The quality of writing

I have been extremely keen to finish the Georgia Trip Report, you can probably tell I rushed through the final two days. Went here, saw this, whatever. This is not blogging. Blogging is interesting, makes you think, makes you think you had thought about something and written it yourself. Gone are the days when one writer would feel motivated by another's post and pen something in response, but the last few things I have dipped into have felt a bit a like that. 

I have read some wonderful things, some beautiful things, some sad things. I was not aware for instance, until I read a post by Steve Gayle that Dylan Wrathall had passed away a number of months ago. I dipped in from time to time but must have missed that one, really gutting. He commented here on occasion, and I in turn popped onto his pages now and then. Mostly it was about fishing of course. Fishing holds little interest for me, so I was only ever the infrequent visitor but it was honest and forthright fare written from a place of quiet observation. He was much more widely read than me, seemed to keep up to date with a great many things, a real shame that his time came too soon but life is like that, unfair and shocking. His kids seem to be keeping the flame alight with their wildlife observations which is nice. If - well, when - I pop my clogs I don't see my kids continung this one, it will just shut down one day and that will be that and to the extent that any blog readers still exist, they will wonder if I simply gave up. Took up fishing again perhaps? This example came back to me recently, I was on Scilly at the Garrison, and suddenly I remembered Les Harrison (Sir LH of the Garrison, an old moniker, hence my sudden recollection) had one day given up birding almost completely and simply gone fishing instead. I have no idea if that is true or not, I think it is. I hope it is. I like the thought of how one thing can so suddenly and absolutely be replaced by another with barely any break or transition. My hobbies can be like that, there is a wide back seat somewhere behind me, things waiting in the wings for when the time is right. The joy of it is that you don't know when that will be, and unless they nag it doesn't matter. Their time will come again.

But back to the blogging and the [dwindling number of] bloggers who pen them? Who are these mysterious people, some of whom write so beautifully and have a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material? I need to make more of an effort to read this stunning output. Far better than doom-scrolling, indeed any type of scrolling. And in doing so it may encourage me in the way it once it did. What I find particularly interesting is that the content is so relatable that it encourages conversation in a way that trip reports on Georgia do not. And it's simple stuff, no great shakes - local walks, weather, reminiscences, quiet contemplation. And moths... No great thrills, no astounding revelations, no drama or intrigue, no manifestos. Connections are made, bonds are formed and reinforced. I like it. I like it a lot. And it's there waiting for me. And for you. No paywall, no adverts, no pop-ups or music suddenly blaring out. Quiet, stable, friendly, often quite deep and meaningful. In other words the complete opposite of the world that we inhabitat and the regular 'content' that is forced upon us.

Some local graffiti I took a photo of some months ago. I don't know whether this is one work or two, but I can appreciate both versions.

So what's my excuse? I don't have one, or at least not any good ones. I mean I could roll out work and time and one limiting the other but actually I do have time. But rather than read a blog I go down a Youtube rabbit hole and lose an hour. Rather than read a blog I pour a glass of something and potter off down the garden. Rather than read a blog I piddle about on a recreational spreadsheet or I look at offerings from wine lists. Rather than read a blog I add meaningless things to to-do lists. I should add "read good blogs" to the list. In fact I might do just that.

I asked AI about Wanstead Birder

The other day I noticed that my WhatsApp had a new button, a kind of blue ring on the right hand side. Curious, I pressed it. Meta AI, with Llama 4. I was on a plane at the time, flying back from a week working in Budapest, and having just finished my book I had logged onto the plane's wifi. As usual (unless you pay, which I don't) this was limited to messaging only, no internet. However as this thing was built into WhatsApp this seemed to defeat this and I found I was able to use it as a search engine of sorts. I'd just finished "The Greek Islands" by Lawrence Durrell so he was the first thing I looked up. Who is Lawrence Durrell, I asked. It spat out a very passable summary. Then I asked it about Hungarian wine regions. This looked pretty decent to an ignoramus such as myself. OK, how about Puligny 1er Cru, something I could actually challenge it on? Gosh, is there anything it doesn't know? It seemed to know what they were, the sizes of each of them in hectares, and then it attempted to describe their individual characterics but seemed to only land on them all having a balance of acidity and fruitiness. Understanding the specific magic of Puligny-Montrachet is of course an impossible task that actual humans have still not fully worked out, but afficionados know that Les Folatieres has clear differences between it's upper and lower reaches and the wine from either is in any event highly influenced by the particular vintage and by who made it. I digress. Then I asked it the following question.

"Who is Wanstead Birder"

Wanstead Birder is a pseudonymous British birdwatcher and blogger who writes about birds, birding and conservation. The blog, "Wanstead Birder," is named after the Wanstead Flats, a park in East London where the author often goes birding.

The Wanstead Birder's blog is known for its:

1. Witty and engaging writing style: The author's humourous and insightful posts have gained a large following.

2. Birding stories and anecdotes: The blog shares tales of birding adventures, successes and failures.

3. Conservation and environmental commentary: Wanstead Birder often discusses conservation issues, birding ethics, and environmental concerns.

The Wanstead Birder's identity remains anonymous, adding to the blog's charm and mystique.

Well now. This is exactly what came up, grammatical errors and all. I will not deny that I am impressed that artificially intelligent Llamas can actually do this, can come up with something broadly accurate but my goodness me. This is 16 years of blogging condensed into 100 words. 106 for any pedants out there. How can this even be possible? Did it genuinely scan all 2300 posts in a nanosecond to come up with this? Maybe it did. Fast reader! There are clear inaccuracies though. In point one for starters, insightful posts and a large following. Hah! As if.  Witty and enagaging! Well, I try....  

Point two is perhaps the most on point. I do indeed share tales of birding successes and failures. Mostly failures. And of adventures, perhaps those are the travel posts? What I am most surprised by is the lack of any acknowledgement that I often ignore birds in large parts of what I write. For many years I wrote about parenting, and even now if you look back you will find a good number of posts about wine, gardening, politics, AI..... I suppose that with such a limited word count you need to generalise.

