Hypatia Avenue

"Shut your filthy girl-gash."

People have often asked me, why do you keep a blog? Well, I like writing. I enjoy the space and spirit of blogging - uncensored, self-centred, highly subjective and a tool to express myself however I wish with no restrictions but those I exercise on myself. I'm aware The Avenue can often read like a whining teenage Livejournal "I don't like my job nobody understands I look at him and he doesn't know I'm alive and I just want to die I feel so fat I feel so ugly Dear Livejournal you're my only friend OMG MY HELLO KITTY BUBBLEGUM DISPENSER IS SOOO CUTE!!!!!1!!1!!" etc. but it suits me to whine here and allow those who follow my business the opportunity to scroll past all the tantrums and sulking. It's also comforting to know that the selected range of my friends and family abroad can share my news and get in touch and, as my recent reunion with Sir Humphrey proved, this blog is a useful tool to fill in the gaps when there's been a while since last contact.

Above all this, this blog has introduced me to some fabulous new people - Planet Halder, McReadie, Shem and others. The extraordinary things about blogging is: I've never met them. And yet I religously check their blogs each day or each time I'm online which means each day) and I notice if there hasn't been any update, I might worry a little, I pounce on the latest entries and I have an urge to comment and create dialogue because there is something that tickles my interest or maybe I just want to let them know I'm there. It's like any relationship we maintain - only this sort is conducted through what we put up on our blogs.

How can this sort of relationship between a bunch of people talking to each other through websites be at all satisfying or fulfilling? It just is - there's a very generous, open spirit in blogging; people share alot about themselves and spend a lot of time writing and posting their thoughts, opinions and experiences. When one blog encounters another and sparks fly, it's like any other relationship or bond - it's exhilarating, stimulating, inspirational. Sometimes just silly and amusing. Sometimes... just habit. You check the blog because you always do and you'd miss it if you didn't.

And sometimes, blogs and blogging can lead to some quite extraordinary events.

I met Monerz from Winnipeg yesterday who was taking a tour of London with Taxloss. I've never met her before and was only recently introduced to her blog via Shem (who I have never met, neither has Monerz) via Taxloss (who he has never met and who Monerz had never met before). And yet there we were, having lunch together, 5 minutes from my office, in central London.

It was too brief to make much of it but all the best to you Monerz)! And the rest of you - keep writing! Keep reading! When are you next in town?

Gosh. Who else is feeling all warm and fuzzy?

"I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street.
- Virginia Woolf

"A friend is a present you give yourself."
- Robert Louis Stevenson