Sometimes real life gets in the way.

And it does it in style, with panache and in myriad ways.

When you’re trying to juggle working with life and a whole bunch of other responsibilities with some attempt to maintain an actual relationship with your wife - compressed by her even more hectic and bizarre work schedule - it’s easy to get a bit bogged down.

It’s surprisingly easy to spend more time being bothered by how little time you have for this or that than you spend actually using the time you’ve got.

Toward the end of the summer I finally got into Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. First two volumes I couldn’t put down. The third, I’ve read 80 pages in the last month. It’s not a comment on the book - every time I pick it up I got sucked straight back in. Just not much picking up going on.

We’re a week and a half back from an excellent holiday back home. There’s half a dozen rolls of film not even on the reels yet, never mind developed and scanned.

Letters (yup, ink on paper - you can’t beat it) lie unwritten.

I only actually disposed of the Christmas tree tonight, cutting it up in the middle of our living room so it would fit in bin liners and then into the wheelie bin - the neighbours already think we’re strange enough without knowing the tree was left up until the 20th of January. In our defence, we did go away almost straight after Christmas, and neither of us has been in the house for long enough since to take it down.

This is the first post here in over a month.

It should be easy to prioritise. First and least negotiable comes our marriage. Then I am contractually obliged to look to my work. After that, I have sermons and things to write. But what about photography? And writing? Sitting with a good book? Or enjoying those Scrubs DVDs that someone eventually took the hint and bought me for Christmas? (Hmmm. Scrubs. I only discovered it a few months ago, four years after the rest of the world. Rather good, isn’t it?)

Things is, though, I’m not complaining. Everything I’m doing, I love. My problem is moderation, or lack of. Boundaries, at the risk of starting to sound all personal-development-y. Balance. Making time for the important things while still allowing time for the not so important things, and being able to switch off and walk away.

Maybe I’ll get it figured out. I hope so.

Anyway. Thank you for bearing with this evening’s self-indulgence. Normal service should be resumed shortly.