Welcome to my blog, although I feel like Emperor Candrax from the planet Tron even using the phrase. ‘Blog’ is a vile word. (‘That’s an ill phrase, a vile phrase’). We all know the derivation of it – ‘web log’ (OMG!, that’s so neat!) But it’s such a clunky word. And there are so many more beautiful ones that could have been created, with a little imagination. How about, for example, ‘Ethechron’: an Ether Chronicle? Particularly appropriate as ‘ether’ can be defined as ‘the space between particles’. There has to be a joke in there about the space between articles. I wish I could think of one.

I also like ‘ViDi’: a Virtual Diary, and not at all a sexually transmitted infection. A ‘Journet’ or ‘Journal on the Net’ has a French and faux sophistique ring to it. ‘Orbital Dicta’ – oh, now, I like that! Thinking with gas, there! In fact, now I do think of it, I’m going to have a page somewhere on this bleedin’ blog called ‘Obiter Dicta’. Space age technology maybe, but we should never lose touch with the classics. O tempora, O mores!

πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει καὶ δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης

Onyhoo, hard hats are recommended – not only because this site is still under construction, but also because some of my ideas are not predigested, mindless pap regurgitated from some execrable TV show or Celeb magazine. (Did you see what I did there? ‘Not only… but also’, not only as in the Pete and Dud show of the 60s, but also a translation of the Latin ‘non modo … sed etiam’ – just after some classical tags. This isn’t just thrown together you know.) Weapons grade readers are welcome here; as are people with liberal values.

(The Latin phrase means ‘O what times! O what customs!’ and was first said by Cicero. He was not a Brazilian footballer. The Greek sentence is pronounced ‘Panta chōrei kai ouden menei kai dis es ton auton potamon ouk an embaies’. It means ‘”Everything changes and nothing remains and you cannot step twice into the same stream”. Said by Heraclitus of Ephesus. (It’s on his Greatest Hits compilation, ‘Now That’s What I Call Metaphysics, 29.’) It is also pretty much the central tenet of Buddhism. I’m not really a Buddhist, but I may have achieved enlightenment. Through a mixture of spirituous liquors, loving the same woman for over 40 years and daydreaming a lot. Rather than working a lot. I can recommend it. If you don’t end up thinking like the Buddha, you certainly end up looking like him.

Will you join me in a think?

The Life and Times ….
(short version, nicked from my literary agent’s website. Or should I say ‘bsite’?)

My name is Dennis O’Donnell and I was born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1951. I still live in the West Lothian hinterland. I am very married – in fact, since 1972.

I have been a teacher, a joiner’s labourer and, in my youth, a chicken catcher. Nowadays I’m too old to catch chickens and too wise to be a teacher. I have also been a columnist for The Scotsman. Most recently, I’ve been in psychiatry – on the nursing side.

I have had two collections of poetry published by Curly Snake Press – ‘Two Clocks Ticking’ (Winner of the Saltire First Book Award 1997); and ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ (2003). Nobody has yet agreed to publish my next collection, ‘The Last Ostrich in Shotts’.

A memoir of my time as an orderly in a secure psychiatric unit, ‘The Locked Ward’, will be published by Jonathan Cape in January 2012.