A belated thank-you

Taken only a few days ago. I
thought the expression shows
- quite vividly - the result of 
devoting oneself to language.

Time passes, on balance less beneficially. I'm writing better than ever before but life is at its worst ebb as my other half slides into oblivion. Comment if you wish but please, please, even if you feel inclined, don't sympathise. There is nothing neither you nor I can do to help.

Even though the visit to France (qv) proved to be a brief exception

As with all misery, irony is just around the corner. I've always condemned nostalgia on the grounds that I mistrust the Golden Era way of thinking. That things were better decades ago merely because they occurred in the past. For me the past was left wrapped in a shapeless bundle in my birth city as the future brought with it a growing sequence of happy revelations.

Until three years ago. And now I trawl the earlier years of Tone Deaf, plus its predecessor Works Well, for scraps of comfort.

To find something I've only just recognised: a genuine sense of community.

Some background is necessary. Since age 11 I have written continuously. Thousands of letters to my widest family, articles for newspapers and magazines, reports about my confined existence in the Royal Air Force, speeches to restless audiences, eloquent appeals to US editors that they consider me for employment, amateurish attempts at fiction, a blog, rather more professional attempts at fiction, and, most surprisingly of all, verse.

In all these outpourings, over 79 years, I wrestled with language as – later – I wrestled with singing: in both instances to achieve an individual voice. I was very serious about this, to the point where self-centredness got the upper hand. Understand this:  writers deserve not a shred of understanding. Their burden is self-imposed and the great majority becomes insufferable outside what they write. To some extent truly dedicated plumbers end up in the same hole.

On reflection I find I’ve been remarkably lucky. Blogs invite responses and – lo and behold – I enjoyed my own Golden Era. For a few years it seemed there were others out there in cyberspace, all individual voices, all capable of grasping ideas and expanding them according to the true meaning of conversation. Driven by a desire to enrich rather than to dispute.

To them this belated expression of gratitude. My misery continues but it would have been crass of me, having discovered this phenomenon, not to have publicised it.