To Write About Nothing

2013 has not been a great year for this blog.

Several times I made the decision to stop writing but either through inherent inconsistency or perverse stubbornness (not sure which) I recanted and elected to continue.

In the lead up to 2013 my blog had suffered several attacks from work based sources (as a consequence I can no longer write about work issues) and also, most damagingly, was attacked by a close member of my family. A family member who dismissed this blog as self aggrandisement, self-publicity, a fantasy ego trip and bizarrely as a means of fencing memories and feelings that they plainly thought I had no right to air to the anonymous, fake "sycophants" who read every post that I write [I wish].

The aftermath of all this was that I began to question every flowering of inspiration, every issue that motivated me to write, every idea for a post that happened to impinge upon my brain.

I went from writing three posts a week to barely managing to cough up one.

I accept that for some of you that was a positive outcome.

For me it lead to a year when this blog stopped feeling like it was mine. When my voice was muted, censored, diminished. When it was no longer enough for a subject to be close to my heart in order for me to write about it; I had to somehow justify it to these "other voices" that had insidiously invaded my head and presented me with a list of rules and regulations that I had to obey.

It's taken me the best part 2013 to realize that these voices have no right to be in my head and I have no business at all to be listening to them.

In that sense 2013 has been a great year for this blog.

The blogging landscape has changed enormously since I began writing here in 2006. Many wonderful blogs have fallen by the wayside to be replaced by automated shop windows and market stalls. Blogging has become less about sharing the experience of the everyday (and sometimes the unusual) and more about selling product.

Call me a puritan but I believe the only thing that should truly be sold on a blog is the writing. The words. The language. [So do buy my books.]

The disappearance of wonderful bloggers means less wonderful readers around to comment and bolster the spirits of flagging writers. You few who visit here regularly are very definitely diamonds in the rough. I know there are amazing blogs out there but having tried to find them I can tell you it is like searching for a needle in a haystack that is made of straw pretending to be needles.

But I have come to realize that that too doesn't really matter. Chasing a readership is just another way of obeying a voice in one's head that has no right to be there.

So at the end of 2013 and the start of 2014 - at the end of 1000 posts and hopefully at the start of another 1000 - it is time to rededicate this blog.

Not grandly or overly ambitiously. Not fakely or servilely.

But honestly.

To write as I see fit about things that matter to me and mine. To share and not to impose.

If you don't want to be here then - please, in the nicest possibly way - don't be.

But if you want to stay then know that you are most welcome.

Happy 2014 to you all.

Proof I’m Not An Axe Murderer

Over the long years of writing this blog some of you have, on occasion, thrown yourselves shamelessly at me. Showered me with invitations to hook up and meet. Quick but passionate rendezvous in love hotels and back streets where the bins are secluded and not too dirty.

I have as a rule refused to acquiesce to your requests (means I said no).

This decision has been driven by two things: (1) a desire not to render the rest of your existence flat, drab and unappealing by comparison to the glorious sunburst of life that a meeting with me would engender and (2) I’m rather skittish about meeting new people and despite the fake protestation of (1) above I am actually quite paranoid that I myself would come across as flat, drab and unappealing compared to the literary personality that inhabits this blog. I fear I would not live up to the easily obtainable personality goals I have set myself because no matter how low I set the bar I can almost always be relied upon to not quite reach it.

I live in fear of personality fail.

So this has meant a lot of flattering requests over the years (well, 2 that I can actually recall) and the same number of disappointing responses.

August of this year changed all that when quite out of the blue a fellow blogger turned up at my place of work having journeyed all the way from New Zealand. I must point out that an interview with me wasn’t the purpose of the trip, just an aside, as the blogger in question – Lady Mondegreen – had family and friends over here in the UK whom she’d long been planning to visit.

She’d written to me a few times asking how I would feel if she happened to drop in and see me. I did that English thing of responding positively because I harboured the suspicion that it was just never going to happen.

Well, suddenly it had and it was. And actually I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And unless Lady Mondegreen says different I don’t think I performed too badly. I think I met and perhaps even exceeded the bar. We had a pub lunch and a damned good chat and it genuinely was like meeting an old friend. All very relaxed and easy and wonderfully life affirming. It proved that being open to new experiences and opportunities can be an enlivening philosophy and is to be recommended. Though I must here point out that all thoughts of love hotels and passionate bins were eschewed.

