It's All About ME - the Self Obsessing Post

Hello friends,

Apologies for the blog silence for the last week and a bit. I think I might has well come clean and let you all know I've been having a bit of a mope. For nearly 3 months now I've been suffering from intermittently sever lower back pain that makes it hard for me to travel, to sit down, to stand still, or pretty much to do anything except lie on my back and occassionally walk slowly. I've had lots of very kind advice and recommendations from many folks about what might help, and I've tried almost all of them. But right now there's no relief in sight and... to be honest, it's been tough.

So I thought I ought to let you all know.

In my life outside this blog, I've been working as a free-lance consultant offering communications and campaigning advice as well as activist training to organisations here in the UK. I'm loving the work, and I'm meeting some wonderful people through it. But, again, my health issues are limiting the amount of time I can spend on it - and I can't sit through even a simple lunch meeting without a lot of pain. So obviously, developing my little business isn't going as well as it might if I were able to do exotic things like going to restaurants and typing at a desk. (Right now, as most of the time these days, I'm lying on the floor with my computer on my knees. It's not dignified, but my cats like it.)

I really love writing this blog. As you all have no doubt noticed, I'm sort of an opinionated person, and it's been really fun to get my thoughts out there in pretty close to real time for my small but loving group of readers. I'm not giving up on it, and hope to do more with it in the very near future. But for now, I can't promise the same level of frequency in the posting as I've been used to doing in the past. Que sera sera. I hope you'll stick with me for when the good times return.

Earlier today I was trying to remember when I started this blog - I went back and dug out the very first post, and it turns out it was a little over a year ago - May 18, 2008. So I missed my own first Blogiversary. Curses.

Here's a reminder of how this blog got started - from the very first post:

There is a longstanding tradition in online debates that as soon as one party in a discussion invokes the spectre of Nazi-ism, the discussion is over and the other party may claim victory.

http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/G/Godwins-Law.html
So I am ready to claim victory over the Republicans today in the ongoing discussion about US foreign policy. In case you missed, it the double-act of George W. Bush and John McCain have this week decided that Barack Obama's foreign policy approach of active engagement withour enemies through robust diplomacy is somehow equivalent to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. Uh huh.

How do we even begin to unpick the levels of nonsense in this thinking? (In this analogy, does W somehow fancy himself standing the place of Churchill? Because apart from the thousand other ways in which they differ, there's also the small point that Winston actuallywon his war.... But never mind.)

Happy belated Blogaversary to me. And many moooore...