These things take time

I don't think the word 'blog' is really a contraction of 'web log'. I think the 'b' stands for 'back'.

The other day I worked out I had four blog posts planned: one on religion and hatred (half-written); one on attitudes to technology (complementing some of Chris's recent posts); one on ideas of 'old' and 'new' in politics, & how pervasive and misleading they are; and one, probably for the Sharpener, on immigration and social control. The trouble is, each one of these will probably take about an hour to write, & that's on top of blog reading time (not to mention work, sleep, life etc). So it could take a while - especially since, when I sat down the other day to finish the 'religious hatred' post, I ended up writing a brief response to one of Alex's posts, which turned out not to be that brief after all and raised several issues I hadn't thought through properly (thanks, Robert). And I'd really like to write something a bit more developed about Orwell in response to Justin...

Aaargh. Too much to think, too little time to think it in.

Part of the problem is that I was blogging like a mad thing at one stage, & don't actually have the stamina to keep it going at that rate. I hope shortly to arrive at a revised definition of normal service, whereupon it will be resumed as soon as possible. In the mean time, I've reshuffled my blogroll, adding some good writers I'd missed and removing a bunch of blogs, including everyone else who posts at the Sharpener. I don't really like blogrolls; as I wrote at my other blog,

the globally 'popular' blogs are quite popular enough already without their readers directing yet more traffic their way - and, for most of us, global 'popularity' is an irrelevant distraction. From which it follows that blogs don't need blogrolls. If we blogroll everyone whose posts we respond to, the blogroll's unnecessary. If, on the other hand, we blogroll everyone whose blogs we read - or, from the look of some blogrolls, every blogWeb site we've ever readheard of - the power law will kick in: links will inevitably tend to cluster around the 'top' five or ten or fifty blogs, the blogs Everybody Knows, the A List (ugh).

I'm keeping the blogroll here, but trimming it to focus on particularly good and overlooked writers. (If I've dropped yours, it was obviously because it was too well-known.)

One final thought: three cheers for the Foreign Office!

Lady Thatcher told Reagan in a telephone call at the end of May 1982 that Britain could not contemplate a ceasefire before Argentina withdrew from the Falklands.

According to Sir Lawrence, she asked Reagan: "How would the Americans react if Alaska were invaded and, as the invaders were being thrown out, there were calls for the Americans to withdraw?" She is said to have been "dismayed" by Reagan's attitude and wanted him to know just how "upset" she was.

Washington pointed out that the US had secretly supplied Britain's special forces with communications satellites and ammunition. But Lady Thatcher was adamant. "We have lost a lot of blood, and it's the best blood," she told Sir Nicholas Henderson, Britain's ambassador to the US, on an open line.

It's the best blood. I know I should be thinking of Enoch Powell here, but I keep coming up with Hilary Briss.

Senior civil servants, we salute you! For at least eight years - perhaps for as long as eleven - our government was clearly headed by a crazy person. The principled men and women of the Foreign Office stood between the world and Thatcher's delusions of racial grandeur. Only now can we see just how well they played their part.

I mean, check it out.