Point three is of course a complete joke. I mean yes, very very occasionally I dip into the environmental theme, but I don't enjoy it, and those posts attract ire more often than not given my lifestyle choices and so I essentially skip it. This is where AI fails. It assumes that all birders, or at least all birders that write, must be conservationists and pump that message. Whereas some of us just write because we enjoy it and not because there is anything we particularly want to promote.

Charm and mystique? Couldn't have put it better myself.

A body of work

At some point towards the back end of 2021 this blog ticked over two million clicks. I did notice and meant to mark the 'occasion' but other things came up and it slipped my mind. Whilst trying to change the text blurb at the top the other day I came across the stats page and saw that this now read two million and fifty thousand. Fifty thousand? Really? If I am lucky the average blog post will get something between 100 and 300 reads. Or between 100 and 300 arrivals at least, many people will quickly realise they have a mistake.... In January I somehow bashed out 16 posts - it is not uncommon that I start the year with a surge and then decline. So 16 posts at an average of 200 suggests that the total clicks should have advanced by a little over 3,000. So where on earth does 55,000 come from?

Taking the last 24 hours as an example, 60-odd people read the most recent blog post. A further 300 read something else. Going back a further 24 hours to the start of February there are now another 450 visitors and no other recent blog posts. What on earth are they reading? Well, digging a little deeper (or as far as you can get within the innards of Blogger), it suggests that the vast majority of visitors are in fact reading stuff I wrote ages ago. And I mean ages ago. There is only so much information I can gather, but here is a snapshot of the last seven days.

No surprise that the most recent posts are at the top of the list, followed by those from last month, but what is St Lucia doing in there? That was 2013. A random post with a photo of a Mallard is from 2010. A bit further down there is something I wrote in 2009 about needing a better pair of gloves. The data runs out below three clicks, but I suspect that there are probably a large number of similarly ancient posts that perhaps get one or two a week. And then you get onto "Pages" - these are things that sit in that bar at the top, where I keep my various lists, a map of the patch and so on. Within the last week eight people have looked up my 2019 patch list. Or one very forgetful person. Five people looked at my garden list! How niche is that?!

If these stats were not available I would have come up with the opposite answer, a gradual downwards trend. In general blogs are somewhat passé, people today favour a shorter web experience measured in characters and seconds. Certainly the number of writers that I follow keeps declining - that list on the right hand side of blogs I visit has several people who have not posted for over a year, and every now and again I go through the list and perform a sad cull. My own output is also a shadow of its former self. I post far less these days and consider what I do post to be far less interesting that it used to be. I reckon I hit my stride in about 2010 when I was a house husband and have been on the wane ever since!

The answer is volume. This has been going for over ten years and there are now over 2,000 posts. They are probably all indexed in some way by Google and other search engines, and thus entirely innocent internet enquiries send people my way. And with so many posts on what is actually a more wide-ranging subject matter than just birds, this must happen on quite a regular basis. I suspect I could stop posting altogether and it would still keep going up. 

I will leave you with one final stat that I think proves what is happening. In 2021 I scraped together just 106 posts, 5% of the grand total. It was hard work and had I not managed to eke out a dozen posts from my trip to the Midwest it would have been my lowest output ever. However the total site visits in 2021 equated to 21% of the historic total. I reckon I can sit back and relax!

Only 800,000 of these are me

My blog counter recently passed a million hits. I am aware that this is hardly a big deal. When some person my daughters told me about called Ed Sheeran releases a video on YouTube it generally surpasses that by lunchtime, but nonetheless I am quite surprised. I was joking about these mostly being me – I actually set it up some time ago to ignore my own IP address which I thought was impressively technical of me.

I started it off back in 2009 with no fanfare, yet somehow it got picked up. I plugged away, and a little later that year I lost my job and turned to it as a form of intellectual output, albeit in a silly kind of way. I don’t think I can safely argue that this is in any way an intellectual website, but the writing of it at least kept my brain ticking over during that period. Those transformative years, from finance employee to domestic goddess, were probably my favourite ones. I had an endless supply of material and I went birding all the time. Since then it has become progressively harder, culminating in several periods over the last couple of years when I have very nearly jacked it in. Nothing to write about, no time in which to do so, and a feeling that somehow the days of social media which required a modicum of actual effort were coming to an end. Somehow I am still going, not exactly rejuvenated in 2018, but ticking over nicely. It will slump of course, that is the familiar pattern, but ultimately I do still enjoy writing.

It’s nearly impossible to see where these million clicks lie, the rudimentary stats on offer simply don’t show the level of detail required. By far the majority of them are, I assume, regular readers who each time a new post pops up diligently go and have a look and are subsequently disappointed. But seemingly never learn. There have now been 1,564 posts, and I’ve no idea how many times each one, on average, might be viewed.  What I can see though is a top 10 posts, so I thought I would list them here. A birding day in New Delhi has topped the leader board for some time, and my mega-dip of a Red-billed Tropicbird has been enduringly popular. Touching. Schadenfreude rules supreme, and indeed is a theme throughout the following posts. If you want blog hits, dip. And make it a big one!

1) I went to India for a wedding and managed to sneak in some birding

2) The big Tropicbird dip!

3) A map of Wanstead Flats, a bit dull but clearly repeat visited.

4) Rather surprisingly not a dip – Ivory Gull at Spurn

5) In which I explore how my expensive trips to Shetland were a complete waste of money as all the birds then turned up near London

6) Stolen Wheatears

7) More Schadenfreude, but happily not mine!

8) My worst twitch ever

9) I have no idea why this post has 1071 hits.

10) More Tropicbird. The only way to survive these things is to laugh.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I’m not sure I can safely say here’s to the next million, but there’s probably a bit more to come.

January Pace II

January has passed at a million miles an hour. I already mentioned that I surpassed my highest ever January total of birds seen on the patch with a frankly magnificent 72 species. As you will have noticed I have also been pretty full on when it comes to blogging which came as rather a surprise given the ability I equally have to be rather lacklustre. Somehow though I have had quite a lot to say (or not, but have written something anyway – Ed.) and so noticing that I posted something on 22 out of 31 days I set off to write about how this was the most productive I had been in recent memory, which also has the benefit of helping to contribute to February. I like to get these things right, so I pulled up the website to check previous years, fully expecting the last time I had written so much in January to be in about 2011. 

