It's taken me 40 years to get to this point. 40 years of world class procrastination.
There's always been one more TV show to watch, one more pixelated foe to vanquish, one more wall to stare at vacantly while my brain churns through all the fabulously important and far more worthwhile things I could be doing instead.
It’s taken a setback at work, a great deal of slightly questionable soul searching and some timely nagging (I’m sorry darling, that meant to say ‘encouragement’) from my wonderfully long-suffering wife to get me to the precipice of the blogiverse and ready to leap.
Except I’ve forgotten to rearrange the post-it collection gathering dust around my keyboard. It’ll only take a few minutes...
I’m sure there are many clichéd anecdotes I could be sharing about the relative merits and difficulties of starting out on fresh adventures: ones to raise spirits and boost flagging hearts on the possibly perilous, and almost certainly fist-clenchingly frustrating, road ahead. But the only fitting words that stumble into my mind are the immortal utterances of Bilbo Baggins at the start of another similar adventure:
“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
So, here I am, stepping onto that road with slight trepidation, wondering just where all this sweeping is going to take me...