Sunday 21 January 2018

What the Hell Am I Doing?

Blogging is a funny thing really – it's based on the assumption that people want to share my inane and random witterings on obscure subjects. (Maybe some of you do.) Or then again, perhaps it comes from an inbuilt desire to record my thoughts in a permanent form, without a care whether anyone reads them or not. Perhaps that's really what it is. Something like a diary, but without the more intimate thoughts. (I've never kept a diary incidentally. I tried once, in about 1986, but by the time it got to January 3rd and nothing much had happened, I soon lost interest.)

If there is anyone out there reading this stuff, you will no doubt have noticed that I haven't really written anything here for a long time (over a year – and that was a one-off after a four and a half year absence.) I think perhaps some of the problem with a blog is the need to find a focus for it. You'll look back and see that this one started as a place where I could expound on the many issues of Doctor Who continuity. And yes, I got a lot of that off my chest in the early days – but then there wasn't so much more to write about. It's more likely that a specific continuity matter would be discussed and debated on my Facebook group, without the need arising to lay down my definitive thoughts on the issue here.

So I tried a reinvention: the “Anderthon”. Do you remember that? It dominated 2011. But then that dried up the following year. I always meant to get back to it, but then the death of Gerry Anderson put a bit of a dampener on the whole thing, and I felt less comfortable about criticizing the man and his work. So it all kind of fell by the wayside. It's not that I stopped watching the Anderson shows, I just didn't want to be writing “witty” capsule reviews of them any more. There are still things I might want to say about them though, just not necessarily in that context.

And that takes me back to the original fundamental question: what is the blog for? There are things I want to say, thoughts I want to express in words. For my own satisfaction really. But they don't have to be about Doctor Who or Supermarionation or tied to any particular theme really. So what I want to do is wipe the slate clean, as it were, and say this blog isn't about anything particular. Just whatever is exercising my mind at any one time. Sometimes these might be reactions to actual events. Sometimes they might be about things long past that have only just occurred to me. Just freeform ramblings really, without the need to tie them to a particular theme or direction – because interests and enthusiasms change. I may even find myself contradicting previous entries, because opinions too can alter with time. So this blog becomes an exercise in documenting the state of my mind over time – God help us!

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