About this Blog
I have re-written this particular page several times since November 2007 when I first started this blog and I am sure that this won’t be the last time I do so. The following is to give a context to this minor opus.
Some Background
Although a South London Boy, my Parents had moved down to the Somerset Levels over 35 years ago and by Summer 2004, I moved down to look after them as they were then in their 80′s, my Mother had been an invalid for almost 20 years and they had reached the stage where if they didn’t have some support, they would need to sell up and move into a Residential Home which they didn’t want to do, their dog Jack may have had an influence here too.
I am now 66 and in the past bought up 4 children have had a varied and various careers my last being as an IT Project Manager. My Father died Easter 2007 at the age of 86, my Mother January 2010 at the age of 89 just about 6 months short of her 90th Birthday. In early 2005 I was asked whether when my Parents died I would stay down here. My response was immediate “No, I would be straight back to London !” But that was then, today in 2011, it is all different, I am staying here, been washed up on a high tide and left stranded … But more importantly I guess, I too have changed and whilst always happy to visit the City of my birth, am content down here on the Somerset Levels.
This Blog and Content
I started writing this blog in November 2007, I guess I missed the conversations on current affairs with my Pops but it is not important to me whether anybody reads this and posts comments, my entries tend to be essays rather than “Twitters” and their importance is less me being “right” and more “me exercising my brain” because the brain is a muscle too. However, my starting point is reading the news on-line and quite often, participating in the on-line blogs, this is a good exercise because it forces you to “examine the issues” form a view, construct an argument and then test it to some extent, although sometimes you will get “blasted” by others but that’s okay too.
My personal ‘interests’ may seem quite wide ranging in most respects and that is because they actually are. I may think that membership of the EU and the “European Court of Human Rights”, is a total waste of time for the UK but, I think it all rather boring to constantly “Bang On” about just one issue exclusively however deeply felt, that is for the mono-brained so I like to ‘range’ a bit between the political, the personal and all stops in between.
Another element in starting this thing was the following: It is easy to start a blog or put up a web site, the real question though is whether you can sustain the effort and this was the basic test I set myself in November 2007 when I started this, I seem to have passed it because without too much effort, I seem to post quite frequently on many different subjects and as my interests takes me, so well over 700 times since 2007 – sad git I know !
The Future
I have another web site which is a conventional “static” one and several other web Domain names to play with, I therefore suspect that I will completely re-jig this site in due course. There is a mass of accumulated material, almost 800 entries and it is hardly likely that anybody is going to plough their way back through them besides which, however interesting articles on the Gordon Brown Government may have been at the time, we have all moved on. However, it does give me a lot of written material to work with in a couple of book ideas I have so, I imagine that I will prune things back to the last 12 months and archive the rest off to a local WordPress site that is not on the web.