I am balancing a pot of tea, a cup, a teeny milk jug and a large slice of cake next to this laptop, on a table designed to hold about a third as many objects. I’ve set everything up now, though, so I feel obligated to do something while the tea steeps. So I’m here! Hi!

If you’re new here, welcome. If you’re not new, I feel like I should reintroduce myself. I’m Francesca, I’m a writer and an undergrad at I’m Not Telling You My Uni, studying I’m Not Telling You That Either. I’m from Southend, which is a sprawling, disjointed town city in a corner of England that is hard to get to by accident. It’s so large that I don’t mind telling you I’m from there. Also, parts of it are said to be haunted, which is cool. Also also, it’s the sort of place most people don’t give a shit about even if they live there, so you’re not going to expect nice photos of cute cafes or pretty buildings in real time. There aren’t many of either.

Anyway, I’m writing from Uni Town, which does have nice cafes and pretty buildings. I might talk more about it once I’ve moved off campus and would be harder to track down. Don’t look at me like that, I have no idea if you’re weird.

If you’re not new and raising your eyebrows, I promise I’ve not been replaced by an android (not that I’d know if I had…). I just wanted to make a fresh start, write a post I could stick to the top of the site for newcomers. I nearly removed this entire blog from the internet, actually, but decided to redecorate instead. I’ve been blogging for over a decade, which in internet years is half a century. I needed a change. I was tired of logging on and seeing the detritus of unfinished posts, and notifications from readers who are, upon closer inspection, actually crypro currency blogs. I was going through my subscriber list the other day, out of curiosity – I don’t think I’ve looked at it for years – and I recognised about three names. The rest, I kid you not, are crypto and syndication sites which I am assuming are run by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda department. Most readers from the pre-Covid years have moved on or passed away. So, change. I was going to make a whole new site, and leave this one as a monument to my incredibly unadventurous youth, but I couldn’t be arsed with the admin. Plus WordPress kept telling me I had a free domain to snaffle from the Internet Gods, and I thought, that’ll do.

So. Welcome to Francesca’s Thoughts. If Indifferent Ignorance was predominately opinions and grumbles and adoration of My Chemical Romance, Francesca’s Thoughts is going to be musings and questions and adoration of My Chemical Romance. I started Indifferent Ignorance to share my thoughts on Huge Things, but back in 2009 you had about one seismic global event per year. These days there’s a genuine chance World War III will have broken out before tea. Anyway, I’m no longer interested in speaking for the sake of sharing. If I have a point to make, I’m more likely to make it in a short story or a book. I’m not going to put away my soap box completely, and I’ll be cynical until the sun explodes, but I don’t know if I want to contribute to the general feeling of irritation that permeates the internet nowdays.

On a sort-of related note, I’ve had a shit few years. Handful of years. Almost coming up on a decade, probably. Not completely fucking terrible, but a definite series of unfortunate events. Have you read or seen Good Omens? In one not-spoilery event, a demon conspires to turn the original design for the M25 orbital motorway into an enormous Satanic sigil. The road’s shape, coupled with the fact that most journeys on the M25 naturally inspire feelings of pure hatred, ensure that the entire motorway is a constant source of low-grade evil.*

That’s what my day-to-day has been feeling like, for ages now. A gentle smog of low-grade evil. Not all day, and not every day. But I’ve had enough anxiety and bouts of depression, enough work-based dead ends, enough physical health issues that it really does feel like something’s in the air. I don’t think it’s just me, either – a reoccurring theme in conversations with friends is how out of balance everything feels. Work, home life, the climate, world events. A lot of us are at the end of our tether. I’ve written about it here before, and it’s not improving naturally. I can’t do anything about the wider world, but there might be something I can do at my end of the phone? Maybe?

I was thinking I could start here. I’m crap at having hobbies, because they nearly all become my job. This site never really materialised as a source of income, so I’m going to make a concerted effort to make it a space to hang out and chat. No pressure on me to create or you to cough up. I was thinking I could talk about the tarot – I’ve been shit at reading for myself lately, it’s been months since I did a reading just for me – or my bizarre writing processes or my quest to make the perfect peanut butter biscuit. Or something else entirely. Who knows!

I don’t know what I’ll continue from Indifferent Ignorance. Probably Read, If You Like, because I bloody love reading. Probably occasional income round ups, because my patrons seem to like them and I like holding myself accountable to them. Definitely my ongoing Killjoy Jacket project. Definitely plant posts. In fact, here’s a bougainvillea. I’ve shared photos of bougainvillea in posts before when I’ve needed a photo, and they’re just such a good plant to look at. This is a crap photo but it still makes me feel, I don’t know, warm and summery. ‘Where do you want to go after you graduate?’ ‘I want to embody a bougainvillea in July.’

I’ll leave the little book reminders at the end of posts, too, because I wrote a book, damnit.

I don’t want to remove all my old posts – some of them are quite sweet, in a ‘this kid is an idiot’ way – or pretend they weren’t there to start with. Half of my problem with internet culture these days is the lack of nuance and lack of desire to let people learn. I think it’s important to show that people evolve.

So, in the spirit of evolution, I hope I’ll see you here soon. I hope I’ll be back here soon.

Look after yourselves!

Francesca

* If you want to leave or reach Southend by car, there’s a good chance you’ll meet the M25. I’m saying nothing about what that does for residents’ psyche.

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