Month: July 2022

It’s hardly a radical or surprising observation that the last few years have been a bit challenging all round. I mean, I’ve really had it easy on nearly every level and still found the whole period pretty fucking difficult to deal with. I can barely imagine what others without my privilege and resources have been through.

I can’t pretend to have responded to those challenges with grit and fortitude. There’s been a lot of retreating into the known and comforting. An awful lot of 2020 was spent playing Animal Crossing New Horizons, an almost aggressively anodyne and undemanding “retirement simulator” whose suspicious timeliness must surely have spawned all manner of lurid conspiracy theories blaming Nintendo for the pandemic. Even though I’d never played an AC game before, NH managed to feel like putting on an old sweater, a slightly queasy escape from our ghastly reality into some kind of undemanding and idealised alternative. Of course, this is one of the things that games and media and art are for — escapism has kind of a bad name, but that’s a lot of puritanical bullshit. Escape is a noble pursuit.

My consumption of new games, new media, new art seems to have taken a bit of a hit as part of this retreat. Not to nothing — and sometimes novelty makes the leap directly to comforting familiarity without passing Go or collecting £200 — but it certainly feels like the proportion of rereading and rewatching and replaying has massively increased.

I’m on my fifth or sixth playthrough of Breath of the Wild, and that’s not counting my many hours of tooled-up meandering through Hyrule after defeating Ganon for the first time. I revisited all of Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels — and recently knocked off Children of Earth and Sky yet again to follow up new release All the Seas of the World, with a revisit of A Brightness Long Ago queued up next. When faced with the option of tackling something new and unknown versus something dependable, the temptation of the familiar is terribly strong.

Which may go a little of the way towards explaining why I’ve resiled from my pending retirement and will be slinking back shamefaced to UCL for more teaching.

The joke’s on me, though, since the things I am familiar and comfortable with there have long been handed over to others. Whole new vistas of terrifying newness beckon. In at the deep end once again.

I don’t know how apparent it might be to casual readers of this site — were there any such, which there absolutely aren’t — but I’ve been circling WT uneasily for the last few weeks, tentatively sidling up to the idea of doing this again, at least a bit, in however limited and constrained a fashion. There’s something appealing about pausing for a bit of a self-indulgent wallow in the midst of whatever local and global catastrophes happen to be continually unfolding around us, a bit of — admittedly partial and dishonest and curated — record-keeping, putting down the odd marker after such a long stretch of unmoored limbo time, that shapeless, featureless slurry of unhistory.

Glancing back at entries from Walky Talky’s heyday, while one or two are now opaque without some crucial piece of omitted and long-forgotten context, the vast majority of those jottings from the past evoke a level of detail I’m hard pressed to recall for almost any time in the last decade; least of all the indistinguishable temporal morass that has been the Age of Covid. Various things did happen in 2020 and 2021, I think — they must have, surely, there are scars — but even the most drastic and wounding are hard to place now, bereft of mnemonic infrastructure, lost in the fog.

And so, the nostalgic allure of blogging. Might a few cuneiform scratchings in the digital clay of 2022 help stave off the worst amnesiac tendencies of my sclerotic brain? Can I erect some new retentive scaffolding to buttress these failing faculties? I don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to. Lying awake in the graveyard hours of interchangeable nights I concoct mental todo lists of salient posts, but when faced with actually writing the fuckers I tend to seize up. Unconvinced of the merit. Lacking the will or commitment. Unfocused and lazy and weak.

This, obviously, is one of those posts.

Call it a gauntlet of sorts. Thrown down. Demanding satisfaction.

Let’s hope it doesn’t just lie in the dust ignored for the next two years.

It’s not like I had other plans for 1 Feb 2023.

Far back in the mists of ancient time, before most people I work with — let alone teach — were even born, an American then-colleague explained to me that the Japanese word for goodbye literally translated as “I’m sorry I have been so rude.” It turns out, of course, that this is bollocks, and borderline-racist stereotypical bollocks at that. Still, it has ring to it.

So, to no one in particular (okay, that’s a lie), and in this specifically untrue sense only, please allow me to bid you: goodbye.

It’s been a slice.

Neglect of this blog is, obviously, nothing new. WT has been ticking over for the best part of a decade at a frequency so low that any actual entries you see around here are basically a rounding error. But it is a measure of just how remiss I’ve been that I haven’t posted one of these before:

Uncle Keith is more than 2½ years old, having arrived a couple of months before lockdown and the ensuing puppy bubble. Nephew Justin is nearly 1½. Both are, of course, adorable.

Having dogs has been transformative in a variety of predictable and unexpected ways. Mostly for the better, even. I’m not sure I can even remember what life was like without them, although that may also be mixed up with the overwhelming brain fog of the plague years. And the idea that they one day won’t be around is too horrible to contemplate — though Border Terriers are a long-lived breed, and I’m no spring chicken myself, so maybe I won’t have to worry about that.