Lady Mondegreen is now back in New Zealand and neither of us appears to have been permanently scarred by our encounter. And so, heady with the bravado of success I feel the urge to extend an open invitation to all my regular readers. If you’re ever in the area and want to say hello – a quick coffee and a bite to eat, whatever’s your poison – then do feel free to drop me a line and make it a date.

I don’t bite. I make some effort toward entertaining conversation. I will try to be urbane and debonair. And I promise to keep my animal magnetism under control (but do keep me away from the pub bins just in case).

Hand Prints

Not for the first time in the comparatively short history of this blog my reasons for writing have yet again been called into question by a third party.

Why do I write? What need does it satisfy? What good does it do? Who the hell do I think cares enough, is interested enough to even want to read it all in the first place?

Needless to say such questions weren't posed in an emotionless psycho-scientific vacuum but were given a hefty wallop of negative spin that created a curve-ball with enough thrust to smash through even my superdense cranium.

Well if you've got this far I guess you've just answered the fourth question.

As for the others I'm pleased to report that it didn't take much brain searching to come up with a few answers.

The way I see it (and that statement alone is the fundamental starting point for any blog, letter, email, newspaper column, book, film or play) blogging of itself it a pretty pointless activity. It's not going to stop world poverty, end human trafficking or child abuse or even get The X Factor axed from our television screens. It's not really within its narrow remit.

But what it could do is flag up to the powers-that-be that enough people want these issues sorted out with enough urgency and passion that the powers-that-be actually plough some energy and money into sorting them.

Yeah. That's a naive argument but I live in hope.

In all honesty I personally see blogging in its entirety the world over as a wonderful ever-expanding social-history document. Kind of like the Bayeux Tapestry but this time mostly about mundane stuff and one where everybody gets to voice their opinion - not just the winners. Taken as a whole it represents lots of truths (some of them conflicting) about human nature, human society and how we all, as a species, interact - not just on a local scale but also globally because the great thing about the online community is that geography as an obstacle is completely and utterly removed.

In fact there was an experiment a year or so ago where everybody (not just regular blog writers) was invited to submit a blog post on the same day so that a group of curators somewhere could have a digital snapshot of what the 20th century world was doing on 25th July 2010 (or whenever it was - I just made that date up so that the sentence would feel like it was going somewhere). Blogging in general is like that. Our descendents 300 years from now will look back at all this online verbiage and feel that they know us a lot more intimately that we can currently say we know the population of Restoration Britain, or the Elizabethans or Stone Age Man.

Which brings me onto a neat conceit.

Whenever anyone asks me why I blog (and no, it isn't just about my ego) I always think of the hand prints our ancient ancestors left on the walls of caves all those millennia ago.

Why did they bother? What need did it satisfy? What good did it do them? Who the hell did they think would ever be interested enough to look at them and care about them?

I mean those hand prints by themselves don't tell us very much at all apart from the date they were made (like most blog posts in fact) and what colour paint they had available. They don't in themselves tell us what these people ate, what they wore, how they spoke or what kind of relationships and hierarchy their society was composed of.

Apart from the aesthetics and the wonderment of how old they are those hand prints don't add to the total sum of human knowledge a great deal at all. They were made by simple folk, in a nascent civilization with nothing very big or world shattering to say at all.

And yet they are invaluable. They are important.

Those hand prints say quite simply but nevertheless very fundamentally, "I was human. I was here."

And actually, on a cosmic scale, that is quite world shattering.

For me, blogging is a bit like that.

I am human and I am here.

And quite honestly if you don't like the shape my hand makes against the wall feel free to drag yourself onto the next cave. There's some "horsies" in that one.

Back

I spat the dummy and now I'm sucking it back up again.

I had a hissy-fit, I was hasty, I erred in anger.

Or something like that.

Giving up Bloggertropolis has been harder than I thought it would be. It's been like having an arteficial limb that has seen me compete in the paralympics suddenly ripped off and denied me.

Plus my wife has pointed out that (a) Bloggertropolis is a weird kind of family annal that we and the kids can look back on when Karen and I are old and grey and the kids have booked us into the Tombstone Express Nursing Home and remember the good old bad old days and (b) I am advertizing myself as a writer - flaunting my novels and poetry - and it rather undoes all that good marketing if visitors to this blog then find I'm "no longer writing" anymore.

