THE SILENCE OF THE BLOG

I seem to have got this blogging business all wrong. In the Guardian on Saturday there was a small piece about author’s blogs which mentioned several of them. I had a look. They are rather good (e.g. www.blog,susanhill.com) But most of the author’s concerned seem to write their blogs every day! Perhaps I’m just too slow or too idle to make a success of it. Once a month is all I manage. Less than that, often. Another difference is that their blogs attract acres of comment. Genuine debate is stirred by their thoughts. For the most part, my blog attracts silence. It is like a quiet corner of a neglected public building. I imagine a place as vast and imposing as the old justice buildings in Brussels (which are so monumental as to give the impression of a craggy mountain, with stone facades like cliffs, complete with plant life growing in the gutters, like mountain flowers clinging to a rockface.) This great complex represents what I think (nay, fear) is sometimes referred to as the blogosphere. And within that building my blog is a small, enclosed courtyard where straws blow about in the wind. The more I think about it, the more I like it. Such places have a certain appeal, I always think. They are filled with a kind of cathartic peace. But to rejoice in the fact that my blog is, like the Hills of the North in the old hymn, unvisited and unblessed is perhaps a bit perverse and undermines the point of the whole thing, surely? All comments welcome. Or, alternatively, silence...