Blogging

B is for Blog

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This post is part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

Why do we Blog?

I love blogging, both writing and reading and hopefully, interacting with other people, bloggers or not, through comments. What makes a good blog for me? Words like interesting, quirky, fresh, well written and, mostly, personal come to mind.

What do I mean by personal? Well even if someone is writing about some thing, I like it if, in the way that they tell it – I learn something about that person. As I said in the previous post, blogs were conceived as nothing more than dated entries – diaries in effect, and though they have gone in many other directions since then, some people still use them as diaries. If you read such a blog, then you don’t need to ask the question which you might ask upon reading an old-school paper diary. Did this person write for themselves or did they have a view to publication and a wider readership? If a blog is published, made public it’s author hopes to be read. Those that are published privately are equivalent to the old private diaries – anyone keep one of these? Please, comment and tell us how it is for you and why you use digital to diary… One group who keep private diaries but with an eye to their future readership, are politicians who mine their diaries for their autobiographies. Do you use your blog – refer back to past posts – do tell!

I have no time for those who say they don’t read or watch fiction because fiction is the one way we have to see what it might be like to be someone else and some blogs can offer this too. I would go so far as to say that story-telling is one of our fundamental human characteristics – “Look! These paw-prints show that a lioness, oh and her cub, passed this way say, 3 days ago and she was limping.” A story formed in our big brains. They say that 80% of our big brains developed to work out what other people were going to do next – that all the other things we accomplish are byproducts of those big brain capabilities – transferable skills! I think that storytelling whether aural, novel, short-story or blog, is one of those defining characteristics of humans that emerged as byproducts of our need to understand “the other”. Never be afraid to share your stories…

Many blogs fall by the wayside after a few posts, a few months, and that is reminiscent of those New Year’s Resolution to “Keep a Diary” but then sometimes you catch the habit, your life’s schedules permit the space to write without struggle and best of all you find it rewarding either for yourself or because you get feedback from others. We all like interaction, but building an audience is hard work and it has to be said that Blogger does not make it easy to find other people – only by searching one “interest” at a time and sometimes it would be nice to conflate two or more – for example, science buffs who also play the ukulele and crochet…

I was spoilt by the experience of my first blog Ripple, hosted on Mo’time. Mo’time was a small blog operated by the manager of a large Italian blog which he used as a testbed before incorporating new wrinkles into the main one. I say small but if I remember correctly, some 10,000 bloggers had started blogs but due to the aforementioned rapid attrition factor, it seemed like there was quite a small core of stalwarts. A more accessible listing made it easier than Blogger to connect and befriend other bloggers. Sadly, the main Italian blog was sold and after a couple of months, the new owners closed down Mo’time. We were bereft at losing our eclectic community bunk-house and some of us tried to find alternatives and a few have ended up staying in touch via Facebook – a scattering of friends around the world…

So! Here I am having picked up this blog again after a few years when writing didn’t seem to fit, liberated by the lockdown and determined to complete the A to Z 2020 Challenge and hoping to make some new friends – hit that comment button, please!

A is for Alistair Cooke

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Part of childhood Sunday mornings back in the 1960s, was my father switching on the radio on the upstairs landing of our house whereby everybody in the house could listen whilst having a lie-in. After “Hymns from the little chapel in the valley” – a precursor of Songs of Praise and before the omnibus edition of “The Archers” there was “Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America”. I am starting the A to Z 2020 challenge with this seminal broadcasting giant because for me, this is where my love of the blog form begins.


There may be some among you who ask how a long-running radio series which began before blogs were conceived of, before PC’s were dreamt of and in fact before mainframe computers were invented, could be considered a Blog! Well in the beginning, Blogs were conceived as a simple sequence of dated posts – ideal for say, a diary. One of the hallmarks of a truly great piece of new technology is perhaps the degree and breadth of mission-creep which accrues to it as people explore it and blogs have moved from a diary to documentary, educational tool, club forum, therapeutic vent, political rant, and blogs cover every subject imaginable. But for me, the classic form is a missive from the individual to the world which reveals their thoughts, reflections and most enjoyably, their personality and it is in this respect that Alistair Cooke is the model for the form. In 2,869 episodes over 58 years, the longest running, spoken word broadcast ever, he spoke with a mellifluous, mid-Atlantic accent that gave his observations on America, explaining it if you will, not only to Britain but to the world via the BBC World Service, but as well, to Americans themselves. They were already used to Alistair’s voice because before he emigrated to America from Britain in 1937, he had delivered “London Letter” for NBS explaining British ways to America.

