The Backstory

Welcome to this blog of mine- founded on the thirteenth of December, 2007. Unlucky for some, but then again this was started on a whim after a lengthy MSN discussion with the founder of I Rant, Therefore I Am, that most delicious of blogs with a good smattering of sarcasm and gratuitous irony, as any good blogger should have.
After reading Salaam Pax’s The Baghdad Blog, I began to get interested in Blogging, and this interest increased after seeing Cox & Forkum’s blogger cartoon. Not that I understood what little humour the cartoon contained, but maybe I will after a few good old rants  musings here. This blog was also started in order to help me improve my writing skills- the more I write, the more I hope them to improve. And what better a way to do that than in a blog? Especially if I want to start writing for a magazine or write short stories or articles of my own one day in the far off future, which approaches uncomfortably quickly.
The closest I came to founding a blog before this one was a piecemeal piece of work called The Vole. I decided then that surrealism probably wasn’t the blogsphere’s audience’s cup of tea, coffee, or cocoa (whatever be their poison) and after some hesitation started this slightly less piecemeal blog.
I also haven’t categorised my posts for the reason that categories would hinder my train of thought whilst letting off the steam of my blog posts, thereby defeating the purpose of writing one- that is, for me anyway.
I remember during one of the readings given by Linton Kwesi Johnson, celebrated Jamaican-British poet and God among us men the response he gave to the question ‘what advice do you give to the youth of today?’. Linton replied simply ‘read, read, and read again’. Probably one of the best quotes I can think of- that, and Oscar Wilde’s ‘give a man a mask and he’ll tell you the truth’. I suppose the latter quote means I’m incapable of lying here through the mask of a blog
Beside me I have an unassuming notebook in which I record every book I read, when I finished them, and what I thought of the experience of reading them. Some of the last two books I’ve read are George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Adam LeBor’s City of Oranges- Arabs and Jews in Jaffa. I’m usually very affected when I read something, so these last two books must have led me to become a militant Zionist Socialist, if such a thing exists. Probably writing a blog will be a sobering experience for me- like another one of my hobbies, debating, I suppose a blog will help me more by revealing the points of view of others to me. Anyway, pretentious babble aside, it’ll be Hannukah/Christmas soon, when mulled wine and lebkuchen will take precedence over managing this blog. I’ll try to keep updating every wednesday and weekend, but then again, chance doesn’t dictate that interesting events around the world happen on those days, so I’ll probably break that neat little rule at some point in the future and type, type, type away.
Mehmet XII/ M.S Edwards