A few weekends ago we visited Malleny Garden on the outskirts of Edinburgh for a second time (here’s the first). A light drizzle had set in, so we weren’t expecting much, but actually that was the making of it.

31 July 2010 · Journal

Most of the late-1988 UK number ones currently under discussion at Popular are awful, but one stands out, for me at least. Other commenters gave it an average mark of 4 out of 10, but then most of them don’t care for this band at all...

Read More · 24 July 2010 · Music

The Occasional Navel-Gazing What-Am-I-Doing-Here Post

Two years ago I wrote about taking a break from blogging because I was sick of the sound of my own voice. Nowadays I’m feeling the opposite, that I miss all the odd ways it used to echo around this cavernous site and feed back into my head, and desperately want to get back to it all... but can’t. All the stuff on my plate at work this year has crowded out any hope of it, and in the odd snatches of time that do occur it’s easier to contribute to other conversations than to cook up something new here. Not that there’s been any conversation here for a while... even a photo of an upended BMW hasn’t raised a peep. Turns out that reducing your posts to a trickle for a year, taking a break for another year, and then trickling back for a year is a foolproof way to lose an audience.

So, time for a rethink, reboot, redesign, re-something. Maybe I should just embrace all the social networking sites I’ve half-heartedly toyed with and ditch the idea of following some personal out-of-date notion of what blogs should or shouldn’t be. Maybe Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr are all you need, and who cares about bringing it all back home.

This needs further thought, but I’m in the mood to try something radical. Though whatever that turns out to be—assuming I get the time to implement it rather than just carry on by default—the old stuff will remain.

Actually, maybe Further Thought is exactly the problem.

15 July 2010 · x5 · Site News