Blogging 101/Er, what?

So, fashionably late, I’m just getting started with Blogging 101, a course which I hope will get me feeling comfortable about blogging, rather than wildly scrabbling for the space where I can type stuff and then randomly pressing things until it says published, only to find weeks (months) later that, bizarrely, no-one has read my hilarious/profound/insightful post.

Why am I here?  I’m supposed to be asking myself in this first post.  Not like in an existential kind of way, which is what I’ve been asking myself with varying degrees of misery and despair over most of the last year, at least, but why am I here on this page writing this blog?

Well…

I’m a writer.  I do it, so I am one (that sounds simple, but I don’t think I’m the only one who spent a lot of time in the past wanting to be a writer without realising that all I had to do was, er, write).  What I’d really like to be is a writer who’s paid to write – as opposed to a writer who’s paid to do something else which allows her to write.  I know. I KNOW.  But what can I say, I’m a hopeless optimist.

Also, I’m interested in stuff.  Which makes me want to write about that stuff.  All sorts of stuff: words, food, family, pots, minutiae.  Observational stuff, I suppose you’d call it.  I like observing.  And I particularly like observing the stuff other people don’t notice, the stuff going on in the background, the overlooked stuff.  Why? I hear you ask.  Well I don’t hear you, but I’ll tell you anyway.

Because I’m a middle child, so am used to being overlooked.  Because I’m a mum, ditto.  Because I’m a middle-aged, middle-class woman, ditto again (should you say ‘ditto again’, I wonder?  Or just ditto.  Again.  Oh, did I mention I am a pedant and an over-analyser?).

At the moment I’m mostly observing how very cold my hands are, because obviously with only me at home I can’t justify putting the heating on, and anyway our house is stupidly cold, built as it was for hardy Victorians who thought a whole brick between them and the British weather was the height of luxury.  Consequently I’m observing that trying to forge a career out of sitting about doing something that can’t be done with gloves on is not a sensible idea for someone in such a house, who also has exceptionally poor circulation.

So that’s it for now.  I’m off to do some jumping about to warm myself up.