Loyal followers of the Blag – of which I now know there are at least two! – have complained, rightly, that I just sod off whenever I please with nary a sign that says ‘gone fishing/off to find myself see you in 6 months/now blogging as a French dog for cash’ swinging in the shop window. They are right to tick me off. The thing is, the longer you leave an update the harder it becomes to write one. So what’s with the long silence?

Okay, time for a little confession…I have in fact been two-timing Blag Lady. What!? Another blog? Well, I decided to start a blog all about my poetic practice, because blogging takes time: there are photos to take, USB cables to find and break and fix, laptops to not lose, Macs to adapt to, passwords to forget/mislay (one of my favourites), widgets to go wow about for five minutes etc etc ad nauseum, and I needed to at least try and be efficient with the old tick tock tick tock that don’t stop but just gets faster and faster as you get slower and can barely keep up. You know what I mean?

So, if you wanna read about me and my notebooks you can take a look here, but it’s all ‘oh how I wish I knew what to do with that comma, full stop etc etc…’ Don’t expect the wit and wisdom you occasionally find on La Blag. Although it does LOOK very nice, and here I confess to being a format floosy. And it is VERY VERY easy to update. Thing is you can’t leave comments. Then again, not many of you do anyway, so perhaps it won’t matter. But you can become a follower! Which is oh so new web 2. It’s currently called ROUGH STUFF, but that, along with everything else, may change.

I’ve also been ‘agressively friending’ 1300 dogs on Facebook. This has been a day job – yup I’ve been paid by the Institute of Contemporary Arts to blog and Twitter as a French dog for the past couple of months! Now that sounds like a blag if ever there was one, but in fact it’s been a lot of hard work as well as plenty of puppy play. So eef I now and zen break into un petit Franglais with ze odd woof woeuf thrown in, now you know pasque zis ees ‘appenin, non? I have learnt a lot about how to syndicate online content to a variety of platforms via FriendFeed and discovered that while Twitter is full of ‘I invented the internet in my lunch break’ techies who take themselves just a LITTLE BIT TOO SERIOUSLY, Orkut is a social networking platform populated by gay dogs from Sao Paolo. Well, no the dogs aren’t gay, but some of the top pockets they reside in look decidely pink…

I have also been trying to finish my poetry collection Incident 263. This is ongoing and going on. Bad Cop Mentor once referred to me as some sort of tenacious terrier/dog with a bone, and it’s true. It won’t be over until I’m signing copies of my magnum opus at the Royal Festival Hall.

Sometimes all this format whoring leaves me boggle eyed: I still have to watch The Wire, keep up with Family Guy, view, believe and then forward at least one totally preposterous/very plausible conspiracy theory video from my Funwall, make my Scrabulous moves, take pictures of random strangers with cool text on their clothing or accessories, keep three status updates on the go and attend actual events in the real world from time to time. Then there has been the pen for hire activities which have involved trying to persuade clients that good, short, Anglo-Saxon words beat multi-syllabic Latinate constructions any day of the week and then changing everything from the former to the latter…(RULE 795c: the paying customer always knows best). Plus the presentations, proposals and something else beginning with P…

The thing is, it can become easy to say very little in a lot of formats. Or should I say it can become tricky and extremely time consuming to say very little in a lot of formats. What I say on Blag Lady these days has become a case in point. The odd photo? Yes please said Fan Number 1. (Why oh why won’t this one picture I’m trying to upload go on to the screen like it normally does, could the developers really have broken Wordpress in 3 short months? See, you so DON’T want to know about all the little technical issues that make one post take for-fucking ever!! Just give me the picture…I’m trying and it’s getting on my wick something chronic.) The odd, amusing little FUNNY once in a while? Can it really be THAT much of a chore, chided Fan Number 2. Even a click through will do.

Well, the thing is, I was writing the rather earnest and annoying process blog the other day, and it started to sound a little bit like Blag Lady. What happened to the rough and ready, uncensored, here’s where you get to see my heart and soul stripped bare for all its contemporary mundanity and literary philosphical angst? Could it be that the arch and how so frivolous? Blag Lady as spurned by her own creator really is me? Ah, well, I spose you can take the Lady out of the Blag but you can’t take the Blag out of the Lady. Or something to that effect.

Expect more T-shirts, more text from where I don’t know next, some whingeing and whining but no woofing, a little blagging and of course some lagging behind on the old updates. Blag Lady is nothing if not irregular.