"what's interesting to you isn't necessarily interesting to a reader." Mitch Albom
I don't know whether it's COVID or whether it's just one of those 'It's time' moments, but I find myself considering whether to delete around half of this blog.
Why would I do that? Well for a vast number of reasons to which I shall come, but the main one is that Wix seems to be limping a bit in terms of speed - of me typing, and you viewing. Well that's what David is telling me. I did upgrade to enable me to have more memory, but this doesn't seem to have helped. I suspect I just have become too big - as it were. There are now 1,103 posts on this site, and let's be honest, nobody is going to go back and read them all. Besides they are picture heavy and that gobbles up the memory.
This picture - I believe it's a poster for a film or streaming/TV series admirably expresses how I feel about all this, which is why I chose it. I suspect the film was probably pretty awful, but the poster is pretty wonderful.
As I have said many, many times the intention of this blog is not to create a blog empire, endless books, heaps of advertising revenue and fame. It's merely to give me something creative to do in my old age, and to stop me being bored. I have a few fairly dedicated readers, and there are a few spikes here and there for posts that hit some kind of a chord. I think the highest readership I have ever attained is about 30. Which is absolutely fine. Deleting half of this iteration of the blog is not going to impact anyone other than me.
However. There are options. Because of course it's not that simple a yes or no decision. Hamlet, after all, pondered for ages on the to be or not to be question and fundamentally didn't come up with an answer. After all there is no definitive answer to any question is there? - the latest example being THE VOICE into which I shall not delve. Douglas Adams proved that long ago with his answer to Life, the Universe and Everything - the number 42. A definitive answer that was meaningless. I confess I am not enough of a scientist or mathematician to know whether there are definitive answers to anything, but I suspect not. It seems to me that they are always discovering something that disproves a previously definite theory.
Options. I just delete half the blog completely. It's easy enough to do and nobody will notice. A tiny part of me says - 'Just do it'. It would be decisive which is such an admired virtue these days. It's not me though. I can always see the other side of the question. Besides a rather larger part of me - the me, me, me bit - tells me that I put a fair amount of work into all of this, and it would be sad to just throw it away. To disappear all those mindless ramblings into bits and bytes in the ether.
Which creates two dilemmas. One how could I save it, and, two, who am I saving it for?
When I closed down my first version of this blog - a compulsory shutdown because of a change in Wix's software, David exhorted me to transfer it into a print format so that it would not be lost. Well I tried, but there was no easy way to do it, other than painstaking copying and pasting into Pages, and even just the first three months, ended up as a huge document. So I gave up. The blog still sits there online but I'm guessing that nobody ever looks at it. Not even me. Wix has no options to save to print - and why should they anyway? It's not their business model. It may well stay there for eons, because it was a free website, not a paid version, unless Wix decides one day to delete old sites such as mine. There must be millions of us tapping away on our computers for an audience of just a few. The current website is a paid one, and so when I disappear - along with my credit card - no doubt the website will too.
I have been pondering on what to do for a short time now, and David's complaints about slow loading obviously recharged my mind, because this morning I wondered whether I could just save each page as a pdf and store them on my computer. Which has masses of memory to spare. So I experimented with a recent post, and yes indeed it can be done. It's not the ideal solution because when you export to pdf you get the whole thing - headings, etc. But let's face it, this is never going to print, and probably never even going to be read by anyone in the future. Not even me. However, it will still exist. Which is weirdly reassuring. Mind you I think some of the pictures have already been completely erased, and I'm certainly not going to track them down.
So saved - for who? Just for my vanity probably, but maybe one day, somebody might have a look - just as occasional researchers venture into the stacks of libraries and archives big and small. I suppose my ramblings, might give a glimpse of the food scene in the early 21st century. Or maybe a long distant descendant will want to find out more about me. I am completely insignificant of course, but when I started to delve into my family history I too became even more fascinated by the multitude of 'ordinary' ancestors - particularly the women of course. That is if the saved pdfs are still accessible of course. Which I fear they will not be. The technology will have been long surpassed, and nobody will have thought to transfer them into the new version. Digital does not survive - not like books and papers.
So just because my vanity won't allow me to just press the Delete button I shall mindlessly save them to my computer, where maybe my children or grandchildren will find them, when I'm gone. Maybe they will just disappear. A futile exercise really, but one that might make me feel better for a while.
Here we go is the name I gave to that very first post of this particular blog. Here it is - it was very short. As I said at the time: "just a place marker". And I suppose that's what I am doing now - marking my place. I was here. Like the hand on the wall in those prehistoric caves.
Just to reiterate. I'm only deleting the early half of this blog, and only when I feel like it.