You can read the quite astonishing history of this prolific broadcaster and writer here and you can listen to the best of the broadcasts here but it’s the style and tone of Alistair Cooke which I love and aspire to channel in my own writing and although he read his broadcast aloud, – his material was, in the first instance, written. You can find the scripts here. He might begin with some observations about squirrels preparing for winter and then take you around the political action in Washington, the reaction of the people before returning effortlessly to the Fall, and the squirrels. The political content would be teased out and explained for the world in a way that was comfortable, reassuring without any hint of patronage. And when you needed to hear about the gravest moments in American history, such as the assassination of JF Kennedy, there was no safer pair of hands, no more moving commentator to describe the events and the reaction of Americans.

That radio on our landing, itself an object of Americana which my father adapted to UK voltage by mounting a light-bulb on top, took us to another country each week – to Alistair Cooke’s America as we lay in bed and listened.

2,869 letters – blog that!

Published as part of the A to Z 2020 Challenge

We Find Ourselves in Strange Times…

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With the Covid 19 Corona Virus filling the airwaves, the over-the-garden-fence the Messenger, WhatsApp and Zoom conversations and yes Old School Texts and Phone calls, the virus thrusting change upon us faster than we could imagine, is it too early to look to the future beyond the outbreak and ask what might be in store for us?

I have not posted here since 2013 when during the early years in this house in Yorkshire, without friends hereabouts, I had continued to develop online exchanges and a new type of friendship. Mo’time, my first serious blog platform, came and went with a change of ownership but having tried a few possible alternatives, some of us found our way onto Facebook where a half dozen of us still hang out and observe each other’s lives from afar. At least one I met in person, in the real world and though there are others I would like to meet, for the moment, the virus has stopped all real-world meetings. But there is an upside, the deaths of thousands notwithstanding, in our social isolation, we have time to think, to draw breath and to reach out to old friends across the void, to finish old projects and begin new ones, rediscover what makes us who we are and where, singularly and collectively, we might head from here.

One thing I never embraced ever since I first encountered it in 2011, is Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, it is a valuable tool if you want to get early warning of an earthquake (Google indexes Twitter in real-time thus picking up important news wherever it might be trending) but the idea of size limited communications just does not appeal to me and it is no surprise that it has become the favourite mouthpiece of the world’s most vacuous ranter. Complex truths need more nuanced treatment, space to grow, so for me, the blog form is the one and it feels good to be back, writing again, thinking on the hoof and in between posts, chewing the cud. (Don’t know where the sudden bovine imagery came from – I’ll be referring to the milk of human kindness next!)

I will let some old friends know and hopefully make some new ones along the way and I will reference things I find too, starting with this article I found on Flipboard https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/wxekvw/the-world-after-coronavirus-healthcare-labor-climate-internet which examines just some of the questions about the future we can begin to wonder about, and although it is written from an American viewpoint, there is much that applies to the rest of our global village…

A Writer is someone who writes…

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A blogger on my reading list has thrown down a challenge that chimes with a decision I had already arrived at, namely that I must write more and set myself some specific challenges. Over on “Off go the Panties”, Panty Parade has posted the “The Stop Whining Twelve Step, Twelve Week Challenge” to all recalcitrant writers claiming to be blocked, too busy yada, yada, yada. 

I’m in!

