Blog, The First

Speaking to yourself or speaking to the World, what's it to be? I think it is probably best to assume the former and hope for the latter. This paragraph is just the very first of what I hope will be many.

Why am I blogging? I know that there are millions of blogs out there that never get read, or that are virtually unreadable. I don't expect that mine will be one that gets quoted by the New Yorker nor that it will win any awards. None of that is the point. I wanted to find a way of giving my writing some discipline. I write regularly for The Olive Press, but not regularly enough to greatly improve my style and skills to a point where I'm happy with my output. Here I hope to do just that.

For TOP I write fortnightly on cultural matters relating to Andalucía. Here I want to speak about a wider set of subjects: politics; culture; religion; nature; history; life choices; food; and any old thing that pops into my mind. I want to do that in a more thoughtful vein and in a less deadline-chasing haste. I also want to do all this with a sense of place. I don't want to write a blog that feels as if it exists only in a cyber-world. Reading many blogs you could be mistaken for thinking that there are people who don't really inhabit any particular place in the real world. Many are written in such a way that they refer to things occurring in the Media, politics and the like, as if these activities constitute a reality in themselves rather than merely being different reflections of what is occurring in villages, towns and cities of wood, brick and concrete in any of the two hundred-plus nations on Earth.

This passage is merely a test passage to allow me to design and create my blog. I believe in what I have written and will follow some of the themes in detail over the next few weeks, but I want to end here for the moment so that I can get the blog up and running.