Welcome to the 175^th Britblog Roundup, the post-solstice, summer sunshine edition with the nesting birds chirping all around, the lilac’s glory browned to make way for the buddleia. The capital has become a more hospitable place once again, the barbed wire barriers with their cruel spikes cleared away, the police have swapped their riot gear and shields for a uniform less redolent of conflict, the fuel price protestors have retreated, anger vented, as have the heads of state and government. Most nominators, it would seem, are out replenishing their vitamin D levels as are many bloggers, whose wise and witty words would normally be presented for your perusal, so, rather than detaining you in front of your computer screens in rooms with the shutters down, this will be a review “lite”.

Politics

Jonathan Calder of Liberal England weighs up his party’s strategic options in Press barons, by-elections and David Davies, which draws an interesting parallel to a similar situation in 1916.

Subtle thinker Tim Worstall takes simplistic thinker Caroline Lucas to task for the logical inconsistencies in her stance that global competition should be jettisoned in favour of global cooperation: “Err, she’s obviously entirely unaware of the fact that the market itself is the most glorious example of human co-operation: not just tens of millions, hundreds of millions, but billions of people co-operate right around the world to bring you the things that you use in your life.

Quite seriously, any and everyone who has bought a metal halide light bulb anywhere in the globe in the past decade has relied, in part, on a small group of Kazakh uranium miners and the work they did in the 80s and 90s. Indeed, just about anyone who has driven down a road lit by street lamps has done so”.

Bill Jones of Skipper responds with good-natured humour and insight to two articles lambasting the civil service by Anushka Asthana and Alasdair Palmer in The Civil Service, Rockall and Government Competence by recounting a Homer Simpsonesque “Doh!” moment.

The criticism levelled against the Unseen, Unaccountable Unsackables to the effect that we are pathologically risk-averse is quite accurate. This ailment malignantly metastasises with incredible rapidity until your entire system is terminally riddled with it. The steady progress up the hierarchy dulls the mind, extinguishing any flair and stifling originality of thought. As Mr Jones so astutely points out, the anonymised little cogs in the vast machine are not encouraged to see beyond the tip of their noses, focusing entirely on following the instructions issued to the letter, never quite grasping the bigger picture: “My little contribution dates to the roll call of incompetence dates back to 1972 when the then Conservative government decided to reinforce British sovereignty over the island of Rockall(see picture) by installing a navigation beacon atop of it. The job of organising the expedition was given to a very junior trainee Sir Humphrey by the name of ‘Jones, DS5′: i.e. me”.

KT Dodge of the eponymous blog celebrates the Rethink on co-payment rules for NHS.

Unity of Ministry of Truth makes profitable use of the publication by the Department of Health of its annual statistics (conveniently summarised here by Louise Livesey) on abortion to savage Nadine Dorries in Mad, Sad and an utter Hypocrite. There are many reasons to commend this exemplary exercise in debunking, but one passage in particular, concerning the hymen-fixation common to many faiths seemed particularly apposite: “Nad’s prescription is the usual nonsense about bombarding teenagers with moral homilies on the subjects of marriage and virginity, an approach that not only doesn’t work but, when taken to its logical conclusion, i.e. abstinence-only sex education, has actually been to have a distorting effect on sexual behaviour in teenagers.

The study most often cited as having demonstrated the efficacy of abstinence-only education is ‘Promising the future: Virginity pledges and first intercourse [Bearman, P. S. & Brueckner, H. (2001) American Journal of Sociology, 106, 859-912.], which continues to be held up as proof of the value of such education despite its ‘headline’ findings having been challenged and soundly overturned by more recent research. However, what is most interesting about this study is not those findings that supporters of abstinence-only education chose to publicise but a number of findings that they chose to avoid mentioning at all cost, not the least of which being this observation:

‘An abstinence movement that encourages no vaginal sex inadvertently encourages other forms of alternative sex that carry a higher risk of sexually transmitted disease’

What the study found is that girls who has received abstinence-only education, and particularly those who taken virginity pledges, were up to six times more likely to have engaged in oral or anal intercourse than girls who have received conventional sex education – only 2% of the non-pledge group indicated that they’d consented to oral or anal intercourse during the period covered by the study compared to 13% in the pledge group. These findings were broadly supported by 2002 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that 55% of girls who had taken a virginity pledge admitted taking part in oral sex while 50% of those in the 15-17 age group considered that oral sex did not compromise their pledge of abstinence”.

