the adlards

I’m James Adlard and this is my blog. The site began back in 2002 as a simple gallery to give distant (spatially rather than relationally, perhaps) relatives a means of keeping in touch around the time my first child was born in 2003.

I began writing here in 2005, principally out of a desire to recall and record. I remember having the strongest sense that others were more immediately in touch with their past than I was. Being an optimist, I suppose I carried a buoyantly eager anticipation of the future and didn’t see myself as defined by the present reality, let alone yesterday’s. In any event I felt out of touch with my past, frustrated at my inability to relate anecdotes of my childhood, for example. I thought that perhaps blogging would bring an introspection that might bridge this seeming void.

As I wrote, of course, rather than actually trawling back through my mottled past in search of some kind of retrospective anecdotal self-sufficiency, what came out on the virtual page was what entertains me most; the content is part commentary, part record of events, part intellectual self-gratification, but through it all, I hope, runs what I really care about, which is eloquent, resonant entertainment.

I don’t presume to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people, but I really would very much like to do just that one day.