I am a blogger. This is something I hesitate to admit in polite society, where the response is likely to be a thinly disguised sneer. However, I’m sure I can safely ‘come out’ to the open-minded readers of Literary Review and proclaim, loud and clear, the joys of blogging.

I never intended to be a blogger. The name alone is enough to put anyone off – ‘blog’ is an ugly word – and besides, I’ve always been about as tech-savvy as an aardvark. Then one of my oldest and closest friends started a blog and the scales fell from my eyes. I realised that, in the right hands, a blog, which I’d lazily assumed to be an outlet for opinionated egos or a medium for look-at-me wittering, could actually be a thing of beauty, a repository of interesting and original thought, of humour and pleasure, of amiable interchange among friends. 

I became a frequent contributor to my friend’s blog, then a co-blogger and stand-in. Finally, when the blog founder showed signs of losing interest, I decided to take the plunge and start my own. I was having too much fun to stop. It’s very easy to set up a blog