2000 not out.....

We have now had more than 2000 hits over 10 months since we started this blog. Is that good or bad?

Our audience in descending order is US, UK, Isle of Man, Thailand, Russia, Germany, Singapore, South Africa, France, Belgium, Romania, India and Holland, although we also get occasional visits from China, Iran, Slovenia, South America etc. A pretty good spread! May saw the highest number of views since last December.

The main site www.whydonttheylistentous.blogspot.com attracts virtually no comment, from which I can only assume that the comment facility is not intuitive enough. The My Telegraph site is of a different nature, as all the current blogs come up on the home page and you can spool through them and comment easily on anything that provokes it. They are also different in terms of content. My Telegraph is broadly about life in this uncertain and turbulent age. Blogspot is impenetrable drivel; fancy pages full of pix and graphics but moronic content. For example, the last time I looked at ‘top Blogs’ they were about hand-made greetings cards and making cup cakes!

My T reminds me of the old News of the World slogan ‘all of human life is here’.

At one end of the spectrum we have the religiosi who are definitely in need of counselling, the anti-Semites who use the defects of Israel (and Lord knows there are enough of them) as a flimsy cloak for Jew-baiting, the anti-Islamists who believe that because all terrorists are Muslims (not having heard of the IRA, the Provos, ETA, the Tamil Tigers et al) all Muslims are terrorists. We have the sniggering Tory youth who pretends to be an illiterate supporter of the SWP. We have what Bernard Levin called SIFs – single issue fanatics.

Moving through we have the Grumpy Old Men who get my vote much of the time. We have the self-loathing ex-pats who have nothing good to say about their native land. We have the wind-up merchants and their victims who can’t resist the temptation to rise to the bait. We have people of astonishing expertise and scholarship who have the gift of explaining complex matters in language that even I can understand. We have the practising barrister who makes eloquent and surprisingly cutting attacks on Judges (clearly he has no ambition to join the Bench). We have the lady who is ring-fenced against the more vicious comments that some of the rude trade here dishes out and who has a gift for going to the heart of relationships.

There are blogs that are on my ‘must read’ agenda and those that I never, ever open, especially those that don’t carry an avatar (silly name; I thought this was a Hindu deity in bodily shape). The avatar gives a clue to the personality of the writer; no avatar, no personality. We have Enoch Powell, Alistair Sim (or his reincarnation, judging by the blogs), Terry Thomas, Joan of Arc, and animals galore. Mine is Angular Merckel denoting a kind of stolid grumpiness.

Our blog attracts very few comments. It may well be that what we think are carefully crafted pieces with sound argument and proper regard to sources are just boring to the outside world, that because we are writing for ourselves as weekly e-mails rather than composing specially written blogs they come across as distant and tedious. One oddity is that my piece on gagging orders got a record number of hits on blogspot but was almost entirely ignored on My T, although this has been very hot and widely misunderstood. Maybe My T readers are more discriminating. But I sometimes feel like a voice crying in the wilderness.