Blogging off

This blog is ten years old today, which seems a good occasion to announce its death. This will come as no surprise to regular readers, who have been regularly reading nothing at all for the past year and extremely little for the couple of years before that.

The cause of death is simple: I grew bored of writing about politics. I only have so many opinions, only so many ways to rearrange them and glue them on to the events of the day. And it turns out that when I march a phalanx of paragraphs out to say that such-and-such should happen, it usually doesn’t.

(Fun fact! For my first year and a half of blogging, when I was averaging maybe 25 posts a month, I lived in a flat with no internet. I would write pieces on my laptop and then lug it to a coffee shop or a library or my office or anywhere with wifi to post them. That’s dedication. Or possibly idiocy.)

Nowadays I tweet instead. I also have a blog about language and editing, which I post on maybe once a month or so. And if I have anything to say about politics or anything else that won’t fit into 140 characters, I’ll do it on Medium.

Thanks to all of you who dropped by here over the years. You made me feel welcome, you made me laugh, you made me think again, you made me want to write better.

Particular thanks to the late Norm Geras, who was very encouraging when I was starting out. He gallantly didn’t laugh in my face when I emailed him to ask, with the carefully constructed innocence of a newbie, whether it would be OK if I linked to his blog from mine.

So that’s that. Freemania is done. I’ll keep it online, as a warning to future generations. And I’ll leave you with a link to the post I’m proudest of, which managed to combine economic policy, theology and monster trucks.

Take care.