A blank page can be an incredibly exciting thing. Myriad possibilities of how to fill such pages flutter in and out of my head on a daily basis. For the past few months, particularly when it comes to writing for this blog, my head has been devoid of such ideas. Numerous new word documents have been pulled up, a sentence written and then the little cross clicked in the corner. No, I don’t want to save changes to the document. It was a load of guff.
The mindset of “well you can’t travel anywhere so you can’t write about travel,” crept in. I used it as justification for not trying to find an alternative angle. Lack of travel makes travel writing hard. It doesn’t make it impossible. A little thinking outside of the box and a can do attitude (£3.99 plus postage and packaging from eBay) has led me to striking the magical substance of blog writing. Content. Like struck oil gushing from the ground, I’ve found inspiration for a series of blog posts to potentially fuel the fires until travelling is easier to do once more. Okay, I just wanted to shoehorn the word gushing in. The fuel analogy was good though, wasn’t it?
There have been subjects I have wanted to write about in the past that I’ve put on the back burner purely because I didn’t have pictures to illustrate them with. The standard of photography offered by Free Range Ben (me, hi) may not be gallery worthy but it is all taken by, or featuring me. I want to keep it that way. The last thing I want or need is legal action being brought against me by someone who went to the Maldives in 2014 whose picture I’ve stumbled across and used on a blog post. I’ll never tick it off the bucket list if I’m doing porridge.
Will this lead to posts about the Maldives illustrated with photographs of a snowy Budapest? Absolutely. Noel Fielding is edgy like that and they let him present The Great British Bake Off, so it will do here too. Although plans are afoot to zoom out of posts about one specific place and embrace different aspects of travel, heavily embellished anecdotes and plans I have for my travels when we’re all allowed to do so freely once again. After all, having paid for the domain name, I should probably make sure I use it. Toilet paper shortage or not, we haven’t reached the stage where I can use cold, hard cash to replace it just yet. There’s a joke about ShitCoin to be made here somewhere.
The fear of the blank page has been banished. Posts that are actually about travel have been written and are sitting in the chamber patiently waiting to be shot into the world like an effective Covid vaccine into an elderly woman’s arm. Satire. Following a smooth segue into the topic that has been on the lips of everybody for the majority of the last year, being unable to go anywhere made me even more desperate to travel more. It also made me reconsider the order in which I want to visit the places on my bucket list. But more on that in my next post, how’s that for a cliffhanger?
Free Range Ben 