WHY WRITE A BLOG?
ON MY 500th POST
Six years ago I was working for the NHS, employed as a Dual
Diagnosis Specialist based in the local Social Services Community Mental health
Team in Haringey, North London. It was a good office to work in and I liked
everyone I worked with and particularly enjoyed the company of my immediate
colleagues. Conversation in the office could be lively, though we were all broadly
speaking of the left, differences of opinion did occur. One day my colleague
Matt passed me an article in the Independent Newspaper written by the left wing ‘comedian’ Mark Steele.[1] The
piece was an attack on the Catholic Church in general and the Pope in
particular and Matt knew of my hostility to organised religion.
Mr Steele’s comments however enraged me, for at a time when
Islamist extremism posed the greatest threat to freedom of speech since the 19th
Century Mr Steele chose to present the Catholic Church as if it were it that presented the greater threat to open and rational debate. This was not the first time
that I had witnessed members of the left ducking the real issues and presenting
their cowardice as radicalism. My normal recourse is to words, argument and
debate. But somehow winning a debate in the office felt wholly unsatisfying, I
wanted to communicate my disgust to Mr Steele directly and demonstrate that I for one
could see clearly what was going on. I wrote him an e-mail, to which I received no
response, (I had not really been expecting one). This left me still unsatisfied
and led me to conceive of the idea of an open letter, the Blog was born.
The rest as they say is history.
Looking back now over the 500 blogs I have written the
central themes remain those that inspired me at the beginning, freedom of
speech, civil liberties, social justice, the threat from religious extremism in
general and Islamism in particular and the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of
so much of the left.
While politics have inevitably predominated I found that I
now had space to explore other areas of interest to me, history, literature,
music and aspects of popular culture. I also found a space to publish fiction
and more creative prose, creating sub blogs in which to post such material.
My life has changed
radically during the period in which I have been writing the blog. In early 2010 I became unwell and had to stop
working; this entailed a rapid descent into relative poverty and bankruptcy as
I moved from earning a good salary to becoming dependent on the state ‘safety
net.’ For a period in that year I toyed with the idea of turning the blog into
a sort of journal exploring the difficulties people in my position faced. After
one or two posts I abandoned the idea, believing, I think correctly, that a mere
focus on my own purely parochial concerns would diminish the blog.
As to exactly whom I have been writing for this has never been very clear to me and certainly never has been a
factor in what I chose to write about or how I chose to express myself. In
truth, at the risk of sounding overly solipsistic, I think I was writing
primarily for myself. If others chose to read what I wrote then so much the
better. This is not to say that I have not been affected by the fact that I was
being read, merely that this was not my starting point. My writing felt more like thinking aloud.
As time has gone on
I have been extremely gratified to see the readership expand. Though still
modest, it has felt like a significant achievement, particularly as I have taken no great steps to publicise the blog. What has both surprised and pleased me a great deal is the numbers reading my
posts from outside the UK. In fact I now enjoy a larger readership outside this country
than within. I have sometimes wondered why my very UK focused concerns attract a larger audience outside the UK, particularly in the United
States, and have even considered adapting post for this wider audience, however
I believe to do so risks losing whatever intrinsic value that they currently
possess.
Needless to say, though I will say it anyway, I am grateful
for each and every one of you who choose to invest your time reading these
posts, they make sitting down and writing in the early hours* that much more
gratifying.
Finally a word on ‘The Hitch,’ if there is one public
intellectual who haunts these blogs it has been Christopher Hitchens. ‘The
Hitch’ inspired me both to write and not pull my punches. His death at the
end of 2012 affected me deeply and it is what inspired me to dedicate the blog
to him. Christopher Hitchens RIP.
So once again thank you for visiting and investing your
time. I hope you will stick around for the next 500 posts.
*I am a morning person and the majority of my writing I do
between 4:00 -9:00 a.m.
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