Debut

Out Damn Blog! Out I Say!

Probably a weird name for a blog but when I decided to begin blogging I checked out the names and so many of the good ones were already taken. My particular favourites - To blog or not to blog and A blog by any other name had already been snapped up - you have to be fast and I am slow. So it’s Out damn blog…. And I know that loud, cursing title makes me sound as if I have an anger-management problem (or am a bit mad like Lady Macbeth) but anyway, it hasn’t been taken and I’m baggsing it. It sounds like I have an obsession with Shakespeare which isn’t true, more that while teaching it over the years some of the catchier lines have imprinted themselves on my jaded brain. Besides, I can’t think of anything particularly clever or original and I think this name conveys my assertive determination to write a blog.

This is my debut blog and I rush to make a disclaimer to anyone, everyone, (particularly my daughter - Precious Poppet), who I may offend inadvertently (or even advertently) as I write in this blog. My daughter is called Precious Poppet for two reasons, one because she is dear to me and two because she is a high-maintenance kind of girl, a teenager, (poppet is a baby nickname). I hope she won’t sue me when she’s older and realises that her mother has been writing about her, sometimes…err often, in a deleterious light (albeit under a pseudonym). I know it’s been done in America (children suing parents), and I could be wrong but so far I don’t believe it’s happened here in Australia. I really don’t want to be a test case - it wouldn’t reflect well on me as a diligent mother. There’s no point anyway, I’m not rich.

I’ve read lots of blogs and am impressed at the range of topics discussed and insights revealed; it’s amazing the way some people can make the detritus of domestic life so fascinating and funny. I’m not sure I can do this but I think blogging will be fun, unlike exercise (apologies to all those fit people, but it’s just so hard), or alcohol, which is effective and palliative at curbing tension, but which you shouldn’t really overdo; (reading ‘High Sobriety – My Year without Booze’ and it really gets you thinking). I like the diary aspect of a blog; it’s a kind of public journal, where you can engage with others and air all manner of things - get them off your chest, hopefully in a healthy purging and maybe at times, entertaining way.

Anyway, I am taking the blogging step…tentatively poking my toe into cold, deep water – it can’t be that cold and deep when you jump in, surely?