All of a sudden, three years of your life flash by.
I’d started to think I would never find a need for this Blog again. I’d just check in now and again to see if anyone was still reading the earlier posts, and pay the annual fee to WordPress to keep it open, in case I wanted to excise any of the old material to use elsewhere. Just as easy to drop it all into a massive Word document, I suppose, but there’s no fun in that. Plus, who wants to kill something off in the click of a mouse that they spent hundreds of hours creating?
I’m back, today, because I have just joined Instagram. This is hardly a revolutionary step – they have about a zillion users, and @suggzy74 is just one more. However, I’m fed up of using ‘X’ as it is now just a beastly arena of people and bots screaming at one another, to the exclusion of pretty much anything else. I told myself I was just going to use it to follow the score and the action when Margate FC are playing, but the fact is you open it, something catches your eye, you open it, and then all human unkindness scrolls out before you.
If I joined Instagram, I figured, then at least I’ll have some prettiness to look at, now and again. I don’t really understand how to use it, yet, but I imagine I’ll get there eventually. I seem to be following some people, about 30% of them are following me back, and I only joined seven hours ago. So far, so good.
It requires a BIO (biography), but this is limited to 150 characters. Mine is:
Pen pusher in the world of Higher Education. Humourist (on good days). Author of one book – soon to be two. Lunch In Moldova? is available on Amazon.
I’ll explain in a moment what Lunch In Moldova? is.
Under the BIO you can add links to external sites that relate to whatever you are Instagramming about. I hit upon using that to put links in to stuff that I had written and published for people to buy. Trouble is, because I am not famous or successful (as yet, it’s only been a decade), the book I have written (and the one I am about to finish) is only available on Amazon, as a print-on-demand book, or an e-book. You can’t use a link to that on Instagram. Boo, hiss, etc.
So, I soon realised the link that would work was one that brings people here. If you came here from Instagram then a) how lovely to see you here and b) I’m amazed – I’ve only been on there for <checks watch> seven hours and 51 minutes.
As a consequence, then, this Blog is up and running once more. I don’t know how often I will use it, or what for, but I can at least use it to tell you that two years ago I finished and published my first book – the aforementioned ‘Lunch In Moldova?’ The content was edited around some of the earlier stories here, along with additional material and a reflection on the other task I set myself in 2022 – training for and ‘running’ (which in my world means “getting to the end of”) the Athens Marathon. The main thrust of the book is the life I have experienced as a rather stumbling traveler. At time of posting, I have visited 62 countries, and enjoyed a rich buffet of experiences. Lots of them are in that book.
This is a very long and roundabout way of saying that if you would like a copy, you can get hold of it here:
Good Lord – a direct link to the Amazon website doesn’t even work here, either! These people just want you to fail, don’t they? Damnit. Anyway, look, you can trust me. That baby link takes you to where you need to go to indulge yourself in just under 400 pages of my rather risible life as a traveler – a publication which includes, at the end, a few sampler pages of a work of a fiction I am fiddling with, now and again, called ‘Three Months Off.’ That’s a book that may, or may not, make it to press.
Next month, I will complete the work on and publish my actual second book, titled ‘Fifty’. Once again, it will be available on Amazon and, like as not, I will presumably be unable to signal to you in anything other than coded shortened URLs where exactly to go to, should you wish to buy it. Oh for a publisher to work all this stuff out for me, eh? Ho hum.
‘Fifty’ is a different sort of book but, like the first one, is taken from direct experience and written in the first person. About a year ago I started to muse on the idea of the mid-life-crisis, as I was feeling rather uncomfortable with some aspects of my life and how I had come to relate to the world around me. I hit upon the idea of my (then upcoming) fiftieth birthday being a point in time through which to write, and reflect the events of the day and how I was feeling about them. I started a bit before the day on which I actually turned Fifty (21st February) and have carried on until pretty much this very day. I’m only a few hundred words or so from finishing the book, I think. It’s for the most part a humorous look at that period of time. Much of the sloppy misadventure that characterised my traveling days can be found in my relating to you the events of other more humdrum days, spent mostly doing normal things. Broadly speaking, it’s another funny book. What I didn’t expect, though, was that not that long after embarking upon this experiment in ‘living memoir’ (as I am choosing to call it, as it sounds clever) I actually came rather massively a cropper and ran headfirst into my own mid life crisis. The book is the story of it. Consequently, whilst I maintain it is funny, it is also rather sad, too.
Don’t let that put you off. There’s also some older stuff in there, drawn from when I was writing about making a mess of things like moving house, or trying to hold down a job. You will be pleased to hear that you do get at least some coverage of the time someone dropped a fridge on me, the time when a crow nearly decapitated me, and the day when I accidentally called some very important people at work ‘The Poundland Mafia’. You’ll also experience my up and down relationship with Michael Palin, and a vision of Rolf Harris. It’s not dull.
As a little teaser to all of this, I have decided, in my next post on here, to release the Prologue – the first 2,078 words, in fact, to help you see what I was driving at. I hope you enjoy it.
Thanks for coming back.
Love, Chris
suggzy 