Purged

I've now finished my purge of posts that didn't reflect my current interests and ways of thinking.

The cull has been fairly light for the most recent years: 535 out of the 659 posts published in 2015 onward are still there, which is 81% of them.

But of course I've deleted everything before 2015. So that's really 535 posts remaining out of 1,966 published since the very beginning in February 2009. And sadly, that means overall only 27% have survived - call it a quarter - representing a fairly severe erasure of past posts.

But it had to be done. There was so much stuff that applied then but not now, and I didn't want new readers to delve into a bloated canon and find old posts that might puzzle them, and encourage them to seek answers from me. At one time, I'd oblige with alacrity. But I've grown tired of explaining myself. Nostalgic pieces aside, I want to look to the future, not backwards, and concentrate the attention of readers onto present-day interests and adventures.

What's left constitutes a slightly quirky 'holiday and special interest' blog that strays into current affairs and other subjects, including my personal and family history. I am not going to radically alter that, and I will leave the writing style unchanged.

I'm sorry if a few of your favourite posts have vanished. And their deletion means the comments have disappeared too, some of which were doubtless the product of long and careful consideration. I do have a complete private archive of all the posts I ever wrote, and some of the best-written or kindest comments have been copied with them; but surely most readers' comments have been lost forever. A pity.

Mind you, if many of the nicest comments have gone, so have most of the not-so-nice ones. Some of the responses I got in the period 2009 to 2012 were perversely argumentative, and I am glad to be rid of them. I was also on occasion unwisely provocative myself, and I can recall some silly, embarrassing posts that generated a stern reaction I well merited. These too have now thankfully passed into oblivion.