Stepping Out. Looking In.

I am so chuffed with the lovely messages I have been getting about this blog. Don't get me wrong - I know this blog isn't earth-shattering and I'm unlikely to win the Orange Prize for Literature here - but it's such a boost to hear that the blog is having a, dare I say it, snowball effect.

Thank you for this, and please keep your messages coming.

I've been thinking long and hard over the past couple of weeks about myself which is great, sounds a bit selfish but to make any of the changes I want to make I need to know what I am now.

You'd think we would all be pretty knowledgeable about ourselves wouldn't you? However, I think, certainly in our culture, that we are discouraged from thinking too much about our feelings, ambitions and ideals and that people who are introspective are seen as being either hippies (sounds good to me) or self obsessed.

When we say as children 'I want....' we are told that 'I want doesn't get' . So, and trying not to get too heavy here, but why do adults say these things to children? Surely, we should just see this as an opening for discussion, for encouragement and guidance. Even now I feel that by writing my wishes down and sharing them that there will be some people who will poo poo it and see it as self publicity. However I genuinely feel that this kind of public diary is massively helping me to focus and to realise what I want from life - call me  a hippy (please) or selfish (not to my face though - I'm a proper wimp!)....either way I'll carry on regardless. Questioning myself and my motives and publishing my hopes and dreams.

You may have already read my personal aims which I posted a couple of days ago and I have made a start, very small steps, to achieving those, I'll be blogging any movement (excluding the bowel type). 

Now I need to start on the wider picture. I have really wracked my brain. Obviously I would like to sort out global poverty, put an end to any form of abuse of human rights and make disease a thing of the past. Realistically though? In twelve months? Give me twenty four and I'll give it my best shot. But for 2012 I'm keeping it simple.

1) Support local. Promote local. I want to educate myself on what exactly is available locally. Produce, art, entertainment, retail everything and anything that's going on locally I aim to find out about and if it's worthy of promotion I shall promote it. With this in mind, if you are a local business (Hastings, St Leonard's etc) and would like me to look at your operation/product with a view to putting it up on here, please feel free to contact me. I can't promise to cover everything on here but I will do my best. Obviously - It would have to be something that I am not actively 'anti'.....'special massages' for example (if you get my drift).

This is more like it

2) Lobby to improve my local Children's Library, which I have to say is depressing - to say the least. Children need to be inspired to read and to be literate, to lose themselves in stories. At the moment they are more likely to lose themselves in the grey tedium of tatty books and torn plastic pouffes that have a faint smell of pee about them.

I have no idea where to start with this apart from arriving in the library with a clipboard and noting down everything that is wrong with the place....I may be gone some time! Again all offers of help gratefully accepted - our children need lovely places filled with lovely books - this is not a middle-class idealistic view - surely, is it?

For the moment, this will do. Who knows where it will end. Or what will happen in the middle or even at the start.....on your marks....I'm off. 

Now where did I put that clipboard?