The rain has fallen with a particular sickening thud…

 Hi Don, hi Dom. 

I mean, of course, Trump and Cummings, the other two washed-up figures clinging desperately to blogging as a means of howling into the electronic void despite clear evidence that everyone else has moved onto Instagram, Tik-Tok or something I'm too old to even have heard about. In my defence, I'm not actively evil nor do I go back and edit my blog to falsify my powers of prediction. And I've never been to Barnard Castle. I can't even drive. 

And yet here we are, the Last Bloggers. Don's been cut off from Twitter of course, a medium to which he was more suited, in that there's very little blank space to fill with ideas. Dom's a creature of the 90s like me though - the generation that saw the internet as a place of total freedom, anarchy or libertarianism depending on your perspective - John Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was huge when I first ventured online, though even back then I thought it leaned worryingly towards the macho libertarian rather than levelled the playing field for the proletariat. Still, the idea of ideas being constantly circulated without being throttled by corporate interests, government or the established media was hugely exciting. I was always convinced that corporate interests would abolish the liberatory potential of the internet - we're virtually all trapped in their private imitations of it now - but I was naive enough to think that new spaces would encourage new, democratic and better behaviours. In actual fact, we imported and amplified the worst aspects of habitual behaviour, encouraged by anonymity (of which I'm generally a fan) and the ease of reaching a big audience fast by being witty, snarky, cutting or just plain vile. The attraction of blogging for Cummings of course is that there are no editors or interruptions - it's a monologue. 

My meatspace following was distinctly limited: perhaps there might be enough saddoes online to boost my ego, given the global reach of the internet. I actually started this blog back in 2008 as part of an MA class in Media and Cultural Studies: I asked the students to start blogging as a practical demonstration of the format's structures, potential and limitations, especially the non-essentialist sense that while one's online self might not be any more 'real' than one's physical manifestation, it provided the opportunity for a different kind of performance (why yes, I was reading Judith Butler at the time and later Anderson's Imagined Communities) . It didn't go very well and none of them were inspired to continue, but I found it a useful outlet for views/rants/observations my friends had had quite enough of already thank you. It also kept me writing when the PhD was going nowhere.

My blogging has declined significantly in recent years. I'm busier than ever, I'm getting too old to keep up with the cultural twists and turns, and I can feel my opinions solidifying or settling, depending on how you see it, while simultaneously feeling less and less like I have anything to add to public debate. I can see why so many newspapers employ Oxbridge-educated columnists: coming up with an authoritative piece about something you previously knew little about to a tight deadline is both difficult and an extension of those universities' pedagogical model. Today's British elections are a case in point. My general sense is that the English electorate in particular is becoming very rightwing and will vote for any party that promises easy answers (especially if blaming foreigners is one of the options) - there are no longer any votes in being nice, kind, thoughtful or honest. They voted for Brexit in a spasm of revenge against a world that left them behind, and the very politicians who left them behind are now encouraging them to double down on the idea that a glorious past is within reach as long as you don't let those bourgeois southerners distract you with talk of corpses and corruption. I don't think it matters what Labour does: in the words of Dick Tuck, 'the people have spoken, the bastards'. I was thinking today of Leon Festinger's classic 1956 study When Prophecy Fails. It's complicated and in many ways outdated (and ethically dubious), but it followed an apocalyptic UFO cult which confidently predicted the end of the world on a specific date. When the date came and went, the core group didn't disband and reassess their ideas: they adjusted the technical calculations but doubled down on their beliefs - partly because it's psychologically easier to do that than admit to being plain wrong. You adjust the world to your beliefs, rather than vice versa. Perhaps the Corbynites are, or the Starmer supporters, and I definitely think the Brexit-supporters are, which probably makes me a deluded 'Seeker' too - the more Britain descends into reaction the more certain I am that it's wrong and I'm right. 

I saw Peter Mandelson opining today that the only response to defeat in Hartlepool is for the Labour Party to adopt the mindset of the Brexiters. Then what? Why bother professing anything other than what you think people will vote for. Just confirm the prejudices of a group of people whose views you find abhorrent and win elections - but then what do you do once there? But if you don't, you never get elected again especially under Britain's deeply stupid electoral system. It's a conundrum I certainly can't answer - all I have to offer is a numbing sense of depression and a reminder (one I give my students quite often) is that the progress of time does not equal progress. Things sometimes get better until they don't. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't: my view on what we currently call the internet is that it's infinitely worse but feels better because it's so quick and shiny. 

Obviously none of this is particularly kind or original, and gets us nowhere, which is why it's appearing on a blog and not, for example, on the comment pages of the Observer. I can't go on. I'll go on. Perhaps less frequently. There's something quite freeing in writing things that have no readership.

On a lighter note though, I've read some very good books recently. If there's anyone out there, I heartily recommend M John Harrison's beautiful, disturbing The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (which is also a fine addition to the short shelf of Shropshire novels alongside Mary Webb and PG Wodehouse's work) and Susanna Clarke's Piranesi. They both take an oblique, fantasy-tinged approach to contemporary identity issues and I loved them both. Piranesi is amazingly different in tone, intention and style to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - a real surprise. I've liked Harrison's work ever since a friend gave me one of his Viroconium novels back in the mid-90s - I don't know many authors who are so at home in a range of genres, and it's great to see him get some mainstream recognition after decades as a cult figure. This particular novel has echoes of the London psychogeographers, Jonathan Coe's Middle England (also partly set in Shropshire - it's having a moment), Jeff Noon's recent folk-horror Creeping Jenny and Angela Carter and some of Jo Walton's work - all books in which something is going radically wrong just out of sight. 

I also read and really enjoyed Robertson Davies's What's Bred in the Bone - an old-fashioned novel of ideas by a semi-forgotten author. He was Canadian, but as his father was Welsh and he lived for a while in Y Trallwng, I might find a way to write something on him within my field. My next book is Michael Arlen's These Charming People, a Waugh-like collection of short stories set in the brittle world of the 1920s smart set. 

Enjoy your weekend.