One of the Amazon customer reviews for Pippa Goldschmidt's excellent debut novel complains that the book has too much astrophysics and far
too much about lesbians. I thought it would be a bit of a wheeze to write my
own review apparently agreeing with this, adding that I knew several young
people who, having read The Falling Sky, went on to buy telescopes in order to
look for lesbians. In the end I didn't, partly because that would have been
sarcastic, and I'm trying not to be sarcastic. I even took a homeopathic remedy
to try to cure my sarcasm. Wow, was I surprised at how well it worked! Sorry.
Maybe, though, this is a case that warrants sarcasm. Imagine giving Julius
Caesar two stars out of five because it had far too much about Romans in it. Leaving
lesbians aside, it's slightly dismaying that something as important and
beautiful as astrophysics should be seen as a bar to appreciating a book. But
that's another blog or recycled TESS article.
Another reason not to have written such a review is that I'd have been
reviewing a review rather than reviewing the book.
It is therefore with some reservations that I am blogging
about a blog. Worse, I'm blogging about a blog that has blogged about my blog.
Douglas Blane, a fellow TES Scotland contributor, or perhaps fellow
ex-contributor, nurtures the sort of blog - wry, but sometimes achingly honest
about his relationships with friends and family - that I could never match. But
he can't do poems, so we're quits. Douglas recently picked up on a comment I
made when I started writing web pieces for no financial reward. I described my
blogging as a vanity project. No, says Douglas, "I have learned my lesson,
fellow writers, and so should you. The world is full of people who want to
write but don't. Soon after you stop writing you stop being a
writer. Fallow is for fields, friends. Keep on writing." I felt
better after that, until the next time I looked at the stats showing how many
people had viewed my piece on music teaching. I like being read. I didn't even
mind when a TESS reader described my fortnightly column as small talk, though
I'd have liked it better if she'd omitted the adjectives "worthless"
and "uninteresting". At least it was proof of readership. Oscar Wilde
said that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked
about, though you do wonder if he'd ever been hit in the nadgers by a football.
That might be worse.
I think I've come to the end of writing for the TESS. My
detractor was right. It was small talk. Writing
fortnightly for 21 years both obliged me to use the trivialities of life for
inspiration and granted me the freedom to do so by building up a certain
familiarity with the regular readership - and it would be false modesty not to
acknowledge that there was a regular readership who knew I was a bald,
fifty-something dad with poor hearing and an eccentric taste in cars. The
important part was the Columbo moment 100 words from the end, just as I was
about to exit the piece. Turning round, I'd make a tenuous link to education.
That's my old friend Uncle Bob's description of what was going on, not mine. As
an occasional contributor, I can't do this any longer and it's not working.
So the blog's exercise, like
walking or cycling when I've got no particular place to go. But I know that
part of me secretly hopes that, out on the exercise I meet someone along the
way who looks pleased to have run into me.
That's it. No more blogs about
blogs or writing about writing. Freed from having to do a Columbo moment, I can
haver on about what ever takes my fancy. Now where's my telescope?
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