The practice of blogging: a decade of evolution

Ten years ago today, I started blogging. With only the haziest understanding of the medium, I posted Not the Naughties, an essay I'd already written and polished. Unsure how to proceed, I sought advice and found plenty of it. Be the expert on a single topic! Monetize your blog! Establish it as part of your platform! When none of that resonated, I continued to go my own way, writing for the joy of it, and editing past posts that came up in my stats.

Soon I was using the blog to schedule posts and meet deadlines. I'd sketch them in roughly, then finish and and edit them before and after they went live. Soon I began to schedule posts in series, on a single topic. Meanwhile, having decided pictures were essential for this kind of short entry, I'd begun taking photos with future blog posts in mind. My new iphone had a great camera, and I used it to illustrate my posts.

Back then, I worked exclusively on a desktop computer -- writing about anything that inspired words. I kept a notebook in the car, one in my purse, and one by my bed. When an idea struck, I'd scribble a note, then develop a post later.

The first entry I posted while away from my home computer was inspired by my reaction to a novel by Khaled Hosseini. As soon I finished the book (in a very long queue at Heathrow Airport), I felt compelled to write down the thoughts that were tumbling around in my head. Settled in at the Penn Club, I lined up to use the single shared computer the hostelry had recently installed beside the clunky old pay phone. The next time I checked in to my London Club, I had my laptop.

Since that early post about Hosseini's book, I've posted 548 other commentaries on books. I follow no rules, but use my current reading obsessions to comment on books that spark a special resonance. Some of these have been published decades before, and some express the voices of wonderful new writers who keep me on the reading edge.

Looking back at my stats, I note the posts that got the most hits. In 2013, following a visit to Lethbridge, my post about Ammolite garnered 4500 views. A post on Chauvet cave in France (2011) was seen over 3500 times, and one on the late and wonderful writer Richard Wagamese (2013) got 2000 views, and continues to get hits today. The next most popular was one about a missing piece in a jigsaw puzzle. What am I to make of this? I used to wonder, but now I just use my energy to write and edit, keeping in tune with a practice that hones my skills and soothes me.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson is both chilling and hilarious

London, 1940. Juliet Armstrong has a boring clerical job in "the Registry" at Wormwood Scrubs, hq of a burgeoning MI5. One day she's approached by Perry Gibbons, who introduces himself, saying "I need a girl, I'm afraid."

"Well...I am a girl, I suppose." This response reflects the author's trademark sheen of humour; Juliet's  thoughts sharpen the comic tone. Impressed by his "firm voice, a nice low register that spoke of both kindness and unassailable authority in a man," she agrees to work for him. Not that she has much choice -- as her friend Clarissa puts it, after a desultory interview, "I think you've been plucked." And so Juliet becomes joins a special operation and becomes a kind of clerical spy, transcribing the words of a group of fifth columnists who meet in the next door apartment to the operation's "office" in Dolphin Square.

Kate Atkinson conveys both characters and setting with devastating wit and power. Readers acquire insight into Juliet from her idle thoughts about word meanings and rhymes, and laugh when she learns that someone's husband is an actuary and wonders what that is, then decides it sounds "as if it belonged in a zoo, along with a cassowary and a dromedary." Learning that "Juliet and Hartley had long since abandoned manners with each other," and find it "refreshing to behave without respect towards someone," the reader absorbs a wealth of information about the social rules of the time. Then there is Juliet's touching but innocent hope that her boss might kiss her -- before she eventually clues in to the fact that he is gay.

Sometimes the comedy takes on a darker hue, as with the sketch of the pilot Juliet had "briefly dated" during the war. When he lost a leg in a crash landing returning from a raid, "He made light of it, joked about it endlessly from his hospital bed (Not a leg to stand on, Pull the other one, and so on)." In the same sentence, we learn that "it ruined him and he gassed himself in his mother's kitchen after he was released from hospital," making Juliet "furious." Convinced that she would have stood by the one-legged pilot, she thinks of her other past lovers as "mistakes."

Long after the war Juliet is working for the BBC when she receives a threatening note saying she will pay for what she did. "Must I?" she wonders, sensing the "clumsily stitched wound" of her war service opening up again, and thinking the war "had thrown up plenty of unpaid debts -- why should she be the one being presented with the bill?" She also wonders who "is going to be next to pop out of the box" that is supposed to keep her past contained.

Astutely, she senses "some kind of osmotic membrane between the Corporation and the Service, employees moving from one world to the other without hindrance...Sometimes you had to wonder if MI5 was using the BBC for its own purposes. Or indeed, if it was the other way round." She also feels there is a "quasi-religious tone to the Corporation. Broadcasting House itself was dedicated to 'Almighty God,' as if [he] was looking down benevolently on the transmitters from the clouds," and wonders if that too is a front.

The reader gets a clear sense of Juliet's character through her conversations with other as well as herself. When she and a doleful Prendergast discuss "isms," Juliet considers these: fascism, communism, and capitalism, and comments "We lose sight of the ideal that propelled them and yet millions die in defence of -- or attack on -- those beliefs." As well as being a clear thinker, Juliet has a high level of self-awareness, as when she observes herself feeling "slighted yet relieved," and thinks it "curious how you could hold two quite opposing feelings at the same time, an unsettling emotional discord."

