The 'hit counter' on the blog is recording a mere handful of hits per month. This doesn't surprise me, I have given up more or less on social media and never understood how you can use tags to maximise traffic. Really blogging is becoming old school with more performative social media sites such as Instagram and TikTok replacing it as people's preferred way of communicating. So Heels for Dust exist now largely as an extended note to self.
Getting a decent WiFi connection in campsites has always been problematic and is getting worse. These days mobile phones have as good functionality as a laptop so people tend to use mobile data rather than WiFi for creating and consuming on-line content. Sadly the app version of Blogger is a cut down version of the one designed for a PC and doesn't really meet my needs, so blogging just using my phone is not really an option.
The upshot of this is that a backlog of posts from our trip to western France built up waiting to be sorted out while I worked on rebuilding the deck at the bottom of the garden..
This hiatus won't be obvious when I finally get around to posting them as I can back date them all. Still, it's not exactly conforming to my aim to write the blog 'in the moment'. The notes may have been written at the time but the finalised blog post not uploaded until weeks later. That's cheating in my book!
Anyway, all of this has led me to the conclusion that I need to change the way I produce the blog so it is less time taking. So for the forthcoming trip to Italy I am going to try to limit myself to a weekly summary of what we have been up to followed by a dozen or so photos each with a sentence or two about them - more a photo journal than a blog.
I never envisaged when I began that the blog would get this big, 835 posts, each around 1200 words long on average, that's over a million words, War and Peace multiplied by two and a bit!
What I am proud of is it is a record of how retirement can be liberating, the beginning of something not the end. Only once, back in 2016, did I attempted to articulate the exhilaration of travelling as thing in itself rather than a means of reaching a destination. How it becomes immersive, a hypnotic pulse of days. The joy too in travelling as a couple, how the journey itself becomes something precious that you have shared, a kind of profound togetherness.
A road through autumn
Autumn stalks us like a jilted lover.
We flee south seeking impossible freedom -
a slow drive across Champagne's ochre plains -
russet woods fringing the mirror-still Meuse.
We flee south seeking impossible freedom,
on ancient roads - empty, poplar shadowed,
through russet woods fringing the mirror-still Meuse.
We hardly speak, but watch the wordless light
hush down ancient roads. Empty, plane-tree shadowed,
a crumbling square in some Burgundian town -
we hardly speak, but watch the wordless light -
le crepuscule’ as we sip our 'deux noisettes'.
A crumbling square in some Burgundian town -
it feels like weeks or months ago,
'le crepuscule' as we sipped our 'deux noisettes',
uncertain how each day slipped out unnoticed.
It feels like weeks or months ago
we chanced upon a verdant valley
uncertain how each day slipped by unnoticed,
time sauntering south with us in Autumn's shadow.
We chanced upon a verdant valley:
turquoise lake, sunlit pastures, ice streaked peaks,
time sauntering south with us in Autumn's shadow.
Herdswomen prod their clanging cattle homewards,
turquoise lake, sunlit pastures, ice streaked peaks,
flowery chalets dotting valley fields -
herders prodding clanging cattle homewards
today as for the past four thousand years.
Flowery chalets dot the valley fields,
"Is this our earthly paradise," I ask,
"today, as for the past four thousand years,
to walk in peace within each seasons' pulse?"
No earthly paradise! We wanderers ask,
"What lies beyond this green Arcadian valley?"
Peace may dwell within each seasons' pulse,
but we flee south on sultry Autumn's heels
to seek what lies beyond these verdant valleys:
a slow drive south on Puglia's dusty plains,
ever south on a sultry season's heels,
stalking Autumn like her long lost lover.