BLOGGING FROM HALLOWE'EN TO THE 1ST OF NOVEMBER: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

 In the blink of a wink, I find I’ve been blogging for a decade. Initially, I blogged weekly. Occasionally, I’d blog more than once a week if something came up. Then something else came up, and I switched to blogging monthly.
   Here we are at the start of another month, and I am still blogging. Last night, Hallowe’en, saw light misty rain fall upon the scene. This was not always the case. A decade back, with a self-imposed blogging deadline, I marched through torrential rain to reach the interwebs.
   In those far-off days, I didn’t have much use for the internet. If I really had to use it for something, I would gain access at a friend’s house for the vital whatever-it-was. The internet strangely rose in importance, and more and more services became almost exclusive online.
   My intermediate solution was to travel to a hub of anti-social activity: the library. There I endured the hopped-up persona of a drug-user who had the zero presence of mind required to conduct his business in a way that involved opening his mouth when he didn’t have to.
   I hope he was convicted of cruelty to his dog. He was defending that very case from the public library and proclaiming this to us. We were not fellow-users of the library. No. We were passengers on the same electronic raft, surviving a shipwreck of this buffoon’s making.
   It seemed important to the prick to let us all know he was defending this case. I hadn’t seen any wanted posters up on public buildings. We wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t mentioned it. People who loudly proclaim their presence in libraries had better be dressed to fight fires in libraries.
   Otherwise, shut the fuck up and keep your business to yourselves.
   He disappeared to the toilet and came back far more animated, shall we say. This was the guy who decided he didn’t like the Polish woman, so I was caught in the middle of that unfathomable minor disagreement.
   Flaked-out druggie started swearing at her in Italian. She had the decency to stick to English, though she could have sworn back in Polish. His patience wore thin as the drugs kicked in, and his instinct for survival told this prince that he’d better quit the scene, stage-right. Or stage-right-now.
   Off he went. The Polish woman commiserated with me. Here’s the score so far. Number of Scottish arseholes I’ve met: too vast to list. I have never met a bad Polish person. Record still stands. All the Polish people I’ve met have been absolutely fine. May that state of affairs long-continue.
   I’ve told that story in many different ways. Trying to soften it, I suppose. I wonder if the drugged-out ninja superspy was a dealer who got high on his own supply. All names haven’t been changed to protect the guy. I didn’t care who he was, is, or will be in the future.
   Upshot. I left the library thanks to the charmless encounters I had in there. On the Hallowe’en night in question, a decade ago, things were a lot easier to take. My main obstacle? As ever, when blogging, the barrier was the blogging platform itself. The library’s customers that night were not the worst I’d encounter.
   All changed, now. The interwebs are piped straight through the electrical hose and up the wall to a handy outlet in my office. Of all the office layouts I’ve had, this much-refined latest version is the best. No dog-bashing drug-users here, thank fuck. Just me in an alcove, off to one side. And all is right with the world.
   What changed for the better, over ten years? Internet is harvested and delivered straight to me. The nearest restaurant, my kitchen, isn’t too far away. Sadly, Twitter slowly died a death over the past decade. It’s on life-support now, and has been for too long to pin down to an exact date.
   Twitter became more like Facebook, while Facebook transformed itself into a data mining operation that can only have one possible goal: artificial intelligence. They are almost there now, given that the plastic robot running the operation is, er, a plastic robot.
   Blogger made improvements. I suppose. It is a little bit better and a little bit worse. When I type this entry up, I know I must transfer my text to the platform itself. There, I must adjust every last rat-bastard motherfucker of a paragraph for reasons of…
   Improvement.
   This is a quick fix, but it was something I never had to fix at all in the Golden Age that never was. A decade on, the template is still broadly the same: borrow a radio format from Alistair Cooke, and write at least 1,500 words on a topic.
   Not golf.
   If I want to write more than 1,500 words, I will. And if I have to write less than that, I’ll have my reasons. I’ve since transferred the format over to writing scripts for game-related videos. It works pretty well.
   I just spent a few moments staring at Cooke’s old apartment building on Fifth Avenue, in New York, courtesy Doctor Google. With all the golf Cooke played, how he found the time to pen his near-infinite list of weekly radio scripts is a mystery.
