Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

Sorry, several days seem to have passed since my last post, despite my good intentions.

I did try writing yesterday but I had left it too late and was too tired to write. It didn’t stop me spending an hour trying but by the end I had written nothing worth reading.  It’s my own fault. I can still function after midnight if I know what I am doing, but if I just start writing and see where it goes, it rarely goes anywhere useful. I just ramble. Fortunately I usually mange to spot when that is happening and delete it. Yes, about 500 words were wasted, but as I’ve observed before – words are cheap and plentiful and can be deleted without major trauma. I deleted 500 words last night, I will save a few of them and write another post.

However, the good news is that my stats have spiked (he said sarcastically). This has happened several times recently. My month will run along with about 30 visitors a day and 10 or so comments. Then it will suddenly come to life  In the last three months I have had three spikes in stats with a couple of thousand views in a day. Strangely, it’s never accompanied by a rise in comments or likes. In fact yesterday’s spike in visitors was accompanied by poorer than average figures for likes and comments.

Pied Wagtail at Donna Nook nature reserve.

This where the small hours effect takes over. I then suggest that this is WP trying to make me think my stats really reflect something useful, then I move on to suggesting it is possibly a sign of rogue computer power as AI tries to take over the world, or even the US government tracking down enemies of the State by scanning social media. The abyss of internet politics then beckons and I begin to spiral out of control.

There are no real government conspiracies, I tell myself, as governments are generally incapable of organising themselves in a unified way. Even old-style Communist regimes had to have periodic culls to preserve the facade of unity.  More open systems, where you swap between parties, would be incapable of keeping a conspiracy together. I refer here, to normal governments, the current US government, if it had an inkling that Democrats had ever covered up an alien landing or the existence of primitive hairy creatures living on mountains, would be right on it. The former would be deported as illegal immigrants and the latter would be quickly registered as Republican voters.

And that, coming dangerously near to the world of politics, is where I am going to stop.

Arnot Hill Park, Arnold, Nottingham

Pictures are, in the main, from my favourite duck pond in December 2018.