In the dim and distant days when my judgement was impaired by the affliction of religion (the particular strain that infected me being born-again, charismatic Christian fundamentalism, difficult to credit though that may now seem), I was taught that all forms of sexual activity outside God-sanctified marriage were sinful. Now, apparently, as long as the holy hymen isn’t rudely torn like the curtain protecting the sanctuary, you are still modestly “saving yourself”. Thus the refrain for the generation brought up in the Internet age has been modified to suit the Bill Clinton School of classifying intercourse as penetrative vaginal sex only: “Jesus still loves me, yes I know, for the pornographers tell me so”. I agree with Unity, this really is quite nauseatingly hypocritical.

At this juncture I have a confession to make: I would never voluntarily read a politician’s blog, though I do take my duties as host seriously (the Britblog Roundup’s editorial policy is set out succinctly here). As ideologies converge politicians become ever more blandly interchangeable irrespective of nominal party affiliation. Whereas it can credibly be argued that any blog is little more than a self-promotional tool for its author there are differences of degree and I cannot help but view the politician-blogger as parasitical upon this mode of expression. The relentless and wearying clamour for attention is a professional imperative, akin to the “publish or perish” commandment for the academic: out of sight is out of mind, out of votes and out of power. This explains their voracious hunger, their insatiable appetite for publicity exacerbated by an unhealthy dose of vanity (though, surrounded as they are by sycophantic bag-carriers aspiring to their exulted position, with their every movement tracked by the paparazzi and the less belligerent interviewers hanging on their every word, this unappealing trait can at least be understood). It may likewise be true that all blogging is an exercise in image management, involving the projection of a carefully manipulated public persona, but politicians already have party spin doctors and spokespersons aplenty at their disposal. Perhaps they are keen to demonstrate that they are net-savvy, wired directly in to the electorate’s concerns, but, really the term bandwagon is what most readily comes to mind.

Which brings me to Tom Harris’ blog, more particularly his musing on happiness entitled Heaven knows we’re miserable now: “In our own country today, despite the recent credit squeeze, our citizens have never been so wealthy. High-def TVs fly off the shelves at Tesco quicker than they can be imported. Whatever the latest technological innovation, most people can treat themselves to it. Eating out – a rare treat when I was a child in the ’70s – is as commonplace as going shopping. And when we do go shopping, whether for groceries or for clothes, we spend money in quantities that would have made our parents gasp”.

He ventures tentatively into the realm of what he deems “heavey [sic] stuff”: “There are more two-car homes in Britain today than there are homes without a car at all. We live longer, eat healthier (if we choose), have better access to forms of entertainment never imagined a generation ago (satellite TV, DVD, computer games), the majority of us have fast access to the worldwide web, which we use to enable even more spending and for entertainment. Crime is down.

So why is everyone so bloody miserable?

Are our crippling levels of cynicism and pessimism simply part of the human condition? Were we always like this? Or is a consequence of the ‘instant gratification society’ that, having been instantly gratified, we must resent the society that manipulates our desires in this way?”

At time of writing, this unremarkable post had attracted 123 comments. Amazing what a few targeted plugs on Radio Scotland and the Today programme can achieve…

To his credit, Harris has endeavoured to strike a “candid” pose, abandoning the more customary evasiveness of his caste (Who could forget the famous 1997 Newsnight broadcast with Paxman badgering Michael Howard, the latter as determined not to give anything away as the journalist was to extract a clear answer?). He has, moreover, kept the comments open, unlike the more cowardly denizens of the corridors of power who plead lack of time to read and react to them…Why bother flirting with the blog format, at all in that case? Surely one of its defining features, beyond instantaneity and (potentially) wide reach is precisely its interactivity – the unique opportunity it affords to really come into contact with the views of the humble voter. Without comments, a politician’s “blog” amounts to nothing more than the Internet equivalent of a glossy propaganda brochure, its opinions as radically airbrushed as the beaming and pristine accompanying mugshot. Very few possess the intellectual calibre or stylistic gifts of a Churchill, churning out soulless and spineless stream-of-consciousness inanities, contributing solely to background chatter in an environment already characterised by chronic noise pollution.

