Andrew Dubber

First, can I just say OH MY GOD IT’S COLD!

I wasn’t expecting to feel it quite as much as I am. I’ve had three winters to acclimatise myself to sub-zero temperatures, and New Zealand was hardly in the midst of a tropical summer while I was there, but for some reason, coming back has been a bit of a shock to the system.

It was with this reluctance to brave the elements, accompanied with a fair degree of residual jetlag that I went with Bobbie to a very grown-up dinner party that had been arranged in my absence.

‘Patrick‘, the nice Irishman who voices the SatNav device I bought Bobbie as an emergency early Christmas present, and who saves us from our complete navigational incompetence, brought us to a place we would never have otherwise located in Harborne. It’s the home of Morag, a former customer of Sage Wholefoods who has become a very good friend of Bobbie’s.

Morag’s a psychiatrist and, as it turns out, an amazing cook. She introduced us to her partner Simon, a medieval historian who specialises in miracles, pilgrimmages and saints; Alan, a philosopher and staff member of the Bodleian Library; and Phllippa, a specialist in Old English literature.

The food was great and the conversation was fascinating. Most interesting to me was the way in which these different disciplines saw each other and, somehow, connected up. I’ve had so little exposure to psychiatry, medieval religious history, philosophy of mind and Anglo-Saxon literature that I felt a bit like a naive tourist trying to identify landmarks and find my way from point A to point B. But the areas of common ground were pretty clear, as were the issues of contention.

I won’t try and reproduce the conversation here, but what I got out of it was the extent to which everyone was interested in the ways in which we make sense of the world, the stories we tell ourselves, the relationship between those narratives and the contemporary cosmology, and the extent to which we can aspire to some sort of objective truth about who we are, where we are and what we think we’re doing.

It was a fascinating discussion, and I was only really able to keep up and stay involved by asking one guest how their field connected with something that another guest had just said. That, and smiling and nodding, was my key strategy.

These people completely inhabited their particular fields and knew the terrain like the backs of their hands. I was just visiting, having a look around and trying to make sense of the landscape. The tourist.

But along the way, the practice of blogging came up. The historian, in particular, was cautious about it. And there were a number of really interesting questions to address in that regard.

The first was the very reasonable ‘what’s the point?’, which is actually quite a hard question to answer when it’s been asked by an academic whose role is to further knowledge, and whose own writings are subject to quite intense scrutiny before publication. There is a central conceit with blogging that suggests that you think that what you have to say is worthy of publication. Sure, keep a diary, but why tell the world? To an academic writer, the act of writing is to commit yourself to a position and to be held accountable to it. To treat writing otherwise is to lack respect for the written word.

The second was ‘where’s the line?’. There’s a sense that most people feel the need to draw a distinct division between their private life and their public ‘blogged’ life. Some things are off limits and some things are open for inspection. I don’t happen to have that clear divide in the same way, and approach the problem slightly differently.

The third was ‘how do you manage it?’. A lot of people think that writing — particularly creative writing — is difficult. That creativity is something that some people have and others don’t, and that stringing sentences together is an ordeal… especially when there’s a possibility that others might read it.

And to me, these have become, over the past five or so years, quite simple to answer.

A blog is a conversation. It’s not journalism or reportage, and nor is it trying to capture history — personal, social or otherwise. It’s not trying to be important, reliable or even particularly useful. The idea that somebody might be reading gives you a fairly compelling reason to try and be interesting (which is different from being ‘merely entertaining’), and hopefully sharpens the writing along the way.

But blogging is not important, dangerous or difficult.

Blogging is like talking. The people who find you interesting for some reason will tend to hang around and hear what you have to say, occasionally respond, and might even remember things you said to bring up later in another conversation. It’s no more difficult or problematic than phoning someone and telling them about your day. Of course, it generally involves typing rather than speaking, and every medium brings its own rules to bear on the communicative process, but there’s nothing particularly troubling about other casual forms of communication. It’s just that this one is easily confused with the more formal genres typical of printed communication.

But that said, it acts as history too. Collectively, the outpourings of the masses are being archived into a massive digital Alexandrian Library. Mostly, it’s full of inane crap, sure – but you can be certain that the wisdom of this age is in there somewhere, and whatever truths it can reveal are there ready to be teased out by some future historian who, like never before, will have access to the minutiae of the lives and times of the people who lived.

Its purpose is also partly to think out loud in the manner of a talking therapy or a Shakespearian soliloquy in which the character overhears himself thinking in a particular way and comes to a new realisation about the world and his place in it.

And it’s the context in which we can come to terms with what we think and what we mean. At best, blogging is interpreting the world around us, attaching our own symbols and, in a sense, engaging in the kind of personal myth-making that lies at the heart of the kinds of activities that historians, philosophers, literary critics and doctors of the mind have interested themselves in all along.

But above all, blogging, in a sense, is a little like holding a dinner party. You get to set the context, the decor and the direction of the conversation. Your guests can weigh in, but they’ve come to your house and should behave accordingly. When things are going well, what gets served up has been well-prepared, the visitors are satisfied, the conversation is engaging and the people get on in such a way that they can feel comfortable questioning, challenging and learning from each other.

That’s when you can be reasonably certain you’ve had a very successful dinner party.

Like the one we went to last night.

Tagged: Personal, Travel