Okay, I confess. It is tempting to answer 'why I blog' with some pretentious twaddle about the technology using me instead of me using it. Or by way of physiological compulsion, "I think therefore I blog" or some such. Truth is, yes. I do feel the need. But I could quite easily stop and do something else. After all, there are more books than I'll ever read. Upstairs a stack of old MegaDrive and Super Nintendo titles are begging for hours to be sunk into them. I'm sure there are people reading this and thinking "yes, why don't you bugger off and do that instead". Sorry, no can do.
When I started this way back I thought the blog might act as some kind of scribble pad for my PhD. But polly-ticks. Sad to say, prod me with a finger and you'll find there's nothing but politics on the end of the tip. And it's been that way for a very long time - since I was ten. There was no way this was ever going to stay strictly academic.
In 2006 I'd not long joined the Socialist Party (née Militant) and like any good Trotskyist I wanted to talk my outfit up. The internet was another arena of class struggle, so it was less about vanity publishing and more battling with petit-bourgeois rascals, liquidationist renegades and those ever-dangerous sectarians on the fringes of the labour movement.
Come 2010 I was in the sell-out swamp as well. The SP's Persil-spotless banner got traded in for Gordon Brown's Labour Party. And yet, surprisingly, the reach of this blog and my Twitter feed was not enough to stop the Tories from getting back in. I soldiered on and then made the proper leap into the mainstream/renegacy by taking the coin of a Member of Parliament. Shortly after came a break and since October 2012, the resumption of normal service. The fare, as before, takes in establishment and radical politics, social and cultural issues, media and social media, books, video games and music, philosophy and sociology, sectariana and sexuality. Somewhat immodestly - reticence is a bourgeois affectation anyway - I've swaggered around the blogging block long enough to know you will find few politics bloggers who range across as many issues. The blog has also had makeover.
None of this answers the why question. The truth is, justifications change like the weather. Vanity. Making the case for critical loyalty to Labour and the labour movement. Promoting the sociological imagination. Challenging misconceptions, misrecognition and stupidity. Offering original takes you won't find elsewhere. All good reasons. But the real reason, ultimately, is I enjoy it.
So have a poke around with the subject cloud. Give us a follow on Twitter or give the blog a like on Facebook. At the very least you'll come away from my blog with a decent music taste.