   His Letter from America truly was from there. Not a gimmick. Nearer the end, Cooke didn’t have the option. He was housebound. A brief politically-themed talk framed as a letter about America simply wouldn’t fly as a series being commissioned today. Cooke made his own job, and was captain of that radio ship from the dawn of time until his retirement.
   Retirement was a thing Cooke put off on the basis that…as soon as you retire, you drop dead. Health failing, relying on three pillows in bed, sounding frail but still firing on all cylinders, Cooke covered the politics of the day.
   He could just as easily have covered golf. I endured his golf talks. And I am quite sure many listeners endured his talks on American politics. In the case of his last broadcast, politics of the day meant a day in February, 2004.
   Cooke, being Cooke, ranged across politics from 2004 back to the early 1990s in that final chat, and veered off into talk of Napoleon by way of several American presidents…and Miss Lewinsky. Cooke talked of many things. American cabbages and American kings…
   The telling point in his last broadcast came at the very end and not in the political chatter that made up the bulk of his final weekly broadcast. Except, that, for reasons of the plot, I couldn’t find that point when I went looking for it. His last talk, his farewell letter, is preserved on the BBC archive…
   And yet, it isn’t.
   Cooke’s recorded letter would be made mid-week and sent from America to London. For the Friday night broadcast, he’d record good evening and good night. And for the Sunday morning repeat broadcast, Cooke would record good morning with no farewell at the end.
   News of his retirement was expected. Leaked. Announced. I tuned in for the Friday night farewell. He offered us good morning. Then he talked politics instead of reflecting on his long-running radio show. The archived version, with good morning preceding the letter, was from the Sunday repeat.
   On the initial Friday broadcast, at the end, instead of hearing his saying good night, I may have misremembered the man saying goodbye. It was no surprise that his death came a little over a month later.
   Cooke was a journalist who observed and reported and observed some more and reported again. He was the sort of journalist who knew that the journalist is never the story. When Robert Kennedy was shot dead, Cooke, nearby through an act of coincidence, found himself reporting on the unreportable. As time passed, he would find the unreportable turning to reportable with disquieting rapidity.
   And then, in death, cremated, Cooke had one last story – this time, about himself. His bones were illegally harvested for anti-cancer treatment, despite having died of cancer himself. The scam uncovered, perpetrators were brought to justice.
   Cooke was not always to my taste. And concerning golf, his obsession was insufferable. I suspect this marks me out as a non-golfer. It seems Mark Twain never made the comment about golf being the spoiling of a good walk. I’ll go with Dorothy Parker’s view, and assume that anything witty was coined by Oscar Wilde.
   That itself sounds witty enough not to have been stated by Dorothy Parker, but by Oscar.
   Would you like Alistair Cooke’s writing? I suspect not. You pretty much had to be there, listening to his weekly radio talks, to get what he was about in the moment. He was topical. That now makes him deeply historical.
   From him I learned the arcane wonders of the Electoral College. He dredged that topic up when elections loomed large. Aside from being topical and historical, Cooke was repetitive. The nature of his show made repetition an inevitability. God was a pup and the Devil wore short trousers and neither of those entities had beards at the time of Cooke’s ascension to radio immortality.
   Of course he repeated himself down the decades. Sometimes that’s the point of keeping going. You must make it a matter of deliberate policy to repeat certain and uncertain things. He died in 2004. His coverage of American politics couldn’t quite take in Obama’s run for the Oval Office. Cooke was 95 when he retired. He gets a pass on that score. It’s difficult to take the man to task for not lasting another half-decade so that he could see in Obama.
   Occasionally I think of Cooke when I pen this blog. I reached high in this cubby-hole for a copy of Cooke’s collected radio letters. He wrote in freedom and he found that pleasing. Cooke wrote with the freedom of a man who wasn’t sure what he’d write about for that week’s radio talk.
   When everyone else was being extraordinary topical that week, he’d find a worm wriggling in the patch of mud revealed by an upturned stone and he’d waffle away about that.
   I don’t know what I will write about when I sit to tackle a blog post. As a writer, I feel that level of freedom easy enough to deal with. Some find the level of choice terrifying. But to me the only true horror is to run out of coffee. In a decade of blogging, that has never been an issue. So. It’s a horror I never worry over. I buy in bulk, of course.