Well guess what? It was actually last year, and this post therefore falls at the first hurdle. Yes, in January 2017 I somehow posted on 24 days out of 31, which in all the years of me doing this is the most ever. It was exceptional however, and I soon petered out – February declined to 11 and I never really picked it up as the year went on, indeed that one month ended up being close to a fifth of the entire year. Back in 2010 and 2011 was the last time there was any output-based consistency. Those years started at the same level as this one and carried on relentlessly, a feeling no doubt felt by readers. Those were the glorious days of unemployment, of domestic trials and tribulations, and endless material provided by children. Blogging was easy then, relatively speaking. Every day contained a multitude of silly events that were ripe for self-deprecation or schadenfreude, and of course I went birding a huge amount. The children were highly portable back then, and every day between about half nine in the morning and three in the afternoon was a blank canvas. I twitched as far as Minsmere once, and Landguard was a piece of cake. Mostly I stayed close to home though, engaged in some London year-listing as well pursuing a national year list at weekends. The days were long and fulfilling and despite all of the house work and child-rearing there were seemingly hours and hours of quality time.

Maybe this is the rose-tinted spectacles effect brought about by having spent most of the intervening years in an office at Canary Wharf, riding the corporate roller coaster and all the aggravation that comes with it. If anything this makes this year and last far more impressive performances. I never write about work and what I do for most of my waking hours – and in January, by far the majority of the daylight hours. Working in the type of environment that I do means that there are endless behavioural gems and countless ridiculous situations that in the real world would make wonderful blogging material. I cannot and do not however, being professional means that these two parts of my life just don't mix. From a personal perspective this is a great shame as I spend a vast amount of time at work and all of that time is essentially off limits. That’s not to say that I don’t think about other things whilst at work during idle moments, of course I do, but in terms of experiences and things that go on there it’s basically dead time.

Which is why of course I try and do as much as I can with what time remains, and why I never have enough time to in my view do justice to all the many things I am interested in. And occasionally - when the writing fires are burning - it also results in a stream of posts about all sorts of things, many of which are totally unrelated. January 2018 saw me cover photography, listing, walking, patch-working, wildfowl, building works, domestic bliss, twitching, travel, plants, birding and blogging statistics, along with a good dollop of nostalgia. You never really know what you are going to get, largely because I rarely know what I am going to write. Generally a safe assumption is that it won't be about birds or Wanstead.

Ideas form either instantly based on some random trigger, or gather pace more slowly, fleshing themselves out during the commute or other empty moments. When I am in the groove I frequently have several ideas on the go at once, and certainly January saw more than a few posts lined up and set to auto-publish several days in advance. If something comes out at exactly 6.30pm that's an indication that it's one of those "here's one I prepared earlier" posts as at that time I'm either at work or still on the way home. One evening I wrote three in succession, they all just tripped out of their own accord, somehow the jumbles of phraseology I had mentally turned over and over were retained and delivered in roughly the right order. Often of course that doesn't happen and I end up with a series of disjointed sentences that I need to reassemble into something that actually makes sense and says what I thought I had in mind, which can sometimes result in something entirely different emerging. Sometimes I just publish it and hope for the best. Life is short and I've got eight thousand hobbies to pursue.

And the house needs dusting again.

Full flow

Believe it or not this is my 10th post of 2017. Ten in 13 days. Somehow I have rediscovered my enjoyment of writing, and you the internet unfortunately have to bear the brunt. Last year I was on the point of throwing the towel in. Quitting blogging altogether. I simply couldn't be bothered, the blogging community was shrinking, most posts received no acknowledgement whatsoever, I didn't really feel I had the time to devote. Then I wrote about this sad state of affairs and in the process discovered that despite all of this I still really enjoyed it. And so here we are. 


After a summer of writing almost nothing, the autumn saw Wansteadbirder.com step up a few gears. I've not regained the heights of 2011 and I doubt I ever will - that was a unique period in my life - but it is beginning to flow again. I can't really say that there is a reason for this, it just is what it is. It may continue or it may not. It may get boring, indeed some may say that it already is! Now that I think about it I'm sure I once wrote a blog post about how I was boring even myself. That said, I’m back to doing what I used to do back then, which is keeping a list of things that I see or think of that I might then choose to bash out a few sentences on. Currently on this small scrap of paper are my unique sense of balance, snowmageddon in Wanstead, how trips often have soundtracks, sunsets, and why it is that I frequently use too many commas. As usual not much birdy content.

That said and despite the title, it has never really been all about birds. That would too boring. Had it been, I think it would have died a death quite a few years ago. As it is this is the ninth year, can I make it ten? How long does the average blog endure for? And how on earth does Steve Gale manage to write so much?! He's just won the highly-coveted Rambler award for the best blog that Neil reads, and for the fourth year running. This is richly deserved, his output is second to none, no repetition, always something to whet the appetite and always something new to make the commute go that little bit quicker. Apparently I was the runner-up again, although I did pick up a gong for my overly-emotional post about the parallels between the US election and Brexit. I think I won it once, probably back when I was a house husband and wrote stupid things every day about the minutae of life and my laughable attempts at domesticity and bringing up children. Anyway cheers Neil (aka Factor), and well done to Steve and thanks for the words!

Factor has also listed a number of really good reads to make up his shortlists, it is well worth going over to his page and having a look - you may discover something that really piques your interest. Since I had my big moan/epiphany, I have been trawling around various birdy spots on the web and have managed to discover a number of enjoyable places to fritter away time. So now over there on the right you should see a fresh and expanded blog-roll. There is a new one about waders, one from a birder who travels possibly more than I do, a few local patch soldiers from around the country, and a couple more photography ones. I hope to add a few more in the coming weeks, albeit that I don’t want the list to be too lengthy. In summary, there is light.

In search of worthiness

I have just undertaken a sad cull of blogs that I used to enjoy. Anyone who has ever written one knows how hard they can be to maintain – I was bemoaning that very fact a few weeks ago – and in these cases I guess that either real life or apathy took over and their authors simply stowed or threw away their metaphorical pens. It’s a shame, but I completely get it. So anything which had been silent for more than three months has been taken away – a dead link, the UK400 club equivalent of a green record. An ex-blogger.

