I can't be sure, but suspect that while I have managed to maintain volume here during the last week, I have not managed to maintain quality. There are several reasons for this. First, I have had only limited access to a computer, and to an unfamiliar one at that. Second, I have not had access to my normal diet of cultural stuff. Usually, what I attend to is the output of the cultural media: DVDs, TV programmes of various kinds, and books, including books with art-type illustrations. Here in France, I have the two or three books which I took with me, none of them very cultural, and very occasional bouts of TV that are of my hosts' choosing rather than mine, together with a determination in any case not to spend much of my time here watching TV.
My third excuse is the one that caught me by surprise, and which I have only now starting to think about. At home, internet time is fixed cost and unlimited. This means that surfing time is plentiful and ideally bloggable thoughts (i.e. thoughts provoked by reading other blogs) occur to me constantly. When they do, and if they strike me as good enough, then I am already where I need to be, at my screen. Here, blogging time is scarce, and I have either to arrive with something beforehand or else to think of something quickly when at the screen. It's not that my hosts are hovering behind me, waiting to do their scarce little burst of surfing, although there is much work that my hostess in particular is now busily ploughing through, and I must wait until that is finished for the day before I even think of taking my turn. It is simply that I no more want to spend lots of time blogging than I want to spend lots of time watching TV.
Blogging, I am finding, is an anti-social habit, at least the way I've been doing it. Michael of the 2 Blowhards (I'll do the link later) has been kind enough to say of me that I do a great deal of blogging. Well, I've failed utterly to contribute anything to Samizdata. My one posting to that had to take the form of an email, and that either didn't get through or was considered unworthy. And my stuff here and at my other place (link, see above) has been very average in quality, I fear.
I've also (see my other place) been watching motherhood at close quarters, and have been witnessing for myself that combining motherhood with getting anything much else done is a herculean task. Tomorrow I return home with a much enhanced feeling of respect for Natalie Solent and for Alice Bachini. I understand that Natalie has recently earned plaudits from no less a personage than Mark Steyn, and Alice's stuff I've always loved.
They do motherhood and blogging. All I've been doing is taking a holiday and blogging. They make their blogging work. All I could manage was to wait until I get home.
Still, I do have some pretty pictures from my travels, and maybe I'll show you some of them when I get home. Maybe, more to the point, I'll get back home and resume doing this stuff, approximately speaking, properly.
