Living history

I was at Roman Vindolanda in Northumberland yesterday. The museum, along with its cousin, the Roman Army Museum a few miles west, has just re-opened after a multi-million pound redevelopment, and the whole thing is looking superb.

Amongst the wealth of treasures on display, one little piece of information caught my eye: a caption for a case full of glossy red Samian pottery. The caption said that the maker's mark on some of the pieces of pottery was identical to that on pieces found in an unopened crate unearthed at Pompeii.

Here was a craftsman, doing his job, who is now immortilised, not just in one country, but in two, hundreds of miles apart, almost two thousand years after he was producing his work.

One human being, one magical little piece of history.

The sand-box approach

My husband informed me over lunch today that what I'm engaged in with my blog at present - it is only two days old - is known as the 'sand-box approach'. I had never heard of this concept, but immediately I said, 'So I just play around with it and see what happens?' And apparently that's exactly what that means.

The words 'sand-box' immediately brought to mind an old photograph my parents have. It shows a toddler in a pair of pink dungarees, playing earnestly in a cardboard sand-box (we really knew how to have fun in the 70's), on the rather barren patio of a brand new Wimpey bungalow.

The garden and patio are a beautiful, lush little haven now, without a whisper of the childhood or the sand-box (though I can still recall the pleasant mustiness of the box and the grittiness of the sand between my fingers). Perhaps the blog is my replacement sand-box, a safe new place to play and experiment, but with words this time, instead of a spade and a blue plastic saucepan.

I'm having fun behind the scenes, adding and adjusting elements, asking myself 'What happens if I click on this...?' and trying out things generally, so I can make this work just as I'd like it to. I hope I'll get into my stride pretty quickly.

Sophie.

Welcome!

Hello, and a warm welcome to my blog.

At the beginning of this year, I determined to set out in earnest on a new career path as a writer. I've dabbled in writing before, but always met with self-made obstacles - chiefly a crippling lack of confidence - at which I invariably fell at the first attempt!

Well, panic has set in now. I've realised that I'm genuinely not getting any younger and if I leave this very much longer, I could end up old, unfulfilled and disappointed, and that thought really does horrify me. It's amazing quite how motivating a factor fear can actually be...

So, here I am, at the start of what I know will be a long, hard journey, but hopefully a happy, interesting one full of adventure too.

I hope that my blog will serve a number of purposes. I would like to use it as a platform for my writing, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as to share my experiences as a new writer, and my own hints and tips. I will also use it as a means to muse on the questions which occur to me from day to day, questions about the nature of life, being human, friendship, and anything else which happens to be exercising my imagination or passions.

On a much more (even more?) prosaic level, I'll be using the blog as a way of disciplining myself to write regularly. I've been reading extensively around the subject of writing, and the one message that comes back time and again is quite how important it is to make writing a habit.

I do hope that you will enjoy what you read. Please leave a comment if you'd like to. I suppose it goes without saying that warm words of reassurance and encouragement will always be welcome! But so, too, will debate and constructive criticism.

Thank you for visiting.

Sophie.