A moment of silence for the departed please.

Right, that said, and despite blogging’s time in the sun declining, there remains a huge amount of wonderful content out there. Some of it I have already, but I am sure that there is a lot that I am missing out on. So I am asking all of you – both of you – to help repopulate the “how I fritter away the day” section of this webpage over there on the right (if you are reading on an actual computer). I’m also going to rename the section as I have precisely no time to fritter away, and indeed it could be that several days elapse before I even get around to reading any new entries. So, if anyone reading this has a suggestion for new things that I might like to read, or indeed that people reading this might like to read in preference then please do tell me what it is called via a comment, and if you are clever enough, leave an html link. I have my eye on a couple already, but I am obviously very concerned about the quality of what I might lead you to and would not wish any substandard experiences on visitors through a poorly-considered endorsement, ahem, so I am waiting to see if what I enjoyed from the outset continues to titillate.

Birds do not have to feature, some of my favourite blogs are not about birds at all. Instead they cover such diverse topics as goats, cycling, capybaras and fishing, nary a mention of a feather. Just like this one really, I like a bit of variety. Some topics are more likely to feature than others of course. In my current mood anything that involves too much do-gooding, too much protest or anger, and especially anything to do with either religion or politics are probably going to be non starters. Whilst I very much enjoyed reading about plans for a referendum on breeding Hen Harriers that lay exploding eggs on “Make Grouse Moors Great Again via the medium of Prayer”, it’s not something I could in all good conscience foist on other people.

Dear, I like your blog very much, I can get many useful information.

"Dear, I like your blog very much, I can get many useful information. Hope that we can communicate with each other. By the way, have you ever used clone partition to ssd ? Unfortunately I lost my partition. I do not know how to do."

This is one of my favourite ever blog comments. Starts nicely, not a problem that the robot doesn't know my name, just miss it out - the sentiment is there. Then a compliment or two. Excellent, everyone likes a bit of positive feedback. How can we communicate with each other? Well that would be lovely, but I'm not sure how that would work. Maybe I need to write an algorithm that generates auto responses. Have you tried to write one? It's more difficult than you might think, so I very much admire some of the ones I get, true works of art. I can't really compete.

Dear blog comment robot. I can like very much your fine words. Thank You. Find best prices for hammocks here. Please help soon. Friendly greetings!

Then the killer line. Have I ever used clone partition? No I have not. I have not the faintest idea what that is, so thank you ever so much for providing a link so that I can go and find out. I shall just click on it now.....

Needless to say I have never clicked on one of these, and I doubt many are innocent shopping links. And I hope that none of you have either. Since dispensing with comment moderation I have been seeing more and more of these creeping in, and because they frequently go onto older posts, it's very difficult to keep going through and getting rid of them. I've just wasted 20 minutes going through pages and page having a good clear out and I think that - for now - they're all gone. Naturally I saved a few of the best. The top one is deserving of special mention, not only for what I assume is a confusion between insinuate and intimate, but also for the seamless way it flows between the aforementioned insinuate bedroom and the link to Business Communication Articles. A triumph. Also what is a Niagara furry?!

Do have a go in the comments section at bettering the bots.

Schadenfreude rules supreme

All this recent writing about blogging or not blogging as the case may be got to me thinking about what makes a blog good. What makes me go back and revisit an old page, what makes me diligently go and check a website just in case there’s something new? I know what I like, I alluded to it earlier – variety. For instance repeated photos of Caspian Gulls banking in flight over shingle, no matter their quality, tends to be a bit of a turn-off. That’s just me, YMMV. And of course I’m hugely guilty of one-dimensionality at times, but nonetheless I wondered if the decline in blogging might be partly due to the material.

Enter blog stats. 

In common with my general falling out of love with this website, though not that you would notice this week, I’ve also not looked at my stats for a while. These tell me - if I desire to know it - who has visited me, where they live, what their pets are called and what those pets had for breakfast. I made an effort to do so yesterday and it is fascinating. Ok so yes there is a general downward trend from about 2013 which I knew about, but taking 2016 as the sample I wondered what had worked and what had not. Seeing as these days comments are a little haphazard in the light of easier forms of social media, I based my “research” on the number of times an individual post has been read. Hits in other words. Highly illuminating! 

All the posts about travel which I admit have been suffocatingly many tend actually not to be very well read. This is a shame as travel is probably my main interest at the moment, but I suppose saturation point has been reached. A trip report on birding Hawaii was read 110 times, a trip to Prague 100, and a post stuffed full of photos of birds on a New York beach just 68. Fair enough, I can see that there may not be a huge amount of relevance there for some people, and it comes back to my Caspo comment above - nice sharp pictures of Skimmers? Meh. Fine.

The local birding posts such as they are tend to do better, perhaps getting 150 individual hits each time. This was a bit of a surprise given it is supposed to be the core element of this blog, but then again I’ve been birding Wanstead and writing about it for many years so to a certain extent it has become a little repetitive and dull  - which of course mirrors my own birding experience: most patch visits are extremely dull! 

Instead the traffic is dominated by tales of woe. Forget local birds and exotic locations, that’s not what the public want. The numbers don’t lie, people want schadenfreude. Noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune. Blog readers want to chuckle at the bad things that happen to other people, which in the case of this blog mostly means me. Thus it was that 200 people gleefully read the post about breaking my hand complete with gory x-ray, 233 joyfully clicked on a post about missing all the rare birds on Shetland, 296 tuned in to my aching buttocks after cycling to work, and then the clear recent winner with 396, a write-up of a dog-walker shouting at another dog-walker and Lee Evans getting zapped by an electric fence.

Ho ho ho! Much mirth and merriment! The message is clear. Lee, no matter what people might think of him, is comedy gold, a best-seller and always will be. That I should engage in more (any!) sporting activity to raise the possibility that something might go "pop!" or "twang!". And that I should start twitching again so that I can DIP.

So why do bloggers give up?

