Well, it took over a week of repeat efforts, including shifting hosting company, updating WordPress, deleting old plugins and old themes, installing new plugins and themes, upgrading my PHP, and manually scouring for malware – the site was suspended not once but twice thanks to remnants of some hack – but finally the kierenmccarthy.co.uk website is back up and updated for 2021.
I have not used this site for 10 years. Which is a ridiculous amount of time. It is also, coincidentally, the last time I was properly freelance. And here I am again. I have left my job reporting at The Register in order to finally write my book on John McLaren – a book I have been researching on and off for a decade.
I made myself a New Year’s Resolution in 2020 that I will finally write it. And I started up again. And then the pandemic hit. You would think that would be a perfect time to write a novel. But the truth was that I had less time rather than more, with the kids doing school from home and the same amount of work in my jobs. Plus, I’ve heard now from a large number of creative types – writers, musicians, filmmakers – that the pandemic was a barrier to creativity, not an enabler.
I suspect it’s because your mind needs to feel free to do creative work and we were far from free this past year. We were enclosed and we knew the reason for that enclosure was a real threat to our lives. Not exactly inspiring. But it is lifting, it is lifting. I have had my first Pfizer vaccine and have an appointment for the second in just over a week. It’s time to get moving again and my book is where I want to start that journey to bigger and better things.
