On Blogs

As you get into this Blog business you realise that some people out there are blog happy. Are they frustrated authors? Are they authors? Most people I know have time to squeeze in The Inbetweeners before falling asleep on the sofa with the kid's packed lunch still unmade.

Nick Robinson, that masterly observer of the modern game of tabloid reported politics, gets paid for it so fair do's. Apostrophe in do's? Many of the other blogs I've toured have no such excuse, they're just out there filling in the hours they've rescued from the demands of life. To be fair, most of them seem to have readers and therefore need to keep going for fear of being seen as impulsive, unlike myself. I'm impulsive, but, you know, four followers is less than my band got on a wet thursday after Christmas. No one would notice if I gave up and those of you good enough to have become followers might justifiably sigh with relief.

But its good for my soul. Someone once wrote that we have forgotten how to disagree and I don't disagree with that. In the days when I willingly went door to door selling the LibDem message (about six months ago) I took comfort in the fact that I stood for something rather than hid from everything and I'm hoping this blog will give me the same rosy glow. I believe it's important to stand up and bare a small part of your soul to random friends and strangers - it shows you're for something, not against everything.

Blogs, it seems, may well have replaced the pub. Or it may be Facebook or Twitter. I learn't many a lesson in a pub. Before the advent of the internet the pub offered a forum to discuss opinions, a public place where friends gathered and exchanged views. You can't do that in the pub so easily now, unless its the local, no music, meat raffle on Friday pub where the old gimmers hang out. The pub has had its soul stolen, its purpose perverted.

So those of you wondering why I started this blog a) read the first post and b) think of the good it does me and my fellow bloggers. Convinced I have something to say in a world often moving too fast to listen, the blog lets me stand up to be knocked down and gives me the rolling arguements to shape my soul, antagonise my friends and work out my allegiance. It might do the same for you?