I last blogged on 18 January - that’s several weeks with no posts, the longest I’ve gone in years. My blog is my home page (well, one of them; I use Firefox so have several homepages at once), and for weeks now my face has looked accusingly at me from the screen as I hastily click the tab closed and go elsewhere.

Partly, it’s lack of inspiration: I’m still interested in the same things I was ever interested in, but don’t really see the need to write another post on abortion, another on equal pay, another on rape convictions, another on why the fathers’ rights movement are mainly misogynists - I’ve written all those posts, many times. Partly it’s not really feeling that I have anything unique to say: what is there to say on Hillary v Obama, MPs’ expenses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and sharia law that hasn’t already been said? Partly it’s because many of the things I want to say are said well by others - don paskini most often makes me think “I wish I’d written that!”, but there are others too. It’s also because what I can say on this blog is a little self-censored, because of what I do for a job, because of the experience of being ridiculed in the local paper just once too often, and because I feel like blogging less about my life (as opposed to my opinions) than I used to. Perhaps that’s about Facebook’s impact on me: I love having access to a constantly-updated feed of one-liners from my friends, and using Facebook status in that way reduces the need to blog about life.

So, I’m seriously re-evaluating the role of the blog. I still don’t want to write a councillor-blog - though that’s not because there isn’t anything going on in Rose Hill and Iffley at the moment! There is: the building work on the 200-odd new houses has started and the re-development will bring £500k into our community for facilities and services; our primary school is about to be fresh-started, hopefully with new buildings; our secondary is about to become an academy (the last set of school results there showed a really disappointing 11% of children getting five good GCSEs); we’re in the middle of an unexpected move of fifteen elderly couples and single people from council bungalows which are deteriorating faster than expected; we’re fighting to keep our local leisure centre open in the teeth of Lib Dem plans to close it. Maybe I’m not blogging because, as a councillor, I’ve never been this busy before. And we’ve local elections in less than three months, so blogging is competing with increasing canvassing and leafletting (not that that ever really stops), my full-time job, councillor duties and trying to get to the gym - no wonder it loses sometimes.