Sorry...

The difficulty with this blogging malarkey is that it requires, above all else, constant enthusiasm.  I have, very occasionally, been asked for advice on blogging – presumably only by the truly desperate – and my advice has always been the very obvious point that any blog stands and falls on content.  Update the damn thing every day – three times a day if possible.  Otherwise people won’t bother.

I am not, as you may have noticed, terribly good at following my own advice.  This is mostly a political blog, and I find the political world a bit depressing at the moment.  This is not so much because it now looks far less likely that Ed Balls will lose Morley and Outwood in six weeks, although the heart admittedly does sink at the prospect of five more years of Gordon Brown, but more because the tone of this pre-election phase is so basically dishonest.  The wilful conflation of debt and deficit; the inability of anybody to be honest about cuts – the wells of political debate have been poisoned.

In the circs, it’s a bit harger to conjure up much enthusiasm.  Electoral fun and games are usually just that – I could take a pretty detached view of the last three elections because I knew Labour would win and I was relaxed about that.  This time, however, I don’t know who’s going to win and it suddenly really does matter.  My tolerance of the usual bullshit is commensurately lower.  That said, I will try harder…