An imperfect blogger

New Year's resolutions. I can't decide whether I am a fan or not. I do enjoy the start of a new year - that feeling of intrigue at what the year will hold. Psychologically, it is an excellent time to make a fresh start - but then we've all committed that cliche of making resolutions which 3 weeks later we've forgotten about. It makes me question the honesty of the "new year's resolution" if part of us knows that the chances are we will have abandoned them in a few months time.
Nonetheless, I have already made a mental list of things I'm going to do in 2011. One of them (and the point of this post) is that I'd like to make a renewed attempt to blog more.

While I was a parliamentary candidate I got into the habit of regularly updating my political website, and I always wanted to actually "blog" during that time aswell. There were loads of insights and thoughts that I had, but the problem I found was that it would take me literally hours to write a blog post. I'd normally get the words down quite quickly, but then I would spend forever agonizing over whether it sounded right, reading and re-reading what I had written a hundred times and tinkering with it. It would normally get to the stage where I wouldn't even publish what I had written and spent hours over, because it could never match up to this perfect ideal that I had in my head. This paralysis continued after the election and my hopes of blogging on a more personal level were stymied.

I thought that this trip to Africa might have provided the stimulus to break my mental block (I'm writing this from Lusaka, Zambia). However as some of you may have noticed, Eeva and my attempt at a blog of this trip fizzled out rather quickly. I am sorry about this, I would have loved to publicly share and record the experiences that we've had over the last 3 months. They have been mind blowing and my understanding of so many issues has been changed massively. Maybe I'll write a "retrospective blog series" of reflections on issues in Africa.

The main problem on this trip has been access to the internet, but I will be back in the UK in 3 weeks and will no longer have that excuse. So, my resolution is to "let go" of that perfectionist tendency, accept that my grammar will not be precise and the way my sentences sound, feel and flow will not be perfect and, well, just get on with it and record my thoughts.

Let's see if this is a new year's resolution I can keep.