The Blog is Back!

If you read the title as “The Bitch is Back”, I respect your interpretation – yes indeedy – and will explain why below.

For those of you who mourned the (temporary, as it happens) demise of my blog, thank you. For those who celebrated wildly, you’d better grab another bottle to numb the pain. In the end, I had to resuscitate the blog to relieve the pressure cooker and give my hard-bitten tongue a rest, not that I bit it all the time, as some poor so-s can testify.

Note the new blog address. I promised someone I’d remove all the old material from public view, and I have done. A promise is a promise for a’ that (well it is Burns Night this week). I know I also promised to stop blogging but, heck, no one’s perfect, not even me, even though my siblings nicknamed me Little Miss Perfect when we were young. Now that we’re old I still lord it over them.

Much to catch up on, and it’s difficult to know where to start. 

How about the choking hypocrisy of the Tory party rallying around Fishy Rishi for not wearing a seatbelt, including those who had kicked out Boris for eating cake. Tell me, which is the worse offence? Putting your life and the lives of those in the front seats in danger and potentially draining already strained emergency service and NHS resources, or eating cake? Exactly! I could also mention the stinking hypocrisy of the Labour party castigating Fishy. Twitter exploded with photos of Starmer equally seatbelt-less. Similarly, he and Rayner were caught drinking beer in Durham during lockdown. Hip. Ock. Ri. See.

Talking of hypocrites, what about Prince Harry, eh? On the other hand could he, on some level, be onto something about his memory being more important than objective facts? What exactly are objective facts? To answer that question we need Roland Barthes and the philosophical / psychological approach of post-structuralism, which replaces the role of the author, as the authoritative voice, with the interaction of writer and reader. In other words, the reader participates in the production of meaning, building their own stories. This sure as heck is what Prince Harry does. Actually, don’t we all? I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve read something and come to a different conclusion from others. I’ve even had people read my own writing very differently from each other as well as differently from what I thought I’d written.

How can that be? Is it because a text lacks clarity? Has the author previously written something contradictory to the current spiel that just won’t budge from the reader’s psyche? Does the reader have ‘motives’, in that they want to read something regardless of what’s actually written because: 1) it suits their attitude to life or political narrative; or 2) that’s how their echo chamber is interpreting it, colouring their judgement? Don’t blame me for thinking like this; blame Barthes.

But, thanks to Barthes, when I interpret something differently from others, I’m comfortable that I’m not closed-minded, not going bonkers and I don’t have dysphasia (sometimes brought on by a stroke or dementia). I’m not saying that my interpretation is always correct; I’m saying that all interpretations should stay on the table and all views be respected (cue, laughing emoji) and discussed further. So is the blog back or is the bitch back? Answers on a postcard.

Now for something completely different. One recurring complaint about my old blogs was that most of them were caustic. Yeah well, it’s my blo-og and I’ll write what I want to. I did try to pepper them with acquired-taste humour, often self-deprecating. If you didn’t get those bits, then we’re back to Roland Barthes again. 

And there were some heartwarming moments, or did you miss those as well? Here’s some recent ones. Last week I enjoyed a delightfully long brunch with delightfully uber-intelligent, delightfully lovely people that only ended because we all had other appointments to get to. The day before, which I had anticipated would be a pointless time-wasting dirge, turned out to be extremely productive and a barrel of laughs. Later in the week, a friend bought me a gift that was nothing exciting and not at all expensive but oh so thoughtful; I blubbed a little.

I could end my first blog of the new era right here, right now, leaving us all feeling warm and fuzzy. I could, but I’m in the mood to give a characteristic two-finger salute, which is my self-defence mechanism kicking in (makes a change from OCD), and was inspired by a recent post on LinkedIn. It read, “If you have a problem with me, call me. If you don’t have my number then that means you don’t know me well enough to have a problem”, to which I responded:

“Variation on a theme: If you have a problem with me, then you're the problem. There are an awful lot of people out there who have a problem. But that's not my problem.”