Writing a blog

I'm just about to start a new blog about things we did as kids. I'm never entirely sure where each one is going, they seem to take on an energy all their own. Sometimes I write what I initially intended to write, and sometimes it goes off in a completely different direction.

The ones about my family and childhood were quite unexpected, but ended up being some of my favourites. I originally began with the intention of simply writing something light-hearted and funny about growing up in Essex. It's seemed an easy subject to take on, because there is no shortage of material. My Essex childhood on the estuary is absolutely jam-packed full of wonderfully horrific characters with big hearts, tatoos, white high heels, and determination of steel.

But the problem with scratching the surface is that you just never know what you're going to find.

Writing about my past just seemed to lead automatically, and also quite naturally, back to my parent's and grandparent's past. Although my mum's over-loving parents seemed to be the more interesting, my father's under-loving, Victorian parents also deserve their own blog at some point.

I didn't realise how much the possibility, or maybe I should say certainty, of losing my grandmother and her link to that area of our past was affecting me. The Long Journey Home probably isn't the best thing I've written, but it was the one which was most difficult to write because I suddenly realised that the loss of my grandmother meant the loss of that whole part of our family history.

Losing things which are impossible to replace is something that only ever seems to become apparent when it's too late. The fact that my grandparents chose not to speak very much about their past was always perfectly normal, and where the rest of my family were genuinely not interested, I didn't ask because I thought they had every right not to talk about it. But I'm suddenly faced with the possibility that it's too late, the horse has bolted, and I wish I had stood up and said 'I want to know, it's important to know'. With my grandparent's passing, that means that two more family histories will have vanished, no more Sztajnbergs (grandad), no more Voightlanders (nanny). What didn't go up in smoke, will just have fizzled out because nobody talked about it.

It's funny how certain things make us realise the importance (or at least relevance) of others.

But I suppose that's what writing a blog is about, the opportunity to write about what is important or relevant to me, without worrying about whether it's of any interest to anybody else.