Sports Calendar

Wednesday: I received seven comments on yesterday’s blog and feel rather pleased, even though one of those was from the site editor and most of the rest were anonymous and look suspiciously like the work of colleagues with not enough to do.

Time to explore the 20six community. The editors of the host site regularly pick out the more interesting blogs and also keep a running record of who has recently updated their blog. There is a lot of tedious stuff; the anticipated mundane ramblings and exhaustive accounts of very ordinary days. A lot of descriptions of long alcohol and drug-fuelled nights. Quite a few photo diaries. One, apparently the work of an attractive party girl who features in most of the shots, has persuaded male friends to display more naked tumescence than you might be looking for. An American virgin in his mid-twenties, calling himself “Lonely Boy”, documents his tours of topless bars and his quest for a woman who will sleep with him.

Many bloggers, clearly aware that the wider world is likely to be scathing of their efforts, seek refuge in irony. At least one hopes it is irony. Someone called “mmm”, who complains about her boyfriend while lusting after another friend, calls her blog “the endless musings of a paranoid peroxide blonde”. Another has the user name “mynameinlights — committing social suicide since May 2003”.

I post an item on my blog asking why so many people are anonymous and strike up an e-mail conversation with someone called SaraSplitsInfinitives. Sara’s blog is a witty and devastating chronicle of office life in which her male colleagues are the victims of particularly savage satire. Of one boss she writes: “When cornered by any minion he exhibits a strange nervous tic. He slumps back in his seat and carefully stretches his tie out to cover his genitals.”

She says she has changed all the names, but when she showed the blog to two female colleagues they recognised the characters immediately. “One was visibly shocked at what I’d written, almost speechless.”

She likes blogging because she works in a stuffy environment — it sounds like a City or law firm — where she appears calm under pressure. “Except that really I’m not. I’m a seething mass of bile and bitterness! Hence the blog.

“Yes, most blogs are tedious, pretentious or just uninvolving, but there are surprisingly many which remind us that the world is rather more bizarre and interesting than we know.” Her own includes a reference to a “sous-la-table experience” with a government minister. When pressed on this, she says it was years ago, before the man in question, “whose predatory reputation was well known”, was in Government.

Thursday: A colleague e-mails to say that my blog is “a slightly sad little site — you don’t seem to have much to say for yourself”.

But for all my workmates’ mockery, there is a great deal of interest in what I am doing, and in one or two cases I would say this interest borders on jealousy, or at least alarm that I might be getting in ahead of them in a medium with boundless scope for self-promotion. After all, whoever got instant feedback from the public on anything they wrote for a newspaper? There is also much scathing comment about the picture of me on my blog: journalists hate to see another journalist getting a photo byline, wherever it is.

The people at 20six suggest that we meet up, in the flesh, at Soho House in Central London. This sounds very un-bloggery and eventually we compromise and Azeem Azhar, the managing director, and I talk on the phone.

“The crap issue is really important,” he says. He admits that a lot of blogs are “not going to win the Pulitzer Prize. But if you trawl around the street and listen to people chatting, a lot of what they say sounds very bad. Most conversations are rubbish if judged that way.” The great virtue of a blog is that “someone is expressing themself” and that can only be a good thing.

He says that blogging is “the blurring of the private and public spheres. It allows people to talk about things that they might otherwise find hard to talk about. They can share and gain emotional support and laugh in ways that they might not if they identified themselves.”