Greetings

Thankyou for visiting! So what is this blog about? Well, it's basically just a collection of ideas and opinions on various topics I have an interest in. I like to write a little bit about politics, history, music, books, what ever takes my fancy.

I've been swithering a while over writing a blog or not. There is some excellent writing out there on the blogs I regularly visit, and I sincerely doubt that I can come up with anything quite as witty, interesting or informative on these just for example;

http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com/
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/ (http://www.markvernon.com/friendshiponline/dotclear/
(http://gracchii.blogspot.com/) (http://www.exile.ru/articles/list.php?IBLOCK_ID=35&SECTION_ID=156).

For a while, the quality of writing I came across intimidated me away from even trying. I eventually came to the conclusion that I shouldn't really worry. If I write a load of crap, people will either tell me or stop visiting. Nothing lost, nothing gained. And if they don't like me, screw em' (latter insight aided by a few beers).

Anyway, a little about myself. I'm a criminal investigator with a govt dept, have been for 6 1/2 years. I'm Scottish, but have lived in the North of England for over 10 years now. I'm very happy down south in The North.

Politically I've always been somewhere on the left. I always remember my grandfather telling me the reason he voted Labour after coming home from the war. "It was simple - I could vote for the haves of the have-nots". This principle remained with me when I went to Salford Uni in 1997 to study history and politics. There as students we talked in pubs and clubs about social-democracy and how to roll back the tide of Thatcherite reforms from 1979. People still talked about marxism. I remember I had voted barely weeks before starting uni in Scotland for devolution; many of us were worried that it wouldn't happen, that the people of Scotland just would grasp the nettle (or thistle, more appropriately). Ask us politics students in 1997 what the struggles of the next decade would be, and just about the last thing anyone would have thought of would be the War on Terror and the erosion of our civil liberties. When we thought of terrorism in 1997, it was the IRA that came to mind.

How times have changed. The main items for discussion on the left today have moved away from this. Today on the left we are more concerned with an increasingly authoritarian govt, the divisive legacy of our involvement in Iraq, the struggle with anti-Americanism, some surprusing vitriol towards religion, the occasion public confessions of former lefties 'mugged by reality'. It's all rather strange. The differences between socialists, socialist-democrats, marxists, liberals and everyone else left of centre seems little more than academic quibbling today. It's just not on the radar of public discussion.

And yet my memory probably fails me. There was to be no rolling back of Thatcherite reforms in 1997, it was simply never on the cards. The 9/11 attack was probably an very unfortunate fluke, but the Middle East was still a powder keg, just waiting for someone to strike the match. Divisions and sub-divisions of lefty groups were probably doomed to irrelevance once the Soviet Union disintegrated as British conservative and American republican leadership claimed victory - an event long before 1997. It's so tempting to say 'I was there' about certain events, whilst probably missing the fact the the real turning point was many years earlier, when you hadn't been looking, or probably born.

Though I have an interest in politics, in my heart of hearts, history is my true passion. I'll be writing quite a bit about this over time. I'll finish this post by quoting one of my favorite historians, Marc Bloch. He was a leading French historian between the wars, and took up arms as a resistance fighter in WW2. He was shot by the Nazis in 1944. Anyway - this quote is what this blog is aspiring to.

"The nature of our intelligence is such that it is stimulated far less by the will to know than by the will to understand."