About

This is Under Construction, my website and repostiory of any thinking I may do. This is its 4th iteration and unfortunately I lost most of the 200 odd posts from the last version during the transition and until I get around to manually going through the database and sorting out the wheat from the chaff you’re stuck with whats here, sorry.

A little about me, I’m 28, male and hairy. I have a wife (I’m not sure how, it just sort of happened about 5 years ago and very grateful I am too), two stepchildren, and one bouncing baby son. I live in a wet little town in the south of Scotland which among other things was the home of Robert Burns. Not that I’m in any way proud of the fact that a womanising alcoholic mysogenist inhabited my town, there are plenty of those living here now and I’m not proud of that either. He did write some fine poems though. I’m currently employed in the care of my 5 month old son, and thats quite enough work for me. My sojourn in the world of employment has been mainly in the hospitality and retail sectors both of which I found ultimately soulless and degrading, theres something about having to be really polite to people who don’t deserve it that I found dishonest. So I’m well out of that and am going to spend the next 4-5 years looking after my son and searching for something more fulfilling to do with my life when he goes to school.

Why Under Construction, you may ask. I haven’t made my mind up, simply that. Over the course of having this website and participating in the global community I have changed my mind about alot of things. I am not the man I was when I started, hell I’m not even the man I was yesterday. We change all the time, every moment brings something new into our minds which we can either embrace or reject. I’ve found a great deal in my forays into the blogosphere which I have embraced and made a part of who I am, I have also given up alot of the beliefs and opinions I had held dear before setting out. We are all undergoing a process of continuous creation, thats what this site was for originally to chart the changing seas of my mind, to follow the construction and deconstruction of my worldview. It has become something else however, as to what it is I, like you, will have to wait and see.

My politics are libertarian, more or less. My religion is strange and doesn’t fit into any box I’ve yet found (more here) and my worldview is cynically optimistic (Things are bad now but they will get better though they might get worse first). But hey, that could change tomorrow.

I don’t think our current system of government is ‘fit for purpose’ to coin a phrase currently in vogue among our political classes. It is slow, self-serving and latently corrupt. It has no chance of keeping up with the pace of change in our society today or in the future. I don’t pretend to know what we should replace it with but I do know that whatever it is should do away with the monolithic bureacracy which has slowly taken power away from the people and given it to faceless comittees. Being a libertarian I obviously think that government should be as small as possible or ideally non-existent. None of this incessant regulation of every piddling little detail and no restrictions on speech, association or trade. If I want to wear a t-shirt expressing my opinion of certain members of our government and meet up with others with similar t-shirts and even sell such t-shirts to others then as long as it doesn’t restrict the liberty of anyone else I should be able to do so. I’m not convinced however of the panacea of a completely free market solving all the worlds ills. If everything is for sale then what happens to those who can’t afford it? As you can probably tell my politics is a work in progress. I know that ideals are rarely attainable and in the real world something has to work for it to be any use.

I have made some paltry attempts at writing fiction and poetry, an abortive blognovel existed here and I will be uploading other peices of my work here in future. I hope to be able to have galleries of photos and drawings available too, the latter being dependent on getting my hands on a graphics tablet. I’ve never been satisfied with the results of scanning and can’t really draw with a mouse.

That seems to be about it for ‘about’ I really can’t think of anything else, and don’t really put much stock in these endless list meme’s that seem to flit about the web (you know the sort of thing, 6 things you’d take to mars, 4 days that changed your life, etc. etc.) and feelt that a page of prose gives far more away than any list could ever do. If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will endeavour to answer them.

Mandrill
AKA Keith
19th September 2006