Friday 31 January 2014

Reminiscences

This is that most difficult part of any new blog – the first post.

What’s this blog for? Well, many years ago I was a member of several Sherlock Holmes societies in the UK. Indeed it was through one of them that I met my wife, nearly 25 years ago. I got sucked into the delightful Great Game of mock-serious scholarship that was played in such societies and, as such, was guilty of one or two pieces on various aspects of the stories. These pieces saw publication in journals that were, sometimes, obscure even by the standards of Holmesian societies, but they were at least read by one or two people other than me.

Time moved on. My wife and I started a family, acquired new interests and even moved to another country. Our Holmesian activities faded over time, and we let our memberships lapse. We never really lost interest in Holmes (as our bookshelves testify), but neither was our interest particularly active.

However we now find ourselves on the home-stretch of parenthood, and with two children who enjoy a good crime story, on TV at least. They like ‘Sherlock’. They’ve enjoyed the odd episode of the Granada Holmes series from the 1980s. Interest in Holmes has increased in our household. And whilst looking for something (like you do) I rediscovered the various things I’d written.

The thing is, though, they were in my copies of the journals in which they were published. The original electronic versions have long gone, lost with the floppy disks they were stored on. So I have set about finding every article I can, and scanning them, so I have electronic versions of them once more. And I thought it would be fun to share them, to a new, online, audience. A blog seemed the easiest way to do this.

And that is what, for now, this blog will be about. Every so often I will release on of my pieces into the wild. I hope that you will find something to enjoy in them. It’s certainly been strange for me; they were written half a lifetime ago, by a person I now only dimly remember but who was, it is obvious, having far too much fun.

Read. Enjoy. Comment if you like.