Vainglorious Bastard (An Introduction…)

It’s a funny hobby, writing. It’s one that tends to consume most of us at some point in our lives, but too often it lays dormant, like an untapped Mt. Etna of potential. I’ve certainly let my writing habits slip all too easily from my grasp. Half-baked journals and article ideas provide bedding for discarded CDs and disused stationary in my chests of drawers. Stale attempts at starting up this very blog clutter up my hard-drive, like old furniture in the basement you never had the heart to throw away but will never find a use for again.

It sometimes surprises me that I’m a student of the arts, even if only at undergraduate level. After all, I’ve never been able to consistently read or write anything much over a period much longer than a month.  I’m not exactly known for my determination and application so much as I am for my big mouth, along with my ability to articulate basic ideas without much substance to them as though they were as meaty as Usain Bolt’s thighs. Bluffing my way through school has been pretty exhilarating at times – writing a chunky piece of A-level coursework without so much as reading a chapter of a library book was a high point – but ultimately it’s been an all too empty endeavour. These days, whenever my essays are returned my reactions to my grades differ only between disappointment and bashful confusion. (‘I got a 70 for that!?’)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve tried to break my bad writing habit of all or nothing, but there’s no reason for me to stop trying altogether. The way I see it, I’ll learn to work and write responsibly eventually, and there’s no better way to do that than to get used to writing about what I love first. It’s a bit weird when you go three months having written nothing more incisive than a shopping list on the back of an old bus ticket, only to end up having to finish a five-thousand-word essay on the theories of the early French colonisation of North America.

So, I need to establish a middle ground: something that sits neatly between bugger all and being buggered. Who knows where the next article will come from? Not me. It’ll probably have all of the literary authority of an imitation Dan Brown novel, but a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step and all that jazz. But now I think about it, it’s about time I wrote a little about my experiences of living in the States and my subsequent return to England. I mean, there’s material in there somewhere, right? Now, finding something to say that I haven’t shot my mouth off about already…  That might be a little more difficult.

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