My kind of blog: a drawback. Followed by a short joke to show just how cheerful we Brits are in adversity. Cue cheerful whistling.

There are blogs by BBC journalists, blogs by whacky wannabe backwoodsmen, highly artificial blogs by companies who just want to sell you financial ‘products’ and this kind of semi-personal blog. I know I have four readers, although how often they tune in I don’t know. The trouble is that knowing one is read and having a vague acquaintance with one’s readers is rather inhibiting. I find I have painted myself into a corner and have now somehow restricted myself in these entries to listing the cars I have owned and various middlebrow pseudo-intellectual musings, but I no longer feel I can write anything more personal.
That was the problem earlier on today. I had a row with my wife (who drives me up the wall — here I’ll restrict myself to the unchivalrous comment that she is not the sharpest blade in the box and possesses more half-understood, undigested knowledge about this, that and t’other than is, I think, entirely legal) and felt tempted to record one or two choice comments on marriage, mine in particular and the institution in general. But I couldn’t. And that inhibition is beginning to piss me off a little. The one solution is to start a second, more anonymous blog but — well, even that seems rather pointless. And that, unfortunately, is all I can say on the matter.

Q. What do the donkeys get for lunch on Blackpool beach?

A. Half-an-hour, same as everyone else.