Republishing and revisiting old blog posts

The Current incarnation of your friendly domestic goddess.

It's been a salutary experience unpublishing every blog post since 2010 and then revisiting each one to see whether I have inadvertently used a copyrighted image before republishing (so far, so good - but still got two years to check back on).

Sonshine is - unbelievably- 25 now. Graduated from St Andrews with a Masters in Computing Science and living his life large in Darkest Dundee. With tattoos. The least attractive tattoos I think I've ever seen tbh. It's been lovely whizzing back through time via those blog posts where he's much younger and 'funner' as he would have said himself - his trials and tribulations with Clean Amy (I never did find out who she was lol!), becoming friends with a stick, decapitation of his sunflower, endless failed baking attempts...

It's been a sadder affair looking at posts that feature my mum, Juno, though. She's still with us at 89 (don't gods go on forever?!) but her short-term memory is absolutely shot to pieces. At the moment she is in a lovely care home that is more like a 5* hotel, but I've still got rent paid on her flat - just in case she changes her mind about going back there. Her memory may be more holey than a block of Gouda, but her mind remains very much with us. It's been nice reading her (often withering) input into Hestia's life.

But mostly I have learned a lot about myself, reading back over these old blog posts.

Running through everything is Tartarus. Yes, it's a very strange relationship. In fact, to call it a relationship is stretching the boundaries of the word far beyond knicker-elastic safety. Yet he's still here. Still bugging the ever-living shit out of me, but then he's tolerating the post menopausal minefield that is Living With Hestia on a daily basis. Whatever happens, I have his back and he has mine.  That said, how we haven't murdered each other with frying pans or kitchen knives continues to be a modern miracle. 

I notice that I like to try new things - new crafts, new languages, new ideas - and am completely besotted with them for a while. But unless I am completely brilliant at it, straight off the bat, I very quickly fall into the Slough of Despond and soon the new items end up consigned to the Craft Drawer From Hell. I have persevered with the sock-knitting and the Gaelic, but everything else is gathering dust upstairs somewhere.

I also make lots of resolutions to change - to lose weight, to write, to exercise, to be creative, to read less and experience more, to buck myself up. And, dear Reader, those resolutions last about as long as it takes to write the blog post itself.  I think this is related to the 'be brilliant or fuck off' approach I just mentioned. Honestly, I'm astounded at the sheer inability of my good self to stay the course on anything at all.

Maybe living with Tartarus takes up all my willpower and I don't have the band-width to be exercising every day. I'm too busy putting one foot in front of the other.

One positive thing that I have noticed is that I can be very funny when I write. I am sure that it is achingly bad form to piss yourself laughing at something you wrote 15 years ago though. But I care not a jot! 

Fifteen years of writing is in this blog. FIFTEEN YEARS. 

I could have written a book. Several books. The Bible, in fact. I actually wrote a blog post about that too. Years ago. I'd tweeted enough words to write the Bible. I've started fewer wars with my tweets though. God, do you remember Twitter? Remember it when it was a good place to be? Those were the days! 

So, what's next? 

I dunno. I swithered about deleting the whole thing - but then, maybe one day Sonshine will want to read this online diary of his youth. 

Do people still read blogs? Are you reading this one?  Does it matter that nobody will read this, or comment on this?  Do I keep going, purely as a sort of diary for myself now?