Ten years ago today, or maybe yesterday, or possibly tomorrow, depending on what day it is (you’ll have to excuse me, I have a spot of summer cold), I started my blog, this Little Red Boat thing you are reading by some means.

I was living and working on a small island off the left coast of Scotland, and I have been and done a bunch of really random, wonderful, difficult, good, bad and unmentionable stuff in the meantime.

This may not be a complete catalogue of every single thing done in that time, but to me, it’s the thread the runs all the way through, and the reason that so many of those things happened. Without this blog, I have no idea what I’d be doing right now.

But I know this for sure: I wouldn’t be sitting here, in my pretty little (rented, natch) house, looking forward to getting back into doing the work that I do tomorrow morning, with two transcontinental cats sitting on my feet, my beloved sitting across the room from me. And, quite unexpectedly, expecting one of those baby things. I am grateful to my blog for all these things.
And no, I’m not suggesting that blogging can make you pregnant.
Although, in a funny kind of way, you know? It can. But that’s not my point.

My point is that I have been blogging for ten years.
And I am glad.

Happy birthday, my dear little Sinky, oh Little Red Boat mine.

The last ten years have I have developed a life-philosophy I can stand behind without question:

If an opportunity comes up, take it. If it goes right, then jolly good. If it doesn’t? Then at least it’s good blog material one day. Or at least a funny story for the pub.

Now that’s something I can live by.

I was going to count the number of colds I’ve had in ten years.

But I’m too full of cold to care for the doing of it.

There comes a moment in blogging, I think, where you decide what you will and won’t write about, for fear of hurting people’s feelings, boring people, general courtesy, fears of professional hopes being dashed, that sort of thing.

I apologise therefore, that you haven’t heard very much about:

1) My relationship, in gritty (or soppy) detail, anyway. But It’s going very well, thank you. Or I should bloody well hope so, as we’ve been living together and muchly in love for about eight years now.

2) Periods. To be fair, I never decided not to write about periods, I have just never found them to be an uncontainable fount of hilarious writing material.

3) My cats. Admittedly I have written *some* about my cats, and probably would write more, except for the fact that every single time someone leaves a comment commanding I write more about my cats, it immediately cancels at least three future posts on the topic of my cats. What can I say? I’m very stubborn.

4) The work I do, and the work I might be hoping to do, and the reasons I don’t do some bits of work any more.

5) My family. Those that want people to know about them have blogs of their own, the rest, I refuse to tell stories about that might embarrass them. Which is a shame, let’s face it, because those are by FAR the best kind of stories. This does not count for the family In My House, for the record. But since that only includes me and My Beloved at present, and the cats, we’re back to 1) and 3) again.
Same goes for friends.

6) My weight. Holy hell, I have gained and lost and gained and lost and gained and lost a goodly number of pounds while writing this blog. And I should have written about it. BUT: the personal nature of it and the fact that it’s a really nice thing for trolls to hang on to if they’re trying to find the point of abuse that will upset you the most, and the fact that I’m always scared that the very moment I mention it is the moment I’ll mysteriously gain 300lb, hold me back. This is foolish, but then, so is letting mean people on the internet.

7) Money. Or large purposes, or where I live exactly, with notes on which windows are generally left unlocked and when this week we might be out of the house. I’m stupid, but I’m not that stupid.

8) Sponsored posts, PR events, and things that people have offered to pay me to write about on my blog. Never. Never have I done this. But does this stop the idiot PR emails coming? No. Not even slightly.

9) The things I forget.
There’s no reason for this. I just forget. I am TOTALLY going to get better at remembering in the next ten years of this blog.

10) Bad stuff. Apart from SAD, and anxieties, and other depressionny-things, which is a returning, constant thread running through this blog, I don’t really like to be the bad news bear. I don’t deal well with sympathy, and I don’t like asking for support, or help, so am very, very good at re-framing things until they look not only like a flood of good fortune, but like nothing bad has ever happened to me - or to us - ever.
(That’s unlikely to change, it’s just me. But I do want to get better about writing about all manner of things. I always do).

