This month I complete exactly thirty years of writing a monthly blog! So this is the 360th time that I have sat down and sought to entertain you with my musings!
Three decades is a long time to be doing anything, and I’m proud of the fact that I have never missed a month and never been late—the new edition has always been published on the last day of the month in order to be ready for the new month.
Of course, for the first few years Chatter was simply part of a monthly printed news sheet, because internet blogging didn’t really exist. But once the web became more important, I transferred Chatter to the website which is where it has resided ever since.
If you look on the right of this page, under the list of the most recent posts you will see the Chatter Archive. If you click on this link you will be taken to a page from where you can download all the individual volumes of Chatter blogs covering the first 25 years.
Occasionally I will dip into the previous blogs myself as a reminder of what I was writing about in years gone by, and it never ceases to amaze me the variety of topics that I have talked about over the years. Some comments and opinions expressed a long time ago still ring very true, some prove to be quite prescient, while others the passage of time has proved to be wrong!
But the point is, each article reflects the times that it was written in and so in a way it often creates a snapshot of the things that were exercising the magic world at any given point. The worries, difficulties, viewpoints and opinions were all very real at the time, and it’s really interesting to look back at it all now with the benefit of hindsight.
Writing a blog on a regular basis I have always found to be quite therapeutic. If I have an issue that I want to get off my chest, I can work through it in Chatter. It’s an opportunity to think about a situation in a little depth and to create an argument on the subject in a finite number of words. It’s a sort of soapbox, except that I don’t have to go and stand on a corner of Hyde Park in order to express my views.
I have used Chatter in a number of different ways too. Sometimes I will give my opinion on a current hot magic topic, other times I will use it as a forum for giving advice or information. Occasionally I will write a piece that is satirical, in order to express a viewpoint on someone or something, other times I will just write an article that I think is fun or amusing.
The one thing I have never used it for is to openly criticise or specifically have a go at a fellow magician. Although there is perhaps an element of fascination in reading the vitriol written by some authors as they lay into someone who has upset them, I have always felt that magic for most people is an escape from some of the unpleasantness of everyday life, and public arguments in print often can get out of hand and spoil the magic world for many people. Anyway, it’s simply not my way of doing things.
So as I set off on a fourth decade of blogs I wonder what topics will spring up, and how I will view the future editions when I ultimately look back on those too.