WARNING! This is not a proper post at all. There are
possible only four or five people alive who will have any interest in
what follows, which could be summarised as a statement of non-intent.
It's a rumination not even on things I intend to catch up with here
but on how often I plan to do them. (Or more accurately, how seldom.)
I am not even sure that I would count as one of those people
myself...
Regular readers (insert mandatory joke
here) may have noticed that this blog does not exactly fit into the
instant-hit, rapid-response world of the internet, where anything
relating to the week before is treated as if it was a time capsule.
In fact, it fits in about as well as a barge canal would if placed in
the middle of the Monaco Grand Prix. Not only is it not “trending”,
I'm not even sure what that word is supposed to mean.
For a film review you
may well have to wait until the end of the year. Art show
write-ups, on the other hand, aren't necessarily that timely. I make
very well-intentioned efforts to keep track of all of this, in the
pretence I will one day stumble upon a stash of time and catch up on
everything.
So perhaps it's not all that surprising
when my blog stats tell me that people are arriving here through
googling the word “late”, and that a post entitled ”I’m
Late!” is currently among my most-read items! Perhaps
these folk are fans of tardiness, lovers of laggardness, foes of
punctuality, who are looking for a nice non-timely report on
something or other. Perhaps I should simply be giving them what they
want, with entries like ’Beatles Rumoured to Split’,
‘Everything Still to Play For in the Hundred Years War’
and ’Could This Be It For the Cretaceous Era?’
Perhaps I should change the strap-line in order to attract this new
audience, 'For Those Who Find the Out-of-Date Great'
or something similar.
Except I don't really want to do that.
But neither do I particularly desire to lead a life of work, blog and
sleep. I cannot remember, for example, the last time I brought out a
comic. For that matter, and for the shame of it I'm not even entirely
sure of the last time I read a book. Except that it was probably
related to something I was writing here.
But mostly I'm keen to resist the lure
of the internet, that seems to get seemingly sensible people all
trigger-happy with that 'Send' button. I have already posted things I
wish I'd thought over for longer, have definitely sent over-hasty and
wrong-headed mailing comments in the past and wouldn't want to slip
down that slope any further. This may be the information
superhighway, but the highway is not my way.
So in a nutshell my solution to
lateness in 2013 is to stop worrying about it. It's the art show
write-ups which tend to take the longest to write, and perhaps by
consequence become the most stockpiled. Expect them to filter
gradually through. Expect some to breach new frontiers in exponential
lateness. Expect me to not even be sorry. Except anything so long
that it's not a full-length post each and every week.
The two or three people who may
remember me volunteering to review
my Top Fifty albums (at the last count, forty-eight to
go)... well, I'm still working on it. The precisely-one-person who
remembers me offering to write about the original 'Doctor
Who', I haven't forgotten about that one either. (In fact,
given the loss of interest I've had lately in 'New Who',
that one may even get accellerated a smidge.)
In short, watch this space.
Which will fairly often be
a space.
I'd far rather see one well-thought-out post from you every month or so than the neverending stream of dribble that comes from most bloggers.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Andrew!
ReplyDeleteThough you seem to manage being more prolific than me and keeping the quality up!
I meant to comment on this last week.
ReplyDeleteCould I get back to you on that?
ReplyDelete