With some trepidation, I am putting back my blogs. This is the one that caused the little storm. I have changed six words. Here goes - I will hit the 'paste' button ... The others are coming back, slowly ...
I used to be be very cynical about blogs. I used to wonder, who are these people who so badly need to find an audience that they start 'publishing' their random jottings on the Internet for strangers to read? Surely it is all to do with vanity, with solipsism, self-aggrandizement and self-promotion. It is the last resort for the failed writer: it is part of a culture that reveals 'all' on the surface, but is lacking substance in the things that really matter. Worst of all, blogs can be a daily version of the dreaded Christmas ‘round-robin.’
It had not occurred to me that blogging could be therapy.
Here is my thought for the day:
The point when I realized that I could not really function any more with my job was when I was trying to explain the concept of ‘doublethink’ to senior pupils – we were studying ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ The only analogy I could come up with on the spur of the moment was that you can sometimes know, intellectually, that someone is going to die but also believe, absolutely and simultaneously, that they are not. You can hold two contradictory concepts in your mind at the same time. (I wonder whether Orwell was thinking about this aspect of being terminally ill? He was dying himself.) Clearly, this was perhaps not the most useful concept for teenagers when I should have been looking for political analogies. I did manage to finish the lesson – but only just.
But death? My husband defies death, shakes a metaphorical fist, and pulls up his very thin body, and goes on, as much as he can, as usual. He is not suffering from doublethink. He is suffering from denial, according to the GP.
And tomorrow, having had a set-back with PDT, I will be back on the phone to ask what on earth they are going to do now.
Buzzie Of The Night. (It doesn’t quite have it, does it?)
