Why British Bloggers Need Regulation

What Ho Proles!

The metal clacks and grinds of the old manual typewriter have not ceased cutting through my thoughts today. My Man and I are hard at work on the next few chapters of the ever expanding Murgatroid memoirs, though, even as I tell you this, a grim and deeply disturbing part of my conscious mind screams the word ‘LIE’.

The ugly truth is that we’ve not been progressing that well. The marker for forty thousand words lies over the next ridge, but we can’t get there because we keep getting interrupted by monstrous trivialities.

This afternoon, barely had I poured myself a glass of a fine Dalmore 12 year old whisky before the phone began to ring.

‘Tell him I’ve taken a gunshot wound to the gut,’ I shouted, hoping that My Man would field the call. But the damn fool had a finger trapped between the Q and the W and the phone continued to wail like a banshee on the unmarried mother’s winter fuel allowance.

I picked up the Bakelite in no fair mood.

‘I hope you have medical insurance,’ I growled into the mouthpiece.

Turns out they did. It was a journalist from the local rag who wanted to break up all their endless advertisements for patio doors, second hand prams, and part-exchanged Fiats with an opinion piece about blogs and blogging. And given I was the most famous denizen of the web to be found in C---- N----, they no doubt thought they’d pester me about this story that’s already being hacked to pieces around the blogosphere about Tim Toulmin of the Press Complaints Commission who has been bending everybody’s ear about regulating the British blogosphere.

What, asked the local hack, is my opinion?

Well, I took a sip of the whisky, not able to restrain myself another moment given I get the shakes whenever I forego wine with lunch, and I told him quite unequivocally that I was all for imposing a bit of martial law on these blogging types. These underfed half-human cyborgs need some regulation before they transform completely into a single unholy organism of memes and foul mouthed rants.

It appears to me that the whole thing has become overrun by overly sentimental types. North, South, East, and West: bloggers come streaming like barbarian hoards hot with opinion pieces in four hundred words or less. Well, no more, I say. The internet was created by an Englishman and a double-barrelled Englishman at that. I don’t know the chap but I’d guess that if you asked him, Tim Berners-Lee would say that he created the internet in order to further the great English qualities of respect, balance, good manners, and dare one add, a proper regard for the law.

The problem with these blogs, as they stand, is that too many people are born missing the vital fleshy organ that goes between the brain and the fingers. It’s that magical piece of wise meat that tells you whether you’re making any damn sense. 'A Tory is born not made', runs the old axiom and it is true because it is precisely this Tory flap of skin that’s missing from your average Lib Dem and is found in excess in many UKIP candidates.

What we need is an etiquette for the British part of the web that keeps these unsound sorts in their place and makes sure that the rest of us collectively keep in step and present a united front to the world that so wants to crush our spirits. I keep saying I’ll do a blog roundup one of these days, and when I do, you’ll see the sort of hard nosed, spit on your shoes journalism I want to champion. The rest of them can climb into the handcart to hell and I’ll be more than happy to help push it down the slippery slope.

‘Are you sure you want to go into print with this stuff?’ asked the journo when I’d finished my speech. I looked to my hand and realised the glass was empty. The damn cad must have been at the malt even as I was doing his job for him.

‘You bacchanal devil!’ I cried, throwing down the phone and ripping the cabling from the wall.

I turned to My Man who had finally managed to unwedge his finger without having to saw through the bone.

‘Onward,’ I cried, picking up the riding crop. ’We hit 40,000 words today and we won’t even be stopping for the devil himself!’