On 17.3.05 I started this blog (first at Typepad, then on WordPress). Even then I felt I was coming late to the blogging party, but thought I’d give it a go anyway. And here we are, me and the blog, 10 years later. Bits of it are a wee bit neglected, needs a spring clean, it’s true. But I’ve come to love blogging because it’s communicating that can be endlessly redrafted, or almost instantaneous (why I like the buzz of conference liveblogging, I suppose). And also because I’m not ever quite sure who I’m writing for. But I like the discipline of it too. Looking back over it, I feel the best posts are where there’s true balance between feeling and thinking and writing. Almost as if the blog itself is the reader over my shoulder. Do you really want to leave the thought like that, it asks. Or, now let’s put that another way shall we. Or sometimes, how about we go for a walk before we tap that Publish button. OK, I say, yes let’s do that.
As for the next 10 years, who knows what technology will bring us to by then. Back on St Patrick’s Day 05 I couldn’t begin to imagine how much of it has turned out. Two years later the final chapter of Transforming attempted to imagine it for a date in the future when I won’t be here for you to raise an eyebrow at how wide of the mark I was. But the central issues won’t go away, I’ve always argued. Same now as they were back in the thirteenth century; and yet so so different, and especially for us because we’re here now, we’re inescapably caught in our moment. Retrospectives and future prophecy have their place, but it’s in our struggle to understand and communicate, the positions we take in the issues that matter, and the education that we strive to bring into being, that determines everything.
So. I haven’t any whisky beside me now, but when I get back to Scotland on 28 March I’ll raise a glass of Lagavulin 16 to the next decade.