Dear readers,
I’d appreciate it if you could indulge me for the next few paragraphs. There’s a bit more for you at the end.
Dear Small Beds & Large Bears,
Thank you, my dear blog, for the past twelve years of companionship. Thank you for helping me to chronicle my life, air my grievances, compose my thoughts, and attempt to assemble my own theory of how my own world and the wider world work. I haven’t finished yet, but trying to do so has been tremendous fun.
What the world (still) calls blogging has changed immeasurably in the past decade; who I am and what I want out of life has changed too. Facebook and Twitter have appeared, while confessional platforms like LiveJournal have, as a genre, faded somewhat. Writing (certainly fiction) as a career is less important to me than the environment, or social issues; furthermore, I no longer see myself as some anti-academic, grimly self-exiled to the shire, yet still academic in my own way (much as the anti-popes, at the time, very much saw themselves as popes.)
While I still plan to blog in some form, somewhere, the time has come for me to say goodbye, both to you and to the persona I present here. We show respect for the works we love by knowing when they have come to a natural end, and the gradual diminuendo of my posts here suggests that I have left my past life, with its small beds and its large bears, far behind. Now I need to take my leave of you too.
Readers: a postscript
Thank you, too. Thank you for your patience and indulgence. Thank you to the few long-standing readers, to the many occasional ones, to the friends who came to read and the friends I made as they read.
I hope you will understand: I write elsewhere; I exist elsewhere. Along with my somewhat dry career blogging, there will be other blogs: perhaps about gardening, or about the environment. I haven’t quite decided yet. Whenever one closes and locks the door on a lodging of many years’ standing and hands over the keys, then sometimes—if baggage and heart are both light—the bright road ahead is sufficient in itself to lift the heart. The destination, on the other hand, can wait for another day.
What I’m trying to say is: this isn’t really goodbye. Wait, no, it is. It is goodbye. A glad goodbye. Goodbye!
Small Beds and Large Bears 
Well, thank you J-P, it’s been an interesting decade (and more, I see!) reading you. I’ve learnt some new words, you’ve brought all the colours and sensations of the weather of Oxfordshire brought into my bedroom through the immediacy of the experience of the day whilst on a bike, I’ve enjoyed the “trivia” as much as your careful phrasings of more reflective states — and mainly, just hearing your voice in its various moods.
But if the horse is tiring, let’s not flog it.
All the best — looby.
Best of luck with the new projects! Nothing more liberating than just letting things go sometimes.
Thank you, both. I wasn’t going to reply, but it’s very kind of you both to leave comments, so I shall peep back through the curtains if only to make a courteous and grateful bow.