It’s gratifying to know that a few people still read it and that a few people would be sad if I stopped, and I thank those people for their kind words, but that wasn’t really where I was going with that last post on the death of blogging. In any event I’m not yet decided on what the future holds. On the one hand I’m tired of it, tired of the nagging feelings it can evoke. On the other hand I’ve not yet totally run out of things to write about, and I’ve not really even started on recycling, that great resource for lapsing bloggers. But whatever happens I won’t delete it, as Gavin mentioned blog authors are probably the greatest readers of their old posts and I would miss them too much.

So I should have been more explicit. Rather than responses along the lines of “Please don’t stop”, very kind though they are, what I really wanted to explore was why it is that blogging appears to be on the way out? Many of my favourite blogs have stopped – 3 months, 4 months, over a year in some instances. Why? Apathy? Malaise? Shift of focus? Lack of time?

For me it is a mixture of all of these things, but time pressure is close to the top. Do many bloggers perhaps start in their relative youth when they have a fair amount of time, but then as work gets busier, relationships start, family comes along, house moves, longer commutes – real life in other words, all of the things that typically begin to weigh people down in their mid-thirties or these days perhaps a little later than that – and so quietly drop it? Of course I didn’t start blogging until I had moved house and had three kids, but I’m just a sucker for punishment. But if any of you reading this are the people whose blogs I used to enjoy but who have gone quiet, why is that? What made you stop? And do you still read blogs even if you don’t now write one yourself? And what might make you start again?

There are parallels with twitching. Of the small group of guys that I typically travelled to see birds with, almost every single one of them barely goes any more. I‘m one of the lapsed. I’m busier than I have ever been and so I am actively attempting to be less busy by dropping out of things that don’t seem to matter as much anymore. Twitching is definitely one of those that's fallen by the wayside, but blogging may be as well. It is in that second tier list which could go either way. 

Most of the blogs I follow or followed were centered around birds and birding, just like mine hem hem. Is their demise or mothballing linked to their author’s current lack of birding? Phasing as it is known? Are bird bloggers falling into the trap of no birding equals no blogging? Reading that article I linked to, I am not sure that follows, as the subject matter there was mostly interpersonal, family-oriented “mom” blogs, and it’s not like parenting just stops is it? But just because it's possible that my favourite writers of yesteryear haven’t really been out birding for a while, does it also follow that they have nothing to say? Why not branch out? The best blogs I always felt were the ones that were more varied and didn’t rely purely on birding material which in some instances, say inland patch-working in June, can get really boring really quickly. But they’ve stopped too, which supports the more general malaise that I’m currently seeing.

So why this malaise?

If you once wrote a blog (especially one I followed) why don't you now?
If you once read blogs more frequently than you do now, why is that?
If you thought of starting one but didn't, what held you back?

Answers on a postcard blog please.

I should really try and generate a new one of these to see what has changed.

Blogging is dead

There’s a question that has been vexing me of late. Even though I’ve been posting something almost every day, I have been wondering whether personal blogging is in fact dead. I was therefore delighted to find this piece written by one of my favourite non-bird bloggers, Emma aka Waffle. Please go away and read it and then come back (the link is entirely safe). I’ll go make a cup of tea.

[...]

Done?

So what did you think? I have been wanting to write this piece or something like it for several months, but now I don’t have to as Emma has done it already, and far better than I ever could have. In simple terms it comes down to the interplay and life-cycle of catharsis and connection. Does a blogger write for themselves or for others? I think it always starts as the former. Surely only very infrequently does someone stand up and declare “The world needs to know about my life.” and then start a blog. Or a reality TV show. No, it’s a release done purely for personal reasons. For me, without going back to the very start I couldn’t actually remember why I started it in January 2009. However reading that firstpost suggests that it was dark and cold, that I was bored, and that other people were writing blogs so why not me? Knowing myself as I do, boredom was and is probably the key element here. As an aside, it also highlights that my love of double deckers existed even then, and that in 2009 my patch list was a mere 89. 89!! Eight years later I am on the dizzy heights of 146, and these days would expect to see 89 birds every year by about May. How things change. But I digress, this post isn’t about that.

About a month later I lost my job of 11 years and the process of writing something, anything, became a little bit more important. Stuck at home with a one year old and a three year old, it became less about birds and more about the minutae of my life. As you would expect the first 20 or so posts sank without trace, and it wasn’t until March that the first comment appeared, from none other than NQS (ex!)writer Gavin H. In the context of this current post this amuses me greatly. I did nothing whatsoever to advertise the fact I was writing it, or at least I don’t think I did, but somehow he found it, and so too did a number of other people. The next 20 posts also mostly sank without trace, but gradually in that first year I started to get what I hesitantly call a following. I hesitate as that sounds awfully big-headed, but we’re only talking about miniscule numbers of people and this is what Blogger itself calls it. I renamed it to Acolytes of course, it seemed only right.

Anyway, thus starts the next phase of personal blogging. The move from writing for yourself to satisfy some kind of inner-need, to writing knowing that other people are reading it, and that those other people may have some kind of connection to what you’re writing. You write differently of course, or I assume you do, and I am sure I did. I cannot pin down exactly what changes, but I think it largely comes down to caring more about whether what you write is actually decent, rather than just bashing something out and hitting publish without much thought. Emma has hit the nail on the head when she writes about the pressure, not imagined but real, to write something “good enough”. Good enough for the 100 people that might read it? Hah! You’ve not clue as to who 90 of them are, but somehow it still matters. You begin to interact with people whether you know them or not. Comments are eagerly anticipated. One blog post spurs another blogger to pick up the theme. One comment spawns a dozen. A tentative community somehow develops, especially on blogs that contain much heartfelt angst. I’ve never really had that, I’ve not laid my life bare as some have, and typically it is the stupider posts that seem to generate the most interest. Especially those with mildly fruity titles that Google searches may misinterpret.

This state of affairs continues for a while. It might be months, it might be years, but eventually this community, such that it ever was, declines. Disappears. It’s like that bit in Amélie where the old guy crosses off another deceased friend in his address book. If I look at that list of my favourite blogs over on the right there are many that are no longer there, many that I have sadly deleted. Of those that are left, some have been inactive for several months and their time is probably up. I note that as they drop off there is not much of a queue of worthy replacements. If not quite dead, personal blogging does indeed seem to be very seriously ill.

