Still standing

Hello to anyone reading my blog for the first time, and welcome back to those of you who have been here before. Thank you for showing up after the long break that I took from posting stuff here.

So, what’s new?

Yesterday I did a one-day course called Blogging for Beginners at City Lit, a further education college in London. The full name of the establishment is City Literary Institute, but City Lit is the name used by its adoring students and fans.

City Lit is a fantastic place, where you can study just about anything you can think of, and lots of things you probably couldn’t imagine, like Advanced Belly-dancing and Biscuit Decoration. Those are two courses, by the way, in case you were wondering how students would go about pursuing those pastimes jointly.

Why, I can hear you ask, did this Wilson chap do a course called Blogging for Beginners? He isn’t a blogging beginner, he’s a blogging geriatric. Too blogging right! Ken Wilson’s Blog kicked off in July 2009, so I can’t make any claim to be a virgin of this corner of cyberspace.

However, eagle-eyed readers will note that my last post was in March 2014, and prior to that, I had hardly posted anything since the autumn of 2012. I stopped tweeting at about the same time, too.

I’m not sure why I stopped, but I did realise that writing Facebook updates was a much simpler task, and the sugar-rush of likes that follows FB stuff led to a sense of well-being.

Unfortunately, as various psychologists have pointed out in the last couple of years, this kind of quick fix dopamine release isn’t really that good for you. In my case, I think it made me a bit lazy regarding anything to do with social media, preferring a couple of short sweet Facebook remarks, rather than anything longer.  

Whenever I feel I’m getting a bit lazy, I tend to sign up for some kind of training or re-education, and my remedy this time was to apply to do a Masters in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, which is part of the University of London and another wonderful educational establishment. I got accepted on the course, finished it last summer and graduated last month.

Anyway, I did the City Lit course yesterday as a kind of refresher and reminder of the possibilities and pitfalls of the world of blogdom but also because … well, there’s no way of avoiding telling you … I have a very big birthday coming up later this year. Extremely big, monumentally big … the biggest big birthday of a life that has been full of big anniversaries recently.

In August, I will be 70.

And there’s rather more dramatic news. I had a heart attack last December. Only a mild one, but it required an emergency surgical procedure to sort out. That kind of thing stops you in your tracks and makes you think.

Amongst the many things it makes you think are … it’s about time I started blogging again.

So, I’m going to do just that. I thought about starting a completely new blog called STILL STANDING – Careering Into My Seventies, but in the end, I just re-worded the sub-title of this one.

I rather like the double-meaning implicit in the word ‘careering’, because I think I will have to go on working for a while yet, so my ‘career’ hasn’t ended.

Let me know if you think this is a really bad idea with no mileage in it at all. If you think the world of blogging and social media in general has moved on and there’s no longer a place for a superannuated septuagenarian, let me know. Or if you don’t think that, let me know the opposite.

And if you have a vote in the UK, please don’t vote for the Tories.

Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man, age 69 and three quarters.