Much of the garden - the drive, I mean, the hard paths - is scattered with tiny white petals. A durable scattering of Spring snow? Soft hail? Apple blossom, of course, various kinds of blossom; no analogy required. Things as they are. Up at 5am, and now it's just before 6, dawn coming as I start this. That kind of sky where the clouds are lit from underneath by the sun as it rises; I am compelled to mention cottonwool. That kind of bird-noisy breeziness. Faint hum of this machine; tick of the clock.
    To be embarking on a new project is reviving in itself - rectangle of new sunlight forms on the cream-coloured wall; the air changes colour - but the most heartening experience this week has been the art. Did I mention The Agency? Click on the <portfolio> button in particular, but start on the home page and take a general look around. Also, the happy designer wrote to the Cornwall Women's Network (members of which pass things on, obviously), and I don't think she'll mind that I, too, have been looking at her site. There's a rightness about good design, good art. 

End of the day, for a change. Just back from town. The radio wittering on in the background about President Obama's coming out (ha!) in favour of gay marriage. One interviewee against - can't accept that his president believes in something that he doesn't - then another in favour. Two male voices, similar tone, diametrically opposite view, same duration. I suppose that counts as 'balance'. But there's never a synthesis after thesis/antithesis. I wonder how there could be. What will the world be, if this goes on?
    I'm in favour of equal opportunity, I suppose, although I think I'm more in favour of letting people get on with their lives without having to know what I think. Somehow, just about anything - marriage, private life, whatever - seems to end up more ruined than resolved when it becomes subject to intervention by opinion-formers, policy-makers, hot-air generators. Radio off; music on.    

This Summer rain. Not noisy, not forceful, just gradually (but quickly) there, like a steady turn of the volume control. Then gone again; withdrawn rather than gone - a more gradual word needed.
    Coffee for an hour yesterday with Patricia, who generates ideas like, I don't know, the - whatever - and then in the evening a meeting of the Cornwall Social Media Cafe, my first, and you can track it down at www.meetup.com. Interesting people. Glad I went; thanks to Peter Delaunay for the introduction. Second Tuesday of the month, 6.30pm at the bar Vertigo, Truro. Interesting projects, actually, as well. And a conversation about the intimate use of toothpaste that I wouldn't have expected. They go to Ask afterwards; I'll join them next time.
    And an email from Paul. First contact in a long time. Everything's changed and we're all moving forward. Clarity.

Gosh! The other thing I did, in this fit of online efficiency, was tick the box to "upgrade to Weebly Pro", which means that when I find out how to do them, I'll be able to do lots of things that I don't know how to do yet. So to speak. Not expensive. I mention it because I now get to see a page listing who reads what. Not many people, and yes, you're right, this is (still?) a relatively private space, in that it's not going all-out to attract readers. But in thirty-ish years in the writing-to-be-read business, the last decade in the company of the internet, the last maybe five years with at least some online exposure, this is the first time I've looked at the technology/functionality square-on and seriously thought about it.
    Not that there are any revelations waiting for me in the stats page (yet?), but if it's my turn to reinvent the online wheel, I think I'm going to start with the inversion of private and public. Once upon a time, many years ago, I faked an entry in one of those small-scale (offline) business directories that used to appear every now and then. I took a pic of myself wearing different glasses and a beard, invented a name, faked a biography and sent it off. Then embellished my own entry and sent that off too. Still got the book somewhere. [I must Google my alter-ego; I wonder if he developed a life of his own.]
    Among the added extras in my own entry was a hobby: making model boats out of matchsticks. That isn't a hobby of mine. Came into my mind and I just put it in. Hey, I was younger then. Anyway, time passed. The day arrived when I was invited to lunch by a PR outfit, to meet their client. They briefed the client about me, using that book. And I remember so clearly the moment when I realised that he was working the conversation round to matchsticks, model boats, making ...
    Just that odd sense of a barrier evaporating. A tiny little private joke committed in the privacy of my office - I must have laughed - that was actually visible round that lunch table. Private into public.
    And now the internet, technology, smartphones, the whole primitive thing (primitive: it's evolving so fast). It's that scri-fi - I meant sci-fi, but I like scri-fi - thing that imagining something is the way to bring it into being. Imaginary people went to the moon before real people did; there's a lot we can do now that the characters on Star Trek did first, et cetera. Imagination plus unintended consequences; the internet as a proxy for telepathy - and the sharing that would bring. The internet is the "I am a camera" of private space.
    Bright sunshine after rain in the night. A Bank Holiday Monday.

May I explain? I read a book called Overcoming the digital divide by Shelly Palmer, who has the brand name 'Digital Living' for various online and offline, TV, media and publishing activities. He puts out an email newsletter, which is interesting in itself.
    But Mr Palmer wrote the book, and I came across mention of it, and in due course I downloaded it onto my Kindle. Could have bought a print copy, but it seemed kind of wrong to do that. One of Mr Palmer's insights was - is - that if you're young enough to have grown up with today's modern technology (as in: you have no memory of it evolving from something substantively, significantly different), you will tend to have a distinctive attitude to new functionality.
    If there's something new that does something different in an unfamiliar way, your reaction will be to try it out. You won't crawl under the covers to spend another month working on your denunciation of all things digital, nor will you avoid the new thing because you don't understand it. You'll just try it out, and eventually, you'll know enough about it to make it work. [Somewhere in this paragraph is a description of me, I think.] 
     Then Mr Palmer made the point that these days, the big evolution is not the gadgetry, the software, the new site, the whatever - it's what's happening to people. In the context of work - the context of the book - they don't just have, for example, a title, a business card, a CV. No. They have a Digital Identity. It's made up of everything that gets found when a prospective customer, supplier, employer goes online to find out more about them. Because - get this - everybody goes online first and asks questions afterwards.
    So I looked myself up. Hence the disintermediation page on this site. The point about a digital identity is that we all have one already, whether or not we're managing it (to the extent that's possible anyway). Our digital identities can become blurred. There are some interesting William Essexes out there,  but they're not me. It is conceivable that an interested party would reach conclusions about me based on something discovered about one of the others. And vice-versa, of course.
    Now, I don't know whether this makes me a dinosaur or just a late adopter, but if I'm in the writing business, it follows that I'm in the communicating business. And if I'm in the communicating business, it's time I tried this out. Because hey, it's bigger, more open, another medium  that could take messages. Fun, too, I expect.

If you come here regularly, you might like to know that this site is about to undergo a few changes. Nothing too drastic, although this blog will no longer be the home page, but I've been reading a number of books, good old printed books, about, er, managing a digital presence, and I think I can make it a bit more practical. Go on writing like this, but add what you might call a day-job element to it. Make it serve a wider purpose.
    So if you want to go on watching this space, you're as welcome as ever, and I hope you won't mind finding that there's a home page to get through first - but only once, if you bookmark this page.