It’s been a while. How’ve you been?
Truth be told, I have no idea if anyone is reading this. Until this week, this entire blog was offline, which may well have broken the email subscriptions I apparently still have (if you’re one of those subscribers and it works, I hope this blast from the past isn’t too unwelcome!). When I last posted, I had it set up to auto-tweet everything I put up on Twitter—vocabulary which shows how long it’s been, and which suggests that that doesn’t work any more either.1 And I think I used to get most of my views from manually linking to each post on Facebook, which doesn’t show how long it’s been so much as how old I now am.
I was reading through my old posts this week in search of something I’d written to read out at an event. I didn’t use anything from here in the end: the most suitable thing I found was a post I wrote towards the end of the first lockdown in 2020, which I’m still rather proud of but which might have killed the mood. But reading the posts made me smile, then made me realise how much I’d missed writing them.
This blog has had two major periods of sustained posting. Let’s call them “Acts”. It’s a little pretentious, but no sense stopping now.
Act I was when I started this whole thing, because that’s how numbers work. Back in early 2018, it was strictly a travel blog, hence the name, with a simple message that getting out of a very claustrophobic city could be good for the soul. It ran for a little over a year, when I got distracted by another writing project that I decided to be irritatingly coy about on here.2 I also started to run out of new places to visit that didn’t need a car and weren’t just London, especially given that I hated buses.3
Act II started in March 2020, when it became clear that the world was going to be at least a little Not Normal for a while, and I decided having as many hobbies as possible might be quite useful to keep me vaguely sane. I’m not sure it worked, given that I have almost no memory of what I wrote in that time: when this week I read back the stuff I’d written, much of the time it was like someone else had written it.4 I guess this association with collective trauma must be why I stopped? Because the timing of the end, in 2021, seems to coincide with things starting to get back towards a vague normality. Either way, Act II was less of a travel blog, partly because there wasn’t much travel to be blogging, and partly because in that time I moved to Edinburgh, thereby finally escaping Oxford for good. Instead, it contained musings on and distractions from COVID life, aided by the, er, interesting post ideas I got from an anonymous suggestion box.
So I suppose this, if I manage to make this post more than a one-off, is Act III. What does this have in store? Honestly, no clue. I’ve been places, many the kind of small towns that were once this blog’s brand™, and I guess I could tell you about them. But, then again, maybe I won’t. After all, given the passage of time, if you’re reading this you’re probably not a student interested in leaving Oxford on a budget. And, if you somehow are, I doubt I could tempt you to take a day trip from there to North Berwick or Leven, even on the best split-ticket deal you could possibly find.
Speaking of which, what of this blog’s name? When I first moved here I suggested I might one day change the title to “Escaping Edinburgh”. But I don’t think so. “Escaping Oxford” was always, deep down, about a longing to be anywhere, anywhere, but there.
I like it here.
So the title stays. If in Act I the title was practical, and in Act II it was surprisingly literal, whatever Act III this blog has is going to see it become psychological. Posting again on here is, you might say, a way of exorcising the demons of my past—of finding a renewed joy in something so connected to so much sadness. You might say that, that is, if you were someone whose writing was a little pretentious.
Ah, well. No sense stopping now.
Seriously, if you are reading this and stuck with this navel-gazing for the whole thing, I’m very grateful you’re (still) here. And if you’d like to make a suggestion for something I should write about, my pandemic-era suggestion box is back open.
- In other signs of the times, em-dashes are now apparently a dead giveaway that a large language model has written something. Back in my day, it was just a feature of me being taught how to typeset a thesis by someone with very strong punctuational opinions. I will continue to use them, but rest assured that all the nonsense on this blog will remain 100% human-generated. ↩︎
- It was a novel manuscript. I don’t know why I didn’t just say that, looking back. It was set in Oxford, for goodness’ sake. It could only have been more thematic if it had involved a jailbreak sequence. (Alas, it didn’t.) ↩︎
- Some things never change. ↩︎
- Making it completely socially acceptable that I laughed at some of my own jokes. ↩︎
Leave a Reply