I’ve been tagged by Brett Holman of the excellent Airminded blog.

This tagging, so far as I can make out, is a sort of chain-letter thing, sending a meme around blogland, where people write five things about themselves,and then tag some other good blogs, in the hope that they’ll carry on the chain.

What five things? I gather it started off as five things about yourself, and by the time it got to Allan the meme had warped into five reasons for blogging. Since Allan wrote five reasons for academic blogging that I thoroughly agree with and can’t better, I thought I’d change it some more. So I’m writing five things I’ve discovered I like about blogging that I’d not thought of as benefits before I started.

And I’m taking the thread away from historians to tag these three good blogs about books (mostly): Only 2 Rs; Sassymonkey reads; and BlogLily. I don’t know whether or not they’ll be interested in carrying on the chain, but I like their blogs.

So – my five things…

1. Contacts. When I began, I hoped I’d make contact with others studying in the same field, and I have. What I didn’t predict was that I’d be contacted by descendants of the novelists I write about. So far I’ve heard from two grandsons and a great-niece. Are there any more out there?

2. Ranting. Of course blogs are really about the joy of ranting. I’ve been fairly disciplined in keeping my blog moreor lesson the subject of Great War Fiction, though stretching it to cover related subjects when I felt like it. So I have kept clear of the subjects that really make me grumpy, like the vast amounts of money being wasted on the 2012 Olympics, or the negative attitude of one or two of the bus drivers on the X6 bus route to Oxford, or the price of Innocent Smoothies in station buffets. On the other hand, I have allowed myself the occasional rant about such subjects as the NationalTheatre’s lack of interest in the English theatrical heritage, and I feel all the better for it.

3 Discovering what people are interested in. The good folk at WordPress supply dialy information about the search engine terms that people have entered to find your blog. Here’s what people have Googled today,together with the number of times those search terms have resulted in someone accessing my site:

“yap films” somme	4
naughty julie	3
Modernism and the war	2
“Simon Called Peter” 1923	2
Somerset Maugham “Theatre”	1
war fiction	1
white feather campaign	1
repression + literature + before 1800	1
australian poems of mateship and surviva	1
war painted faces	1
“supreme war council”	1
Great War PowerPoint Design template	1
poetry about mateship	1
shell shock treatment ww1	1
what is the history behind the white fea	1
“Medal without bar” blaker	1
Frederic Manning and Her Privates We and	1
private harry farr memoir	1
prohack	1
T.S ELiot’s poem about war	1
“George Simmers”	1
What the victorians wore	1
“great war fiction”	1
mrs dalloway – post war england	1
ww1 chanson de craonne	1
the meaning of a white feather	1

Quite a good range for a single day, I think. “Naughty Julie” is the most common term that is used to Google me, which is sad in a way. The people who type it in are looking for a very rude site indeed, and most must be disappointed when they find they’ve landed up here. I like to think, though, that at least one or two have lingered to discover more about Richard Blaker or Rose Macaulay, gradually gaining in knowledge even as they lose tumescence.

4. Keeping it going. I’m a bit amazed with myself for keeping going since May without major breaks. When I’ve tried to keep diaries before they usually petered out round about Jan 4th. When I was a teacher I was by no means known for the up-to-dateness of my record book. But I’ve kept this going so far. And I’m rather chuffed with myself.

5. Displacement activity At this very moment I should be hunting up a Richard Blaker reference that is lost somewhere in the jungle of my notes. But instead I blog…