I started or rather re-started writing creatively a few years back when I lived in Co. Sligo, Ireland – a place steeped in the likes of WB Yeats and soused with a barful of contemporary writers. The vicissitudes of schooling had meant giving up anything but criticising other people’s writing at an early age and I had forgotten the pleasure of setting sail down an open page…

I progressed from short pieces generated in a writing group to a novel that now stands at some 40 thousand words and which I have added to in the last few years in a desultory fashion – but now the time has come to knuckle down and finish it. So below I will list some goals and seek a mentor as per the challenge but first let me share an insight.

On Sunday mornings my parents, and by custom, us children too, had a lie in. My father would switch on a small radio on the landing and we would all hear “Songs form the Little Chapel in the Valley”, “The Archers” Omnibus edition and Alastair Cooke’s “Letter from America” and it came to me suddenly the other day that my blogging style owes much to Mr Cooke’s wonderful rambles that would start and return to some key observation on American life by way of several other fascinating stories. Blogs are like a diary and all diaries are addressed to some future audience whatever anyone says and Alastair Cooke was definitely and directly addressing the British audience with his observations softly dropped into our Sunday morning ears. So perhaps he was the prototypical blogger from before the internet was born. I wonder how many others had their writing sensibilities subtle shaped by the wonderful Mr Cooke.

Back to the challenge…

Goals:-

1. What kind of writer am I (and what programme of writing will suit me)?
I am a morning person by choice and I can get out of bed and write before I have even had a cup of tea and if I can do this regularly it suits me and I will steadily increase the words in my novel. I have thought enough about the novel I have plenty that just needs to get out. 

2. I also like blogging and besides this one which takes me when I feel inspired, I also started a new one dealing with my relationship to photography. This is partly an excuse to get my brain in gear in another way so although it might seem counter-productive to finishing the novel. I also commit to posting at least once a week both here and there.

3. I am going to seek a mentor for the novel writing and by way of a fishing trip, I include a fragment below and to anyone who cares to read more I will send 2 chapters of what is a sub-plot of the book. As a result of any comments I receive back, I may request a mentor.

There are other goals to the challenge but I will return to them in later posts.
Any other stalled writers out there? Take the challenge…

The novel – a fragment…

As the Dublin coach made it ‘s way along the banks of the Liffey, through the evening rush hour traffic, a pedestrian with more than a little “drink taken”, lurched off the pavement. The jolt of brakes applied suddenly together with the driver’s curses brought Margaret out of the trance she had been in for the whole journey. The same song had been going round and round in her head without registering but now she realised with a certain amount of chagrin, it was The Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”. Before the words could unfold their story again, at this moment too painfully close to her own home, Margaret switched her attention to the river running alongside The Quays. In the Margaret of all previous journeys heading into Dublin along the Liffey had always produced a barely suppressed excitement. A teacher had once told her class how every breath you take contains a molecule of air expelled by Julius Caesar in his dying breath. Peering down into the green walled channel, the water always at a different height depending on the state of the tide, Margaret had thenceforth imagined the Liffey as a lung for Dublin – breathing it’s slow, twice daily intake of water that might have come from anywhere in the world. What foreign ports had breathed in this water before and where would it waft to next? Further down The Quays, you could see the ships moored that went to other countries and as a child she had pictured herself on board some vessel, swimming out the river, through the sea and up some other river in “foreign parts. Tonight, the dream would become reality, she would change at Bus Aras an head out to the North Wall and board the night ferry to Holyhead, not the most exotic destination possible but a gateway to a new life nevertheless. She would take the train to London and do a little sight seeing but she wouldn’t stay there in case she was followed – no, she would move on somewhere else, somewhere less obvious, somewhere special. Exactly where she wasn’t sure, but it would come to her, or rather shewould come to it.

The Blog Title

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I should explain the title of this blog it is from a Haiku I made up as part of an artwork I created some years back

” How would you know it was just a dream if you don’t know you’re asleep!”

I was pretty pleased with it as it is not just the 17 syllable rule that make it a Haiku but there has to be some reference to time or seasons passing. I hope the shift in tense between would and don’t, imply the difference between a waking and sleeping state hence the passage of time.
Even without the time reference, I still love John Cooper Clarke, the Punk Poet’s skit of a Haiku

“Writing a poem in seventeen syllables is very dific”

Any favourites?