Paul Malpas

One of the great things about having a WordPress blog is that you also get entry to a tool called Google Analytics which allows you to see which articles you have written are the most popular amongst readers and indeed where these readers are from.  Picking a date, say 4th April 2010 nearly two years ago, people from 145 countries have logged on to my blog and hopefully hundreds of thousands of people have become a little wiser because of this.

I picked the 4th April 2010 because on that day I wrote a piece called Paedophilia: The Hollie Greig Scandal, The Dunblane Massacre & The Scottish Cabal  and in all that time since, for over a 100 weeks, this piece has remained in the top most popular pages read. At this moment it is riding high in first place for this last month.  Why this should be, I do not know, it is not particularly well written but it does bring together a few threads that two years ago were just hanging in the air.  What has happened since is that most of what I wrote then in that posting and in others on the same subject I wrote at that time is now just accepted fact and a few more names can be added to the list I appended at the bottom of the article.

For example two Grampian Police Chief Constables, Dr Ian Oliver, who was forced out of office in 1998 for a reputed botched handling of a child murder and who chose not to investigate the very suspicious and convenient “suicide” of Hollie’s uncle, Roy Greig, in 1997.  Roy being the only witness to Hollie’s rape by her father, Dennis.  Incidentally Oliver’s son, Craig Oliver, is now head of communications in the Prime Minister’s office replacing the infamous Andy Coulson of phone hacking fame.  The other Chief Constable to add to the list is the present incumbent, Colin McKerracher, who has recently shut up shop and refuses to talk or answer any questions put to him about Scottish cover ups of all that is bad north of the border.  Another gracious name is the Glasgow law firm Levy McRae, who are played like a fine fiddle by former Procurator Fiscal, Elish Angiolini.  If any one or anything has to be leaned on in Scotia, Levy McRae are the boys to do it.  They are implicated in everything iffy and down right illegal in Scotland today.

What is interesting in this climate is that those who stood accused of malfeasance in these campaigns for truth and justice have all gone upwards and higher over the last two years, whilst all the campaigners are being trampled on and forced further down the ladder of life.  Robert Green is now serving 12 months in Aberdeen Prison for thinking of handing out leaflets in a breach of the peace conviction that cost scottish jurisprudence a bundle of money to bring to fruition and which involved most of Scotland’s legal bigwigs and all for what.  A simple breach of the peace!  Ann & Hollie Greig are being dragged through the legal system in England and are now back in the secret Family Court awaiting a judgement and a very real threat of Hollie being taken away from Ann if she is deemed not to be a fit and proper person as carer to her daughter.  A daughter she has looked after for the last 31 years.

But the wind has changed, now on a daily basis there is a slow drip, drip of information suggesting that things are not well in the upper echelons of the Scottish establishment.  Judges, lawyers, politicians, high ranking police officers and top civil servants are all bound up in this maze of obfuscation and illegality to ensure that these wrong doings and criminality are kept from the general public.  But history tells us that this type of behaviour cannot be sustained, there are whistle blowers in every walk of life and these whistle blowers are like the oncoming tide which King Canute found could not be resisted.

I have deliberately not gone into detail about these case but you can read all about the grossness of Scottish injustice and the hogwash that their establishment puts out by going on to Hollie’s web site Hollie Demands Justice and spend some time there and also click on Robert Green’s blog on the same site.  Slowly you will be overcome with emotion as you try and reconcile what truth and justice means to you and how it is actually portrayed in Scotland.

One big thing you can do is write to Robert in Aberdeen Prison, he would welcome contact even though the Governor and prison officers are treating him with all the care and responsibility they give their own families.  Roberts address is:-

George Robert Green

Prisoner No 125799

HMP Aberdeen

Craiginches

4 Grampian Place

Aberdeen

ABII 8FN

Try and send him a stamped addressed envelope because he has to pay for his stamps and he will definitely write back.  I got one from him this morning and he does not know me from Adam

I retired at the relatively early age of 59 on the eve of my 60th birthday.  I retired because I did not like what work had become but I had assiduously applied myself to the task and had a modicum of success and vowed my next few years were for Helen and myself.  I was reasonably young and had most of my faculties intact but I was obviously needing something to do and I naturally knew what it was.  I wanted to write, not rubbish, but something with a little quality attached either in phrasing or ideas or both.

