Now would be a good time to get my mojo back

There must be something in the air lately: Mr. Eugenides and ASWaS have announced brief blogging hiati, and Kez, as we know, has pulled the shutters down on hers.

I must confess that I have been considering the same course of action. Nothing quite so drastic as Kez, you understand, but just packing it in for a little while to recharge my batteries. It has felt for some time that the posts were either contrived, or just thrown together on account of the fact that something big had happened and I just had to blog it. So I haven't been happy with the standard of work I've been putting out (in the past three months, only 'Leadership Saturday' has had me buzzing about my blog), and there have been occasional moments where I've wondered if it was time for J. Arthur MacNumpty (incidentally, I got that name from a Margo MacDonald line: I think she was talking about a hypothetical MSP, and I was taken by the name, so I nicked it) to be put to bed, and for something new to fill the void.

Hardly surprising: my motivational levels have been at a massive low - their lowest, in fact, since Fourth Year of Uni, when I couldn't be bothered anymore and I only pressed on because I'd got as far as I had done, and felt the need to finish the job. In the end, I trundled towards graduation, with a 2:2 that nearly ended up a third (or even an Ordinary degree), when twelve months before I'd been on sure 2:1 territory and looking forward to the final year, and maybe postgrad studies. A couple of bad course choices later, and I was glad just to finish with something to show for it all.

I have, for a while, been in a similar state as then: work has been boring me somewhat, with the obvious exception of the rows generated by one of my slightly less stable co-workers. It's been the same old thing every day and when one thing in your life, something that big, is such a chore, it becomes exhausting, it becomes demoralising and everything else becomes a chore as well. But the routine has been shaken up this week. And it's taken until about 11:00 this morning (when keen-eyed readers will have noticed changes to the Blogroll starting to take place) to really have an impact. Now it may just be that my mind has got into gear again, or it may be that I'm looking forward to blogging from Conference this week, or even that Kez opting to step down from her Soapbox has given me a much-needed boot up the jacksy. Whatever the reason, I feel renewed. Posting may still be erratic (my basic principles haven't changed), but the zeal is back.

And MacNumpty is here to stay.