I spent a fair bit of last week apologising. Firstly to Manuel for my original reply to his post on online discussion, and secondly to anybody who had read (or even cited) my reply only for me to go and completely rewrite it.

(I should make it clear that Manuel never asked me to edit or remove the post.)

So what did we learn from all this, Leon?

Firstly, to be more direct about what I mean, and to spend a bit more time getting the tone and voice right. I stand by what I said about Manuel’s post, but not the way I said it.

I should have gone down one of two routes. Either out and out disagreed and taken issue with him, or written a point-to-the-post-and-use-it-as-a-prompt approach. Instead, I took a sort of middle path.

The second route would have been best as Manuel doesn’t hold what I’m guessing he means by the “wrong” opinions, even if I don’t agree with his straw man argument, or the idea that the “good” side of an argument will alienate a kind of passive, silent majority.

Anyway, as Manuel notes, we exchanged some interesting emails and all’s well now.

Secondly, I need to return to some basic blogging ethics. I have always been cavalier with this blog’s design (such as it is), but that’s sometimes extended to the content. As I’ve discussed before, I’ve not had any qualms editing – or even altering – posts after publishing them.

I have quite an odd relationship with This day’s portion. You’d think after banging away at it for 17 years it would be precious to me, but in some ways I feel it’s quite temporary, something I could take down and happily carry on with my life. This is linked to my stubbornly persistent belief that no-one reads it, even when I get emails about something I’ve written, or I read someone else’s response.

So despite pouring a lot of my energy into this blog, it seems I don’t view it as a canonical, corpus of work. I value the process of writing and publishing, but not the archive it creates. Don’t get me wrong, if I did switch the site off, I’d keep a copy of all the posts, but their value lies in how they aid meaning, a store of memories and thoughts I can evoke simply through linking.

Truly, we don’t deserve rock and roll the web.

Ultimately, this is a selfish view of blogging. Even if we have no readers, we can only write for an audience, and a post implies a contract between writer and reader, the first clause of which is that the rug isn’t pulled away from the reader a matter of hours after reading, or, worse still, they took the time to write a response. Apart from how rude and disrespectful that makes me, it’s also the way chaos lies.

So this is my guarantee (I know, that sounds like Kier Starmer) I won’t rewrite posts in the future. Edit for clarity, yes, or even delete if I have to, but not completely change.