So after a period of thought and preparation I set about writing the memoir of my life, not a great life but one with some interest even to the casual reader, let alone my children for whom the tome was originally prescribed.  I started it in the winter of 2006 and quickly found out that I could write more easily at night time when it was quiet and there was no distraction.  So with a little planning and preparation I set to.  I was amazed; the words tumbled out of my mind onto the page almost quicker than I could write.  In those days and even today with some scripts, I had to put pen to paper first before transferring them onto the typed page.

So as England was trounced by Australia in five Ashes test matches over that deep dark winter, I crafted 130,000 words of my own to describe myself and my forebears.  I wrote it in about four weeks and then asked Helen, my devoted wife of 39 years, to type it out, because her earlier training, before she started on me, was in that direction.  She knocked out about 60 pages in quick time before she tired of the task, or possibly of me, who stood at her shoulder and glowed as she committed my words to the screen and she told me that I would have to finish the job myself.

For me the size of the imposition was gargantuan, never having used a keyboard previously but in true surveyor’s style, I split the work into sections and vowed to complete 20 pages per day, in double line spacing, about 6000 words per session.  I had it done in a little over three weeks and I was a proud man until I started reading and editing which then took me the best part of the next three years before I was happy enough to let others read it.  It was received well by some and not by others.  I could not help being critical of some stages and some characters in my life.  I was brutal but probably factual in parts but I knew I was not quite there yet.

Sometime between 2009 and 2011 my painfully typed memoir disappeared off my computer screen, why or how, I do not know but into the ether it went.  I had made a typed copy but for tinkering purposes I missed it.  I was always adding words or subtracting sentences and it was lovely to play with it.  I am no expert in computers and it probably is in there somewhere that the intrepid expert will  easily extricate.  One day I might give the task to some familial great in the field to find but I have kind of resigned myself to retyping and not without a little pleasure at the thought, because in retrospect some sections need revisiting and rewriting from a different angle.  However that is a promised duty for when I run out of steam and not now when I am so busy with other ideas.

So come the winter of 2009 I was in a writing desert, wanting to write but trying to find a medium, finding a way for others to read my thoughts.  The urge to write is an amazing need in one so struck.  You are impelled by some intangible force to get words on paper, not particularly to earn money, though that would be nice, but that others could benefit from or be critical of your fine turn of phrase and laugh or at least smirk at the humour of your thoughts.

It was then I was struck by an idea mooted by my son-in-law, although he was referring to it in a business sense.  Blogging and how it could help people in business.  I signed myself up as a non-paying customer of a symposium he was about to give on the subject and after 10 hours of education, I realised this idea was for me.  It also taught me a few insider tricks in how to make the blog more available to others.

Within a couple of days my daughter and husband had set me up with a vehicle to put my words on and after a very shy and tentative start I was into my stride very quickly, helped by the antics of the Catholic Church and the publication of the Ryan Report into clerical abuse in Dublin, which gave me an ocean to trawl through for ideas from the very start.

I realised  quickly the subjects to steer clear of.  My scrapbook was full of poison pen letters and anonymous phone calls and threats of all descriptions, including three from the local rag here in Boyle, who were considering suing me for defamation.  Funnily enough I also received a threat from a bumbling priest in Manchester who was going to sue me for “deformation”.  My mind has boggled ever since.  Certainly the parish pump is a no go area if you want a quiet life, especially in small town Ireland.  There are still people seething from stuff I wrote regarding the local scene two years ago, it does not matter that it was the truth but for them to be confronted with it, was not quite on.

So my mind and blogging moved to the international arena and away from the small minds stadium.  I wrote about anything and everything, little ideas wormed their way into my head as I lay, a supine insomniac, in my bed at night and the next day these thoughts displayed themselves onto my screen as I nodded off for want of sleep.

What cheered me and what drove me on was the choice of subjects, especially the Catholic church and its works and pomps for which I had a particular dislike, but the real driver was the feedback.  Over the last 27 months I have met thousands of people through this medium with readers from all over the world e-mailing me and posting comments on the site.  So far people from over 150 countries have contacted me to give me their point of view on a particular subject.  That is the real power of the blog, the fact that there are no boundaries, the whole world is your stage.  Once you have written your piece it is there forever, like an over-abundant fruit tree with a never ending crop waiting to be picked off 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by anybody who chances along.  In that time of 27 months, I have written 177 blog postings containing about 300,000 words with hundreds of thousands of people reading what I have to say.  A tool called Google Analytics tells you exactly how many people read my printed words and how much of it they actually read.  Really useful when you are looking for popular topics to write about, not that that bothers me because I write about things that jar my mind and if others agree or even disagree that is where my pleasure lies.

