Why I’ll Never Be A Blogger

In an idle moment between episodes of The Sopranos at work today, I indulged in a spot of narcissism and Googled myself. Previous searches had revealed an ever-increasing number of people who share my name, some aged as young as 14, or some who’ve been dead for around 300 years. I’d always thought my surname was reasonably unusual (Lewis Carroll aside), since nobody’s ever been able to spell it. If I could have been bothered to change my name when we got married, my namesakes would multiply rapidly. I may even have got away with pretending that I had a sideline in producing Ken Loach films (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0639780/).

But Google usually located three incidences that were me – a Norwegian website advertising a Tallis Scholars music DVD that I project-managed a couple of years ago, a letter about Virgin trains that I had published in the Guardian after several of our wedding guests had a 9-hour journey from hell back to London from Oxenholme station, and then a film database that a friend’s husband set up and made me register on when he only had about four other members and was desperately trying to bolster his numbers with anyone he knew vaguely connected with the movie industry.

However, to my great surprise, Google has now picked up on this blog. It’s quite a frightening prospect to realise that complete strangers, or even long-lost acquaintances, can now readily access these somewhat stilted and infrequent ramblings. I suddenly panicked that there might be several entries that were libellous or grossly offensive. Would my relatives mind discovering that I spent a lot of last summer pouring out my agony at Mum’s death in a public domain? Would I suddenly get peed-off comments from celebrities I’ve spotted in Crouch End? But in reality most of my entries are probably no better, worse, or more or less tedious than many of the other blogs out there.

But I’m a crap blogger: I just don’t have, or make, the time to post daily. I am envious of people who do, since I enjoy writing but find too much of my day is spent staring at a computer screen for someone else’s benefit which doesn’t leave me with enough creative energy to continue doing so for my own purposes once I get home. I have about fully-formed 30 blog entries in my head that remain unwritten, some of which may even be interesting to other people. Others such as "Despite its claims, Windolene really is very smeary" and "Why does Boots in Crouch End never have anything I want in stock?" are best left in some desolate recess of my brain. If I end up without freelance work for a while again (which is looking likely), I might get around to finally typing up some of them, though they’d all have to be back-dated. Which of course contravenes the fundamental idea of a blog.

I do write a diary every night, and have done so for the last 20 years bar one, but I’d never be prepared to abandon pen and paper to create an electronic version of that, and certainly not to publish it into a potentially world-wide space. Whilst Dave and I do get up to an awful lot more than gets blogged about, most of my diary entries still read along the lines of “Got up, messed about, went to bed” or are in a Bridget-Jones-after-a-bottle-of-Chardonnay slanted hand, “Grrrreallybloodygoodeveninnngbutcrapjourneyhome, mmmm,pissedagainwhy didI havethatlastpint?” I may occasionally remember to mention an earth-shattering news event but half the time I’m too half-asleep to do anything other than clear my head before hitting the pillow. Plus Dave’s supposed to write entries in this blog too, which he doesn’t do in my diary.

REBECCA