I would primarily recommend this for the comments, which contain a wealth of suggestions for further reading matter alongside the replies to his queries, some more flippant than others. What struck me was the virtual absence of gratuitous insults hurled by that Internet-dwelling species of knuckle-dragger so familiar to bloggers, the troll, the seriousness with which those who took the trouble to offer their thoughts approached the task (a compliment in itself). Perhaps this has something to do with the awareness that the author enjoys some authority (by virtue of holding ministerial office), perhaps because by their own admission many had been nudged in his direction by the BBC (the civility of the tone struck linked to realisation that a wide audience could be expected for the sentiments aired). Even whilst mauling him or articulating their rage, the comments did not stoop to puerile name-calling, expounding their positions at length and with careful thought. I cite Louise as an example: “I’ll tell you why people are so bloody miserable because they literally cannot afford to live. Every day is a struggle. I don’t have high-def TV’s or two cars outside my house. I don’t even have one car. I am a sick single mum of 2 boys, one who is 13 and one who is 9. My 13 year old is sick too but the DSS refuse to pay his DLA saying he isn’t sick enough yet because of his illness my expenses are increased not double but triple. And because I have an illness that requires special investigation at St Thomas hospital, I have to travel from Liverpool and the DSS refused to cover my accommodation and taxi fare expenses and subsequently I have had now had to cancel two appointments. I am on income support and child tax credits. I am not on DLA. I don’t drink or smoke. The last time I socialised with friends was in October last year. Yes I have high speed internet access and struggle each month to pay it. You know why I have high speed internet access? Because both my sons’ schools require it. Both children’s homework is put online. If they don’t have high speed internet access they don’t get their homework done and then land up in trouble. And I’m sorry but they have so much homework to be sat in a library every night. I have gone without food so my children have food. I have had to scrimp and save just so my children can have a haircut. My son’s birthday has just gone and he got a £20 present. Luckily my son understands my financial hardship at the moment and knows that when I am healthy again I will make it up to him. So before you go around making comments about people being better off than before because they can afford High Def TVs at Tescos (oh yeah some of us can’t afford to shop at Tescos either) you should take a look into the real world and not just at your surrounding friends, family and colleagues”.

Blogging and Censorship

Bloggers come in all shapes and sizes, all providing input to the chaotic and colourful variety that distinguishes the Internet from all other information sources, from teenagers posting YouTube clips and gossip about classmates in cryptic text-messaging-style slang through to ambulance drivers, magistrates and, as we have seen, politicians. 112.8 million blogs are registered on Technorati alone. Newspapers, television channels and product-peddlers alike have all latched on to the popularity of the World Wide Web and its immense revenue-generating potential. Indeed without an Internet presence a company might as well not exist.

As with all creative output, it is incumbent upon the consumer to sift the wheat from the chaff, to discard the dross in favour of the worthwhile or the entertaining. A modicum of discernment, a bare minimum of mental application is required, yet we take being in possession of more than an ounce of common sense for granted, and do not as a general rule look consider ourselves as ignorant dimwits unable to tell the difference between the Financial Times and the Sunday Sport as repositories of accurate reporting. No public health warning needs to be printed on the front page for us to apply our critical faculties to the publications. The political class is remarkably unwilling to concede even this much to us, however, as evinced by the draft report from the Committee on Culture and Education of the European Parliament on concentration and pluralism in the media, rapporteur Marianne Mikko (PES, Estonia). It is important to emphasise that this document has not been adopted in its definitive version (it will be voted on in the part-session in Strasbourg in July). It can still be amended and the passage about blogs removed. Moreover, as Jon Worth of Euroblog notes, it is a recommendation, not a piece of binding legislation like a Directive or Regulation.

Recital O reads: “[W]hereas weblogs are an increasingly common medium for self-expression by media professionals as well as private persons, the status of their authors and publishers, including their legal status, is neither determined nor made clear to the readers of the weblogs, causing uncertainties regarding impartiality, reliability, source protection, applicability of ethical codes and the assignment of liability in the event of lawsuits”.

Paragraph 9 makes a proposal to remedy this unhappy state of affairs: “Suggests clarifying the status, legal or otherwise, of weblogs and encourages their voluntary labelling according to the professional and financial responsibilities and interests of their authors and publishers”.

In the news article entitled User-generated content and weblogs – a new challenge [a markedly toned down version compared to the offensive original: Malicious bloggers under scrutiny in new report] on the Parliament’s website, Ms Mikko is quoted as saying: “‘[T]he blogosphere has so far been a haven of good intentions and relatively honest dealing. However, with blogs becoming commonplace, less principled people will want to use them’”.