In all that time two people stand out as really influencing my thought process and making me think seriously about my topics but at the same time distracting me in the nicest possible way from my task of delivering words, having to construct and answer a daily crop of e-mails to them.  However their thoughts, ideas, cajolements and humour have turned me into a far better person.

One of this duo contacted me first out of a need to share his experiences with me after a piece I had written.  This single contact turned into an avalanche of daily e-mails, full of wit, innuendo and downright truth about the revelations coming out of the Catholic Church which certainly attracted the main butt of our humour at that time.  His constant hammering on my computer screen made our main construct into a viable cause and hopefully we will be friends for ever, even after this rash of clerical crap is over.

The main problem with my writing is my lack of subtlety.  My scripts are a blunt force, which makes the point to easily.  I needed  assuagement, like a car engine needs lubricating oil.  My problem was that I did not understand the power of the blog.  I did not realise that you could not just tell it as it was but as the blog became popular I knew that this bluntness could not last because I might be over-stepping that thin, hazy, grey line they call legality.

I was eager to learn because my wealth, however small it might be, was destined for Arthur Guinness’ pockets and not some sidewinding litigant hoping to line his breeches with my hard earned.  A person made herself available, a person with more than a little knowledge of the legal code, a person, who at first, had me cowed with the fineness of her mind, she volunteered to turn my rough Longsight ideas and words into things of beauty and awe.  Her deftness of phrasing was a pleasure to read, her subject easily wrought but it was her humour I craved.  In the midst of all this horror and talk of what legal bods could do to you if you only slightly overstepped this indeterminable line, there was a humour so unlike anything from her ilk, that I had to listen to and take in everything she said.

Eventually her tuition turned me into a far better man and a far more circumspect writer and hopefully I taught her a little of the northern spirit she claimed she had in her genes ( her family having moved from a semi-detached mud hut in Jarrow to a twee bijou residence close to Buck House in the 14th century).  So,  having been edited and tutored to distraction, I write now with ease, splaying silken sentences onto a sensuous screen.  I am no longer the man I was but I thank both my amanuenses for turning me from the guttersnipe I obviously was to a person you could take anywhere.

Today I am struck dumb, my mind is not working because my wife has just done something that I am very proud of but for legal reasons I cannot tell you about it, so you will all have to celebrate with me in this anonymous brilliance and I will try and experiment to see if we can get some empathy here.

One of the beautiful things about blog writing is the facility that WordPress give you to analyse where your readers are, how long they spend reading you and when.  This is  magnificent if you are blogging for business reasons, it helps you to know your customer, but when your purpose is not commercial it becomes useless, but interesting.  So today I am going to try and winkle out some of my readers from exotic corners of this planet and try to get them to tell me what turns them on.

I know who is reading the misguided waffle that pours from these keys on a good day.  I know where you are from, how long I keep you interested and how many pages you read before you get bored to tears. Therefore I am today going to analyse the less trafficked areas of the world.  I will list the locations of these readers, no names because I do not have them, but I know what you read and how many minutes of most days you waste, reading this guff that I spew onto the page.

Introduce yourself in the comments facility so I know who you are.  It might help me write something more pertaining to your situation.

Who for example is the person in San Francisco who spent ages reading me on 7th April or for that matter the person in Sacramento.  I think I might know the person in Tallahassee in Florida, who is a regular visitor and has little to do if she reads me regularly, but at least she has introduced herself and congratulated me.  I also think that I might know the person in Oxford, Mississippi who is a frequent reader and as also written nice things in the past.

I can only guess at the person in Rochester, Minnesota, who had a spate in late March but who has run aground since and I can understand why the person in Manchester, New Hampshire spent ages reading me this Monday gone, obviously wishing they were in Manchester in England enjoying the lovely Spring sunshine as opposed to the horrible rainy weather that early April always brings to New England.

The person in Etobicoke, Canada intrigues me, who spent ages reading me on 6th April.  Where is it?  We also have a regular reader in Bolton, Ontario, near Toronto.  I can have an educated guess at the person in San Miguel de Allende, in Central Mexico.  Good morning Eileen, by the way if your name is not Eileen and your a bloke, my apologies but the name definitely suits you.

