Day 495: I Am Off Trend

Yesterday, when someone asked me (in tones of wonderment), "How did you meet your CANADIAN boyfriend when you are FROM LONDON?" (expecting me to say 'on the internet loveline sites' or 'from a Desperate Canadian Man Shop' or 'at a cockring exchange party*'), I said "in Canterbury" then changed the subject.

I did not want to tell them that we had met through my blog. I didn't want to tell them that I had a blog at all. It has been like this for some months; if ever I admit to it, I talk about it in the same tones that you would use if you were admitting to labial plastic surgery.

It seems that people find it harder to receive the news that I have a blog than I do to give it. They make the sort of face they'd make if you were showing them the features on your new mobile phone or telling them about "Web 2.0" or "the long tail", or seriously recommending Blink by Mr Gladwell like it is the Bible.**

The people who sneer the most are the people who work in advertising and marketing, or 'trend hunters'; the sort of people who get money for talking about trends and consumers and strategies without ever leaving their office in Soho or watching commercial television.

They write about 'blogging' with as much authority as they write about people who live in council houses and drink Diamond White and like Daniel O'Donnell, which must be quite hard when you earn $150,000 a year and live in a nice apartment and can use words like "dissonance" accurately.

Some of them write blogs, too; blogs about marketing and advertising, or blogs about trends, or how to spot trends, or the impact of blogging on the dissonance of trends. But they don't read your blog, or my blog; they just write about the idea of them, and have many theories about what sort of person you are (they cannot imagine me, not even if they try).

I have had it with my blog. I want to give it up because having a blog isn't interesting at parties anymore, and I do not like caring that my stats are going down every day. But more to the point because I work in advertising and get paid money for talking about trends and consumers and people (without ever leaving my lovely office or lovely house and talking to actual people), I know that blogging is, like, over.

Everything now is Web 6.0 and dissonance and mashed up culture and Premiumisation; two years ago it was New Traditionalism and something to do with some bloke in Portland, and three years ago it was all about - well, I can't remember; it's about something else now, and I'm thinking about that instead.

But then there are the facts! I do not like facts, for they have a habit of reminding you who you actually are, and not who you are in your head (when at imaginary parties). I moved to Canada because of this blog. I have met nice people through it (and some bloke in Newcastle); been asked for my opinion about things I know nothing about by very clever people because of it; learnt weird things, been sent stuff and because of it been treated kindly and with great generosity by people I will probably never meet.

But all of that is sentimental claptrap (even if some of it has meant emigrating to another country). The sad truth is that even if no-one else is reading it, writing this web-blog still amuses me greatly, and long as I still find it funny (despite the fact that no-one else does), I shall carry on regardless. And if things get really desperate, I shall invent a trend about the dissonance of blogging and sell it to someone for $150,000.



* I do not recommend them!!!

** Summary of the book: "Often your instinct is right. Trust it!" (You may now send me $30 as you have not had to buy the book to find that out for yourself.)