What’s the difference between blagging and blogging? Someone asked me that the other day, someone even older than me. Well blagging is getting away with things, by telling some cock-and-bull story, I said, and blogging is … well not very different really, except you do it on a computer.

So here I am, feeling very alone in the gi-normous world of  t’ Internet (Lancashire expression). About to reveal my soul to billions of people who don’t know I exist? Absolutely barmy (Lancashire again -think of barm-cakes? – a kind of flat bread-bun).

I love writing – stories, essays, anything, and I love putting the world to rights, even though there isn’t much chance of that. So now here’s the opportunity to set things down, get my thoughts and words into writing, see who else out there thinks like me. I am someone of a certain age, living in uncertain times, released from work at last, and wanting something worthwhile to do. Looking after the little grey cells before I shuffle off this mortal coil, or at least keeping them fed, like the yeast starter which now lives in our kitchen for bread-making (and looks like the Quatermass Experiment – remember that?)

More about me -that should emerge in future posts, how can it not?  The bread-maker? That’s  HO, ‘Him Outdoors’, my lifelong partner and father of my kids. The bread-winner (although not completely) and now into sour-dough and ciabatta, although he’d rather be out on his boat in the Bristol Channel.

We live in a ‘pleasant Victorian villa’ as the agent described it (actually it’s Edwardian and an over-sized cottage) not far from the sea – hence the boat, which I generally steer clear of, given that it has an inherent instability which upsets my semi-circular canals (medical terminology – of which there will no doubt be more).

Who else is there in our ‘Victorian villa’ sharing our sunset years? We used to have dogs, 2 Cavalier King Charles spaniels, now sadly gone to the great Kennel in the Sky (actually they preferred beaches to kennels). We have Cat, a tortoise-shell-and-white female. (Did you know these cats, aka Calico Cats, are almost always female?)  She shares the bed and some of the most intimate details of our life, most of which you won’t get to hear about. Pawn not Porn. Although this is her – revealing all!

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That’s enough for now. HO has just brought me some lunch on a tray while I sit here typing in my tiny office. Should I be worried? How long have I got to live?

Long enough for the next post I hope….