So with apologies I am kind of back.

My other writing projects will continue (Lord knows I have another novel to write even as I continue to push The Great Escapes of Danny Houdini onto unreceptive agents) but alongside them will be Bloggertropolis. Probably not as it was before. The posts may be a little more infrequent and out of the blue. But continue they shall.

And it feels right.

I am going to have my cake and eat it.

And if that's a hissy fit, well, I love it.

I'm getting all diva on yo' ass and there ain't  a thing you can do about it.

Except, er, maybe not read my posts...

Gag

Blogs. I wrote a few. But then again, too few to mention...

Well. That’s not factually true.

Since I began this on-line journey into the egotistical sublime back in the heady days of 2006 I’ve managed to rack up a mind-numbing 920 posts. I’ve been pretty darn consistent too. 3 posts a week for much of it, covering a wealth of subjects that have ranged from TV shows, politics, news events, social issues, home life and whatever doe-eyed beauty off the telly that I happened to fancy in any given moment.

But most of you won’t have failed to have noticed a gradual tailing off of productive output. A creative brewer’s droop. A distinct lessening of literal vitality.

My Bloggertropolis mojo is all but spent.

It’s time to draw a line beneath, put an end to and snuff out the guttering candle that is Bloggertropolis.

Oh hush your wailing. The end has been nigh for months now and the writing has been on the wall for longer than that.

The rot for me began when my blog was outed and touted by those who know me in real life (as opposed to just virtually). Without going over old wounds it caused upset and strife and made life difficult. Mostly for me (and I have to say my life is the one that I’m most concerned about). Certain subjects became taboo. Certain emotional chakras were suddenly blocked. Despite my best efforts I found myself gelded and my teeth pulled and a whacking great gag shoved into my mouth. Sure I kept going. Kept the writing production line rolling. Desperately tried to search out loopholes and ways round the restrictions... but euphemism and metaphor can only express so much.

Suddenly I woke up and found that Bloggertropolis had lost its bite, its bile and its balls (though thankfully not its alliteration).

I had become the blogging eunuch.

As much as it has tickled me to be a thorn in the side of so many for so long I have to admit to myself that the pale reflection this blog has become is now more of a thorn in my side than anybody else’s. Simply because it is not doing what I want it to do nor allowing me to express myself in the way that I would wish.

So, my old muckers, mateys and fellamelads, ‘tis time to say goodbye. Time to sign off and let the blogging underwriters evaluate my creative credit. I have other projects planned. Some of them not involving world domination or getting into Professor Alice Robert’s handsomely scientific knickers. Some lucky few of you will receive an email from me soon describing ways in which we might stay in touch.

The unlucky few can kiss my blogging ass.

This is how my blog ends.

Not with a bang (alas). But with you whimpering.

Airplane

If I seem quiet over the next 7 days it is because – with my wife’s gracious consent – I am trying something new.

I am trying something I have never done before. I am experimenting.

It may or may not involve dressing up in a weird costume and hiding in the wardrobe, re-enacting choice scenes from Fifty Shades Of Grey.

Upon reflection, I suspect it won’t.

For the next week I am not going to be here. I am going to be even more virtual than I have been previously. The family and I are taking a week’s holiday away from the ol’ homestead (our eldest is already experiencing X-Box withdrawal symptoms) and heading out of town. For the next 7 days we are house-sitting / cat-sitting for friends down in Nailsworth – a gorgeous part of Gloucestershire that feels like someone has cut out a small segment of Wales and transplanted it into England.

Access to the internet might be scanty. We shall have some, no doubt, but I don’t intend to be slaving away at a computer keyboard composing masterpieces for you all to read whilst I am on my holiday. Instead, using the old noggin to forward plan and utilising the nifty little scheduling tool on Blogger, I will be publishing a couple of posts via autopilot. Please don’t blame me if the plane crashes.

I will try and check in and reply to comments (should there be any – I find it never bodes well to assume), but if you find you are not on the receiving end of the kind of immediately witty reply that you have come to expect and adore then I hope you can understand why. It may take me a day or two to get back to you... but get back to you I shall and I shall endeavour to make it worth the extra wait.

