"heaven, I'm in heaven, and I wish that....."

Thank you leesepea, but I don’t think I’ll be buying flowers for the vet after all…she's nice but, I'm still looking for the real thing.

I know how this started, out there on the world wide web I bumped into an American girl and we started to write to each other. We got quite close and lied to each other on a regular basis, and she had a “blog”. I used to marvel at that, I was a regular visitor and even in the times where we weren’t corresponding with each other (that’s the immediacy of email for you right there, people who’ve never met can argue about a lack of feeling or intuition!), I had a real feel for how she was. She wrote freely and openly about her feelings, and knowing her even from a distance I could see the ebb and flow of her moods. What amazed me most was her commitment to her blog, no matter how she felt, what it cost her to reveal, she posted – and she was private too, hardly anyone commented on what she had disclosed.

That’s why I thought I’d give it a try. Do you recognise the symptoms? A tiny bubble of hysteria, building as it rises and the fear that it might hit the surface in a public place? Imagine, the office, if you felt a sudden irrepressible urge to say what was really on your mind (I’m still going to do it one day and people will say”that was a funny way to resign”). The anonymity appealed to me. It would be helpful to write, to get things out, to think them through and put them in perspective through the simple discipline of writing about them. Squeezing spots on to a page. You can’t imagine the release! (Of course you can, stupid). It was marvellous, better than I had imagined, I could say what I wanted, rant, rave, roll with the flow, anything I liked from what I had for tea to polishing the bones of my skeletons.

It took me a while to get over myself, to start to have a look around. There’s a universe out there, and it’s possible to go scudding from star to star. It’s incredible. There are so many people, saying so many things, every single one of them completely justified just by the very act of having something to say, that you could lose yourself. Still, and all, I found myself coming back to some people, and (finally) found out how to link places so that I could get back to them easily. That should have been a clue for me, but I’m thick.

I’d dug a nice, comfortable hole and filled it with the comfortable mess of my head, and then like a fool I went messing about on the river.

There’s no point in me saying, to anyone who might read this, that there is some wonderful writing out there (but I suspect I’m going to say it anyw…oops, too late). There are people who make what probably seems mundane even to them seem exciting, if only because it’s a window into their world. There are others that make you laugh out loud, and those who can describe the deep dark night of their soul, and do it as if they were writing just for you. I’ve read things that I will remember forever, things that I know will make me hesitate and think before I offer an opinion on things I was once certain about.

This may be boring the pants of you by now, but it is going somewhere really….

I felt the need to leave comments with other people, to try and express my appreciation. I’d no idea, I guess like most of us, how this macrocosm worked, when I first entered it. And then, well look at that!, people left comments on some of the things I’d written. Which is when it really all started to go wrong. I must admit I got carried away. I left footprints in the snow. Suddenly it wasn’t enough to just read other people, I had to go and say something, and they followed me home. And then I wasn’t writing for me anymore I was writing , in my head, for an audience, and showing off (what with I’ve got no idea). Nothing to do with the subject matter, but it was in my mind now that other people would read what I’d written, so I could never be sure that I wasn’t trying to impress.

But that’s not the worst of it. The people that I’ve met here are extraordinary. They care, (you care don’t you?). Have you noticed? I’ve ‘met’ more genuine people in these few months in this cyber world than I have ‘outside’ in my entire life. You don’t simply comment on each other, you actually, really do give tuppence about each others lives. It’s wonderful, it’s incredible, it’s addictive and for me it’s very dangerous.

The truth of it is that the atmosphere is a bit too rarefied for me, up here the air’s too clean. This world on this inside is good, wholesome, supportive. I could live here. But I don’t, I live out there, and mostly it’s not a pleasant place to be, but it is at least real, in a way that unfortunately you are not. I’ll make a fool of myself if I stay, in fact I already have.

On the bright side, on the outside, it’s autumn, which is my favourite season. It’s full of wood smoke and the crisp crunch of leaves under foot, wellie boots and conkers, cool sheets and red hair and freckles (yes, freckles). These are dog singing days.

I’ve dreamt my very pleasant dream, and now I’ve woken up, and it’s a lovely day outside.

So, I’m off, no comments (PLEASE!), let a chap put his wellie boots on..

..wait, better check the gas is off….yup,

switch off the lights and, close the door with a

click