And so it begins...

Last Wednesday, whilst waiting for my sausage baguette to be cooked in the café at work (ashamedly, my second such baguette of the week - but I felt justified having played squash that morning), a strange urge came over me to start a blog.

I'm not entirely sure where this urge came from. There was certainly nothing inspiring to be found from sitting next to a stack of plastic cutlery and watching my fellow workers order similarly unhealthy breakfasts. Nevertheless, the urge was there, and it had to be satisfied.

Quite how it's taken me over a week to get started, therefore, is beyond me. Well, actually, it's not. I'm just horribly good at procrastinating - to the point that if it was an Olympic sport, I'd be a world-beater. Although, if it was an Olympic sport, would it require me to train regularly? That might clash with the ethics of a procrastinator.

Thankfully, eight days on, I've finally found enough spare time in my busy schedule of sitting down to get things started, and so another blog, undoubtedly destined to go unnoticed amongst the bajillion other pages on the Internet, is born.

It's not my first attempt at this sort of thing. At the age of 14 I started to keep a diary, and I amazingly managed to keep it going for five whole years. Unfortunately the content was, shall we say, poor. My Obsessive Compulsive nature seemingly forced me to write something on every single date, even if I had actually skipped a night in reality, and thus the result was five years of inane drivel, mostly the (mis)fortunes of my football team, or how I liked a girl at school but couldn't tell her for fear of making a fool of myself. Some things, apparently, never change.

Every so often, usually when I'm moving house, I come across those diaries again and flick through them, cringing.

(For the record, I'm not actually Obsessive Compulsive. I'm certainly pedantic and a perfectionist, and on occasions I can be over-organised, but anyone that's seen the horror that is my bedroom will vouch for the fact that I blatantly don't have OCD.)

My second attempt at recording my life started in 2001 with an online journal. We'll call that, "the graduate years". A year after leaving university, with me harbouring ambitions of becoming a writer yet not having written anything for six months, I thought it would just be useful to be writing something again, even if it was a new diary. Unfortunately I didn't bank on this journal also descending down the route of a lovestruck and/or angry teenager. Why would you, when you're supposedly in your twenties?

Needless to say, re-reading some of those entries also makes me shudder at the idea of being so... well... immature.

You're probably wondering, therefore, what I have to write about now that I'm creaking towards 30. I contemplated this in the café last week, and came to the conclusion that the answer is, in all honesty, not a lot. I don't think of myself as a particularly opinionated person (except when it comes to slow walkers, but who doesn't want to punch them in the back of the head?), my job isn't interesting enough to inflict upon the world, and my hobbies still include supporting a crap football team and not talking to girls - and no-one wants to read about that. Believe me.

The truth is, I have the same intentions for this blog as I did with my first online journal. I still entertain the dream of one day becoming a (screen)writer, but I'm not going to get anywhere if I'm not actually writing. And I realise that no-one ever won an Oscar for creating a blog, but I'd like to think that if I can at least get into the habit of sitting down every so often and getting something onto the screen, it might just spur me on to develop one of my ideas into something a bit more... wordy.

Don't worry, I won't be subjecting you to the really personal stuff. This is a public blog, so there definitely won't be any entries about unrequited love or rants about ignorant people here. I'm not entirely sure what that leaves us with at this stage. We'll have to wait and see.

Incidentally, the sausage baguette was very tasty. Having said that, I think I'll bring a bowl into work next week and start eating cereal at my desk. Apparently there's something about turning 29 that's made me into a conscientious being. It scares me, somewhat...