve been to enough of these things to know that it can be tricky getting the first question out of an audience, and that once there has been one question it’s generally easier to draw out another and then another. But when Salley asked for questions about 20 hands shot into the air and in the end I didn’t have time to address more than half of them. Good questions too. Do we have freewill? Why should I buy your book when I’ve read Bill Bryson’s? Is dark matter an indication that the Big Bang theory isn’t working? When you’re sitting there wondering what on earth (what in the universe) the question is going to be it certainly gets the adrenalin going. My first thought a number of times was ‘I can’t answer this question, I don’t know where to begin?’ But then somewhere inside me a voice was also saying, ‘you have to say something, just think’. Of course I loved the fact that various people came up afterwards to tell me in person how much they had enjoyed the talk, but my favourite moment came as I was leaving the hall: I heard one very English older woman say to another: ‘Did you enjoy that?’ to which she received the one word reply, which even in its monsyllable could be said to stentorian: ‘Bits’. Quite.