It feels kind of weird to leave this blog to fly alone. To leave it to the mercy of you guys – my passengers.

I do hope I can trust you all not to misbehave while I am absent.

Please leave the aisles as clean as you found them and I want no smuttiness in the toilets (especially at altitude). Any attempts to storm the cockpit and take control will be not be thought well of, I can assure you.

And please, please, whatever you do, do not play around with my flaps.

I Made The Shortlist

No, not for the Man Booker Prize but for the Lit section in the BIBs – Brilliance in Blogging Awards.

I would like to thank all those of you that stirred yourselves to vote for me against an undoubted plethora of good reasons not to.

I’m not sure what anyone can do from this point onwards. Voting closed on 30th April; now I think the judges just cogitate and ruminate on the finalists before naming their champion of champions on the 22nd June.

I guess the last few weeks are up to me.

If I knew who to bribe and sleep with I’d be emptying my pockets in more ways than one and doing it. Alas, the most I could offer anyone is 39p and about 15 minutes (tops) of full-on pash. I’m not sure such gifts would at all be first prize-worthy so it’s just as well the judges are not known to me and are beyond my paltry reach.

All I can do is keep blogging and hope that the gods of blogdom eventually recognize my small votive offerings.

That and like the smell of the fatted calves that I regularly sacrifice on a stone altar for their vicarious blood-thirsty pleasure...

Held To Ransom

I’m feeling a bit emotionally hijacked this morning.

I feel like an old friend has stabbed me in the back. Or worse, slashed the buttons off my best coat with a flash of his blade like the Scarlet Pimpernel putting down some damn Frenchie.

In the bigger scheme of things this is no big deal but it has got my goat: Blogger has changed the layout and functionality of its Dashboard.

Some of you will be shrugging. Some of you may not have noticed any difference. Some of you may like the changes.

I don’t like the changes.

Worse, I can’t click on anything without Blogger informing me that my browser is incompatible with the new Dashboard, some functions will no longer work and I might like to try installing Google Chrome instead.

I don’t want to install Google Chrome.

I’m sure Google Chrome is a lovely browser. I’m sure it would make love to my computer and make it come all night long. But I use Internet Explorer, like Internet Explorer and am familiar with Internet Explorer. And further, I don’t like having unnecessary bits of software installed on my computer chogging up the registry and increasing the potential for foul-ups. Having two browsers installed goes against the grain.

I feel like Blogger – owned by Google, of course – is trying to bully me into using its own software. This is not on.

Persuade me (if you can) by all means. Sell it to me. Bribe me. Make me come all night long.

But don’t bully me. Don’t mug me. Don’t hold me to ransom.

Because that makes me dig my heels in even harder. That makes me flex and exercise my rather muscular stubborn gene.

At the end of the day this whole thing is a cynical exercise in overly ferocious marketing. What annoys me most is that if you check your blogging stats via the Dashboard (if you can get yours to work now, that is) you will see that Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser that the majority of people use when logging into and using Blogger.

And yet Blogger / Google has seen fit to deliberately disregard the lion’s share of its own user demographic and create an interface that doesn’t work properly in Internet Explorer.

If that isn’t a slap in the face I don’t know what is.

So what do I do?

Go against my principals and install Google Chrome? Dump Blogger and switch to Wordpress? *shudder*

Stop Blogging altogether?

(I’m going to ignore all of you who are currently screaming, “yes!”)

No.

I’m going to moan about it on my Blog via Internet Explorer.

Screw you Blogger. You’re not the only one who can rip off coat buttons with a flick of a dandy’s foil.


Addendum:

I couldn't even publish this post via Internet Explorer. The compose and edit functions don't work. So I have had no choice but to install Google Chrome. I now feel like, not only have I had the buttons slashed off my coat, but I have also had my balls cut off and shoved into my mouth.

Fuck you, Blogger.


P.S. My thanks to you that have pointed out that you can revert to the old Dashboard by clicking on the cog icon on the top of the Dashboard. Alas, this icon does not even appear when viewed in Internet Explorer... therefore one has to install Google Chrome just to revert to the old Dashboard and then carry on using Internet Explorer.

Damned sneaky. Damned underhand.