And the Machine Grinds into Motion again.

 And so I sit me down to write. Gosh! It's been ages, hasn't it! So much has happened! This is strange though: Where once a computer keyboard was the landscape of much of my life, now I am very rare visitor to it. When I think of the tens of hours per week I used to sit and tap away, it seems incongruous for it to now be such an unfamiliar activity. I spent this morning directing volunteers in planting a greengage tree and spreading compost on raised beds on the side of damp windswept hill: As far away, perhaps from the artificiality of the plastic office and online world as it is possible to be.

But I have been alarmed of late to note the decline in the availability of words to me. The regular beating-of-the-bounds of my vocabulary allowed a fluency which I have noticed is slipping away. The observational skills I used to spot noteworthy events and behaviours have waned. Life is merely pragmatic these days. Indeed, writing this is actually much harder than I expected because, well, I never write any more. 

And so, here, for my own benefit, is a small foray into the once-familiar but now foreign territory of attempting to be articulate. It's not for you, you understand,. It's for me. I compel nobody to read this and perhaps nobody will. And that is ok. The possibility that someone might helps aspire to clarity and discipline. But really, I just need the exercise if I am to be honest. What do I write about? I don't know. It doesn't matter really. As long as words are chosen, written down and are subsequently coherent, the purpose will have been served. It seems a shame to have the ability to compose a cogent sentence and not to at least try to do so. Previously, in my Old Life it was necessary to communicate clearly in order to earn a crust, but not now. Nobody needs my words now. 

I suppose, in order to regain some kind of verbal fitness, practice must be undertaken. Hence here I am, with nothing of substance to say, other than "I need to say something so here are some words". The house is a tip, the rain is coming through my roof and there are still some big pans which need washing up from yesterday's dinner. But this can all wait. Verbal composition is self-care (though so is cleaning the kitchen so as not to be unhygienic), just like exercise or eating your greens. There are things we must do for our own good. I seem to be discovering this is one of them.

Not only that, it is an enriching exercise to portray the seemingly mundane in  everyday life. One watches more closely and with a different frame of mind if something profound might be described. It makes you look at things in a different way. I envy those people who can look upon an ordinary scene with an artist's eye and capture it in a painting or photograph such that it makes you stop and look deeper at something. Words can do that too.

Therefore, with creaking reluctance, I shift my brain into a mode it had almost forgotten and I force words out of my mind, through these keys and on to a screen. Ye gods! But I am so out of shape! Time to try to put that right.