An enigmatic title, and you may have to do a little research to find the precise quote I am thinking of. I could offer you my copy of The Norton Shakespeare, about half a hundred weight of literary genius, and a souvenir of my years of Open University study. In the end I didn't come out with a degree, mostly because I discovered that child rearing was rather more rewarding and much more immediate than studying the humanities.
Every course I studied gave me a new work of which I was previously ignorant but which has enriched my life since. In the case of Bill the Bard I got the poetry. The 1996 movie based on a Royal Shakespeare Company production did it for A Midsummer Nights Dream. Richard II was the other play that blew me away. I saw it twice at The Globe in London in 2003 with Mark Rylance as Richard. Theatre, actor, rest of cast, production. All wonderful (I realise I use that word too much, sorry if I am sounding like Pollyanna or perhaps since I am being arty farty, Candide).
A better title might have been 'Why blog'.
When episode one came out I thought I was doing it so that friends could read about my condition and when we met or spoke we wouldn't have to waste time on the illness and could immediately chat about the things that had made us friends in the first place, although in many cases we have been friends for so long that the beginning is lost in history.
Things have moved on and I have discovered many other, possibly more selfish reasons.
And yes VANITY is right up there. I confess that I do study the numbers. To find that well over a thousand people looked at the last episode gave me a huge kick (mathematically it might have been a hundred people looking 10 times each but that might actually be better).
That so many of you took the time to like, share and comment was humbling. Many of you spoke about my bravery, not a word that has often been associated with me in the last 60 years, and not quite accurate in this case but I will come back to it. Perhaps not today, space is limited and I do need to get to TUMOUR TOURETTES.
I have also discovered that blogging is a highly therapeutic exercise. I have never slept all that long at night. This may shock people who have seen me sleep for Scotland in licensed premises after a tube or two of wine gums.
I don't class myself as an insomniac, I have radio and earphones set up to listen to and I assume that if I was tired I would be asleep. In the last month rather than think about the illness I have been able to think about what I would write about it. The difference doesn't sound much but actually it puts everything in the third person and clears a space round about me.
A final reason to blog is that it allows me to blot out the large heap of egg based paperwork I should be grafting over right now! Displacement activity!
Rage has a place in my predicament. Not against the condition. That is nobody's fault, I have no supernatural entity to blame or to beg to.
No, my rage expresses itself in what Clare has christened TUMOUR TOURETTES. It takes the form of an increasing level of intolerance aimed at what I see as intolerance. There are many expletives, the occasional stomping out of rooms, with or without door slamming.
What, you may well ask, ignites this extraordinary behaviour? A short list follows:
The British Government and its policies or at least any policy which involves wealth redistribution from the poor or the disabled or the merely feckless to the 24% of our population who had the bad taste to vote for them. You were wrong!
And did I mention their decision to move away from renewable energy to gas and nuclear (almost certainly pronounced nucular round the cabinet table).
Or the decision after watching the hideous waste of life at the Bataclan where France wisely didn't institute airstrikes in Paris to clinically take out the terrorists, to start these airstrikes on Syria where the dead civilians could be renamed collateral damage.
Or the bloody Daily Mail, and don't get me started on the US Republican Party presidential candidates. AND BLOODY DONALD TRUMP AND WHO THE HELL IS KATIE HOPKINS.
and breathe.
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