Those of you who know me and/or like to read my blog frequently will know that, since the start of this year, I've tried to keep this blog updated with a post every week. I felt like producing regular content more frequently would lead to a bigger readership and more relevant writing.
Those of you who are on my journalism course will also know that this semester we have an assignment for which we have to produce regular blog posts for six weeks.
Yet, if you're reading this, you'll probably already be aware that I haven't published a blog post for two weeks. Arguably not the best of moves when your blog is being assessed, let alone when you've promised yourself to keep blogging regularly.
As with everything, though, there are reasons for it. Not intentional reasons, but reasons that become evident when you look back and take account of what has happened.
While I made the conscious decision to try to update this blog every week, that was because I thought I would be able to set time aside every week to think about what I was going to write. For the past couple of months, I have been able to do that. However, I've been much busier over the past couple of weeks, what with some SU elections and a print deadline for the student newspaper, as well as a bunch of other side projects.
You might say that I should prioritise this blog rather than things that I'm neither obliged to do nor being graded on. I understand why that might make sense. But I'm not going to.
I have no desire to churn out a blog post every week that I haven't thought a lot about, because if I haven't given myself the time to think, I wouldn't expect anyone to take the time to read (or the time to grade, if you happen to be one of my tutors). My post would be more of the same dull opinions you could find on any other blog or even in one of the newspapers, if you still buy them.
Even those newspapers and their bloggers and columnists produce pieces that I'd be ashamed to write, let alone publish. You can see when they've been contractually obliged to write something this week and they haven't thought about it; it reads like a Tumblr post, incoherently repeating its witticisms without having any meaningful point to make.
There will, I hope, be another (more interesting?) blog post from me this week, but in short, it would be hypocritical of me to promise that. While I do have lots of ideas, those ideas develop and change in the processes of thinking and writing, and at least half of the posts I've produced on this blog have changed from my writing the first paragraph to drawing it to a close.
This closure is no different.