Because I like the sound of my own typing...

I really hate blogs, bloggers and blogging. These narcissistic excuses for pseudo-journalism embody my biggest frustration with the internet, namely that too many people with too little intelligence are given too much of an opportunity to make their too ill-informed opinions (or worse, feelings) heard. Gone are the days when the journalist would sit around in London coffee shops with his fellow wits-about-town, urbanely dissecting the intricacies of the Prince Regent's latest folly, or railing against substandard theatrical performances, preferably through the medium of a freshly translated Horatian Ode. Gone too are the days when your discerning reader would sit with the Times of London over his marmalade on toast, perusing the latest humanitarian exploits of the East India Company, while his children and wife are remain mercifully silent and repressed. It seems that even the cosy world where obedient Oxbridge educated hacks trot out quasi-Fascist articles under enormous punning headlines to the barks of a foul-mouthed editor is similarly staring extinction in the face. Instead we are left with the blog: a briefly warm and quickly dissipated urination of opinion in a sea of useless information.

Your typical blog opens with a suitably pretentious title. It needs to be at once profound and meaningless, witty and absent of any humour, and most importantly, needs to bear no relation to the subject being 'blogged' about. Song titles and lyrics are particularly good in this regard, as are ham-fistedly altered figures of speech. Presuming your reader (or 'bloggee' as I will now disdainfully call him or her) bothers to click on the half-chorus of a Morrissey song in front of her, she will most likely be faced with an inchoate mass of cliché, stale rhetoric and a generous helping of self-aggrandizing nothingness.

The opening line will probably be a bold, eye-catching statement. The kind of thing that GCSE creative writing students produce on cue for any assignment which requires writing 'persuasively'. It will be neither funny, nor shocking, nor remotely relevant. What it will be, is a short, arrogant precursor to a much longer, equally bland second sentence, with the overall effect being to show just how seamlessly the blogger can move from one mode of sanctimonious bullshit to the next.

What follows is, inevitably, more of the same. As Alexander Pope once said, "A little learning is a dangerous thing", and half-hearted displays of both general and esoteric knowledge are common, as are implied political attitudes and broad historical generalizations. Bloggers also love quotations: preferably literary or philosophical (but ideally literary which masquerades as the philosophical), but always employed with the religious conviction that any quotation, no matter how tautological or otherwise pointless it may be, immediately raises the intellectual legitimacy of the piece. Watch out too for cooler-than-thou (or sometimes even smarter-than-thou) namedropping, usually of bands, literature or Wes Anderson films, as well as unintelligent neologisms, typically based on techno-words such as 'tweet' or 'blog' or 'technology'. Keep your eyes open for a preponderance of needlessly long words, too.

Essentially the blog is a medium for those kinds of people who always seem to have something to say, believe that they have a divine right to say it, and even when they are acutely aware of the ostentatious ridiculousness of what they are saying (which is rarely), they go ahead and say it anyway. With this in mind, I present to you my first blog. What I want to do, if this experiment/whim goes ahead at all, is just to write pieces of amateur journalism ranging over pretty much anything from music to sport to politics to whatever, and hopefully entertain people a little on the way. Any feedback, ideas or questions will be welcomed, and I would be more than happy to publish anything people want to write (heavily edited of course).

Let me know what you think, and watch this space....