Ironically enough I blame social media. I don’t use many of these apps, Twitter and Whatsapp only, but surely the demise of blogging has a lot to do with the condensation of what little material there ever was into 140 characters or a quick photo. In the past I’d have written a whole post on a bird, and sometimes I still do. However I frequently now simply ‘tweet’ out a photo of the back of my camera and move on. It is the modern way. People can ‘like’ it with the prod of finger and also move on. It’s quick, it’s efficient, it requires almost no effort from any of us. You need not have an attention span longer than ten seconds. Why bother reading a post about a Yellow-browed Warbler hours later that evening when you can vicariously see the bird on the phone in your pocket two minutes after it has been discovered? As a further irony I sometimes tweet links to my latest blog post and sometimes people prod a finger at that too. Like. But that singular prod largely eliminates any possibility of community and commonality.  Am I suggesting that as a society we are becoming ever more vacuous?  I think I am.

By the way, this post isn’t a lengthy proxy for “leave more comments you ungrateful bastards”. Far from it. Time is at a premium, I understand that, and as people move into middle age (very early middle age in my case) I am experiencing this first hand and I am sure it is no different for most of my generation. I am busier than ever before. But nonetheless the demise is a shame. Blogging has only lasted a decade. I’ve been going for over seven years now, and as you may have guessed from the title of this post I'm feeling that it, and me, are on the way out. I’m not sure I need it any more, and I can fairly confidently say that nobody else really does either. Oddly enough though I’ve been bashing out more posts recently than at any time since 2013, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. A late and final flourish perhaps? And I’ve got half a dozen things lined up that last week and this weekend triggered the “oooh, I could write about that” instinct and that I filed away in whatever bit of my brain stores these nuggets. Feeding birds in my garden. Chequebook twitching. Sweet and delicious karma. How I’m not the only person to leave Shetland before a biggie (OK so those last two might be related…). A binocular craving. An obsession with temperature. How I am probably more stressed than ever but feeling incredibly relaxed.

Anyway, if you have ever blogged, or been a regular reader of a blog, please do go and read that link above. What I’ve written can’t possibly do it justice, and yes it’s a bit emotional and ‘deep’ in a way that Wansteadbirder never was or is ever likely to be, but nonetheless it resonates strongly, and it may do so with you too.

"Back when your blog was good..."

I had to laugh recently - you know who you are! And indeed it's completely true. As I mentioned towards the start of this year in a post called something along the lines of "where is the joy?", the urge to blog has diminished remarkably. Once up on a time I ideas bubbling up all the time - stupid ideas to be sure, but ideas nonetheless. I wrote about them, and enjoyed doing so. Today finds the blog in need of love and attention, and I have none really to give it. I've actually got a list (no really I have) of blog posts. I started it several months ago and periodically add to it, and then I never get round to writing any of them. Back in the day I used to compose the posts in my head as I was wandering about and then simply blast them out when I hit a keyboard. Today I can just about manage the title and then it kind of slips away, not forgotten, but kind of on indefinite hold. The lurkers are as follows:

1. Istanbul - usual travel guff, a few photos, some lovely towels, and now lots of bombs, deaths, and a crumbling democracy. Promises to be fun.

2. Gardening. This is my latest hobby, or rather a recycling of a previous hobby. Most of my plants died or became significantly pissed off whilst I was birding madly, but I'm now showing them love again. Consequently I've not been birding. 

3. Doing a decade of jobs about the house in about three weeks. This is one of the reasons why you have not heard from me for a while. The BP count is off the chart and yet I've just discovered I probably can't do Shetland after all!

4. Camping. I went camping for the first time in, oooh, 15 years? This was actually quite amusing, but I have just about recovered now.

5. Selling crap on Ebay. I hate Ebay, I hate many of the people who use it, and I am going to tell you why. One day.

6. Politics and stupidity. To be honest I have about half a dozen posts on this topic, all seething in my head. In fact this is the closest I've come to the time when I composed entire blog entries in my head. This country is a bloody joke. My second country is even worse. I've tried to write the first of these posts three times, and each time have come away spewing, incomprehensibly angry.

7. Work. See final sentence above. Basically I am not amused.

8. Public Transport and the cretins that use it, which includes me.

9. Icelandic Waders. This is deeply in progress as it involves lots of lovely photos. Sorry, images. The plan is to bore the reader senseless with shot after shot of point blank birds on posts. Win.

So, nine posts (well, fifteen if you count all the things I hate about Brexit individually) gently simmering away. I may or may not get around to them, it will be a surprise. There is also the small matter of my sigmoid colon, a part of me that I had never heard of, frankly wish I had still never heard of, and probably the main reason for my relative silence in recent weeks. Well, months. The good news (for the blog, obvs) is that I'm not about to drop dead, which was initially a worry, but the same time all is not especially rosy and I'm actually rather annoyed by the whole situation. That said I've had some lovely new, ahem, experiences, my new bestest best friend is called Mark, and in time it will hopefully all be a lot funnier..... 

....10. I could do a great post on what I think may be the longest fart in the history of human life on earth. I'll try and give notice in case you're about to have dinner or something.

Where is the joy?

I was reading a few of my earliest ever blog posts recently, from back in 2009. I’ve not looked at them for ages but with the revival of NQS and the recycling of some of those early blog posts, I wondered how I’ve evolved in nearly seven years of clogging up the www. In a nutshell I have become a lot more boring. The photographs have improved, but the content has been on a steady downhill trajectory since around 2011. The joy has gone from it.

