A random ending.

My last post in the random series.

It’s now December 2023 and I come to the end of a personal writing project at a very strange time in human history and also a very odd seeming time in the world of ‘culture’. I think that I see the oddities and strangeness through the distorting lens of the internet, where I spend far too much time and which, I feel, I am close to abandoning……at least for a long break and reality check.

I’d like to start today with a couple of observations about the internet – at least the small and muddy corner that I inhabit. I have, as many of you will know, both a written blog space (that’s this one btw) and a very minor YouTube channel that is currently bumping along the bottom in terms of views and subscribers ; I got briefly excited this month when I put out a new video clip on my own channel and briefly reached the heady heights of 500 subscribers and strangely enough 500 views in the first couple of days for my new video segment. Don’t get too excited though as it was back to 499 subscribers by the next morning.

The odd thing though was what happened with the view count – I take an active interest for the first 24 hours. What happened was pretty normal for the first few hours which translates to a few views but nothing to write home about : I consider a new video to be a failure if it doesn’t make a hundred views in the first 24 hours and a successful/worthwhile making if it gets to 250 views in that time. What my latest video clip did was to bounce along the bottom for a few hours and then the curve on the graph of view-count went vertical for a few hours with over a hundred views an hour for a few hours and then simply stopped. The other thing that happened at the same time was that the watch time was much lower than average – in other words more people clicked on but then didn’t hang around to watch anything like the whole piece. It’s as though people’s attention time was markedly reduced – either that or my video clip was simply not engaging enough.

I only, usually, blog or vlog about a small genre of specialized interest so it’s not as though I should expect huge interest, my first observation about blogging a video blogging is that video form gets about 10 times the views that a written post and i’m fine with that because most sailors, it seems, just want a few pretty pictures and as few words as possible. I completed, by the way, a first draft my 21st century version of Maurice Griffiths first book but unless I publish it for free there’s almost no point in trying to market it because what I have found is that (mostly) it’s a ‘blokes’ world interest and blokes don’t read but spend that time on YouTube. To succeed as a ‘publisher’ of sailing content the way to do it is to be a more competent videographer and maybe to support that with technical written pieces where they work.

However…..that’s getting into my own subject matter…..which doesn’t really matter (sorry about that one), today my main thoughts and observations are about the strange world we inhabit as seen through the distorting lens of internet channels covering current affairs.

Just out of sheer internet nerdery I saved my YouTube search history for a couple of days and then took a look at what my own view time said about my viewing history – did I, for example, click onto a video and then faithfully sit through the whole thing in one go ?. Well, unsurprisingly the answer to that one is no and I seem to have as low an attention span as most of my viewers do for my recent video clips. I wondered if most of my viewers have a similar problem to the one that I have with any current affairs channel and that is that when I click on to a piece, read the title and listen to the first minute or so I already know exactly what line of bias the ‘presenter’ is going to take – if anything even worse (more predictable) with the mainstream channels or those with an extreme declared bias already in place. The impressions I get are firstly of extremely polarized opinion and secondly being told what to think about a given situation rather than being shown a verifiable fact and only then forming an opinion about it.

To pin this down a bit, to put flesh on the bones of an idea, I thought I would end this series with a look at the strangeness of this year so……. This year for example we have an ongoing investigation into our government’s actions during the Covid 19 pandemic and social lockdown – and what a total ‘shitshow’ the government response/non response was. What I have heard from everything I sat through was almost everyone involved was ‘slopey shoulders’ and heaping as much abuse and blame on somebody else as possible while ignoring and glossing over their failures. The one small frisson of entertainment came with the odious ‘little man’ (Dominic Cummins) using the expression ‘Moronic Fuckpigs’ to describe most of the Covid cabinet. According to DC there never was really a plan even when the so called health minister claimed that there was and even worse it seemed that our very own prime minister held the view that Covid was simply ‘natures way’ of dealing with the elderly.

It is a bad joke of sorts that the thing which cured Covid was neither a dangerous vaccine or an unnecessary social lockdown but it was rather a ‘useful’ war in central and eastern Europe which gave the MSM every excuse to stop trying to scare us over one thing and instead dangled a new piece of fear under our mask laden noses. Now (October and Novmber) even that was surpassed by what just happened in Israel and the response to which, at least in this country, I feel deeply ashamed about.

I guess that this will be very unpopular but I see the ‘peaceful’ protests, whipped into a frenzy of hate by terrorist supporting ‘progressives’ and not in the least reigned in by the mainstream media and British Police as being nothing less than the new rise of antisemitism in the UK …..and we all know how that went last time around.

So, I finish the year under what feels like the weight of the year – the nearest I can get to it without a continuous swearing rant is that it feels today just like something I was working on several years ago – another writing project which I over ambitiously intended as a book project and which died an electronic death when my first computer got hacked and lost it’s marbles ; but not only the computer but the external hard drive which I had cleverly bought to back up my work with. That project, by the way, had the working title of ‘The state vs The people’ and was largely based on my experiences of, and a story built onto it, of the Thatcher years, her destruction of the hippy ‘peace’ convoy and then the British mining industry and the communities near where to the place I was living at the time……somehow it also takes in a bit of sailing and ends in Essex with the Rettendon shootings and ‘Firestsarter’.

Thus,……the first person who deeply politicized me (against politics) was Ma Thatcher and the second was ‘Teflon’ Tony Blair who, like a bad smell. just won’t go away but instead has become a role model for every politician who wants to avoid responsibility but instead shift the blame onto somebody (anybody and everyone else’s) shoulders. If anything it feels like being back in the NHS after something has gone wrong and managers fall back on their limited intelligence and training to search around for someone to dump the blame for the problem on.

As I write it is the end of November and generally it’s been a cold, grey and wet month – it feels like the ‘fag end’ of a dismal year and on a personal level the year in which this blog also fails to gain any attention and my YouTube channel stalls in the weeds too. As it is iv’e just finished 8 weeks of solid work outside that started with a several days long weeding session and ended with the nicer work of planting spring bulbs – this place really perks up in the spring. In the next few days I have to decide how and where to spend this month’s limited boat budget as what I really need this month or next is sufficient material to allow me to get on with the next stage of work – right now I actually mean material as my next main jobs are both related to shelter on the boat and camping shelter outdoors.

I has been in November that much of what i’m thinking about and writing about today normally culminates in a 2 minute silence over the whole country with perhaps the plangent notes of The Last post blown on a solo bugle. This year of course it was overshadowed by a protest seemingly held to celebrate an act of terror in a far off country and overshadowed even more by own national broadcasters being quick to label native British people, including war veterans and pensioners as ‘far right’ thugs ; broadcasters and former ministers who would not even have the courage to call out Hamas as rapists, murderers and terrorists.

Today strangely reminds me of childhood days in the autumn and winter in east Anglia – days where it stayed dank and cold all day and where in the evening I would take my late uncle’s dog for a walk across several fields under the harsh ‘talk’ of crows flying back to their nests in the half light of late afternoon. There was a strange feature in the landscape there where a long and low hill, covered by trees, seemed to be something like a burial barrow, after all Sutton Hoo is just up the road. That was the same small town from where, one summer evening, I saw an unidentified flying object slowly descending – 50+ years later and I still have no rational explanation for what I saw. Today, by way of similarity and contrast my background noise is a different pair of the Corvid family (Magpies) yawking away in the backyard.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say……….(Pink Floyd – Time)