I enjoy blogging because it’s interactive and intercontinental.
It’s fun to be in touch with readers in Asia, Africa, North America and Australasia, as well as people in the UK, some of whom have become good friends.
After eighteen years of communicating with the Arsenal diaspora I’ve realised that Gooners are some of the nicest and smartest people in this world and it’s been a privilege to write for you all, especially since the majority tolerate my mistakes and misjudgements.
The internet is more democratic than newspapers, much more open and varied, with fewer rules and more surprises. You have more feedback, so you never get bored.
Since 2008 I’ve subscribed to a music business newsletter by Bob Lefsetz, who writes from Los Angeles and wherever else he happens to be in the world, and on 27/2/2014, Bob wrote this:
I need you more than you need me. I wouldn’t do it otherwise. It’s a cornucopia of feedback, but it makes me feel connected, like my life is worth living. And when you tell me your story, when you testify…My life is complete.
Those comments reflected my growing feeling that it’s the feedback that has made blogging worthwhile for the last 18 years.
Sure, as a rock journalist in the age of typewriters and vinyl, I got free tickets to everything, far more albums than anybody could possibly review, had fun with loads of rock stars, and enjoyed the same privileged life as other Seventies journalists who were courted by record companies in that golden age of colossal album sales.
However, I rarely met my readers or heard from them, apart from a couple of letters from American girls who were visiting Britain and wanted to talk about Bruce Springsteen and Jeff Beck.
Since the feedback was almost nil, I rarely thought about who might be reading me later on when I wrote for The Scotsman, a broadsheet based in Edinburgh. I assumed that my typical reader was a school teacher in Stirling.
Then, over twenty years ago, I met one of my readers in very unusual circumstances.
One night I was coming home from a gig at The Borderline when a young man got on the Jubilee Line train and sat down next to me and started to read 90 Minutes, a weekly magazine edited by Paul Hawksbee, who is now a radio host on TalkSport.
The magazine always contained interviews with footballers and that issue contained a piece I had done with Aston Villa midfielder Mark Draper. Since Londoners don’t talk to each other on public transport, I didn’t say anything.
But as we travelled north I began to worry that the lad would get off the train before he got to Mark’s interview. Luckily, he continued sitting on my left, and eventually he began to read my article.
By now I had realised that that this was a once-in-a-lifetime situation, so I had to say…. something.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t hip enough, so I said the wrong thing.
I said, “Do you like my interview with Mark?”
“What?” he said.
“I wrote that article.”
“You didn’t!” he said, emphatically.
“Yes, I did. Test me on it.”
The lad thought that a middle-aged psycho winding him up. He was flabbergasted by the coincidence and the moment was too odd for both of us,too random.
As I say, I blew it.
What I should have said was, “By sitting down next to me, and reading that magazine, you’ve put me in a very strange situation.”
What would you have said?