I caught a bit of Ed Milliband's speech to the Welsh Labour conference on the radio yesterday . The excerpts stunned me so I searched the Internet for the full text and found it on the New Statesman's website. Now I don't know the man, so this is obvously a subjective judgement, but it left me both pitying and despising him for the comprehensive deceit of it all....
Then, when I cooled down, I felt slightly guilty about my reaction and I started thinking about how I could feel so strongly about someone I've never spoken to. I mean, the man's just a baby. Perhaps he should be given the benefit of the doubt?. Perhaps he believes what he said?
Then I thought, he's a politician. He's probably never had a proper job - and if he doesn't know what he's doing by putting himself out there, he's surrounded by people who do. Just as he, or those around him, knew what he was doing when he set out to take away the job he knew meant more to his older brother than any other. Sibling revenge for goodness knows what, of the most public sort. Perhaps that sort of blind ignorance is what a politician needs. So I'm glad I don't know him because it frees me to think how blind, ignorant, patronising and smug he appears. How sad.
I got started on this train of thought because of another blog I contribute to. A personal thing, involving normal people.
It was born from the wreckage of the (still) ongoing situation concerning a well-known ex-drama-now-soap and the reason I finally started this blog. By the time comments on one particular page of TA blog got into the 600s a group of regular contributors started tossing ideas around about an alternative place to meet. While the rest of us were still talking about characters and places, one person offered the use of a blog she'd had already got and no longer used. We'd barely started signing on there and discussing whether our host would really want her blog invaded, when another person took the initiative and registered Lawnder Hall on Wordpress. Well, yes, a bit previous, but so far, so good and someone needs to be proactive about these things or nothing will happen.
Lawnder was set up to be a democratic alternative to TA and its blog, anyone could contribute, there'd be no moderation or censorship and we'd take it one day at a time and mistakes would be apologised for. And LH has grown .... and grown .... and grown since 27th Jan this year. .... at least in physical size. Contributor numbers on the other hand rose at first, then dropped back and have now stablised on about a dozen hardcore regular contributors.
The thing that makes LH relevant on this post is that, more interesting even than the blog itself, is the personal dimension: the struggle each person has between RL and the fiction, who prefers which and who is more able to switch between the two and the effect those things have on the whole.
The thing is, everything is driven entirely by what we see written on the page, or an email in front of us and our subjective interpretation of it. None of us has ever met. About four weeks ago we were all strangers. Not any more and yet.... We all make judgements and some of us feel we know and like each other, based on nothing but a few squiggles on a page. Others seem to have done their best to alienate anyone that disagrees with them. But how real is any of it? Some characters burst onto the page in full colour - good or bad. Others release information gradually, throwing up surprises on the way. At the moment it seems that one dominant personality is heading for disaster, but that could change. At the moment LH resembles nothing so much as a swooping flock of starlings: it varies in size, with hundreds of individual elements, but is in constant motion and making ever changing patterns. It fascinates me, this judging by nothing more than a few words.
Are those judgements rational? No.... but it's interesting, very human, changeable and normal .... and incredibly easy.
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