Five hundredth post

When I  started here on Blogger back in January 2009 I did not have any particular intention in mind, it was just something to occupy myself with. I have intermittently felt that the blog should have some kind of 'mission statement', something that tells visitors what it's all about and who I am, but whatever I tried writing tended to sound either too mundane or way too pretentious. Even writing a blog feels vaguely pretentious; why would anyone want to come here and read what I write. I guess mainly they don't. They come and look at pictures of lizard cakes and then go away again. But I have vaguely wanted it to be something other than a waffly perambulation through my life. 


So here I am 500 posts later and still rambling about books and knitting and wondering if my visitors would think they were in the wrong place if I dropped in a political treatise, an exhortation to 'improve' your lifestyle or a detailed analysis of what's wrong with the world. I used to have a little box by my profile picture that said some kind of nonsense about doing things quietly. It tends to give my title (silencing the bell that is) a bit of a double entendre. The original meaning was a reference to school bells, that tell children when to start and stop 'learning', and by extension how life is so often controlled by external forces, or social constraints, that tell you when it is time to do this or that, but also that in the post-small-child part of my life it has become metaphorically and literally quiet. Even though the nest is not quite empty I find myself at something of a loose end and I have all this spare time which I fill with books and fluffy stuff. Anyway, thanks for visiting, this blog has become quite important to me, in spite of the vague sense of dissatisfaction, so I'll stick with it a bit longer and see where the next 500 posts might go.