When I got an email from the London Press Club to say that I had been shortlisted in their annual awards I got very excited. I knew Nick Ferrari had won Broadcaster of the Year last year at the same awards, so I thought, wow, that’s quite an accolade. However, I hadn’t been shortlisted for Broadcaster of the Year, I had been shortlisted for Blog of the Year. Shurely shome mishtake. I scratched my head in slight bemusement.
As you will know, my blogging since 2010 has been intermittent to say the least, although admittedly as the election approaches I have tried to up my game a bit. But even I would be hard pressed to say that my blogging output has been as high profile or maybe as influential as it was between 2005 and 2010. But hey, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth.
So off I trotted to Stationers’ Hall near St Pauls to the London Press Club Award lunch. It was quite a star studded audience, in that anyone who’s anyone in newspapers was there, including most newspaper editors.
The even started with Andrew Lloyd Webber being given the Londoner of the Year awards and then we had a speech from the Director General of MI5 Andrew Cargill. We were told we were to treat it as a confidential briefing, so if I told you anything he said I’d obviously have to kill you. So I won’t.
And then it was onto the awards. I don’t know about you but on those occasions I have ever been shortlisted for an award, I adopt a split personality. Of course I want to win. I’d be inhuman if I didn’t. But there’s also a big part of me that thinks “No, please let it be someone else” as the thought of making a duff acceptance speech fills me with horror.
I was up against Sarah Ditum and David Hepworth. For some reason I kind of guessed I was going to win. I have no idea why, call it instinct, I suppose. Sorry if that sounds arrogant, it isn’t meant to be as there have been plenty of occasions when I have been shortlisted and guessed I wasn’t going to win. And I was right then too!
So what does it all mean? Well, it has made me think about what I do with this blog and whether I should try to up my game a bit. I am going to try. I will never go back to the good old days when I blogged several times a day, but I’m going to try to blog a bit more often. But I’ll only do it when I have got something to say. I gave up the old blog at the end of 2010 because I hadn’t got the time to keep up the volume that people had come to expect.
In 2015 Twitter has taken over the kind of short-form blogging I used to do. My articles on this site are a lot longer than they used to be on the old blog. I’m sure there is a happy medium somewhere.
Anyway, I hope you continue to enjoy what I do on here.
