You Say Tomato

I don't think Peter Preston would think much of blogging, or at least not the kind of personal blogging I most enjoy reading. His observations about journal-keepers--"a ludicrous tribe" he calls them--pertain just as well to perbloggers.

There is the black spot of the congenital diarist. There's the obsession with self and justification which flows instantaneously. There's the therapy of a solitary nocturnal monologue co-joined with the belief that this political life has such moment that it's worth the chronicling in the midst of battle. ...

Such things set the diarist apart.