Former regulars still knocking about may be disappointed this place has been left to the tumbleweed. On the other hand, some might find the lack of blogging a big improvement.
Unfortunately, my inclination to blog sputtered out at the start of the year (see here). This isn't because I've run out of opinions. It's down to the nature of the work I now do. While I'm not going to divulge a great deal about it, it does require writing thousands and thousands of finely-crafted words every week and demands the brain be fully engaged at all times. It's certainly different from the factories and checkouts of old, when I could just switch off; or my stints in academia where I pursued my research interests and theoretical inclinations. If you want to flirt with Marx's theory of alienation, for most of the week my thoughts are disciplined by and beholden to a power outside of myself. And so I find myself caught up in an alienating process, one that has left me too knackered and frazzled to spend evenings and weekends hunched over a computer composing yet another screed. Whereas politics used to be pretty much all I did, my species-being now finds fulfillment in sleeping, the pub quiz, and collecting retro video games.
While the days of AVPS blogging are over for the time being, there are a couple of projects I am involved in - one party political, the other a great deal less so - neither of which I cannot say too much about at present. Both require this ex-blogger to take up the cudgels again, albeit elsewhere and under my real name.
This place will not be consigned to the gnawing flattery of spambots, however. I intend to use this for reposting my odds and sods from the other platforms and maybe, just maybe, play host to a couple of pieces that do not fit the other two. And music videos.
So the time for writing the blog's obituary has not arrived, and may yet prove to be some distance off.
NB Quick plug: Don't forget to check out Collective Invective, the new(ish) blog by Lawrence Shaw of the NUJ and the ex-Trot Unicorn quiz cadre.
