Give Blood?

Blogs are strange places.  They’re kept for so many different reasons – as a digital diary, to share thoughts and opinions, to meet new and exciting people and, of course, every now and then, to talk at great and waffly length about books and stuff.

I must admit, when I first started keeping a blog, I really wasn’t sure what I’d end up using it for.  I mean, of course books, because books are awesome and here I am, semi-compulsive scribbler with a keyboard whose letters are becoming so faded from over-use that touch-typing is now the only way to go.  But what else?  Catharsis, a sort of digital diary, a way of getting things off the mind by writing them down?  Quite possibly, because if there’s any universal truths about writing, it’s that you’ll inevitably write what you are rather than what you intended, simply because there isn’t an easy off-switch for the subconscious.  To express my social and political views?  Well yes, a bit of that, but that was never really my main intention since by definition, my views are my own and the internet is the absolute place for wild disagreement and heated argument with no real hope of resolution.  Witness wikipedia, where invariably the most interesting and often informative place to get a good view on controversial subjects is not the article itself, but on the discussion page, where reasonable debate can often degenerate into fraught sentences striving to disguise mad views behind a veneer of academic acronyms.

One thing I never thought I’d use the blog for was as a sort of courage-mustering call to arms, but here I am and here it goes.

Give blood, people!

Do it because it’s a good thing.  I mean, that’s about the limit of the argument, so perhaps I should re-phrase and say, do it not just because it’s a good thing, but because it’s a Very Good Thing with all its own capital letters, one of those unconditionally Good Things that really has no subtext of bad about it.

And I say this right here, and right now, because I am terrified of giving blood and trying to muster the courage to do it.  Well, actually, terrified isn’t the right word.  I don’t like needles.  I can look at them, no worries.  I can sit next to people who’ve been stuck with them, no problemo.  I can even just about handle injections, but I can’t help but notice that when I do the nurse has to hold my arm down as I’m usually so tense the needle just ricochets like a bullet off cast iron tank armour.  It’s not so much active, pant-wetting terror as passive, oh-god-maybe-tomorrow-not-today kind of terror.  It manifests itself in a great deal of research followed by not actually doing anything, in signing registers and then not filling in the form, in checking appointment times but not picking up the phone – basically, I do everything that needs to be done, except actually go to the centre and donate.  Hell, I don’t even know my own blood group, don’t even know if they’ll want what I’ve gotta give.  I did have a pact to go with a friend who has both more courage and initiative than me, but alas, a combination of – and you can’t make this up – a strike in the Fiat car factories of Italy, a boss at an arts magazine whose life was saved by a transfusion, and an unexpected change of call times to go and rig lights for a show that has me both ridiculously excited and, annoyingly considering the scribbling compulsion discussed above, sworn to silence – kinda undermined that moment and so here I am, rallying my courage by, hopefully, rallying yours.

So!  All yea readers of this blog…

… hello, by the way…

… go give blood!  And then so will I…