Taking off...

  My First Blog, eh? I wonder what drives people to do them. It can't be fulfilling the function of a record, an aide-memoire of When We Were Young to be coaxed from the yellowing pages of a diary that is read by us when we're entering the agar-culture of old age: it's not private or locked in the bedside drawer.
   Is it the need for validation, then, smacked mewling and puking into operancy as we try and have a voice and identity despite the world telling us that little boys should neither be seen nor heard? And surely our phones, I-pods and countless other little helpers, "optimise" our photos, our music, our chances of meeting That Special Someone...heck, even our writing and spelling are taken out of our hands, are done for us like a savvy parent doing the kid's homework.... then all these faits accomplis are given back to us to hand in to Life's daily inspection and we believe that we've done it all ourselves. And of course, when we do manage to create something unique and beautiful off our own bat, the reader/viewer/listener avoids any challenge of having to celebrate or feel jealousy, by assuming some brill piece of software did it all for us....
...so is a blog actually a way for us to not merely have some control, some voice but also kid ourselves we're really having a conversation, in which we're listened to and given the option to have others to contribute too?
Well, after we've held the floor and had our say, that is.
And I'll tell you now: the first thing I do whenever I've bought a new computer, is to fire up Word and forbid it to correct either my spelling or grammar.
   This blog of mine will have my random thoughts, my considered fair musings, my poisoned rants; it will have photographs taken by me, provide links to music written and created by me and will have the odd poem written by me from any time since the mid-1980s.
   I wonder if I'll  "censor" it when I imagine an actual person out there whose virtual interface is reading what I've written...will I then tailor my output to dovetail with my imagined creation of what the reader/viewer is like, in effect creating a likeness of you that is based on the idols of either gold or  dark clay that I have made people into over the years? Is a blog then also a consequence of our need for a confessor, a rescuer, a liberator? After I've blogged too...is the post then crystallized into ownership: is my output then bonded firmly to me, or have I in fact liberated it from me? And then does it wander to and fro upon a virtual landscape, with people choosing to engage with it, to be interested or annoyed by it?
         
   Let's start with something fairly interesting: I went on a sort of holiday to Italy a couple of months ago with a host of Christians. Now, Italy and me, well, we've had a kind of thing going for some time....