Nickel Blogs - 21 years of going against the grain

Developing a life of views

It would appear even to me that my blog has developed some unintended characteristics, but these have become some of the elements that give context to what I write.

For instance, one regularly occurring theme is the Thought Picnic which began just like when the blog began, in a hotel room on one of my travels. I was in Antwerp during my news junkie days when another of those Israeli-Palestinian conflicts was in the news.

The world news channels gave an Israeli representative a global platform to which she relayed to my unmistakable hearing, “We have to tell the world our truth.” Not the truth, but their version of the truth, which in its narrative was as far from the truth as the opposite cardinal points of the compass were from each other.

I found myself carted away in my mind’s eye on a picnic into a wilderness left to my thoughts to contemplate the seemingly intractable issues of the world around me. Indeed, I wander away in thought, into things that seem silly or complex. Those who have wondered what goes on in my head want to venture in there as I warn them it is probably no place for the sane.

Becoming an alien to the contemporary

You might also wonder why I have a theme titled Essential Snobbery 101; it is hardly about snobbery but a reflection on how norms have changed over time that some of us despite adaptations still find certain attitudes and behaviours unbelievably strange as to wonder if we have been visited by an alien civilisation.

There are themes dotted around this blog of 21 years, they are informed by perspectives and outlooks that might differ from how people would generally view things. There is a surfeit of commentary on the issues of the day, and where I have an opinion, I dare say it is rarely on the well-trodden ground of thought.

Challenging the orthodoxy brings conflict and controversy, however, celebrating independent thinking should never go out of fashion. Even when I was involved in syndication, remaining unaffiliated and so not beholden to a corporate policy mattered more to me than gaining a wider audience.