Migration

I thought long and hard about whether or not I wanted to move my historical blog posts over to this new site after my long hiatus, but in the end I decided to not rewrite history.

This wasn’t actually a particularly easy decision; a big reason that I didn’t write for so long was because of the complications and messiness in my personal life during 2021, something that I still feel the reverberations of today. Looking back at pre-2022 writing isn’t something I find particularly easy to reconcile with where my life is today.

Changes

I have actively not changed any of the wording of the old posts in any way. In fact, the only actual changes I have made were to correct the images and some links, and update the metadata tags to align with the new design. I’ve left in the old category tagging too, although they’re not used here yet, I might look into it in the future.

The wording though, I won’t change (even the couple of typos that I know to be present). What I wrote is a reflection of where I was at the time, and to change it would be to be dishonest to my history. I don’t want to do that.

Who I am now though, and the direction my life has taken, is fairly far removed from what I would have pictured back then. I was going to write that Charlie has been the only constant thread throughout, but even that wouldn’t be true; I didn’t get Charlie until a few months after I started writing. He’s getting to be an old man now, retired from racing last year and living a life of luxury now.

Next Steps

Jú and I are in the process of deciding on the next big step to take now that we’re married. We have three that we want; adopt a puppy, have a child, and move to continental Europe. These things aren’t really compatible simultaneously, but equally, we don’t have unlimited time to wait for them in sequence. Charlie is getting close to the age where a puppy will do him more harm than good as he gets older, so we can’t postpone that too long, and either a puppy or a child would postpone living elsewhere for several years at least (for me anyway; Jú is a lot more relaxed about future chaos than I am).

But whichever we choose, I do want to consciously keep track of it here. So much has changed since 2021, and there’s so much that I feel I haven’t recorded for myself. Now that I’m married, it feels like a good time to start a new chapter, with a new name and a new site for myself, but it’s a chapter I feel that I need to write (literally, as well as metaphorically).