Tuesday, December 27, 2005

The Blogist

My friend Michele asked me why I maintain this indulgence - the blog.

There is a tradition of ordinary people and some not so ordinary maintaining diaries as reflective accounts of experience. James Lees Milne, for example, wasnt an unusually celebrated person in his lifetime, he just knew a lot of people - Mike Jagger, almost everyone who ever owned a country house - and was great friends with Andrew and Debo Devonshire (the Duke and Duchess thereof) and many others. He kept a diary from the 1930's onwards. It has become a classic read about the social fabric of middle and upper class Britain through to 1998.

Then there are political diaries, such as those of Alan Clark or Anthony Wedgewood Benn (Tony Benn as he became) and those of artists and writers, such as Alan Bennet (whose diaries appear each year in The London Review of Books).

All of these have much in common. Reflective, introspective yet valid social comment on the events which happen to them or which affect their sensibilities.

So too this collection of pieces. Patchy quality - welcome to the world of the real writer - and odd collections of ideas. They are not intended for publication in the sense of profit, but as a basis for sharing the understanding one develops over time for the meaning of the existence we call life.

So blog on it is.

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