When asked whether she considered bloggers to be ‘a threat’, she replied: “‘[W]e do not see bloggers as a threat. They are in position, however, to considerably pollute cyberspace. We already have too much spam, misinformation and malicious intent in cyberspace’”, adding, “‘I think the public is still very trusting towards blogs, it is still seen as sincere. And it should remain sincere. For that we need a quality mark, a disclosure of who is really writing and why’”.

As the likes of Janet Street-Porter is only too eager to sneer at regular intervals (when her muse has temporarily abandoned her), the vast majority of bloggers are not journalists. Nor are they professional writers in the sense of deriving their primary or sole source of income from the activity (though many display infinitely more talent than deadline-harassed, unreflective payroll hacks and the works of authors whose words are reproduced on dead trees rather than in pixels). Nor would journalists want us to be placed on an equal footing, as this would simultaneously bolster our challenge to their authority and further undermine their claim to superiority.

The issue of what would be classified as “malicious” blogging is deeply worrying. Even if lawyers pore over the minutiae of a definition with the most pedantic obsessiveness they will not be able to cover every conceivable eventuality, to preclude the possibility of abuse by a vengeful politician smarting from a perceived slight. However, this is beside the point. The freedom of speech ought to be sacrosanct. We should not allow anyone to chip away at it under the pretext of protecting the gullible and the guileless. We should not permit anyone else to do our thinking for us, to dictate to us what we can and cannot read and we certainly should not hand the authorities a mandate to indulge in the totalitarian surveillance of every “rambling”, “muttering” or “rant” to use but a few of the labels bloggers self-deprecatingly employ to describe their sites.

The parallel drawn between blogs and spam is horrendously ill-informed and betrays quite stunning ignorance. Unlike spam, blog posts are not sent unsolicited into your inbox, a notification of an update only dispatched when the recipient has deliberately chosen to subscribe to a feed. As for cyberspace “pollution”, there are plenty of commercial blogs out there unscrupulously masquerading as personal online diaries, yet reading a line or two usually suffices for the penny to drop and it only takes one click to move away. Nobody can force you to continue reading a blog. If you come across something that offends you, just close the window or, if you are in a more combative frame of mind, engage in discussion via the comments box.

The likelihood of stumbling upon any blog is limited by search engine ranking, condemning most bloggers to quiet, unassuming obscurity, perhaps dreaming of being “discovered”. As for the “malicious” nature of their content – how does the Internet user find any site? By entering certain terms. Instead of launching an unprovoked and unjustifiable attack on bloggers, why not clamp down on the pornographers who exploit the propensity to misspell certain web addresses? I recall the horror of being directed to the Palace of Pussy with images more graphic than you would expect to see in a gynaecologist’s examination room by typing hotlail instead of hotmail to the great amusement of my colleagues.

And, on reliability, although columnists might have lost out to more skilful commentators online, the major newspapers have been anxious to preserve their market share by reaffirming their authoritative status. Bloggers have not yet won the battle to be taken seriously (although the irony of this report is that it does, albeit in a backhanded and negative way). To return to the example given earlier, who is the reader more likely to place their trust in, the FT, Dave from Dagenham or Sadie from Scunthorpe’s diary? True, you could retort that it very much depends on what the reader is looking for.

As Clairwil (amplifying the alarm bells set ringing in The Devil’s Kitchen, and I sincerely hope that his prediction “I absolutely guarantee that the EU will attempt to constrain blogging at some point. Apart from anything else, these bastard control freaks cannot bear to leave anything unregulated”, does not come true) pertinently asks in Please Tell Me This is a Prank: “Exactly who will be dishing out this ‘quality mark’ and what in Gods name has it to do with the European Parliament who is blogging and why they choose to do so? What will being denied the ‘quality mark’ mean? What happens if you go ahead and blog without it? What relevance is why someone blogs to anyone let alone Marianne Mikko and chums? Why can’t they mind their own bloody business? Does it not occur to them that blogs are seen as ‘sincere’ because they are by and large honest about their views unlike say self-serving politicians for example?”