Whose fancy have I tickled in I’viv, in the Ukraine, who spent three hours reading last week.  I know the people in Falkenberg in Swedan, because they rang me and said how much they have enjoyed the blog and that they had read the lot.  I have news for them, they have only read seven pages, there are 96 of these posts altogether, so keep reading.  The recent visitor from Melbourne worries me, he should be in the nets training hard for the forthcoming tour not sitting on his backside.  You do not realize how good we are.

There is too much traffic in England and Ireland to isolate individuals but the popularity of the blog lies in London, Manchester, Stockport, Huyton, Sale, Atherton, Henfield, wherever that is, Huddersfield, Basingstoke, Boothstown, Wembley, Reading and Sheffield.  As you would expect Dublin and Limerick feature highly in Ireland.

So please get in touch on the comments facility and tell me what you think, what makes you tick and why I should stop making a fool of myself.  Otherwise it is like talking to a brick wall and I was doing that all my life in Manchester.

Get in touch.

It was about three months ago when I decided to go one step higher on the writing ladder.  For years I had always fancied myself as a writer, but one of poor quality.  I wanted to improve this quality and the only way I knew besides reading quality 24/7 was writing in a disciplined manner on a regular and determined basis. Putting together pieces of writing on various subjects but doing them  almost as a  daily routine and then re-reading and editing to try to ensure an increase in quality.  I was thinking for some time of a diary but that did not really get me to where I wanted to be.  Then I started to read of this comparatively new idea of blogging, which seemed to fulfill all the necessary parameters I had set myself but which I had no idea on how to float.

I heard about this seminar that Mark Attwood, my son-in-law and an internet marketing expert, was holding in Cheshire in mid November 2009.  It was called The Art Of Blogging For Business. As I did not have a clue what blogging entailed I thought that this might be a good start and went along hoping to learn something.  What I got was something else, far above my expectations.  Mark spoke for six hours only broken up by an hour from another really interesting guy and whereas a lot of it was above my head in terms of computer know-how, I grasped enough to make myself decide that this genre was for me.  I listened afterwards to the delegates talking amongst themselves and realized how much these professionals had got out of the day and I decided to take another step forward.  I approached Mark, informed him of my predicament, told him I was computer illiterate almost and surely I would need to go on a course.

“”Nonsense” was the brave words he used, “just do it” he said and he called over one of his associates, Steve Wild, explained my case and within two days I was set up with a blog vehicle on which all I had to do was press a few buttons in a predetermined sequence and hey presto!  A blog.

Initially I was rather scared as I stared at the screen wondering what to write about and 19 words dribbled out of my brain and down my arm onto the blog.  I read, re-read and edited this mighty piece, pressed a button and there it was on the printed page.  How proud was I?  The following day 545 words splattered themselves onto the page and from there it just flowed.  What was a trickle very quickly became a torrent and I saw an increase in quality but I suppose a lot of that could be down to conceit.

However as I wrote I could hear Mark’s words ringing in my ears “do not underestimate the power of the blog, it is a serious tool” but little did I realize that only two weeks into my venture and quickly getting into my stride, I wrote a piece, an innocent piece I thought, and I was inundated with e-mails and comments on my blog page.  A lot of people thought I was libellous, the editor of the local paper, who had the grace to ring me and let me know said she would sue me the next time it happened.  People I had known for years stopped talking to me all because I had written the truth.

This onslaught knocked me back considerably, I had never known anything so immediate and so powerful.  My style suffered as a result and the following days blog output was anodyne to say the least.  However buoyed up by encouragement from various quarters I continued my merry way but in a more watchful and circumspect manner and slowly cranked myself up to my present “tell it as it is” state.  I can honestly say I have never come across a more potent tool of communication than a blog.  I was not prepared for the onslaught although Mark had told me of the weirdos out there.  He had been attacked for months by certain individuals whose only motive was jealousy and whose only aim was disruption and now, don’t I know it, but let us soldier on and f… the begrudgers!

If any reader wants to follow my trail of self immolation, just refer back to my previous blogs on the subject, namely  Blogging On written on 9 December 2009, Keep Writing of the 18 December 2009 and The Importance Of Blogs of the 12 January 2010.  Happy writing, make it good, but do not be vindictive for the sake of it.