Longing it out

There's some pretty major shit going on right now - Covid, Brexit fallout, Trump fallout, a potential Russian uprising, a military coup in Burma, and that's not even the half of it. If you stopped too long to think about it you probably wouldn't bother getting out of bed in the morning.

The news is probably a major contributor to most people's worries and anxieties: I stopped taking a daily paper a couple of years ago instead opting for just a couple of Sundays; I don't even bother with that now - though I do miss the long read. Getting my news in bite size chunks off Twitter and BBC/LBC sound bytes is probably leaving me with a very jaundiced view of the world right now (the UK, anyway), so maybe I need to once more make that pilgrimage to the newsagent on a Sunday morning while my sausages are browning in the oven...

Talking about long reads, when the future of this blog hung in the balance last year (rumours were rife that New Blogger would be making it nigh on impossible for writers such as myself to continue in the way they had been doing for years), I remember saying that one option open to me would be to wipe the slate clean and start a more literary based blog (no messing about with coloured fonts, no cutaway videos, no photo montages) based around the long read format found in Sunday papers and the myriad of supplements contained therein. But I pricked my own bubble and said, basically, that if that was the style of writing I was going to pursue wouldn't I already have moved in that direction long ago?

My writing style, such that it is, combines brevity and levity and leans more in the direction of 'My Top 5 Biscuits' rather than a serious look at 'Biden's First 100 Days'. Though if there is a way to link the two I'm sure I'd find it if I stroked my chin for long enough. That's not to say that I shy away from political hot potatoes. For instance I'd call anyone out for being a hypocrite: show me someone who gets on their high horse about the current mental health of children at the moment and I'll point to that same person who voted for 10 years of Tory austerity and say to them "I don't remember you having a problem pulling funding for mental health and closing libraries." But, and I think this is the point I want to make, as much as I often feel my blog is far too silly or trivial at times, it's only because there are writers far better equipped than me to really tackle the big issues of the day. Leave me to tell you what Brian Connolly of the Sweet used to have for his breakfast in 1974 and I'm yer man. Though if our dimwitted PM makes one more fuck up I'm just as likely to sharpen my pencil and say "Oi! Johnson! No!"