What’s the point of blogging? Only a tiny handful of people read the posts of obscure academics like me. To be fair, a large audience was not what I expected, or even wanted, when I began this blog ten years ago. Its purpose was simply self-indulgence; I needed to write, and still enjoy reading what I have written back to myself. (Isn’t that narcissistic?) Admittedly, it would be nice if I could influence opinion on certain historical and political matters; but that tiny and even unlikely degree of influence is more likely to come from my books. Even there, I’ve never written for wealth or for fame, and never bothered much about either; which is probably partly why I’ve accrued neither in the course of my career.

Which must now be nearing its end. Elderly, infirm, tired, world-weary and forgetful, I’ve come to realise that I can no longer contribute significantly to the sum of human knowledge, even in my small corner of the academic wood. I still have the old urge to write, part of the ‘creative’ imperative that I believe is shared by nearly every human being (just look at their gardens), and which may even distinguish us as a species; but no longer the time, energy or enthusiasm to put the effort – the research – into writing anything original or valuable. So my days as a historian are – well – history. I can just about live with that, in my declining years.

To help me live with it, however, I’m presently exploring ways of extending my writing life without involving the preliminary work that has preceded all my previous efforts. I’ve had three specific ideas, and indeed have written short introductions for each of them. Here they are. All of them broke down after about a quarter of a page of E4. You’ll see why.

(1) Autobiography. That would start dramatically (I was born, backwards, in the middle of Hitler’s London Blitz), but would then peter out into a kind of middle-class normality. I doubt whether anyone – not even my children, perhaps – would be interested in the ‘history of a nobody’; which in any case has been done already – by George and Weedon Grossmith in 1887, to be precise – and would be too boring, because I know it all, for me to sustain any enthusiasm for writing it. In any case it seems a rather egotistical thing to do. My memories of school, Cambridge and the other universities I’ve worked in, British, American and Australian, and my experience of living in Sweden, won’t add much to what is already known about those places generally; and certain more personal aspects of my life – like my boyhood, early relationships with girls, marriage and parenting – I’d rather keep quiet about. It’s bad enough having lived an uneventful and unimportant life; to have to write about it – to live it again, in other words – would merely compound the pain and embarrassment.

(2) I then had the idea of writing a ‘history of the British empire’ for children; rather like Lady Callcott’s notorious Little Arthur’s History of England (1835) – in its simplicity, that is, and not of course its chauvinism. Of course I already have the knowledge for that. The problem with it, however, was that I found it impossible to probe deeply enough into the minds of children to be able to translate fairly complex ideas into forms they could relate to. Perhaps I should have tackled this when I was reading bed-time stories to ten year-olds of my own. This is sad; not least because we have an artist neighbour and friend here in Stockholm who could illustrate the book brilliantly. Children’s authors are usually a special breed; and more suited to imaginative literature than to non-fiction.

(3) My third idea, a long-fermenting one, was to use my already detailed knowledge of late Victorian and early Edwardian police, imperial and architectural history, to write a novel; a detective thriller set around that time, referencing real historical figures and events, but with a totally fictional plot. It’s the plot that is still stumping me. (I remember my otherwise inspirational English master at school telling me: ‘The trouble with you, Bernard, is that you have no imagination.’ That’s probably why I read History at university rather than English literature, as he had hoped.) The single idea I’ve had for the novel is based on a Special Branch detective’s report I unearthed on the movements of Karl Marx, dated a couple of years after he was supposedly dead and buried. There’s also a cricket connection here. (The first leader of the first overtly Marxist party in Britain was a Sussex County Cricketer. He’s in Wisden.) Here, then, is the plot. – Marx doesn’t die, but climbs out of his grave in Highgate Cemetery, joins Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, and becomes WG Grace. They both had bushy beards, after all. – No? Anyway, the dates are wrong. And the one thing we historians can’t mess around with is chronology.

Those are my thoughts currently. I may take one or two of them up again. In the meantime, I’m giving up blogging about the events of this mad, mad time; madder even, I feel – but comparable in some ways: dictators, incipient Fascism – to the situation into which I was born. I may return to it in the lead-up to the next British general election. We’ll see.