In 2009 when I kicked it off I was about to lose my job. I didn’t know this at the time of course, but under two months in and I found my world turned upside down. It was OK as Famille L had a plan which we swiftly put into action. It involved me being IN CHARGE!!!! (or being made to believe I was at least, in reality Mrs L was in charge). Whilst I had heaps to do, and many new things to learn (far-fetched things like how to shop for stuff to eat), I was at a loose end intellectually. Reading back some of what I wrote, I can’t in all honesty say that the blog satisfied this, but it seems a lot merrier. Much sillier, with happiness and humour derived from the minutiae of a new life spent grappling with domesticity. My many failures and few triumphs were shared with the spirit of a pioneer, issues with socks and cleaning products detailed to the nth degree, child-rearing and rarity-twitching combined to, err, interesting effect. You would not think that the life of a newly promoted and under-skilled house husband could possibly have generated so much material, but back them it seemed like anything I looked at was fair game for a few hundred words and what's more I had the time to do it. Craft is the wrong word, but I did take reasonable care with each post. It was pretty formulaic stuff really with the odd curveball thrown in, but somehow it worked, or at least that’s what I continue to tell myself. I enjoyed it immensely, despite the drudgery of most of the subject matter, and I remember giggling like a schoolboy at some of what I put down. It was of course mostly all true, albeit with a bit of exaggerration. I did struggle with really really easy things, I was absolutely hopeless at most of it to start with, but some of what I did to get through it, though not obvious to Mrs L, did actually work and somehow I have three very well grounded and fully-limbed children at the end of it. And the house is still standing.

Things are different now. In 2011 I went back to working in the financial sector. The flip-flopped life I had enjoyed for over two years changed overnight and it was back to suits and office cubicles. My pool of “life material” shrank dramatically, though my bank balance started going up again. For obvious reasons I cannot write about what I do in Canary Wharf, but take it from me that it is unbelievably dull and would not make good blogging material. 

Both my recent careers come with their own challenges, and I would take issue with anyone that said being a stay-at-home parent was a walk in the park, though we did of course go for walks in the park. WHEN ALL THE WORK WAS DONE WHICH WAS NEVER. But only one of the jobs turns me into a grumpy, moaning, unpleasant, stressed and objectionable individual. I’ll give you a clue: It wasn’t the one that came with a pink brush. So the combination of having done nothing worthwhile and being permanently irritable is not ideal for getting the creative juices flowing. Nor, frankly, do I often come home from work feeling in the mood for a bit of light-hearted blogging, so these days if you get anything at all it’s more likely to be a rant or a trip report. Very one dimensional and not very interesting.

It retained a bit of the old spark after 2011, but by the end of that year it’s a shadow of 2010 which is when I felt I really hit my stride. The numbers tell the story quite well, 202 posts in 2011 declined to 123 by 2014, and this year it’s a mere 81. Of these 81, probably a third of them are trip reports – I went abroad and I saw such and such. Zzzzzz. This leaves about 50 posts, and a miserable 50 at that. Where is the joy? How can I get it back? Am I at a crossroads? Can my nearly 41 year-old self rediscover the absurdity and joie-de-vivre that existed as a 35 year old? Why was I better at writing about doing the dishes than I seem to be at detailing birding the west coast of the USA? More to the point, why did I enjoy writing about the dishes more than I do writing about foreign birding? Is the difference purely causal? Or is it that I’m five years older and five years more knackered?

2009-2011 – Domestic drudgery and seeing the same local birds over and over again. Fun!

2012-2015 – Working in a fast-paced environment and travelling the world. Ugh.

I mean it’s perverse isn’t it? I have all these opportunities now and I make the most of them. I constantly burn the candle at both ends and do a huge amount. I enjoy most aspects of my current life a great deal, but I think my writing shows that I enjoyed my time at home more. And I don’t dispute that, those two years were fantastic. No work, lots of time with the kids and master of my own time, brilliant. And I knew then they would never come again and it was an opportunity not to be missed. So what to do? How can I get the spark back? I’ve been thinking long and hard about this as I sit and stare at my computer screen and realise I have absolutely nothing to say. Back in the day this never seemed a constraint, I would think about what I did that day and off I would go. These days the screen remains blank and I go off and have a G&T, and you dear readers get nothing. Or if you do it’s more often than not half-hearted. I’m constantly impressed by those bloggers who do seem to have a steady stream of something meaningful to say. Not drivel like me. 

So I am musing on what to do. How to refresh myself? I’ve only had two “back to basics” ideas so far, and they were pretty obvious. If I were to re-takeup domestic duties as a hobby, would my blog improve?! Ditch photography, start dusting. It’s a thought isn’t it? Sack the cleaner, get back to doing the vacuuming myself. I used to love that vacuum, spilled rice was a joy. Baked-beans less so but if left a while they became easier. It rather lacks the element of competitive listing so important to birding, but I’m sure this could be worked around. But this is where the second idea comes in! Get back to local birding of course! Properly I mean. Every time I get out there I love it. And every time I say that I don't do it! Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, I have a go and then lapse again, as it can be dreadful, and as I’m also sure I’ve said before, I’ve not got the time to work the patch properly. A snatched 30 minutes here and there simply isn’t enough time to do it justice, especially with other birders out there more or less constantly, annoying you with good birds. This is what leads me to the “sod it” decision more often than not. That and being at Heathrow.

Ultimately it all comes down to time and not having enough of it. There is so much going on that free time is rare and I can’t do everything I want to do. A day would need to be 36 hours long at least for me to get to all the things on my list. This is why vacuuming and writing a decent blog post about vacuuming rarely feature, I just don’t get round to it. That post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about memory I had been wanting to do for ages, but I kept forgetting to do it and doing something else. When I finally got to it it was pretty easy to bash out, but I’m convinced that the time between thinking of it and then doing it meant it lost some spontaneity. When I was a Domestic Goddess that was all part of the fun. Mop down, keyboard out, write some rubbish, cook dinner realise no food in the house, go shopping, cook dinner. Which is what I've just done as it happens, cook dinner. It involved unwrapping two pizzas and turning the oven on, not exactly haute cuisine but, as ever, all I had time for. Pizza #2 was enhanced with Chorizo, and was a massive hit with the children, stratospherically better than the Margherita it started off life as. Worthy of a separate blog post? In 2009 I probably would have done it. In 2015 I simply can't be bothered. Be thankful for small mercies.

PS I've sprinkled this post with some "old life" photos. Do any long-time readers remember what it was like?

A matter of light, a matter of opinion.

