(Not) Quitting Blogging

The sad demise of Mr E – one of the most talented bloggers out there – has again got me contemplating quitting blogging. But rest assured, whatever fans of this blog may exist, I’m not going to quite blogging.

Mainly because I can’t. It's true, I even tried once, but was back writing here within a few months.

There’s an odd sort of compulsion to my blogging. Sometimes I wake up and I can’t be bothered to write anything, or I need to write something else other than a blogpost. Then something will happen. I’ll see a news story, or I’ll think of something, and a post will develop in my mind. And then I’ll have to splurge it on the page – often with varying degress of success, but for whatever the reason I'll write it and publish it to the limited readership of this blog.

But it is more than that. Since this blog has started to get more comments and more links, I’ve encountered ideas and comment-makers who, while they seldom change my mind, do at least challenge my views and help to develop them. Take a recent post I wrote about Liberty – the comments there developed, in part, to a debate about abortion. Responding to those comments helped me to fully understand why I am pro-choice – something I probably wouldn’t have a cause to do in my everyday life.

And aside from everything else, there is still so much wrong with this society and the way that it is going that I feel just iterating the comments of others and developing my own views is vital if a case, however small and piecemeal it might be, is to be made for an alternative to the status quo. I also – perhaps arrogantly – can’t help but feel that no-one is going to represent my views as well as I can.

Like Mr E, I don’t have the same levels of rage I had when I stared this blog. But that simply means that the tone of this blog has changed, rather than the contents and its messages. So this blog will go on, despite the fact that my life is getting busier and busier. Of course a day will come when I stop, but that day is so far off that it can’t even be seen on the horizon.