Blogs and why I like them

I like reading blogs. They open a little window into the life of a person that otherwise I would never meet. They can give me an insight into the thoughts and the daily lives of people, some of whom seem to live on an entirely different planet to me.

Some blogs I remember vividly include one written by a City of London banker whose entire world seemed to be ring-fenced by the M25. There was the teacher in rural North Dakota (USA) and the student teacher doing VSO in Calabar (Nigeria) whose combined experiences in teaching were so like mine but whose daily routines were entirely different from mine and from each other. 

There was the religious couple who had lost three children through miscarriage or still birth whose strength in adversity was quite simply awe inspiring and the youngster from South Wales who had a grade one hissy fit at every tiny thing that went wrong is her, apparently very affluent, world.

While some blogs are intended to be amusing - and a small number succeeded in this aim - most blogs are rather more mundane. A few blogs I discovered, usually by accident, were almost unbelievably poignant. I’ve read about a young married couple where the husband was dying from a rare degenerative disease, I’ve shared the pain and sense of injustice of a father whose ex-wife took their child back to Mexico (from Texas) and the story of the university lecturer whose “face didn’t fit”.

But all this enjoyment comes with a price attached. Bloggers come and go and are free to stop blogging whenever they want. None of the blogs I spoken about in this message have been added to in the last 6 months. Some remained accessible but inactive, dormant residues of a half-told story for weeks or months then vanished. Others were deleted with no warning and, presumably, few to mourn their passing.

But I remember them.