That last question touches a raw nerve, I suspect. Some readers might prefer to glean information from blogs, regarding us as intrinsically less biased than the official mouthpiece of a corporation, organisation or institution (our much derided “amateurism” not a defect for once, lending us credibility). Who are you going to listen to more sympathetically, the manufacturer who sold you the gadget and has a vested interest in depicting it as the pinnacle of perfection or the dissatisfied (or even satisfied) customer? The sheer mind-boggling blandness of the blogs penned by politicians should act as the most eloquent warning against the imposition of externally imposed standards. Imagine this extended to the blogosphere as a whole. It’s enough to give you the shudders, isn’t it?

Yes, a lot of nonsense is spread about the EU, yet “Brussels” does itself no favours when it adopts an arrogant posture, showing disdain both for the results of the Irish referendum and for its own rules, according to which the Treaty of Lisbon should no longer be a viable proposition, whereas it apparently boasts more lives than your average moggy. No wonder disillusionment has set in. Repressive measures against bloggers are not the way to dispel our doubts. In his explanation of vote (Wednesday 18^th June), Chris Heaton-Harris dealt with the matter with masterful irony: “I am an English soccer referee and I therefore fear every Polish politician in this House who wants to kill such a person. However, I was thinking, after watching the football last night – especially the France-Italy game – that maybe the French team should do what their political masters do and completely ignore the result and turn up at the quarter finals anyway, because that is what we are going to do with the Lisbon Treaty in this place”.

Feminism

Feminist Avatar of the consistently excellent An Open Letter by a Feminist writes on a subject dear to my heart in Housework, in this instance examining the reasons why employing a cleaning lady is problematic.

She explains why, no matter how hard the Happy Housewife brigade try to put a positive gloss – (Mr) Sheen? – on intrepidly donning your rubber gloves to wipe away the most unsavoury of stains they are doomed to failure:“[H]ousework is seen as demeaning as it is women’s work. This, of course, is never explicitly said, but why else would such disgust arise at the idea of doing housework. Housework is not that difficult; it’s not that disgusting. I have cleaned houses for money and would much, much prefer that to, say, to having to bathe and dress elderly people, which is considered to a be a respectable (women’s) occupation. It is far less disgusting than working in an abattoir or cleaning out stables. For the queasy stomached like myself, it is far less disgusting that stitching up gushing head wounds or cutting out people’s hearts. The work is not that physically hard and it is only as demeaning as you are treated. I personally had much more patronising and sleazy employers in retail than in house cleaning. Furthermore, while it is not often recognised, housework is an essential part of the economy. If houses weren’t cleaned and laundry left undone, workers would not be able to go to work in clean clothes, or make themselves food; they would eventually be made ill by bacteria, germs and mould; eventually (ok this would take a while but…) houses would decay and fall down, leaving worker’s homeless. Housework is only considered demeaning because it is something that women do”.

The Chameleon household appears to be in the middle of conducting an experiment to determine quite how long it might take for such decay to set in, with grey cobweb strands dangling perilously close to being sucked into the Hungarian’s nostril as he snores, the dust obscuring my son’s school portrait like an exotic fungal growth and as for the toilet bowl, it is a microbiologist’s paradise – goodness knows how many new strains have developed there since disinfectant was last squirted beneath the rim. This neglect is not so much attributable to scruples as inertia (although I did feel uncomfortable on those rare occasions when my former cleaning lady was mopping the cherry-wood parquet whilst I was sitting around on call). I have never found a replacement for the (white) student whose income we boosted during the transitional stage in her life between leaving school and entering full-time formal employment, assuaging my guilt by making her cups of honey-sweetened mint tea. Most of my colleagues have relied on the services of Polish women long before the 2004 enlargement (the observant eye will notice, driving through the streets of Waffle Central, how many vehicles have number plates from Bialystok, the plumber, or more likely multi-skilled general handyman, long since having ousted the over-priced, sour-faced and unreliable native). For the professional woman who leaves home before her offspring are loaded onto the school bus in the morning and returns long after they have been tucked into bed there is little alternative to appropriating the labour of another woman to act as a stand-in, although this can gobble up a large proportion of her salary. For couples, housework is a minefield to be painstakingly negotiated (the most common male avoidance tactic being to assure his partner that he will indeed do the dishes and resolutely continue slouching on the sofa until the clean plates have run out – and the stack is growing a beard – and she can tolerate waiting no longer, only to be treated to his protestations that he really had been going to get round to it, he was simply otherwise engaged), a cleaning lady a neat way of sidestepping the issue and avoiding arguments.