And… you know… other stuff.
…That I’m not mentioning.

I don’t know how other people decide. What they decide is off-limits, and what they decide is fine to write about. I don’t know how other people draw the line. Through the last ten years, drawing lines against things and blocking off parts of my life I don’t feel right writing about, I think I’ve mainly been happy, but I’ve also become very cautious (for many good reasons) and conservative. And I don’t like that at all. So I want to start taking down some of those walls, again. I just have to remember how to do that.

I was going to make a list of ten of my favourite words over the last ten years, but that’s ridiculous. I have hundreds of favourite words, and I have better things to do than try and whittle that down.

They include, this week, the words Malevolent, Nefarious, Mellifluous and Fucknugget. But there are lots of other words I could call favourites. Favourite swearwords, for example, could take up several different lists all on their own. “Sweary swearwords”, “Non-sweary-swearwords”, “Half-sweary-swearwords”, “Variations on the word cunt”, there are literally a WORLD of lists out there. Which I will not be narrowing down for this one post.

I like the word Yes. And I like the word Takeoff.

The plan was - when I thought about it, several months ago, in a vague fug of nostalgia - that I would make a big hoo-ha of reaching the tenth anniversary of my dear little blog. And that I would write lots of things in the weeks leading up to it that would reflect and examine the happy bits and the important things that have happened over the last ten years, with lots of links to past posts, and everything.

Inevitably, this has ended up in me trying to think of ten lists of ten things to mark my ten years of blogging, the night before the anniversary actually falls. But I WILL do it.

Even if the plain truth is that I’m really short of ideas for these lists, too, although there are plenty of things to write about in general (and more of that later), I’m finding it hard to think of different lists of things that have happened over the last ten years that I can rattle out quickly and don’t make me sound like too much of a self-obsessed braggart.
Well, no more so than having a blog in the first place does, anyway.

Anyway, don’t be surprised if, by the time I reach list number eight, it’s something like “A list of ten of my favourite numbers between one and ten in the last ten years, in no particular order”

Ten Things I Know Now, After Ten Years Of Writing My Blog, That I Didn’t Know When I Started Writing It.

1) How to work our DVD player. You either have to lift the tray, or bop it on the top when it starts making that dreadful NURRRRRGGGGGRGGRGRGGGGRGGGGHHHH noise. There you go. Now you know too.
2) The ways of the internet. And how to harness the loveliness of it.
3) How to make custard. Oh. And the fact that you can freeze both egg yolks and egg whites if you seperate them and beat them a tiny bit first. But those two things are related, so I won’t separate them out. [edit: ha ha ha ha. "separate them". I didn't mean that as a joke [edit-edit: goos thing, it's not very funny…] I meant the custard and the egg facts, but…, oh, never mind.]
4) Very basic HTML. Very, very basic. So very basic.
5) How to touch-type.
6) The capitals of all the US states. You just might have to give me some time to remember them. Some time and some prompting. And maybe some hints.
7) Layouts of ikea stores in at least five different cities. Not especially proud of this.
8) How to drive on the other side of the road (I haven’t passed my test on either side of the road yet).
9) What an ‘emoticon’ is.
10) The correct way to iron and fold a shirt. I just don’t DO it.

If I hadn’t been doing this blog already, if I HADN’T been writing this here blog about nothing at all under my very own name (and no other, no hiding, no pretending I’m not me after all) then there are at least ten anonymous blogs I would like to have written.

Which are…

Ten things I’m not about to list. Because it would suggest I know enough scurrilous things about them, and frankly, that would be almost as bad as writing ten scurrilous blogs about them, and then being found out and that being a big palaver. And frankly, I’m not that attention-hungry or stupid. Or both.

I have written at least ten other blogs WHILE writing this blog, of course, covering such topics as Christmas, Telly, Being a Lady, Things, Stuff and Other, but that wasn’t the point of this list.

Then again, neither was the list. The list wasn’t the point of this post either. Or rather it was the point, but then it wasn’t a list. So the list that wasn’t was the point.

I’m going to go and write another post. I’m getting a little tired, I think.

