About

Why would I start blogging at my age? I’m hoping it will be fun. Or maybe it will just be somewhere I can dump a load of grumpy-old-man opinions. Nah, it’ll be fun.

Drafting this About page, I saw it had become a kind of manifesto, so let’s run with that:

• I am not promising great originality, or searing insights into the minds of artists, or revelatory analysis of the modern world.
• I am promising honest efforts to write well, to use good English (especially punctuation), to be interesting.
• I will write short posts and long ones. I believe in giving words space to breathe and ideas time to develop.
• I will challenge myself to write in a friendly, conversational way – in my working life I’ve been brought up on writing project reports, specifications, procedures and other types of formal documents, so this should be the chance to loosen up.
• I will welcome feedback and comments, but I’d prefer it to be constructive. I want to learn, and I want to know how my words come across: “It sounded great when it left me, what did it sound like when it reached you?”
• I will do some research for most of what I write, because I hate being factually inaccurate, but I will focus on my own ideas as the starting point.
• I will avoid controversial subjects. I’ve spent my life doing that, and I’m not going to change just because I can’t see the people I’m communicating with. There’s enough ignorant opinion expressed in the world without me adding to it.
• I reserve the right to break any of these rules in the interests of interest.

I’m also supposed to say a bit about me. I’m British, married with children. I think I’ve got fairly diverse tastes, so I’ll be writing about movies I’ve seen, about Shakespeare plays, about folk, rock and classical music, about boardgames, about fantasy sports, and whatever other topics come to mind.

So far this is just somewhere to write semi-random stuff, in the hope that occasionally someone will find something of interest. Who knows, maybe it’ll turn into something.