I wanted to start posting on the spur of a good moment. Or on a whim-sy.

But I got bored of waiting.

As I mentioned earlier, this is an occasional thing for me. I was never one to keep a journal or diary. Every year we used to get one from a grandparent, and would earnestly fill in the first few days of January. This was because we were mainly on holiday for New Year, visiting our Scottish relatives.

The Scots always have preferred the New Year holiday to Xmas. My mother told me that up until the 60s in Scotland, Xmas day was only a half day. This is why the Scots have an extra day off at New Year.

So, me and my sister would spend the first 3 or 4 days of that particular new year detailing what we had done that day. Well, detailing is rather misleading. Conciseness, succinctness was the order of the day. "Went to Uncle Pat's. Had dinner. Then to Aunt Anne's. Saw Uncle Frank and cousins. Went home. Went to Bed." A whole day's worth of social interactions, family politics, burgeoning lust and fried bread all condensed into a language even Big Brother would find austere and lifeless.

Still, as soon as we arrived home and returned to school, we ceased detailing the minutae of the day, tossing the diary into some obscure drawer, to be left untouched, unloved and unread for the next 10 years. It was strange when we did rediscover our diaries. My sister was leaving home, to go and live with her boyfriend, and she found it in a drawer, covered with childhood stuffed animals.

Reading the entries, in her neat, italic handwriting, brought back many tearful memories. Silently reading the few entries, it suddenly hit us that in the 8 years that had passed, half the people mentioned during that week had since died. Our father was one, his brother another. Neither of them had reached 40. Eldery relatives had also passed on, and as sad as it was they had died, they all had had good innings. None was younger than 75.

And here I am, 13 years after that discovery, finally getting around to writing my own blog. As I mention somewhere, I'm not publishing this blog for approval, nor for sympathy, simply because I want to. And I can.

In those 13 years, the number of people who have passed on has remained constant, only this time one of the fallen was my mother. She was only 57, and died from cancer. The big C. How I hate that disease. It makes you feel so helpless. By the end, she weighed just 6 stone, and there I was, a hulking great presence (22 stone or thereabouts), unable to stop what was happening. Totally and utterly useless.

Oh well, I've had enough today.