MORE OF LESS (aka THIS BLOG OF LATE)

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 Perhaps I should change the strap-line in order to attract this new audience, 'For Those Who Find the Out-of-Date Great' or something similar.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.