I have never been a master of nuns.

I have, however, held several different jobs during my (very almost) ten years of having this blog. Yes. If you haven’t noticed, I’m making ten lists of ten things before that anniversary comes along. I am, however, running out time. Because it’s tomorrow. Never mind, I mean, it’s not like I had any plans for tonight.

SO.

In no particular order (apart from the order that they happened, which, now I think of it, should probably be considered an order of sorts) I have been:

1) A craft worker on a small Scottish Island, helping children (and big children) paint rocks and make candles.

2) Student. This obviously isn’t a job. I do understand, it’s more commonly perceived as an anti-job, as a matter of fact. But still, if there is a better way to study how to become a Dramaturg (and to subsequently not become one) I do not know what it is.

3) Front of house staff at a theatre.

4) A barkeep. At a theatre. The same theatre as in 3), that is. It wasn’t the first time I had done these jobs, but it was the only time in these ten years that I did’em. So there.

5) Gopher at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Sadly, this does not mean I got to be an actual cute little sandy-coloured rodent, it means I got to run around going to see between six and ten of the smaller, more unknown and less-likely-to-be-good plays at the festival every day to see if there were any diamonds in the rough that were even vaguely worth the REAL theatre critics going to see. Also: grocery shopping for said critics first thing in the morning before any of them awoke. They eat a lot of soft fruit and tortellini, and run out of toilet paper often, for the record.

6) Tour Guide at the Science Museum, London. To be fair I did this for less than a day. I was there long enough to fail to learn the guided tour route, and then I got an offer of another, less confusing, temp job.

7) Production person on a newspaper website. This meant I helped build pages, construct whole new sections for new kinds of newses and features, help editorial people talk to technical people and try to put crosswords online and get them double-, triple-, quadruple-checked to make sure there were no typos. Thanks to the mysteries of our system, there were almost always typos. It was MAGIC, that system. I worked with some of the loveliest people I’m lucky still to know, at that point.

8) Journalisty person and TV writer at a newspaper. For a bit.

9) Pretending to be a cat, on the internet, part time. For the purposes of selling dairy products. If nothing else, in years to come I hope this will prove a comedy high point in my memoirs. Or my CV. Or both.

10) Writing words for a marvellous game. This is mainly what I’m doing at the moment (in a freelance way) in fact. It is a very good game. And I love working on it very much.

There are good things about all of these jobs. Apart from the one that I only did for a day. By which I mean, I’m sure that’s a very nice job, but I only did it for a day, so I can’t really speak for or against it. Still, though, I am pretty impressed that it managed to make a neat little list of ten.

And, if I was to go through it, more slowly and carefully, I could join the dots and plot the route that took me from craft worker and candle-maker to computer game writer and pretend cat, but I won’t. Because it’s more fun not to. And it suffices to say: this blog is the thread that runs all the way through that career path. And I am so grateful for it I sometimes think I might explode.

It was a weird night, the other night. There was the soft sound of soft rain falling outside, and the swish of the occasional car. But behind that, very quietly, there seemed to be the slightest hint of everyone in our very polite little neighbourhood having the mother of all arguments.

It wasn’t much, and certainly not so much that it would keep you awake if you weren’t awake already.
I was awake already.

Every few minutes there’d be a soft slamming of an inside door from a few houses up the street, and the very muffled shout about “something something ruining my life…”.

Then, entirely unconnectedly, a couple of pairs of drunken feet, half in heels and half not, would clomp up the road from the direction of the centre of town, feet punctuating a slightly surred fight about something that both would have forgotten about in the morning.

Five minutes later, a restrained but rapid knocking on a door some way down the street, trying to keep itself quiet, but failing to keep itself subtle.

And then, without any drama, it all faded away again, all these stiff-upper-lipped domestics in stumbling transit and behind closed doors, and I fell asleep.

I like the sounds of life. I like the way they change, from place to place.
Those are the sounds of this place, this house I have lived in only a couple of months. But (as anyone who has read this blog over any of the last ten years will tell you) I have a lot of other places to compare it to.

