blog – Jo Ind

“Spirituality” slows down blogging

Jo Ind — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 10:34:45 +0000

“Spirituality is when the inside of things is bigger than the outside” – Richard Rohr.

I came across that quote while I was taking a look at the new website of St Saviour’s, Bridge of Allan where my brother is rector.

It just happened to catch my eye because I was about to write a post on why I was finding it hard to post at the moment.

Why it’s sometimes hard to write a blog post

There are many times in life when I find my inner world more vivid and enticing than the outer world: I can’t read on the bus because I want to stare out of the window, I’m late for an appointment because I have been day-dreaming in the bath, I don’t switch the telly on because lying on my back looking at the ceiling is far more entertaining than anything being offered to me on a screen.

I’m going through a time like this at the moment – a time when I am being beckoned by my soul rather than wooed through the web. The outer world is small and thin. My inner world is rich and deep.

I don’t know if this is “spirituality.” I don’t know if this is the way of being to which Richard Rohr was alluding. But it is good to name this place and it a good place to be.

The number one reason why I blog

Jo Ind — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 14:05:53 +0000

PLEASURE.

That’s it, I’ve said it.

I was leading a workshop for Birmingham Book Festival last weekend called Finding Your Blogging Voice. One of the first things we did was brainstorm our reasons for blogging. Between us we said:

to have a voice
to showcase work
to create an archive of material
to explain a business
to connect with people
to improve SEO.

I was leading the workshop and so I forgot to say that, though I do indeed get all those benefits from blogging, my number one reason for going tap, tap, tap is because I enjoy it.

There are all sorts of different pleasures, of course.

Blogging isn’t like sex

The pleasure of blogging isn’t like that of sex or swimming or lying on the sofa with a glass of wine. It’s more like the pleasure of making a photo album – but using word-pictures rather than images.

And, as I said when I created this website, it’s like the pleasure of having my own room and getting it just how I want – my own little bit of cyberpace where I can play and muse and hang out with my friends.

In her seminal post What We’re Doing When We Blog, Meg Hourian talks about the anatomy of a post and the communication evolution etc. It’s all good stuff.

But she doesn’t say: “Having fun.” That’s what I’m doing when I blog and the day it stops being enjoyable, is the day I’ll stop blogging.

Farewell Birmingham Post

Jo Ind — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:04:16 +0000

My last day at the Birmingham Post was Tuesday 22 December 2009. I slid out on a farewell blog like Santa on his sleigh. Here is my heart-felt post, with added pictures, which was published in the Birmingham Post that day.

Bye bye Birmingham Post

Bye bye Birmingham Post. I have been with you for more than 21 years. In those years you have been through eight editors, gone from being a broadsheet, to a tabloid, to a broadsheet and back to a tabloid again, only we don’t call you that. You were black and white then, you’re colour now. You were a six day a week publication when I joined. Now you are a multi-media operation of which the newspaper is only a part.

In those 21 years, I have changed too. My mother has died, I’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, I’ve lived in community, I’ve lived on my own and I’ve lived with my family. I’ve married, I’ve had a son, I’ve had two books published and I’ve learnt to sing jazz. I’ve gone from being an angry idealist determined to change the world to someone who is content to change her little bit of it and is happier than I knew was possible – same hairstyle though.

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed

Farewell everyone I have ever interviewed. I became a journalist because of you. It’s been an honour to hear your stories and to tell them as faithfully as I could, whatever the pressure of my deadlines or the barking of the newsdesk. There are some of you who have touched me so deeply, I will never forget you. Thank you for your trust and for making my work such a privilege.

Adieu colleagues. What can I say to you? Do you know what I respect about you? That whatever we go through – and we have been through one Hell of a lot – still the stories get written, still the deadlines get met, still the newspapers come out. Sometimes I wonder how we do it. We do it because nobody cares about journalism as much as we do. What binds us is our professionalism and our dedication to our trade. By God, I shall miss that camaraderie. Stay in touch.

Farewell to the grubby sensuality of printing

There are other things which ceased to be part of my working life some time ago, but to which I feel the need to say goodbye. Bye bye inky fingers. Ta ra to the increasing clattering of keyboards as the deadlines draw nearer. Adieu to getting on my knees in the library to pull out files of black and white photographs and rub the red crayon marks from them with the sleeve of my jumper. Farewell to the deafening clamour of newspapers rattling along overhead conveyor belts into lorries blocking Printing House Street, so we could not get out of the building. Farewell to the grubby sensuality of printing.

Bye bye, Fort Dunlop. Ta ra M6, or rather the sight of you snaking your way through the estates of Castle Vale. Farewell standing in the bitter-cold opposite Moor Street Station wondering if the Urban Splash shuttle bus will ever turn up. Goodbye ladies loos, the secrets you have heard and the lipstick applications you have witnessed. You never did get those bog brushes did you?

Au revoir journalism

Au revoir journalism. This is the one which brings a tear to my eye as I type. I leave in the hope it is “ta ra a bit” rather than goodbye for good. We will always tell stories. We will always need story-tellers. Bye bye to the traditional ways of doing it – you were great, you really were. Hello wonderfully connected new world.

A cyber-room of one’s own

Jo Ind — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 15:07:43 +0000

When Virginia Woolf famously said a room of one’s own was necessary for a woman to write, she could not have envisaged a room that looked like the one below.

But for me, having my own space on the web in which to doodle my thoughts and write my life feels every bit as important as the hut at the bottom of the garden, for which so many women yearn.

Ever since I started blogging for the Birmingham Post, around 18 months ago, I have longed for my own little patch on the internet – a space that I have designed, that I manage and in which I can say what the Hell I like.

Waiting for my cyber-space

But I have had to wait, for all the reasons dear Virignia so well understands. My little boy, Arch, is now three-and-a-half and stays all day at nursery but for the first two years of his life, we had no childcare at all. My husband and I would swap work for the baby, literally picking one up and putting the other down. I didn’t have time to turn a computer on, never mind do anything creative once I had.

I have been through an experience that has rocked and shocked me – giving birth. I have been blissed-out beyond my imagining – lying with a sleeping new born on my chest. I have wanted to grab these experiences with both hands and squeeze every last drop I can from them. For me, that means writing about them. But I simply haven’t had the space or time.

A room of my own at last

Today all that has changed. With the help of my friends Chris Duggan and Emma Jones, I have created a website. The name has been chosen, the pages furnished, the images polished, the typos swept. My blog is a playroom, a study, a chapel, and a dance floor all at the same time. Welcome to my cyber-room – a room of my own.