A new beginning.

I have have lately discovered that Google directs you to this page when you look for Windermere diaries. In fact this page is like taking a step into history. This is where I first started writing, ages and ages ago, and will not tell you anything much at all. Probably the most important thing to start off with is the Cast of Characters, you’ll find the link to that at the top, and  after that your best bet is to look at the bit in the right hand side – yes, there, next to the picture of the tree over the top of this – where it lists the most recent posts, and start there. The top one will be today’s entry.

I am not nearly computer literate enough to change what the mighty Google has decided, so I thought that some Advice from the Author might be the best way forward.

Read on…

So I have spent today painstakingly trying to set up my new blog. I have been hampered a bit by not being terrifically competent with this sort of thing: Number Two Daughter once said that watching me with technology was like watching a chimp trying to dig termites out of a mound with a stick.

Several people assured me that WordPress is the way forward: so I signed up for it optimistically, and immediately got lost in a puzzling confusion of widgets and plug-ins and then in the whole absorbing project of trying to choose a theme. This last took me ages. I tried several of them but couldn’t manage to work out whether I liked the background and structure, or just the sample pictures of cute children and thrilling foreign adventures put there to illustrate and which secretly make you wish that your own life contained gorgeous blond babies and exotic landscapes instead of howling sticky urchins and Sainsburys.

I picked this one in the end, and if all has gone according to plan you should now be looking at legible paragraphs of writing posted over the top of some pictures Mark took last winter somewhere around Hawkshead. I am really proud of these, because they are amazing colour photographs but when I put them underneath the writing you couldn’t read any of it. I had to fiddle about for ages but in the end I managed to work out how to change the picture to make it look as though it had faded into the background, and felt very clever. I am sure you must be able to put the real ones on somewhere as well, but I haven’t quite got that far yet. You will know if I manage it because they will be there tastefully positioned next to the paragraph.

I have started with a page which is my Cast of Characters. This is because this blog is a sort of offspring of my Facebook diaries, and anybody who has read those will already know a lot about my life and the people in it, but anybody who just starts reading this won’t, and it saves lots of explanation later.

It is going to be a diary. Everybody who knows anything about blogs is unanimous in their opinion that before you start one, you need to know why you want to write it. I’m not sure that I do really. I know that writing on Facebook has been ace fun for months: it’s like being able to tell stories to a room full of cheerful faces. It has got to the point now where I want to write too much for Facebook, which isn’t supposed to be full of rambling yarns: and so here it is.

Please comment on things, half the pleasure is in sharing, who wants to talk into a void? I read comments on Facebook that make me laugh out loud, sometimes again later when I remember them: I have been hugely lucky in knowing some amazingly bright and funny people. I am so excited about this. See you tomorrow.

          I did it…