The Search for the Holy Grail

I’m proud  this last day of the year to present The Search for the Holy Grail – the 2018 posts – being the fourth annual collection of my blogposts but the first to emerge from a strenuous process of editing.

It was 2015 when I started the habit of publishing annual collections of these posts - although In Praise of Doubt – a blogger’s year cheated a bit by actually covering 15 months and therefore running it at 250 pages – a bit too much perhaps for the average reader. Most of the images I used for this first effort were from my collections of paintings and artefacts…

The Slaves’ Chorus was more manageable at 120 pages (including the Sceptic’s Glossary I had included the previous year) and it kept the focus of the images on my own collection.

Last year’s Common Endeavour covered 76 posts and 180 pages – with the images being – initially at any rate – more eclectic but, ultimately, petering out…

Why the title?

The very first little book I wrote (way back in 1977) was called The Search for Democracy; the first effort I made some 15 years ago to crystallise some of the key lessons from my organisational endeavours bore the title “The search for the Holy Grail”; and the visiting card I now use bears the epithet “explorer and aesthete” – so “searching and exploring – if not discovery” seem clearly to be part of who I am..….

What’s different

Until now, I have let the posts speak for themselves. I chose this year to start rereading and reflecting on them from about October and soon realised it might add a little coherence if I grouped posts with a common theme together. So some of the posts are not quite in the order in which they appeared….

This in turn inspired me to use, for the beginning of each section, the tables which I had started to use last year. The first column gives the title of the post – with the other compressing what I was trying to say into a few lines (a real challenge!)…… Most of my readership is not using English as their first language and such summaries seem therefore a useful endeavour 

What’s the same?

The blog is not a diary – it does not record what I do on a weekly basis – although events such as exhibitions, wine-tasting or trips do make the occasional appearance. I made two trips to Scotland this year – my first such visits since a wedding in 2012 – which didn’t feature in the posts but are covered here. The blog remains a record of more cerebral activities – of the thoughts sparked by books and general reading…

Key points

The year started with some advice for the Davos set; some deaths; and some Italian and German writers before returning to a subject which had occupied the blog in previous months – Reforming the State

Change, of one shape or form, was the dominant theme of this year’s posts – exactly half of them, not counting several posts on Brexit in the early part of the year.

But it was how ideas are conveyed that seemed to exercise me as much as the ideas themselves – with quite a few posts being devoted to examples of both good and bad writing as well as that of the future of the blog

This is the first year for a decade I have spent fully in Romania – so a few posts about the country figure in this year’s collection….

At one stage I thought the posts had dried up – for almost 3 months I lacked anything to spark inspiration. I realised some time ago that my mind/body was telling me something when this happened – but what exactly? When I was younger, I could blame stress – but this was high summer…..and in blessed Sirnea of the meadows and high peaks…

It’s true that I had just finished a challenging series of posts about “administrative reform” and the nature of the State – so I could be forgiven for being a bit alienated….And that I had spent most of the winter holed up in Ploiesti……but reasonably active with walking and swimming….

I knew, of course, that one of the curses of retirement is that time can hang heavily but I had, since at least 2012, managed to avoid this….I had discovered wines from both sides of the Lower Danube; written a little book about Romanian culture (see Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey); and started a serious collection of Bulgarian painters - Bulgarian Realists – getting to know the Bulgarians through their art. And the morning discipline of a blogpost had seemed to keep me ticking over…..but suddenly vanished….Even the taste for reading disappeared…in what was to be a three-month hiaitus…

But late October saw the blog back with a bang – not just the posts but a flurry of the first book purchases (at Bucharest’s annual Book Fair) since the spring…  And November saw the reader numbers over the entire period of the blog hit the 300,000 mark. Quite a landmark ….

Once this year the monthly viewing hit the 10,000 mark and twice just missed but, generally, the monthly figure has been around 4,000