The blogger Robert Birming promotes and writes about blogging and sometimes sets challenges for bloggers to respond to. His latest one is called 'Knowember' where you post (in November) in response to 4 prompts about yourself and your blogging. Then he lists the posts so bloggers (and their readers) can get to know each other and their blogs. I don't usually do such challenges when I see them but decided to respond to this one. I've read some of the 'Knowember' posts by other bloggers and discovered some really great ones - check them out, Chloe for example.
Robert's 4 prompts are:
1. A photo
2. Name or nickname
3. Where in the world I blog from
4. What is my blog mostly about
A photo
The photo is a picture of me that my partner painted when I was asleep on the settee at home. She was kind enough to flatter me - my hairline is receding more than that, and my hair is more white. The cat is Yul who joined me as a kitten in 2009 when I lived alone. She actually came from someone down my street so she's always lived in the same road. Now she's an old lady of 17. She's tiny and brown with ginger patches. I have another cat, black and white, Sidney, also 17. She's originally from Hackney in London. The view from the window isn't the real one - the real one would be a tree in my back garden and houses opposite. The buildings in the painting are actually from an Edward Hopper painting, Morning Sun.
Name or nickname
My name is Luke. I don't really have a nickname but at school people used to call me 'Skywalker'. In the UK Luke was a rare name when I was a kid so it was a real novelty and the only other Luke people knew of was Luke Skywalker. I think in places like the US and France, Luke (or Luc) was more common. Nowadays Luke is very common in the UK and I think some years has been in the top 10 most used names for new male babies.
My first name is actually Anthony but I was always called by my middle name Luke. I've given up correcting it when people in official capacities call me Anthony. Nowadays I just go with it. My parents say they didn't call me Luke Anthony (in that order) because they thought it sounded too much like the Roman general Mark Anthony. But, as if most people would automatically make that connection when they heard 'Luke Anthony' and whether it would matter. There must be some other story behind the sequence of names. I've asked my parents and they stick to the unlikely Mark Anthony line. I won't find out more now as my dad is no longer with us and my mum has dementia.
I called my blog 'Luke's Notes'. I chose the title very quickly. I just wanted it to sound unpretentious and like notes rather than anything more. Although I gave the name of the blog very little thought, it just came automatically, I'm still happy with it.
Where in the world I blog from
I mostly blog from my home in Brighton in the UK. Brighton is on the south coast by the sea about 50 miles down from London. I love living by the sea, with its stony beach. It, and the sound of seagulls, still give me a thrill. To people outside the UK who didn't know where Brighton is I used to say 'near London' but Americans would respond with 'everywhere in Britain is near London'! I've lived here since 1987 when I moved from London aged 23 while I was doing my PhD at London University. Even though I've lived here most of my life I don't think of myself as a Brightonian, not having been born and brought up here, as my kids were. Beforehand I lived in Kenya, Zambia, Reading, Buckinghamshire, York, and London. I had mixed feelings about Brighton for a long time. Not because it's not nice, it is. But I think partly because Brightonians can be a bit smug about the place and I preferred bigger more urban places like London. Brighton feels quite middle class sometimes, but it actually isn't especially in terms of demography. Over the years I've come to love the city more, especially when seen through the eyes of people who've come here from elsewhere. It's a small city so you can walk, cycle, or bus everywhere quickly. It has the sea and a pier. The amazing Pavilion was built for Prince George as a getaway home: outside it's Indian in appearance and inside the decor is Chinese. There is the Dome which is an arts venue that most towns this small would not have. I see something there most months. People are sick of me telling them the Dome is where Abba won the 1974 Eurovision contest. There is great urban art. Brighton has some nice boutiquey shopping streets - shops are not my kind of thing at all but these lanes are nice. There are loads of pubs and cafes; I really don't know how they manage to stay afloat given there are so many. It's a great place for kids and teenagers. There's a football club that I tried to support, but my heart is with Reading who I started watching when I was a kid and I just couldn't change.
