Just back from a magical weekend with Mrs Towers. I am one of the luckiest men on t’planet, without the inkling of a penumbra of a shadow of a doubt. From the rice and dahl to the deep-fried mars bar (yes, really) to the veggie breakfast at the fab sea-front B&B, and on to the brainiac woman who thinks I’m worth the trouble – what more could a man ask for? Oh, and on the way home, I got to swing past the guy who was best man at our wedding. These are the times I know just how insanely privileged I am. Health, enough wealth for these needs, time, friends. Worthwhile (if frustrating!) work, and challenging self-created tasks.
And guilty pleasures, like the book “Don’t Look Back”, (“I’d Know You Anywhere” in the States) by Laura “Tess Monaghan” Lippman. Picked up for a quid in a charity shop (sorry, Ms Lippman!) I have already read it (when I should have been Honing Plans). It is an effectively-told story of a girl abducted at 15 who, 22 years later, is contacted by her soon-to-be executed kidnapper.
The novel runs in parallel – the 1985 sections spliced with the present day. Echoes back and forth, reflections, memories, doubts. It’s all nicely done, and if the resolution is anti-climactic, then blame the marketeers, not the author. (I was horrified to see a bunch of icons on the back (dagger for thriller, scales for “legal”, question mark for conspiracy etc) and a pie-chart showing the purported proportions for this particular book. Really, is this what we have come to?)
Anyway, coming back to my neglected blog* while thinking about these questions of the past knocking incessant, , I see I am now being followed by “My Mending Wall” billed as “A girl’s journey through overcoming abuse and neglect”
I’ve read a couple of the posts, and they are powerful stuff. Will they be to every DT reader’s taste? No. Does that matter? No. One of the many worthwhile things about the internet (besides the stupefying, the coarsening, the speed-freakery and glibifying) is the space it opens for people to work through – publicly but yet anonymously if they choose – the problems they are encountering in their lives. My Mending Wall is, in my opinion, an example of what can be done with “confessional/self-help” blogging.
Update: This popped up in my googlereader. “Oh! There are other people just like me? I’m not so weird after all”: the transformation of identity in the digital age
* There a LOT of posts half-written in the drafts folder and on the memory stick around my neck
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