There's a line, and I've crossed it - even though I was meant to be below it.

Today i started the Live Below the Line challenge. It's not going so well. It started with the best of intentions. I had some squidgyfied (meaning slightly past its best) spinach, some value rice, and a few bunches of herbs to get me through the first day, with some chewy sweets thrown into my work backpack for good measure in case I got a sugar low and couldn't concentrate on my world-saving work.

But then Jeannette brought chocolate in. And Damien had lots of leftover roast meat that was going to go to waste...so instead of sticking to the challenge which I'd harked on about for weeks, I went for utilitariansim. Is me proving to myself and my peers that I can scrimp and suffer and save and starve for five days really worth letting purchased and processed food go to waste? Is that really what awareness-raising is about ? Or is it more sensitive and sensible to use up all the shockingly shoddy foods we produce and sell for extortiante profits on this side of the economic divide in order to prevent additional wastage ? And also to prevent me from spending what little money I earn on even more nutrition-free crap.

There's a further argument (oh yes, this can get worse) : I have good friends. I know decent people. I frequent sociable people. Thereby, food and sociability go hand in sticky hand. To top off the plying of cooked and packaged goods thrown at me during the deskjob, upon returning home to my gourmet flatshare, I was flipped at by some fresh pancakes, which were justified solely by the explanation 'yes but you didn't buy them, I'm giving them to you' (also accompanied by some faux-champagen which Lucinda had left for us after a flying visit to Paris). It's a fair excuse and one which, frankly, if I were to turn my nose up at, would make me think I had even less heart than those people who forget that there are starving suffering (for real) people on the other side of the world/channel/road.

Hello old friend.

Writers are known to take brief breaks, in order to delve back into the world of the living, and neglect for a small moment the world that spills out of the tip of one's fingers; though no less real, this world is not as tangible or as ultimately satisfying, in my sensation-driven existence. 

However, the break I have taken from writing for purely egotistical purposes such as this one is neither brief nor explainable. So I shan't try and justify it, and I certainly shan't try and shorten the past, as both of these ambitions seem as dead-end to me as my desire to learn to play a new musical instrument (perhaps I'll come back to this soon). 

What I can explain, right here, right now, is the purpose of this blog. Because the truth is that this blog is not meant to be read. On the contrary, if you read it, you'd be doing it a mis-service. It is to be written. Which writer, however hopeless, however obnoxious or tireless, writes in order to be read? If they do, they should be shot ink at from the top of their pen. For writing is a purely egotistical experience. I realised this a short while ago, whilst I was doing some freelance journalism for an increasingly popular online travel journal. The purpose of the writing wasn't for people to really glean useful tidbits to aid them on their journeys of discovery. It was to prove to myself that I could write for money, and research thoroughly enough for an article to be respectably objective and coherent. Of course, the fact that what I had written from my Parisian living room could perhaps be of use to an American tourist travelling through South America gave me infinite joy, but that wasn't what got me behind my computer every evening after a day at the office. 

And so there is no non-egotistical reason for me to write this. I'm just going to do it. Because although I'm still Claire and I still make half-baked observations, I've seen and lived and felt a fair few things since I left Mexico and wrote my last blog article almost three years ago. But I haven't quite moved far enough in my life, for my liking. So by writing this I'm going to try and get moving even more. By 'moving' I mean learning from the things I live. Because there's no point in doing things if they don't make you do better things afterwards.