Seven links

As regular readers will know, I very rarely do memes; I make an exception about once a year when they look interesting and I’m asked by someone I have a lot of time for. I was very flattered when MiMi, who writes Meemalee’s Kitchen, passed this one on to me so naturally I agreed to give it a go. MiMi’s blog is well worth a read but is very hard to sum up – there are some cracking recipes, some excellent restaurant reviews, some extremely funny food writing (the pieces about Masterchef are worth the price of admission alone) and an awful lot more into the bargain. I think that the best way to get an idea of the range of MiMi’s writing is to have a look at her post about the 7 Links meme here, which rather neatly brings us on to the subject of the meme.

The premise is straightforward, you pick seven posts from your back catalogue that you think deserve to see the light of day again and then you nominate another five bloggers to take part. Easy as pie. So, without further ado, here we go:

1. Your most beautiful post

This feels like something for other people to say about your writing, but if I was choosing just one, I think it would be Goodbye, Natalie which I wrote about a friend of mine who died earlier this year. I still go to her Facebook wall several times a week, as do her many other friends. Sometimes I tell her I miss her, sometimes I post a link to a song that reminds me of her or that I think she would have liked, sometimes I just read what everyone else has to say. It has got easier, even if the sadness has never quite gone away. I’m not one hundred per cent sure I want it to.

2. Your most popular post

It’s probably Reading material; I didn’t realise when I put it up just how widely discussed it would be. It got circulated a lot through Twitter and all sorts of people who had never visited my blog before (and probably never did again) stopped by to recommend books or weigh in to talk about the classics and whether they were all they’re cracked up to be. I don’t think I’ve ever had a post go viral, but this is probably the closest I’ve come to it. Some of the recommendations were good, too – I read I, Claudius off the back of the comments on that post and rather liked it.

Nothing has really changed since I wrote it - I still struggle with finding things I enjoy reading, although I’ve gone through a very good patch of late. I loved Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, thought Revolutionary Road was terrific and, most recently, thoroughly enjoyed The Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles. But for every book I love, there’s at least one that gets abandoned long before the final page. If you go to my local branch of Oxfam in a few weeks’ time you will see a copy of A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and a copy of Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway. They are both in mint condition, and if you buy either of them all I can say is this: best of luck with that.

3. Your most controversial post

In the early days of my blog it was largely a repository for what I thought were funny stories, so it was very different from the beast it evolved into. Many of those stories were about goings-on at work, my incredible cluelessness or a combination of the two. One of those stories loosely revolved around 9/11 and with hindsight, publishing it wasn’t necessarily my finest hour. Compounding the offence by reposting it on September the 11th, with a pretty picture added into the bargain, was also not the masterstroke I initially believed it to be. The post was called Because you need to understand that it’s really all about me, and quite a few people never spoke to me again after reading it.

Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes; the following year, although I may have Tweeted a link to the post, I didn’t post it again. This year, on the tenth anniversary, I plan to keep my mouth firmly shut.

4. Your most helpful post

Although I’m trying to stick to one blog post per question, this one isn’t easy. Not because my blog posts are generally helpful – far from it, I suspect - but because there are different kinds of helpful. So in terms of blogging, I think my most helpful might be Various answers, which was an interview I did on someone else’s (defunct) blog about a year ago. Most of it isn’t useful at all, but it does feature a section on the advice I’d give to new bloggers, and I did get some feedback saying that parts of it were very handy. I’m not sure if my advice to bloggers has changed, nowadays I would probably just say “do what you like and for God's sake, whatever you do don’t listen to me”.

The other post which a lot of people told me was very helpful was the piece I wrote last year about depression, called Happy pills.

5. A post whose success surprised you

I’m not sure if “success” is the right word, but the real surprise has to be Hugh. What was intended as a throwaway pen portrait of an unpleasant, odd man who used to work at our place turned into a really heated debate in the comments field. I was criticised by a number of people for writing such an unsympathetic piece, was told by several that I hadn’t lived up to their expectations of me as a person or as a writer and, in one truly exceptional case, was compared to Leni Riefenstahl (I didn’t publish that one). It’s a truly odd experience wandering round Waitrose doing the shopping while your phone keeps pinging with emails telling you how disappointing you are. Still, even if it didn’t manage to get the reader onside it was much read, heavily debated and it definitely provoked a reaction, so it’s hard not to see it as a success.