One of the more radical moments in the recent remake of Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig echoed the scene in Dr No when Ursula Andress emerges like a Venus from the waves, the first time in my (admittedly patchy) recollection that the hero himself had been held up for the kind of admiration as a sex object, which has been the sole purpose of the pouting legion of nubile Bond-ettes. Fleeting though it was, it nonetheless constituted a rare concession to the female viewer.

The dashing secret agent was most definitely a figment of the imagination of the 60s, emerging from explosions shaken but not stirred, testing out all the coolest gadgets (jet packs), wrecking top of the range sports cars with even greater abandon and more spectacularly than the Top Gear team, maintaining his reputation as the Red Baron of sexual conquests when permissiveness was still a novelty and always ready with a devastating riposte in the face of imminent death (preceded by castration by laser beam). All innocent fun?

Abby O’Reilly is prompted by a report in the Daily Wail on the “dark triad” of narcissism, psychopathic thrill-seeking and callousness and Machiavellian exploitativeness that supposedly combine to make Mr Bond (and his less glamorous emulators) irresistible: “While Ian Fleming’s fictional creation makes for good viewing, let’s not forget that Bond is a character that exists on paper – in novels, film scripts – he is not real. And to list “killing people” as a throwaway interest that apparently enhances Bond’s sex appeal (although I know he does only kill the “baddies”), can’t really be used as a prototype for real life because if such a character were to exist, rolling around the UK, killing those with facial disfigurements, disabilities, penchants for cats and clear psychological disorders culminating in their desire to take over the World, then I’m sure, aside from the fact the recruitment process for the Civil Service would be brought into disrepute, he would be arrested. He would be considered a psychopath. (Plus, wasn’t his throwaway babe attitude towards women and relationships fostered by the fact he was burned by a woman who betrayed him? Isn’t he just a man launching an assault on the female sex in order to prevent himself from getting hurt once again? And did this revelation make Bond less attractive?) I’ll stop being facetious and will try to look at this logically, and assess the attributes with which Bond is invested that can be transferred to the everyday man. OK, he’s independent, confident and saturated in self-belief. He’s a charmer, intelligent, and isn’t afraid to use violence if the situation presents itself, and always wins. If you were with Bond and some other cheeky young scamp tried to woo you or feel you up you know JB would have him by the nuts. While you’re with him and he wants you, he will treat you with respect, albeit superficially. He considers women as nothing more than disposable goods, while at the same time treating the one he is with as the most beautiful sensual thing ever to exist. Other women envy you when you’re with him, but can’t handle him themselves. Sounds good and bad, no? So what’s the problem? Well, he doesn’t really mean it. He is ruled by his desire to get laid, to conquer, to be the first to have the stand-offish stunning woman who everyone wants but only a few will get. Is it true that we want strong men, men who will take what they want when they want it? Do we really want to loose control? And by default, do we find something gratifying about being treated badly? About pouring our heart and soul into a few clumsy encounters with a man we adore, only to be tossed aside like a dirty old porn mag? Or rather to we like the bad boys because we hope upon hope that somehow we will be able to change them? We hope that he will become so enamoured with us that he will be forced to change his wily ways – he’ll simply be unable not to, and in this respect is it not our own vanity that comes into play?”

I am the wrong girl to ask – my first crush was on the sensible, Val Doonican cardigan-wearing look-alike Virgil Tracy of Thunderbirds fame (yes, I even had the wallpaper!) rather than his show-off brother Scott and, tarrying for a moment longer in the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson universe, the dangerously masculine Captain Black with his menacing stubble was never able to compete for my affections when his clean-shaven adversary Captain Scarlet was around.

Miscellaneous

To conclude, a beautifully crafted contemplative essay on learning the lessons of empathy and forgiveness by Deek Deekster of Blog of Funk, Annie’s Horses: “Another [thing the author knows] is when I should stand up to an accuser. Sometimes, I just need to remind myself not to give a flying fuck, no matter how intrusive, misguided or hateful the words, and to remember that whatever it is that weighs them down need not be any major concern of mine, however bad I might be already feeling about my own sins, past or present, real or imaginary, connected to them or not. Another one is that sometimes, no matter how innocent you actually are, or whether you meant to do harm, you should simply apologise if harm was the outcome”.

Next week’s Roundup will be hosted by Susanne Lamido at Suzblog. If you are interested in keeping track of the hosting rota or in perusing the text archives, please consult (and bookmark) the Britblog Roundup Central site. As ever, nominations should be sent to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com