The plot of the story hinges on this: who is using whom for what? Who is one of them and who one of us? In a moment that combines horror and hilarity, Juliet finds herself in the Brompton Oratory with the dog of an absent spy, trying to keep out of sight of someone she thinks is "one of us." Yet he has just mysteriously handed something over to "the man in the astrakhan-collared coat," whom she has seen on a few occasions, and suspects may be "one of them." Obliged to hold the dog firmly and duck down twice to avoid being seen, she begins to feel "almost religious."

It's all very complicated. As Juliet concludes, people disappear from history, not by being erased, but by being "explained away."

Geraldton War Memorial in Western Australia

This war memorial comemmorates the 745 sailors lost when the HMAS Sydney was sunk off Shark Bay during WWII.

The dome is comprised of gulls, and rests on seven pillars that represent the seven states of Australia. In the memorial garden, a bronze statue of a woman keeps watch over the pool below, symbolizing the women who watch and wait in wartime. Here visitors can visit and contemplate 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Remembering our shared past: a ride through the jungle on an Army Duck

The amphibious Army Duck gave a group of tourists a ride through the jungle at Kuranda in Australia's tropical Northern Territory. We bumped along a rutted track, looking at basket ferns, blueberry ginger, and some of the many poisonous plants that grow in the world's oldest rainforest. The vehicle became a boat and we travelled through muddy brown waters before emerging onto a rough track.

Like many other human inventions that we use daily and with less awareness of their history, this vehicle was devised for use in war.

Remembering our past: Trinity Beach, Australia in WWII

To visit this out-of-the-way beach, we got a car from Cairns. The brisk wind was blowing roiled the sand, making the blue water look brown. After a pleasant interval lying on the soft sand sunning ourselves, we shared a meal in a nearly deserted beachside restaurant. Strolling on the beach afterwards, we read signs detailing the history of this place in WWII. With the Japanese in control of nearby Papua New Guinea, this became a site where Allied men practiced the skills of amphibious warfare. The current threats are stingrays and crocodiles.

Remembering our past: Potshot Memorial, Western Australia

Standing opposite the RAAF's Learmonth airport, this memorial seems to be in the middle of nowhere. But during WWII, this place was a submarine base and a refueling facility. The Australian armed forces ran anti-aircraft guns, radio and radar stations, and provided fighter cover for submarines. The Allies devised Operation Jaywick in 1942. Disguised as a fishing boat, a ship left Exmouth Gulf for Japanese-controlled Singapore. The crew attached limpet mines to Japanese ships, blowing up seven of them.

The raiders returned safely to Potshot without being found out, and the disguised boat was used for a second operation. In 1943, Japan bombed the Potshot base. In 1945 a cyclone damaged the facilities and they were subsequently closed.

Brother Kemal by Jakob Arjuni

When a wealthy woman hires Kemal Kayankaya to find her missing daughter, the private detective quickly gets the girl away from the clutches of a notorious pimp. However, to get her home safely means walking away from a bit of a mess. Meanwhile, he accepts a job as a bodyguard for a Tunisian author during the Frankfurt Book Fair. Aware that "the risk of dying in an attack involving explosives is a hundred times less than the risk of choking on a mini-mozzarella," Kemal doesn't take the publisher's talk of threats too seriously. He assumes the bodyguard is being provided "for promotional purposes."

Raised in Gemany, the orphaned Kemal has learned no Turkish. Yet in multicultural Frankfurt, even dealing with his French client and her Dutch husband, he can't escape being stereotyped.

This is a book where people wear masks and nothing is what it seems. Watching the transparently phony act of his client Valerie, Kemal concludes that she herself "no longer knew what she did unintentionally and what was a calculation or a trick."

All around him, values are upended. When Octavian, his policeman friend, confides that he knows "a great many people who prefer to save their own skin over the punishment of a criminal," Kemal tells him he's '"been in the Vice Squad too long," adding, "It's bad for your morals."' In fact, the cop is aware of an informer in his own ranks passing information to a known criminal, but puts off disturbing "the pyramid of police power" as his "promotion is due in a few weeks."

Nothing is as it seems. Kemal suspects a devout sheikh of resorting to kidnapping and threats to protect his nephew, a pimp who sells heroin. Receiving a strange phone call from this man, the "Turk" does not respond as expected to the sheik's "heavy hints and impenetrable remarks," but tells him to quit beating about the bush and get to the point. Convinced that Kemal Kayankaya is a Muslim name, the sheik later gives him a Koran.

Only with Kemal's wife Deborah can the reader relax into knowing that what we see is what we get. Her character is the classic uncomplicated ex-tart with a heart of gold.

In contrast to its red cover, the genre of the novel tends toward the noir, leavened by touches of sharp humour. This topsy turvy detective story by the talented Jakob Arjouni is a wild ride, full of ironic twists expressed in deliciously skillful language. This talented writer hit the ground running, winning a prize for his first novel, published at age 18. He died aged 49 in 2013, the year this final Kayankaya novel was published.