As I Please...

It has been quite a while since I wrote anything here, but this is not because I have not been writing: I have spent the time finishing off a doctoral thesis on postwar Birmingham dubbed ‘Building Slums in the Sky’. As a result I now have a new title to accompany the new liver I received in 2022.

This all achieved, I now have the space for more relaxed, casual writing again. But what should I write about? After being through so much, what am I now interested in? It might sound trite, but as the answer is essentially ‘life’, to an extent the answer is also ‘everything’, and I like the idea of writing about whatever I feel like, without any particular limitations and with no need to worry about themes or fields. ‘As I Please’ was, of course, the title of Orwell’s gloriously eclectic Tribune column of the mid 1940s, and it is as fine a model as one could ever hope to find.