The Gormlets get their own blog

The Gormlets have their own blog now. [Edit: updated the URL because they've emigrated to Wordpress].

Gormlets at my desk

This blog (the mainly tango one) has been a really big help to me in learning to dance well. Just the process of finding something to say and saying it has been a great way at different times to get out of my comfort zone, explore, and think carefully about what's important.

When I was young I had an obvious talent for drawing, but I had no idea at all what to do with it. It seemed like something I might be able to go back to, one day, in some hard-to-imagine situation, but all it did at the time was get me banned from playing "Squiggle" at school.*

Gormlets.blogspot.co.uk is for drawings, paintings, and any other artwork it occurs to me to make. I'll probably put some knitted things there, too, as well as here. The idea is not to work towards a specific goal, but just to do something, see where I get to, do something else that seems to make sense given the results, and repeat. There are two pages of posts already, so you can go and click around.

That approach has served me extremely well for tango. It's probably going to be harder with the drawings, because I'm not too sure yet how to identify small goals, work on it regularly, or get meaningful feedback. But blogging them will help me to keep track of what I have done, and gives me some chance of developing ideas.

* Squiggle is a game in which you divide the blackboard, and the class, into two halves. Someone draws an identical meaningless squiggle on each half of the blackboard. A volunteer from each half of the class, has thirty seconds or a minute to turn the squiggle into something. The class as a whole then judges and declares a winner. A problem with this game is that if one student is good at it, it stops being fun for anyone else.