I was told that blogs were dead and buried. Yesterday’s news. No one reads them any more. Yet over a thirty-month content drought, I have kept Sprezzatura alive, and much to my surprise, there has continued to be a reasonable level of traffic.

As any long-time readers will know, this blog was indeed intended to be catharsis – for my own mind during a difficult period of my life, and hopefully by extension, others in need of some soothing of their own. At least one item ended up in print, in a magazine-feature on mental health. It’s about things that can make our lives both materially and mentally better; things that are often perceived as rarefied, but which I believe we exclude to our detriment; things whose relevance for their own lives, people often seem to dismiss – but about which I utter a defiant “I do!”

I think catharsis is still most definitely required; life is no less perplexing than it was when I started writing back in 2017. I still think that over-indulgence doesn’t help, but neither does denial; that trying to find that sweet-spot between cloying self-centredness and hair-shirt abstemiousness, of treating oneself legitimately well is a valid and necessary quest.

A criticism might be that this blog is about expensive things – but it mostly isn’t. True, many good things come with a cost attached – but it’s about being and doing as well as having; in general, it’s about the act of appreciation. When it comes to spending, I have often found that it is not the amount that matters, so much as how it is deployed – what tolerance one does or doesn’t have for inferior things, and how much work one is willing to put into finding something better – where cost can be substituted with effort. It’s also about accepting that, as Terence Conran advocated, simplicity can often be better than bling. Coming back to the original Italian meaning of the word, sprezzatura is not really about living life expensively, but imaginatively. But on occasions, I can’t deny that it helps to believe that one really is “worth it”.

The lack of recent posts is not down to a sudden loss of faith, so much as the fact my own life resumed something of its prior pace, and to be honest, I felt that I had rather exhausted my message at the time. However, more of life’s ups and downs, and the chance of a series of conversations over the last year have made me think that it is time to say and share more.

I’ve once again had to fall back on my resilience, as there having been some challenging times over the past couple of years. Even as I thought I was perhaps past that bad period, more of life’s sadnesses arose, not least the loss of a good friend over two years to cancer, and some less serious but still worrying health concerns of my own. At such times, it is all the more important to try to keep one’s spirits up – and I have become increasingly aware of the power of ‘grounding’ – trying to anchor oneself in the present, to appreciate the good things that we experience and not to get unduly strung up about what might happen next.

This positive thinking is something that we can actively cultivate, and I have come to suspect that doing so has a practical impact on both our state of mind and our wider quality of life, as lived day-to-day.

So I think the time may now be ripe to reprise this blog, if perhaps not as intensively as before; as I move towards retirement, there are certainly many projects and events that are worthy of coverage, and if the reading of my esoteric and eclectic search for a ‘well-lived life’ provides catharsis to others as well, then all to the good.