Navel Gazing : The Birds In The Meadow

Adventures and earning my keep

I spend a lot of time travelling in the summer. You’ll have seen in my previous post that I recently spent a week in Copenhagen – it was that wonderful luxury that is a real holiday. It’s usually been the case throughout my life that when travelling I am also doing some kind of work, either voluntary or paid. I live on my wits, and I live like a mouse – I have no expensive tastes and generally try to make my enthusiasms pay in some way – I love the natural world, so I’ll do little jobs for nature reserves and kill two birds with one stone, as the ill fitting cliché goes. I’ve done some amazing things in my life by living that way. But Copenhagen was a holiday pure and simple, and for me it was expensive.

The problem with having such an incredibly tight budget is that even the smallest indulgence has to go by the wayside when times are hard, and a huge indulgence like a holiday throws everything out of balance. I don’t know if anyone noticed that this website vanished for a day or so recently - it’s because my yearly hosting and domain bill had been due… and I’ll leave you to guess the rest. I am hugely relieved that I didn’t lose The Birds In The Meadow and have to start again, it was always meant to be self sufficient and has in fact paid for it’s-self many times over as well as providing much needed income. However, having re-purchased my domain name and hosting, it seems that I have also run out of hosting space on the server which in plain talk means I can’t actually continue a picture heavy blog here any more ’till I sort out my finances and buy some more webspace. A fine mess, and I’ll apologise for it right now. If anyone’s interested, there is a 15% off sale over at the shop, which I’m hoping will help the process along. I know, I have no shame. Well, maybe just a little…

In the meantime, I’ve dusted off a Blogger blog I began earlier this year and kept very much under my hat because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, or even if I could find time to keep it updated. It’s called The Aethernaut, and I’m thinking of it as a picture heavy personal diary, a little more succinct than what I’ve made here. You can keep an eye on me over there, and most important for me at the moment, it’s not likely to vanish any time soon.

Navel Gazing

I don’t update as often as I’d like to; do you know why? It isn’t just my insane work schedule as I scrabble to make a crust out of being…well.. whatever the hell it is I am. It’s because I deliberately limit myself as to what I write here which sometimes makes this feel like an oddly formal environment. Yes, I like writing; in fact I love writing and yet I rarely use my real voice in anything I’ve written here, and that is deliberate. I set out to write a blog purely about the natural world, and I often feel that anything that includes my personality gets in the way. Look at what I actually am writing though; I can’t get away from myself, I’m there in every single page, albeit a watered down version. And as to content, my intention was to write about nature and I produced a highly edited travelogue instead, albeit one with lots of pretty pictures. Hmph. What to do?

First of all I intend to simplify my categories – hold your breath though, as like everything around here it will take me an age to get round to actually doing it. From now on I intend to just have two – Nature, and Navel Gazing. The latter will be for those times when I just can’t help myself, like now. Secondly, in order to stop myself wincing every time I introduce a rankly commercial post showing off stuff I have to sell I have set up an entirely seperate (and as yet empty) craft diary, here. I hope to express a little more of myself there once it gets going; right now there is just a lot of tumbleweed blowing through. And as for this blog here, I intend to write more about the small everyday things that I seek and sometimes find in nature, whether that be in a rainforest, a bit of waste ground in the city or a neglected kitchen window-box. If all I have to write about is the spider that spins it’s web there, then that’s what I’ll write about and in my own voice too if I can find it. It might mean that I only post here once a week or less, but I will be going back to what I always intended. And who knows, maybe I’ll even get that starlings post I promised you written up.