I got back from Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago. After ten days in the Pyrenees and a few more lounging around contemplating in my brother’s garden in East Lothian, I started working at the frantic pace and meeting the excessively tight deadlines I had promised myself I would avoid. The paradoxical lesson has been that I never learn. Ha!

I didn’t feel like writing the blog. Although I find inventing ridiculous characters and writing absurd stories amusing, there is something a bit unsatisfactory about it –it’s a bit like lurking behind a wall and shouting jokes out from behind it. Perhaps a psychoanalyst can get a glimpse of the person writing, but it does not invite any communication.

It did feature stories that had occurred in the Sudan and a clothes warehouse I had worked in but that all happened about 17 years ago (for goodness sake)! For years I have been going over the same stuff, stuck in the memories of a short three-year period of my life. I remember my paternal grandparents often talked about the war (Second World) until they died. It was "their" era. I got the impression that they felt the forty or so years they lived after 1945 did not count for very much.

Fortunately, there is a lot of light at the end of this tunnel and the roof seems to be caving in a little, which is good. The blog will therefore change both its name to bob'sblog and its address http://bobinbarna.blogspot.com/ (don’t expect anything there yet) and will be directly biographical (i.e. Dear Diary, why has she not shown any sign that she loves me?).

I hope you know what I’m on about.