Paul Malpas

I am still reeling from the mental onslaught I have been through these past few days and my piece yesterday confirms to me the power a blog has.  A power that has to be carefully and considerately handled to enable the readers not to have to spring up from their screens and put their feet through them.

I have only been blogging for two weeks and I am learning all the time.  My life has been enveloped by it and although enjoying the literary progress I am making, I am alarmed at the grief I have caused to some people.  I can understand how punctuation wrongly placed or a word erroneously or clumsily used can put a different interpretation on a sentence, but the reader has got to learn to read and learn how the writer is thinking and not read what  he/she wants to read.  Reading  and understanding what is written is just as much an art form as writing.  My recent blog entitled Wondering Why was such a piece.  I wrote the text wondering why 52 years of employment with one company was not acknowledged as being something to behold, a quite remarkable feat in this transient world of ours.  A feat that I cannot imagine will be repeated in a long time.  A feat that should have had the blue touch paper lit under it and allowed to fizz all over North Roscommon, let alone Boyle. A celebration and nothing more of this epic.  However people have read the piece and put their own familial or amicable interpretation on it for possibly the erroneous use of the word redundant and the clumsy use of the word ungrateful and the mistakenly poor clause This shoddy treatment deserves castigation. For this I apologise.  Others have read it as it was meant to read and applauded Dermot for his 52 years of employment.  This has indeed taught me a  great lesson and I will personally apologise over the next few days to those people who have suffered grief from it and should not have been implicated.

Which brings me to another point that I have been considering.  All things have their day and in the media it was first of all cave paintings and grunts and then smoke signals and drums and then spoken tales by wandering minstrels and poets and then books by learned monks and sometime in the 18th century newspapers made their appearance and captured our hearts and imaginations for over 200 years; but the day of the newspapers will be finished shortly.  Philip Meyer in his book The Vanishing Newspaper calculates that the last newspaper in America will be published in the first quarter of 2043 and he worked this out four years ago, so that day will have regressed with the growth of the web.  Middle ground newspapers that are neither highbrow or entertainingly populist will go first as their advertisers desert and start in the more accountable vehicle that the web undoubtably is.  This newspaper demise is already happening with falling share prices ensuring that share holders put pressure on big publishers to close their loss makers.  The numbers employed by journalism is falling remarkably quickly on a year on year basis and so remarkably the end is nigh for both newspapers and newsagents. What does this mean for our local rags?  I wonder when they will become defunct according to The Vanishing Newspaper’s algorithm. I could not say but I know the end is nigh.  People are tired of spending two to three euros to read the anodyne and mundane accounts of local events when you can get it for nothing on blogs like realboyle.com along with some interesting comment.  The hack is dead and the age of the maverick is dawning. What takes their place, you might well ask.  Well bloggers of course.  Citizen journalists who will of course stick to personal and local matters in the begining, but new models will arise as papers retreat.

Which brings me on to my last thought which I have just heard on the Joe Duffy show.  All our TDs are given an allowance of €10,000 at Christmas to send cards to all and sundry.  Joe Duffy has calculated this amount to be with its attendant costs in the order of €3,000,000.  On this day after such a fierce Budget would it not be nice to wander the towns of Ireland with this amount in your pocket giving out to the poor and needy and feck the Christmas Cards?

I started writing this blog about ten days ago with the sole purpose in mind of improving my computer skills which were and still are fairly basic and practising my writing skills to give better construction and sense of articles of between 500 and 1000 words content.

I decided as a discipline to write about what effects me, on a daily basis.  This is difficult; journalists call it the daily grind, coughing up articles every morning.  My main interest was to try to buckle down to its discipline.  I had no real thought of  people reading them except for my family, who are the sternest critics.  Imagine my surprise when I started receiving e-mails advising and directing me as to content.  Two or three of these unwanted missives appeared before the blog was many days old, so it appears that instead of three or four family members keeping me on the straight and narrow, I now have six or seven avid fans criticising the hell out of me.  One from the address in England calling me the devil incarnate for actually writing the piece Once a Catholic.

So I say to all you good guys out there who know they can put the world to rights.  Start a blog, vent your spleen, do not come bothering me.  Put up on the screen in words of more than one syllable the things that twang on your heart strings.  It is great practise and will certainly give great discipline to your mind, which will, as time goes by, make you really understand the power of the blog.

In two weeks I have started to understand this power and although all power needs harnessing (ask the ESB in the Shannon System) you should not reign your writing back to the extent that the horse stops.  Let it have meaning and expression and especially soul, do not be afraid of telling it how it is.  Spill the beans, get it off your chest, cough it up and above all be truthful.  Do not hide behind nicety and neutrality, go as your mind directs and be man or woman enough to withstand the blows and above all believe in its power.  After all why should a man in England, judging by the tone of his e-mail. get upset about something I wrote in Roscommon and why should he bother his arse replying to somebody he considers to be a crackpot. I read pretentious unthought out drivel every day in the newspapers and in blogs but it does not drive me to respond but that might tell you more about my indolent self than it does about the quality of what I read.

So fight the good fight, publish and be damned, tell the truth as you see it, f… the begrudgers and do not expect to have a friend in this world.