A few more photos, words are overrated. Keen to see if I could do any better than yesterday I went back to Southend, there to meet up with Mick, Richard and a few Med Gulls. Mick, as you will know if you have ever clicked his web page (over to the right somewhere, in the photo-bloggers section), is mildly fanatical about Gulls and photographing them. I can't think of anybody who does it better, and that includes any pro you care to name. I on the other hand have a great deal to learn about this art form, so spending a bit of time with him is always worthwhile, and I hoped to get some killer shots. The light however had different ideas, and I barely pulled the trigger, ahem. In between not taking blindingly amazing shots of Gulls, we nattered about camera settings and how today was a complete waste of time, about forthcoming trips such as Morocco and Iceland, and theorized on why some so-called bird photographers that plaster their 'work' all over the net are able to consistently take such shockingly poor photos. And why lots of other people acclaim them as amazing when in fact they are shit. A mixture of the usual nonsense in other words, highly cathartic, good to get various things off my chest rather than just tweet or blog about it. Oh.

Ah, it is all good fun really, and indeed my new moniker of "Internet Birder" has even provoked some blog posts from a couple of people who are always worth a read, and who tend to make you think. For example the words Pompous and Ass were used, which at points in the last couple of weeks I almost certainly have been (see example above, written for illustrative purposes). This of course isn't unusual, I would not be me without the occasional outburst, venting spleen. Highly correlated to periods of bank-based employment it appears. Unbecoming though, and as Gav points out, in this internet age it will live on without you if people can be bothered to look for it. Interestingly though, the comment the prompted this, the curious insult of Internet Birder (no, I have little idea either - if anything I write less about birding than many birders), has now been deleted by its author and I cannot find it. That tells its own story if you ask me. I am not going to elaborate, and like most things on the internet, it will all just drift away until people will read this post in isolation in a few years and wonder what on earth I am going on about. Very little really. Storms and teacups, the usual shite. I really must learn to keep my big mouth shut is the key take-away here, hard though that is. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance.

Anyway, the light was awful. Technical specs can be found later on my other, nicer, blog. But suffice to say that flight shots were largely out of the question, and even portraits ended up looking flat. But it was still enjoyable, and trying to coax images out in dire conditions is always good for a laugh. I.e. you look at the back of your camera and just laugh. Oh for white clouds rather than grey, but other than this slight issue today, I can't think of many other things I'd have liked to have done this weekend. Funny how you get a bee in your bonnet about some things - an itch to be in a specific place doing a specific thing. This weekend that was Southend-on-Sea. Next weekend it could be something completely different. Even though I exist on the internet only, I lead a relatively varied birding life. A bit of this, a bit of that. And of course the key thing to remember is that my view of what birding is about trumps anyone else's. And as long as that's clear we'll get along just fine.

One-track

I am becoming boring, and it is annoying me. I have four things in my life - my family (important to mention that first, no end of trouble if I leave it until last!), birds, photos (of birds), and work. Nobody wants to hear about the latter, but it dominates my life so comprehensively that it leaves far less time for any of the former. Long-term acolytes may recall that when I started this blog in 2009 I got made redundant almost immediately. Surely a coincidence, but it did mean that all of sudden life became a lot more interesting. Rather than the grim darkness of Canary Wharf and the ongoing world finanical implosion, you were treated hem hem to my new struggles with washing, buying food and attempting to cook it, potty training, and other daily examples of domestic martyrdom. In between you got to know a bit about my three precious charges, and very occasionally some birding featured.

My domestic days are behind me - as was always agreed (under duress), as soon as my youngest started school, I had to go back. No life of leisure for me, so now, and indeed for the past year, I have been back in my ancestral home of E14. The consequence of this is that I now have nothing to write about, or so it seems to me. Except birds. Bo-ring birds. But hang on a minute, isn't that what I started this blog to witter about? Wanstead Birder, not Wanstead Domestic God. Indeed. It was always supposed to be about the birds, not the minutae of my life. I mean who cares about that other than me? Perhaps not even me actually. As it happens though, I found it much easier to write about various household disasters and what silly things the kids have done recently than I did to write about what birds could be found in Wanstead. In short, I felt - and feel - that writing about my ineptitude was much more interesting than writing about birds. Birds aren't funny. Birds aren't humourous. They appeal to many people for sure, but there's only so much you can say about patch Skylarks. On the other hand, my domestic foul-ups were essentially infinite, and kids will surprise you every day of the week.

At the moment I get up, I go to work and crush rocks for several hours, and I return home in a bad mood and drink wine to soothe my shattered nerves. I repeat this for five days a week, albeit with some school runs and refereeing of offspring thrown in. Then for two days, if I can, I go out and blitz our poor feathered friends with a camera. In other words, I have very little to say. In the dare I say it 'good old days', you got to hear about trying to find an oven shelf online, boozing dollies, food shopping for cretins, and Grebe porn. Today you get to hear about what ISO speed I used.

So what can be done? Well, pack it in I suppose, but all bloggers that I have known to pack it in inevitably come to regret the rash "delete all" decision of their intemperate former selves, and come slinking back, and no doubt that would happen to me too. So that's out. Blog less frequently? Perhaps - in one of my first ever posts, I counselled myself to do just that, and have steadfastly ignored this advice for almost exactly four years. I have verbal diahorrea, and there is no known cure. I enjoy it; you suffer it - a tried-and-tested formula. I know, what about seek inspiration, write about stuff I've not written about before? Eh, what? No, I couldn't do that. I need to rant about dog walkers, post Daily Mail tribute articles, moan about work, and eulogise about the patch. And Wheatears. Branch out? Madness!

Not long now.....

So I have no answers, except to think more about maintaining variety, indeed perhaps return to the minutae of life, as it is from there that all variety stems. Not necessarily mine either, which could get dull fast. I'm always hearing little snippets on the radio, noticing absurd behaviour, seeing some scene or other than gets me cogitating. I occasionally think "oh, that would make a good piece", and then do precisely nothing about it and continue dreaming about optics past, present, and - mostly - future. I have somewhat of a one-track mind, I just need to make sure I don't have too much of a one-track blog.

By the way, 1600 is my most-used speed at present.