Maybe I should have mentioned that Hugh, who was married, made a pass at one of my friends. Would that have made a difference, I wonder?

6. A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

Last summer I went to a psychic show with my wife. It was an interesting experience because while I was in the theatre bar before the show I looked round at my fellow audience members and sent all sorts of uncomplimentary Tweets about the whole experience, but from the moment the show started I knew that it, and my reaction to it, were far more nuanced and complicated than that. I’m really pleased with the piece I ended up writing about it, called The medium, and it remains one of my favourite things I’ve done.

It didn’t attract an awful lot of comments and responses at the time, but the main reason I’m putting it in here is that I submitted it to a competition run by the Journal Of Creative Nonfiction. They were running a contest for blog posts, in an attempt to prove that blog posts can be Proper Writing too (the fact that they ran the competition, and published the eventual winner billed as a “blog post”, suggests to me they didn’t quite believe it). My piece made the final five, out of a shortlist of hundreds and hundreds, and I was unbelievably proud. But it didn’t win, which is a real shame, and of course I thought that it should because naturally I reckoned it was miles better than the piece that did.

The thing that really hurt, though, was the way I found out – they didn’t mail me to let me know, I just found out weeks later on their standard email newsletter confirming what was going to be in the upcoming issue which strikes me as a bit of a shoddy way to treat writers. So this piece is the one that got away – it nearly got published, and almost could have been read by a much wider audience than normally sees my writing, and it just wasn’t to be. Never mind, onwards and upwards (I certainly won’t be submitting to the Journal Of Creative Nonfiction again, either).

7. The post that you are most proud of

This is a difficult question, because the answer changes on a regular basis. I am proud of everything I’ve written on one level or another, either because it sums up something I really felt, or described something I really experienced, or captures an element of a person, situation or friendship in a way which is as good as any photograph. To some extent this is how I imagine being asked to choose between your children must feel.

My gut reaction, though, is to choose The girl from WH Smiths. I’m proud of a lot of the pieces that I’ve written about my wife and our marriage, but this one is probably my favourite. Not only is it my favourite post about her, but it’s probably also the best Christmas present she’s ever going to get from me.

Passing it on

I am passing this meme on to five other bloggers, and I really hope they do it. Some of them are very old friends, some of them are relatively new discoveries, but what they all have in common is that they have written a lot of blog posts and deserve to be read by more people. So in all cases, I hope they do the meme and I hope you jump over to read their blogs and get a really good introduction to the highlights of an excellent back catalogue.

Tales From Beyond The End Of The World - Robbie’s blog is a particular favourite of mine right now. He has a lovely dry view of the world from where he is, but also writes some beautiful, lyrical prose. He is prolific to a fault (in fact, I’m still waiting for him to slow down), so I’m looking forward to seeing his seven links.

Stuff From Ellen’s Head - Ellen would probably be the first to admit that her blog is a real mixed bag. You get some pieces about her family and day-to-day life alongside meditations and memories. I am a particular fan of the sequence of posts she has done around the letters of the alphabet.

The Victorianist - There are an awful lot of historical blogs out there, as I have discovered via Twitter, but The Amateur Casual writes one of my very favourites. The writing and research are truly excellent, and I’m selfishly looking forward to him doing the meme and giving me a further much-needed primer about the Victorian era. (To my shame, the only time I’ve Tweeted one of his links, it was about the history of the flushing toilet. I hope he can forgive me).

Bag Lady - Well, as many of you know, the eponymous Baglady is a close personal friend of mine. But I’ve picked her despite that because I think her blog is excellent – a real mixture of fiction, nonfiction, nostalgia, day-to-day life, long pieces, little 100 word palate cleansers and everything in between. She’s been blogging almost exactly as long as I have and in that time has gone from being a blogger who tries to write to a writer who happens to do it in a blog. I’ll be interested to see which seven posts she links to.

The Gravel Farm - The Jules is easily one of the most naturally funny writers I’ve come across (I still remember him describing trying to cut his baby’s hair as ”like trying to shave an angry cat on a roller coaster”) and his blog posts are often akin to being taken for a walk round his brain. The views are excellent, as you’ll see if he does the meme.

Right, now nobody ask me to do a meme for at least another twelve months. Deal?