'my blog'... introducing thoughts from out there...

I like writing.  I write a lot.  Nearly every day I write something.  And for the last year I have written 'my blog'.   My aim is to write something, hopefully something worth reading, once a week.

My blog will be simply my thoughts - in a way it will be like a diary. Although there is a difference between blog and a diary.  A blog is 'on line'.  This means that what is written is recorded and the words remain on record for as long as the internet remains 'on line'.   And anyone can read it... but likely given few if anyone will read it...

So why?  Why write a blog that no one reads?  Writing with an audience, even a pretend audience, is good practice.  There are certain standards:  the writing (spelling / grammar) should be good enough to allow anyone who reads English to read easily; the comments should be political in the sense of 'not gossip' - about ideas rather than people; the thoughts should be comfortably public (allowing the reader to task issue with the idea rather than with 'me'). 

Here I could launch myself into a discussion of standards - what makes a good standard etc.  I could then discuss standards for blogging and so on.  But I won't, at least not now.  It is perhaps enough simply to say that for me, blogging is a discipline - the structured practice of writing.

Disciplined writing has long been the reserve of the well born - Michel de Montaigne and in a more contemporary form, Alain de Botton are keen examples of the kind of writer I have in mind ...  blogging allows the petty bourgeois (members of the grey middle class) to pretend an audience and thus write with intention.  Write well and write often - what more should be expected of an author?  

So ok - readers?  What would readers add to the writing?  Would what was written be better or worse for having been read? I intend to write.  My subjects will be varied - bicycles, feminism, travel, socialism - punditry - but at the heart of all this is creative activity.  To use Hannah Arendts' word, my blog will be about 'action'.  

And  if you are a reader - welcome to my world!