Mea Culpa

 

The more attentive of you may have noticed that, apart from the odd pithy comment in relation to either the terrible situation in Ukraine and/or the Tory government, on my TravellinBob Facebook account and This World,This Life FB page, I've not written anything - or at least posted anything here - since the end of March.  So I thought as the chilly and damp Polish spring gives way to a (hopefully) hot and sunny Polish summer this weekend, I should explain myself.

First up, there have been some technical issues on the Blogger platform I use for this and, so far, I've not been able to fix them.  The View Count function seems to have stopped working, for a start, and when I log off I get a message saying that the system has been unable to comply with my request please try later (I'm paraphrasing there, but you get the gist I'm sure) then logs me off anyway......  At least, I think it does, on the basis that if I come back to the site later (be it after a minute, an hour, a day or longer) I have to log in again.  I've reached out to the Blogger Community - which is as close as you get to a Help Desk on the platform - to see if anyone has any bright ideas and checked and rechecked all my Settings, but to no avail - the silence, as they say, is deafening.  I can still post stuff, so it's not completely dead, but I have no idea who (if anyone) is reading it - there are no Comments appearing or coming through to give me even the slightest clue.  I don't get that much feedback in any case -  there is one reader who has given at least one Comment to every Post I've published, but even those have dried up.  More than anything, for my part, it's disheartening......

But mainly, I haven't written anything because I've found it next to impossible to find anything to write about.  Messrs Putin and Johnson have dominated the news cycle that typically feeds my creative juices to such an extent - and in such bloody depressing ways! - that for me at least it's drowned everything else out.

The aim has always been for me to entertain with this stuff, and to be honest I can't really find any entertainment in writing about a psychopathic Russian serial killer who seems intent on starting World War 3, and Britain's Worst Ever Prime Minister, a serial liar intent only on advancing himself (and his sycophantic camp followers) and who clearly doesn't believe the laws his own Government has passed  apply to themselves.  These are strange times we live in......

My travel (the original raison d'etre for the blog) has all but ceased, because there are so many other things to spend my pension on; it's taking me forever to read any book longer than about 5 pages because since recovering from Covid my attention span has shrunk to teenage levels and the odd book review would now take me at least 6 months to get to; and even sport - football, F1 and especially cricket - doesn't float my boat in the way it used to.  The pandemic, despite popular beliefs, has NOT ended, it's still going on as events in and around Shanghai right now clearly show, and the worst effects of Brexit are just beginning to manifest themselves, but are masked by the global economic issues caused by Covid....but those topics are nearly (but not quite) as depressing as the War and the Nasty Party.

So there we go....... I'm at a bit of loss as to what to do next.  When it flows, I still enjoying writing this Blog, but because I get no feedback I have no idea whether anyone reads the damned thing, never mind enjoys doing so.  For the time being, at least, I'll carry on writing it - and hoping that the world changes during these summer months and I start finding stuff that's interesting enough to share with you (and not depressing enough to drive us all over the edge....).

Finally, if anyone of you does read this, at least TRY and let me know what you think! Try posting a Comment in the space provided under this Post, or use the Contact Form to send me an email with your views - neither cost a penny and only take a couple of minutes, and it would help me a lot.  

In the meantime, stay safe, all, and stay healthy.......and stay happy!