Commencement

It sounded better after the third glass of champagne. As far as I am concerned, most things do.

"Boring but smart," Tom said. "That would be a brilliant blog title. It says it all about you, doesn't it?" Methinks that may have been a bit of an exaggeration.

Tom, Claire and I were lounging on their balcony, taking in the night view of the Baie des Anges while celebrating life and good friends. We were enjoying champagne from one of Tom's friends, from who he rents his flat in Nice. I had brought up the idea of me finally starting a blog, for the heck of it, and decided to bring it up again. After all, Tom is one of the three people I know who runs an excellent blog.

Tom's blog, English Cut, is rather focussed on his job and passion - bespoke clothing. It's an excellent blog, and a good place for someone wanting to know more about bespoke clothing to go and read about what goes on in Savile Row today. What I was proposing was something quite different though - a general blog about whatever the hell I wanted to write about.

You would think that such a blog would not be difficult to start. Something like Tom's, where you need to be an expert and are crafting most of your entries with the explicit purpose of informing the potential customer and the implicit purpose of converting the potential customer to an actual customer of the business (either Tom's or another tailor's), seems to be difficult. Something that an average person is writing in the wee hours of the morning, on the other hand, shouldn't be.

Talking about what I would write about, over that glass of champagne, I mentioned how I wanted to write about finance, though not exclusively about it. Writing exclusively about it would be boring, and there are plenty of people out there writing about it better than I (i.e. Greenbackd and Old School Value, for example). Instead, I would also write about other subjects of interest to me. If I read an excellent book, for example, that broadened my horizons. If I was utterly bored in a French modern art museum that cost 14 euros to enter. If I tried a new recipe and utterly loved it. Any of these things and more, I would write about, hopefully offering something more to whoever happens to read this.

I'd like to say you're an brilliant audience, but more likely you're just an exclusive, tiny audience that happened to visit because you know me somehow.

Back to that glass of champagne, and the consumption of it. This vacation that I am currently taking in Nice, and what the next post will be about, is what finally convinced me to start writing. Tom, however, over dinner and later champagne on his balcony, convinced me that the direction I aimed to write would be of value.

So savor whatever you're drinking at the moment, because so we commence on whatever I encounter in my odd pursuit of joie de vivre.