Some Memorable Posts

Posts from other blogs that have stuck in the memory

Although it’s over four years since I started this blog, I don’t have many readers or followers. Would I do better by being more like other bloggers?

Sadly, in my case, the answer is almost certainly “No”. No one would be interested in the beauty products I use, or pictures showing my repertoire of appealing facial expressions. I’m not sure anyone would want to know how comfortable my ten-year old M&S underpants are, or that I have had three Shredded Wheat for breakfast almost every day for the last forty years. I’m not qualified to give tips on how to get thousands of followers in just one week, or how to find commercial partnerships and get paid to promote products. As for hints on parenting and lifestyle, my kids would go ballistic if I posted those childhood photographs of them nude in the bath. 

I have explored linkies, retweet accounts and facebook boosts, but it seems to me that the main beneficiaries of these things are the people who host them. They get them going and within a few weeks are pestering you to say they have “teamed up” with this or that product to bring you the latest feminine lingerie, slimming aids or facial filler creams.

There are, however, some wonderful blogs I do admire, and would like to mention posts from the past few years that left a memorable impression.

I have a soft spot for blogs by middle aged men from the North of England retrospectively trying to construct meaning in their lives. Jonathan Humble’s poetry blog has some pretty powerful stuff, and some amusing stuff too, but it was a short story, Rainbow Friday, that first caught my attention. It could be straight from my own childhood. It is so good, I sometimes wonder why I bother trying to write a blog myself.

I followed Andrew Petcher from fairly early on. He has a well-read travel blog written in his guise as “international man of leisure”, but it was his childhood blog, from when children roamed free without a care, that attracted me first. His memories of a rugby-mad games teacher are spot-on, and his experiences of working in a privatised utility (part 1, part 2) have you gunning for re-nationalisation.

David Hodgson Personal Blog (not the snappiest of titles) is always fascinating. Two pieces I especially remember are one which begins by wondering what became of a large map of East Yorkshire bus routes that used to be on the side of a building overlooking the bus station in Bridlington, and a piece about the bizarre demise of the British electronics company Ferranti which supported him through university.

Moving on from elderly memoir, Estelle Hargraves’ The Skittish Library, a reflection on out-of-print oddities, was another early following. I found it when researching one of my own favourite old books, The Universal Book of Hobbies and Handicrafts. Her posts about the chapters on pet keeping and self defence give questionable advice about the disposal of unwanted kittens and how to pierce an assailant’s throat with the tip of your umbrella.

Brian’s Blog, a philosophical take on anything and everything contradictory in the world, always makes me think. The writer strives for a green and thoughtful life by cycling and recycling, and minimising present-day irrationalities. The diversity of the blog makes it difficult to pick specific pieces, but two recent ones that come to mind are on micro-beads and the idiocy of  GDPR cookies.

Sarada Gray also blogs about anything and everything. I look at all her posts, and especially enjoyed one about her new pair of reading glasses. She also, quite rightly, roused my indignation at how Mo Mowlem has been airbrushed out of history.

Finally, for now, Gary Strachan is possibly the most prolific blogger I follow. At sometimes two or three lengthy posts a day I could never keep up with everything he writes, but I regularly find myself returning for his wit and humour which is up there with Tim Dowling in the Guardian or Eddie Mair in the Radio Times. To be honest, I envy how easily he seems to turn it out. Over the last few days he has even produced a series of posts joking about his recent heart attack.  

I feel that’s enough for now and apologise for not mentioning more of the blogs I follow. I’ve made a mental note to attend to it in due course.

Research Before The Internet

as evoked by
A.S. Byatt - Possession: a Romance (5***)

The novel, Possession, evokes for me exactly what it was like to carry out research before the age of the internet, when we had to go to libraries to look things up in books and journals, and even use primary sources. More on this below.

It may also be the cleverest novel I have ever read: in fact I read it twice, partly because I enjoyed it so much and partly because a lot of it went over my head the first time through.

To describe the book first, the plot concerns two nineteen-eighties scholars who discover correspondence between two fictional Victorian poets revealing a previously unknown love affair. It is a discovery of immense historical significance, akin, say, to finding revelatory private correspondence by major literary figures such as Alfred Lord Tennyson or Christina Rossetti. As the two present-day scholars investigate the lives of the poets, they themselves are drawn into a relationship echoing that of the two Victorians. The two stories are revealed in parallel through five hundred pages of narrative, fictional poetry, letters, journals and diaries. So as well as the two love stories, and a cracking mystery story, A. S. Byatt has created substantial bodies of work attributed to the fictional poets and numerous pieces of writing attributed to other characters.

I struggled the first time through because: (i) the Victorian setting is rich in classical, biblical, literary and contemporary references of the kind with which educated Victorians of the time would have been very familiar but most of us today are not; and (ii) the nineteen-eighties setting alludes to numerous arcane and specialist approaches to textual analysis and criticism; e.g. we learn one of the scholars is trained in post-structuralist deconstruction. It found my own education sorely lacking.

Some might say the author is simply showing off, but essentially she is poking fun, and is abundantly able to do so because of her sweeping knowledge of Victorian and modern scholarship, poetry and literature. Some might say this is self-indulgent, but surely that is what all writers are. Her descriptions of beautiful things are dazzling, be they Victorian bathrooms, snowfall, the North York Moors or libraries. The 1990 Booker judges were clearly impressed.

That she put this sumptuous book together before 1990, before the internet, makes the achievement all the more impressive. She has not simply googled a tapestry of ideas and stitched them in, it stems from a lifetime’s study and expertise.

And that is what Possession strongly evokes for me: the pleasure and excitement of academic work before the age of abundant electronic resources and the internet. Anyone whose university days predated the turn of the century, perhaps researching a thesis or dissertation, or a final-year project, will find Possession brings it all back. You feel as if you are researching the Victorian poets yourself.

For me it was the light and quiet in a corner of the top floor of the Brynmor Jones Library at Hull, looking through the raked windows across the city to the distant Humber where bogies high above the river crossed slowly back and forth spinning the Humber Bridge suspension cables. Later it was the darkness and claustrophobia of the open stacks deep in the bowels of the John Rylands Library at Manchester.

The silence; the decades of collected journals; the Dewey Decimal index; the chance discovery of a promising book next to the one you were looking for; deliberately mis-shelving books so that no one else can deny you them the next day (I plead guilty, but I never stole anything, unlike one of the scholars in Possession); pages of handwritten notes from volumes piled six or seven high on your desk; coloured pens and paper clips, sore fingers; treasure-trails through the impenetrable Science and Social Sciences Citation Indexes (the SCI and SSCI); flip-lidded index card boxes; inter-library loans; journal offprint requests; scratchy, smelly, chemical photocopies; microfilm readers; hours following leads and loose ends which led to nowhere; puzzling new words and terminology in need of clarification; flashes of insight on encountering new ideas and making what you hoped, but rarely were, entirely original associations. More than anything else, the Csikszentmihalyian sense of flow: the buzz of your own thoughts, total immersion in the task at hand, suspended in time so that nothing else seemed to matter.

Through the nineteen-nineties things gradually changed. It became possible to research whole topics instantly and with plausible thoroughness through just a screen in an austere book-free room. Things were never the same again. I was still recommending books for my courses into the new century, but in rapidly changing subject areas such as computing, and even the social sciences, some of the university lecturers I knew stopped using print sources completely.

I hung on to my collection of academic books until retirement when they had to go. I kept a few that no one wanted, and ones that had once been especially useful and dear to me.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.