I believe I ended my previous blog with my rather busy itinerary of this second half of November: from Genova to Madrid and from Bologna to Florence. That’s also the exact reason why you couldn’t read this blog on Monday already like you’re used to. I had a late evening flight to Madrid on Monday evening, so I thought to write my weekly blog on the plane. But the wheels of the plane had not even been pulled up completely when I already fell into a deep sleep. And as my mother always puts it “that’s a sign you really needed your sleep”. And if I have learned one thing over these past few years, it is that if you sleep well, you can take on the whole world.
Hence, I have asked myself whether I should keep blogging every Monday
But of course, it can get quite exhausting every now and then; being on the road all the time, doing all kinds of things for the very first time, meeting dozens – if not a hundred – new people, and then also building a new life in Milan in the meantime. Hence, I have definitely asked myself before whether I should keep blogging every Monday, or whether it might become a thing once every fortnight. But at the same time, I find it very hard to part with this weekly ritual. After all, I have been doing this every single Monday for more than three years already, without ever skipping a week. And even though you are all reading along, in some way it’s also a sort of diary I keep for myself.
It’s precisely the shortest blogs that have the most extensive memories behind them
Because it’s exactly those blogs that I published in the heat of the moment that are the ones I hold most dear. It’s precisely the shortest blogs that have the most extensive memories behind them. Take that blog I wrote during the Eurovision Song Contest, no more than a paragraph long, I believe. As the jury show of the First Semi-final was about to start, I had crammed myself with my laptop on the only remaining free centimetres of the bar in the steaming backstage lounge where the artists around me were singing their lungs out in an attempt to warm up their vocal cords while their managers and delegations nervously paced around. It was thanks to publishing my blog that I myself stepped out of the madness for two minutes and that I was able to watch it all as an outsider, so to speak. It was exactly what I needed to make me realise what a wonderful world I had landed in.
Right now, I am sitting here on my bed in this hotel in the heart of Madrid typing this blog while the memories of the past week shoot through my head
And while nothing is as wondrous and crazy (in a good sense) as Eurovision, to some extent I’ve once again landed in a wonderful world. Right now, I am sitting here on my bed in this hotel in the heart of Madrid typing this blog while the memories of the past week shoot through my head. The first weeks in Milan, the premiere concerts in Genova last Thursday and Friday and this full day in Madrid that we ended at a pizzeria. It’s so much that it’s impossible to remember it all forever. And it’s okay that, in a while, I will forget all those hundreds of little details. However, there is one thing that always stays with me: how it all made me feel at this particular moment in time and during these weeks. And it’s thanks to writing this blog that I anchor this feeling now, so when I read it again someday in the future, it will all come back to me again. Perhaps that’s the single biggest reason why I find the motivation to get behind my laptop for an hour every week. So, for now, from my hotel room in Madrid: hasta luego!