THUS I WILL DO COMPARING. BECAUSE IT IS A BLOG. SO I CAN.

Things I Might Have Been Most Likely to Hear At Night From The Houses I Have Lived In During the Period I Have Been Writing This Blog
Possibly Could Have Thought Of A Shorter Title For This List, Now I Think About It. Sorry

- “house” no.1: In the summer, a corncrake. (a rare bird with a rare singing voice, like a cog being scraped against a corrugated iron fence, and a rare talent for hiding in long grass, which is good, as it also inspires a rare talent for inspiring people to hunt it down and wring its tiny neck)

- “house” no.2 (Technically the same house as above, but different living quarters within it): The faulty fire alarm that went off, without fail, at least once a week during the summer season. In the spring, though, sheep in the next field crying for their lambs who had been moved to the next field in preparation for the inevitable.

- house no.3 (Glasgow): The haunting strains of the father of the On-The-Toilet Family next door, who appeared to be building a full-scale cathedral pipe organ in the back bedroom.

- house no.4 (London): The sound of a trumpet drifting on kebab-scented air from the Jazz club out the back.

- house no.5 (London): The mice that ran riot on the kitchen floor of the flat above us. The kitchen directly above our bathroom, that is. We tried telling the couple upstairs they had mice. They said they didn’t have mice. Every night, I lay awake, petrified, listening to the mice they didn’t have.

- house no.6 (London): The last no.73 routemaster buses, rumbling up the road outside.

- house no.7 (Brighton): People doing drug deals in the passageway outside. Or having a wee. Or, on one memorable occasion, kicking a seagull to death.

- house no.8 (Brighton): Postal vans, and the sound of the open mic night drifting down from the pub down the road. Seagulls.

- house no.9 (San Francisco): Police sirens pulling over people coming off the freeway ramp too fast.

- house no.10 (San Francisco): Racoons in the garden of the house next door. Foghorns drifting over the city from the Golden Gate.

- house no.11 (Brighton): Traffic. The soft kerchunk of trains leaving Brighton station, travelling toward Hove.

- house no.12 (Brighton. Here): The banging of distant doors, and the noise of life going on.

Ten years is a long time. But bugger me, there’s been a lot of moving house.

This is the bigger of our two cats (known variously as Squirrel, Squig, Squiddles, and very occasionally by her formal name, Sir Ian McKellan) demonstrating how good she is at hiding.

She is, I’m sure you will agree, a veritable ninja.
It is the small bump displaying the location of her nose that really gets me.

Speaking of ninjas, I was delighted by this story last week from a newspaper in Texas:

Sunland Park police are keeping an eye out for a “ninja” prowling around a neighborhood in the middle of the night.
At 3 a.m. Thursday, a woman and her husband were awakened by dogs barking in the Edgemont neighborhood, said the woman’s father, Alan Turnello. The couple saw a man in a black ninja costume in their front yard holding a sword. When the husband went outside to confront him, the ninja vanished.

The ninja “didn’t say anything,” Turnello said. “He ran off attempting to hide behind things that were too small for him to hide behind. He (Turnello’s son-in-law) doesn’t know if this guy is crazy or maybe he really thinks he is a ninja.”

Sunland Park city spokesman Arturo Alba said police responded to the call of a suspicious person but were unable to find the prowler.

And while I am not underestimating the scariness of someone waving a sword around in ones front garden, it is, in particular it is the sentence “He ran off attempting to hide behind things that were too small for him to hide behind” that I am in love with. Just for the mental images it conjures.

I think perhaps the terrible ninja and my biggest cat should play hide and seek. I think I would pay to watch that.

I keep hearing from various sources that blogging is ‘DEAD’, which makes me want to rush to the internet and cover the ears of my poor wee boat before it panics that it is doing the wrong thing by not being dead, and immediately sinks before anyone thinks badly of it for this unforgivable internetty social faux pas.

