Repetition

After twelve years as a regular blogger, it is easy to forget blogposts one created in the past. Fortunately, we have that blog search facility up on the left of the top bar. You can use it to check past content.

Late last night I began to write a post about English pubs, bewailing their decline. Half way through writing it, somewhere in the murky depths of my brain a little voice asked - "Haven't you covered this before?" I went to the search box and discovered that I have indeed made three previous blogposts all titled "Pubs". In two of them there was enough bewailing to raise the dead from their graves. Consequently, I abandoned the new post feeling like a lemon.

It can be very odd looking back over past posts one has written. They can read like someone else's blogging. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by the quality of certain posts or particular sentences I wrote several years back. The business of writing - it's one of the main things that led me into blogging in the first place.

Repeating oneself can seem like the start of a slippery slope that leads all the way downhill to senility. Last year I blogged about a severe case of repetition by one of my old university tutors - a revered Scottish poet called Norman MacCaig. The polite quietness that hung over his identical second telling of the same story was pregnant with wonder about his declining mental state.

I guess it is inevitable that we will fall back on pet subjects, strong memories, the things that matter to us, the things that made us but repetition can be most embarrassing. The decline of the English pub is a fascinating subject but you don't need to be reading about it every couple of months. From now on I shall use that search box more habitually as a useful aide-memoire when creating new blogposts. Otherwise, men in white coats may arrive to take me away in an unmarked van.