So Much Blah Blah.

In which our hero get’s really fed up with the amount of blah blah on the internet, why certain types of bloke seem to thrive on the blah and why our hero chooses to go his own way, thus ignoring the blah blah

Today. I want to start with a quote : it’s from the late USA president Teddy Roosevelt and it’s more than a little bit OTT but it puts the point across quite nicely.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”

There is a much pithier saying in medicine which expresses the same view except that it deals solely with opinions : in other words the blah blah of medicine . I once heard it spoken (by a consultant physician) as : Opinions are like arseholes……everyone has got one until the surgeon shows up and whips it out – obviously he was arguing with the young surgical houseman that had come to see the same poorly patient that I was seeing for his pain problem and the physician was scratching his head over. As it happens I was there to offer an opinion about the patient’s abdominal pain and wisely I kept quiet and simply asked my consultant to attend.

This, obviously, will be a short post about the blah blah and specifically about the amount of it seen and heard on the internet and the sheer vitriol of those that foist their own opinions as gospel truth, woe betide the person that dares to venture an incorrect opinion : that’s the way you get insta labelled with a word that always has ist (Fascist/Racist/Sexist etc) and gets you shunned, cancelled or in the extreme – shot and killed a la Charlie Kirk.

As comedian Stephen Fry once said : “Blogs are basically Graffiti with Punctuation and Grammar”

My reflection on 2024 and 2025.

It’s been two really bad years for both of us, Jackie developed PMR and is now having to manage a very slow and careful wean off the steroids : luckily she has a great GP and is seeing a smart consultant physician. As for me – well iv’e written enough about the effects of several strokes that even i’m bored with the topic except to say that in a Petersonian kind of way iv’e learned to embrace the suck, by which I mean to stop resenting it and instead accept it with good grace learn to reset my life. Right now, I have a sniff of a hint that I might have found a way to do that.

Now, at the near end of 2025 both of us are experiencing new medical problems : Jackie’s being musculo-skeletal in origin while mean has been a miserable bout of prostatits which has felt, at times, more miserable than the late effects of strokes.

Health problems aside we both agree that we have the worst government that we have seen in our lifetimes – for me that includes the dark and cold winter of discontent when the power was off for hours at a time when we lived in a bungalow that got cold very quickly but didn’t have the smarts to invest in the simple technology that we could have had. Now, in our own place, an 1860’s era miners cottage we live with that simple technology and my own scavenged firewood all seasoning for several years. Now though we seem to have a government that hates us for being white and mostly retired, somewhat independent in outlook and owning something as incorrect as a wood burning stove. This government, it seems, would rather we don’t own our own home, be dependent on whatever crumbs drop from the table but they seem to love taxing us and wasting it in whatever profligate way they can – and then claiming that the big black hole is someone else’s responsibility……it really is just so much blah blah .

Today, i’m absolutely not here to talk about the toxic space that much of the internet has now become when it comes to any discussion of politics but instead to flip it around a bit and talk about the dark side – the opposite end of what iv’e talked about in the way of using the fine detail observation of the model maker.

There was this one time when I was talking to the consultant I worked for during which we chatted about the various outdoors things that we had done. In his spare time he was the medical advisor to the Dartmoor rescue group and at that time he was trying to teach them how to deal with hypothermic casualties. Details aside, the link with today’s post is that he was expected to be a member of it’s controlling committee and he left the group because he detested that kind of thing. My response was that the rescue group committee sounded just like the rules and protest committee that I had come up against during my brief yacht club membership : basically a group of blazer clad yacht club socialites that would rather argue endlessly about points of order or fine interpretations of some racing rule rather than actually go offshore sailing.

Although not my intended purpose today I find that I have to bemoan the attitudes of the small minority that feel the great need to give highly charged opinions on sites that are mostly harmless hobby spaces such as those where old blokes and blokettes show off their model railways or maybe,even worse, their non canon take on some miniature from a company such as Wargames World.

At one end of the miniature modeling world there are those that do the work and, if you like, walk the walk with their own interpretations of times and places that actually existed in meat world – also known as reality or the real world. Then there are the few that try to get ‘correct’ every tiny detail : some of those models are inspirational I agree but then there are the many that don’t aspire to that degree of perfection/anal retentiveness – read it either way. It’s still a model railway though, or in the case of a Warhammer/40k model still a bunch of small plastic model soldiers from someone else’s fantasy and imagination of a world that hasn’t and won’t ever exist and yet still creates an intense amount of argument and vitriol about some microscopic detail or other.

In this video (and in several others), below, model maker Jonathan Newton talks about the blah blah of the railway modeling world.

Going my own way.

As many readers will know, I used to identify myself as more outdoorsman than specialist nurse and today iv’e had to put all of that life outside. It was mostly being able to walk to work via a small patch of woodland that I think kept me functional, fit and sane – at least enough to do the job I was paid for. Walking/hiking and bushcraft was also one of my main activities that got me through episodes of S.A.D. : that and hard workouts in the gym.

This year (2026) is the first time I have neither of those options and what I find that I need is some means of mental engagement that isn’t just sitting and watching endless Youtube videos with it’s tedious but vitriolic blah blah. I might keep the blog running because the process of writing is better for me than not writing : strangely enough my new project seems to be creating it’s own story in my mind which in itself is highly engaging.

Iv’e made the first, tentative, baby steps, in trying to be a modeler again except this time I also need to learn the basics of art – at least as far as making sketches and color swatches – before I get down and dirty with the physical model in mind. Right now, I can spin my old office chair around and see the first iteration of my own art inspiration board – even as a first version it’s not very good but that doesn’t matter as much as the fact that it’s done and that I get to see what i’m working on each and every time I come to my desk. Eventually I intend to build a much better version for my intended studio/workshop cum crafting space,