But then I remember helpful things like
a) Boats, like walls, have no ears. This is bad, in that it means boats (and walls) cannot wear earrings, so are very difficult to buy for at Christmas. But good, because it means that they cannot hear people say mean things.
b) People have short attention spans, and very short memories. This is both a sad thing, if you try and keep ahead of them, and be where they are wanting to be, and an ok thing, if you have other reasons for doing what you do, and being where you are.
c) There weren’t, comparatively that many people blogging when I started, and writing for not many people in a scene that didn’t quite exist was far easier. I find it quite comforting, actually. And freeing.
d) People just like saying things are dead when they don’t feel like doing them anymore, just because it makes them feel better about not doing them anymore. It very rarely means the things are actually dead.
e) There is plenty of room for doing things that are short, like twitter, but also room for other things. It is just about having a desire to say something, and something to say things about. And I have a sense that I will continue to grow in both those areas, as time goes on, so see no reason for this blog to die.
f) I like my boat. It’s part of me.

So there. While the Personal Blogs folder in my Google Reader gets quieter and quieter, it doesn’t make feel sad, as I can hear those voices elsewhere now, on twitter and facebook and google+ and in emails and IM conversations and, quite often, in my house. But it doesn’t mean I have to help that folder get quieter.

I will just sit here, happily, doing the thing that is dead, talking to a few nice people, and tapping away in the middle of the night when I can get myself to stop feeling like I should still be doing some work instead.

So just saying hello. From my boat. Not sinking. Not Drowning - just waving.

“But we had those lovely couple of weeks of sunshine in April!” people keep saying, like that is supposed to excuse the fact that heavy big grey meanbastard clouds have been merrily pissing miserable rains all over what was meant to be my summer.

Of course, I should know how this works by now. Seasons are not seasons. All that there is is a succession of days that are sometimes sunny, sometimes clear and scorching, and mainly grey and rainy and wet and coldish. And when the days that are appropriate for whatever that season is MEANT to be come along, people say “Yes, here it is, we have been expecting this to happen all along”, and when the other days come instead, they say “What’s THIS?!?” and then say “Oh, this is what it is ALWAYS like and we said it was going to be like this anyway, it’s not like we expected any different.”. And they are very annoying.

Most annoying, though, is the rain. And the clouds. And the coldness when you know that, in a few months, cold is all there will be anyway. So I wish to make an official complaint.

It’s not the post I meant to write today, but the weather. The weather made me do it:

Dear Clouds.

Stop it, and go away.

Love
Anna.

It was hot, so I bought some lemonade.

And then put some lemon squash into it. This made it Lemonemonade.

I considered putting a slice of lemon into it, which would conceivably have made it into Lemonemonemonade, but that seemed a bit too lemonny.

My Beloved, discovering that I had invented Lemonemonade and ALMOST invented Lemonemonemonade, suggested we could put some small, coloured chocolate sweets in a hard candy shell in the new drink for a little novelty as well as the slice of fresh fruit, thus creating the world’s first Lemonemonemonm&made, but we both decided that that would just be silly, and that anyone who did that probably needed help.

Luckily, if someone DID try that, and demonstrated they needed help, we decided we would throw a benefit for them. It would be called Lemonemonemonm&made Aid.

It has been a very productive evening.

Good GRIEF I have to get over the writing blockingness that has been making my fingers feel like carrots, if carrots were attached to hands and made of lead, and keyboards were anti-carrrot-magnetic and made of treacle. I have no chance, at the moment (it seems) of getting rid of the anxiety that makes it feel like my insides are being overrun by gerbils with squeaky squeakings, and little scratchy feets, but if I can’t solve that, I can at least try to solve the finger, carrot, treacle, antimagnet thing.

Which I’m going to do, this week, by walking, and then, when not walking, by writing and writing and writing with my brain turned off until I can’t think of anything to write anymore.

And I may do a fair portion of that here. Not sure what it will be, in that case (apart from my long and very complex argument explaining to the world once and for all, why Honey is really a Dairy Product and Bees should, therefore, really be considered nothing more than tiny flying cows) but also drafts, photos that I’ve forgotten about and not used, and posts like this, in which people helpfully provided random titles.

I may start there, in fact. After a walk.