When I moved to Brighton I think it had 3 Conservative MPs but now it's more left - the council shifts between Labour and Green and currently has one Green MP (in my area) and two Labour MPs. It started out as a fishing town and then became a centre of therapeutic bathing. It takes an hour to get to London by train which I love, so day trips to art galleries and museums and to see friends there are very easy. At the weekends it gets lots of trippers, mostly from London but is also becoming more of a tourist town for visitors from further afar. There's a second broken down pier which, though dilapidated, has become a distinctive beautiful thing. Actually, when I moved to Brighton this pier was all intact but too dangerous to walk on, so closed. One day what's left will disappear. There are lots of hotels including the very posh Grand. The Brighton and Hove conurbation (the two towns are effectively one now) has a population of about 300,000. When I moved here it was a (the?) global LGBT centre and still has a major Pride carnival every year. It's LGBT character is less unique than it was in the 1980s when I moved to the town, but it's still there. Brighton has two universities, one of which I worked at for 34 years, and a high proportion of young people. The mean age in my street, according to the census, is 21. Imagine how low it would be if I wasn't there keeping the average up. The census also shows it as a very unreligious town. It's average for the UK in terms of ethnic diversity but the diversity has grown while I've been here, partly because of Londoners moving down and because of migration. The central-ish area where I live is quite urban and more diverse than other parts of the town and many of the shops near me are run by Asian or Middle-Eastern workers. Brighton has a lot of homelessness, I think because people come here looking for cash-in-hand seasonal work. One thing I like about the city is that people can look very individual and different and in general (of course, there are exceptions) no-one bats an eyelid. You can get to the countryside quickly but although many Brightonians love the Sussex downs, they're not, for me, as dramatic and beautiful as the countryside in other places in the UK. There are some large amazing cemeteries near where I live - much visited by me during lockdowns and more generally
The room I blog from is a tiny one at the back of the house which is in a street of packed 3 storey Victorian terraced houses with small gardens. They were built around the turn of the 20th century. Many were built by the church and the deeds to my house say that dancing or the sale of alcohol are not allowed in it. I've kept to that. Apparently, where I live is one of the most densely populated areas in the UK outside some parts of London. The room is so small, I sit nearly with my back to the window which overlooks houses and gardens behind. The desk is tiny and my desktop computer sits on it. Around me are a bike, a boiler, shelves, books, piles of paper, a cat basket, children's toys, and more. During lockdown Zoom meetings my students became very familiar with the room, and some time later one sent me a picture she had drawn of me sitting in the room during online classes (I thought she was taking notes but, no, she was drawing!).
In terms of technology I blog from the Mataroa blog platform and just use their URL name and not any personal website name (custom domain as it is called). Mataroa is based on the Bear blog platform. I've posted on why I chose Mataroa. But it's mainly because it's very minimalist and so encourages you to just write and not get bogged down in appearances. It gives very little in the way of analytics about visits to your site so you can't get too preoccupied with whether people read your blog or not and where they've come from. I like all this, I just focus on writing for myself and don't worry too much about how much the posts are read other than just checking now and then to see if there have been any visits at all. My posts are usually quite long (you are still reading?!) so I'm fairly sure people who do visit usually don't read them all they way through. Again, I don't mind, I just write for myself and if people do read them that's a bonus rather than the main focus. Overall, I like Mataroa because it has some solid moral principles including but beyond privacy. One other is that there are really no cost obstacles to joining. I hope that Theodore, who runs Mataroa by himself, doesn't give it up.
What is my blog mostly about
I retired from being a university lecturer (in sociology) in 2024 and wanted to keep writing but in a less challenging and shorter way than I had with academic books and articles. So I started my blog, although I've never seen myself as a 'blogger', just someone who writes about things now and then. I began writing about themes I had studied as an academic - social alternatives, education, politics, etc and I wrote a few posts about my time working as an academic at Sussex University. I also post every year on books I've read that year and there are two series of posts running on music - one on my top albums of the year and one on my favourite tracks of all time, which I add to from time to time. I've also started a series on football world cups through my life and other football themes. Often the posts end up being quite autobiographical. Not everything on my blog is by me. I typed up my mum's diaries of her very interesting childhood and posted them, and one post is something my kids wrote about my dad. I've also posted on alternatives to big tech. I'm not a techie, these are more from a social and political angle. Of course, I've posted about blogging! There are some random other things, for instance on libraries or pessimism. I like to put lots of links in my posts, as you can see!
My blog posts are listed by topic here.