Keeping a blog isn’t entirely about indulging my need to have comment on things that are going on around me. I’ve kept various over the years, all documenting different journeys. This one started out life over on a website called Caringbridge as a way of keeping family and friends informed about what was going on with Dominic when he was an inpatient in Great Ormond Street for 8 months. It didn’t seem fair to make people rely on cryptic Facebook updates all the time and I was fed up with sending the same text message repeatedly to all our concerned friends, and so the journal was started. Caringbridge is a useful, but limited blogging tool. Frustrated with everything it wouldn’t do I started looking around and seeing what else was out there.

I knew nothing about web design when I started building the site, and I’ve made many mistakes and sworn quite a lot along the way. There is nothing I like more than a good bit of procrastination, and so I have fiddled and changed and designed and redesigned and no doubt will carry on doing so for many months to come. For the current design I decided to use my own illustrations. All the illustrations you see around the blog are my own, the older ones that you’ll find on blog posts are done on an iPad with a finger, hence the slightly clunky style. The ones in the design are done with a digital drawing pad. Please do ask if you want to reproduce them anywhere.

So why the strange name? It’s true I’m afraid, I’m a self confessed chocolate fan, with little control when it comes to chocolatey deliciousness. When I was first designing the website I was stuck in a tiny room in hospital and had been for months. Whenever people came to visit they always asked if they should bring anything. At first I sent comprehensive lists of everything I needed, adding chocolate on almost as an afterthought. Over the course of our incarceration, as my hopes of getting us discharged started waning, until I no longer even let myself think about coming home, my lists reduced to one sentence… just bring the chocolate.

The phrase seemed to sum up how life felt, how it still feels. Chocolate is the non-alcoholic tipple at the end of my day, so why not just cut to the good stuff and embrace one of life’s little pleasures? My visitors may now only be stopping by in the virtual sense, but the sentiment is still there and so Just Bring the Chocolate found its name.