"Better late than never" is a phrase that trips off my tongue worryingly easily. In yet another instance, I have finally relabelled my previous "blog" as "essays". I enjoy writing essays, because they invariably force me to investigate things I'd previously glossed over, and rethink others from scratch. However, that means that essays are hard work [1] — each typically takes about 3 to 5 days of my time. As the years have passed, I've found it more difficult both to carve out, and to justify, the time they take — too often, there seems to be something more important to do.
Perhaps the fundamental problem with essays is that, to my mind at least, they come with a contract: they should be on fairly meaty subjects, and have been subject to enough thought that they can stand up to a reasonable level of scrutiny. That makes essays an appropriate medium for getting across mature ideas (or ideas that I think can be matured), but it makes them a poor medium for new, incomplete, or simple ideas.
So, having denied reality for getting on for 20 years, it finally seems sensible for me to acknowledge that a standard blog might be a useful thing for me to have. I hope it will contain more frequent, informal updates, where I also feel that I can risk being wrong more often than I can in essays. I've promised myself that, at least for the first three months, I'll make weekly updates. Beyond that only time will tell how this will turn out — after all, I have by now established a terrible track record in this area!