Oh, hello

Oh hello, I’m back, at least for now. For one reason or another I have been finding blogging difficult. This has gone hand in hand with also finding birding rather difficult. The end result is that I felt compelled to do neither for quite a while. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy, far from it. In fact I consider that I have been as productive as I have ever been, but unfortunately unless I rename this blog “Wanstead Gardener” then the kinds of things I’ve been up to don’t really fit. There were hints I suppose; a photo of a flower bed at Chateau L earlier on in the summer, and then most recently of a plant in the greenhouse doing its thing, but I did rather feel that those fell on deaf ears so I subsided into silence.

Ah yes, when a hobby goes quiet. Phasing. Most often seen in the context of birding, I’ve seen talk of this surface in a few places lately and it has definitely struck a chord. I am hesitant to label myself a serial phaser, after all the whole 'not birding during June' thing is basically an annual event for many people, however this year I have extended this period of abstention into July as I have been busy digging holes in the garden. I did consider going out and trying to find a Yellow-legged Gull, but then those holes won’t dig themselves will they?

No they won’t! It has been a bit back-breaking actually, and whilst I would love to show you my carefully crossed-out to-do lists as they tell a tale of true graft and considerable effort, it actually bores me as well! In summary however the extensive grounds of Chateau L are undergoing a transformation, and I am very much enjoying the visual results of my labour. But given that this is of interest to, oh let’s see, zero other people, I think I’ll leave it there. Suffice it to say that all my obsessive tendencies have been spent on horticulture (itself a victim of phasing in the past) and as such I have felt no compunction to go out birding at all in the UK. I did manage a weekend in Estonia which I plan to share in due course, but compare this to April and May when I spent several hours a day out on the patch and it must be difficult to understand why something that was so all-consuming can so easily and abruptly be dropped entirely.

It’s the same with the camera, it has barely seen the light of day since I pumped 4000 frames through it in the space of 48 hours in Iceland. When I sit down and think about I’ll admit that it sounds odd, but it is just what happens and I don’t fight it. I don’t have any interests that ever truly die, or at least not any more. I have of course dabbled in many things over the years, but I think I am now down to the few hobbies I know I really like, and whilst they might wax and wane from time to time, they’ll always be there. Take birds for instance, I’ve been interested in them for many years, but there was probably a break of ten years from late teens to my late twenties where they barely registered. In that context a gap of a few months is nothing! I’ll get back out there soon I expect, it is beginning to feel about right.

I'm pleased to say that despite the recent lack of use my binoculars have seen, I remain as sharp as ever. Here is a Cattle Egret from Estonia.

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.

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.

Back to Bird Blogging

Today I went to Canary Wharf. I saw some birds there. They were nice. They were some Great Crested Grebes, some Cormorants, a Heron, some Mallards, a Moorhen, some Coots, some Common Gulls, some Herring Gulls, some Black-headed Gulls, some Pigeons, a Wood Pigeon, a Magpie, and some Crows. The Magpie was the best one.