It’s a Saturday morning in mid-February in Hampstead and the beginning of my last full weekend in this flat. Over the next week I am loading up all my stuff into a van and driving it up to Norfolk, where my parents live. And then I have a month of homelessness (including two weeks of holiday) where I will be sleeping on the floors of friends. I am contemplating wandering over to America for a week or so – I might go and see Kerry in Los Angeles.
At the moment though, I am sitting in my bedroom looking out over Heath Street and thinking about the last year and a half living here – all the stuff that has happened to me, all the stuff I have had to deal with and all the stuff I have accomplished. It’s a strange time indeed.
Things on the web move so fast. Yesterday at work I was asked to write a list of a few sites that I thought were well designed and interesting. I duly wrote this list from memory, only to find that glassdog.com had completely changed its look, famewhore.com was on a self-imposed hiatus and vitaflo.com (a recent favourite of mine) had disappeared completely without trace.
Opinions can change so quickly too. Derek Powazek, an old friend to barbelith, used to have a pretty low opinion of weblogs and weblogging – until he tried it for himself. Now he’s written a piece about it – What The Hell Is A Weblog And Why Won’t They Leave Me Alone?. It’s interesting reading which raises a fair number of important questions (including “Why do people waste their time when they could be building something Big, beautiful and daring).
Even emotions seem energised and heightened on the web. Riothero has been in my thoughts a lot recently – when I first stumbled upon his site I was amazed by his energy, and as time has passed he has managed to connect that energy with a flair for writing entertaining and quick-witted copy. His latest move has been to put a personal letter online – one that resolves his recent crises with Lyda. It just goes to show how the weblog can become something completely beyond its initial remit as a bunch of interesting links, and can become a synthesis of confessional, entertainment, journalism, column and online diary – a new and interesting, albeit low-key genre of writing. I only have one question – I wonder if she knows?