Blogout and Blogging In Again
I am not one of these blogger fellows who believes you want to know a lot about his day; what a bitch of a morning he had at his office or a dog of an afternoon with his divorce lawyer and how he was hounded by drinking friends until he got to bed. However, I should perhaps tell the two or three of you out there and reading today what personal complications have led to a silence here this last year.
I could claim that months recovering from hip resurfacing surgery, brought on by years of international level shot- putting, distracted me with pain or that the decision by Trigg, my illustrator, to let his brushes dry to board and turn his attention to teaching disheartened me too much.
The truth is that I acquired ‘clients’. This is a term for organizations of size, substance and fragile egos which have paid me money for services rendered that have had nothing to do with writing. They have done this in gushes, immediately after the fact and without the slightest of pressure. These slicks of cash have been in giddying contrast to the trickles of coin extracted from magazine publishers after weeks of hacking at accounts departments with a pickaxe.
Many of these bountiful clients are not strangers to the public arena. Some of them have already appeared, teased rather, in writings on this site. As matters stood, they most certainly would again. Yet, the cash level was rising. I was treading notes and learning to splash. I had already bought a little Mazda to play with in the bath. What would happen if the three or four of you reading here were joined by a passing fifth who happened to be one of those gushing benefactors but didn’t quite get a joke in the way that you do?
I may have struck you as a beacon of unlimited principle but, sadly, now is the time for disillusion. In order to avoid any small misunderstandings and drastic reductions in the lucre level, I decided to be careful over who I was observing.
It is called self censorship. Within hours, it reduced me to making fun of the weather- but not climate change which, one way or another, was bound to be the fault of a client. I fell silent and went away.
I am returning to have some fun. Money is nearly everything but it falls short in that critical ‘ a miss is as good as a mile.’ sort of way. My problem with it is I have never been able to pay it much attention for very long. It proves a tedious topic even when it belongs to me. This means I cannot keep it in any quantity because it will go wandering off.
Taking the clients seriously became difficult to stick to as well. Most of them are global investment banks- hence the gushing. One or two of them do not even exist as such any more. They are now a pit lower in public estimation than divorce lawyers. One really cannot afford to be too concerned about the opinion of a guild of compulsives whose epic charlatanism has turned out to exceed even the suspiscions of the common man.
When you watch Bloomberg, you should stone it. The people who appear on it are all guilty down to the financial journalists who fawned upon them. The drawback is that you would damage your TV and these people have left barely enough trust in their counting houses for you to borrow the money to buy a new one.
