If there was one thing the BBC could always be relied on to provide, it was serious, sombre coverage of national events and the Queen. Yet, apparently, no more.

Yesterday, here in the UK, there was a national two minutes’ silence to mark the first anniversary of the London bombings. This is the kind of thing the BBC would normally be excellent at. We’d have got a serious sounding announcer over a clock, telling us that we now joined BBC News, where upon we’d be greeted by a senior, authoratative news presenter in a suit, behind a desk. We’d wait for the chimes of Big Ben, be silent for two minutes whilst watching pictures of the Queen and of the country at large doing the same, and then life would continue. It would be a respectful, appropriate silence.

Yet, yesterday, the plan was to introduce the silence programme over two male dancers doing acrobatics, and then cross to a presenter best known for light-entertainment shows standing in a tent. That’s bad enough, but it’s not even what we got, as the following video shows:
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I’m all for making news accessible and open, but in times gone by the BBC would have just got this right. There would have been no room for cock-ups crashing into the programme, or interruptions with Cash in the Attack. This kind of thing used to be what the BBC excelled at, and just got right. Why no more?

I know I’ve asked this of other people before, but just how is John Prescott still in office? He’s lost his job yet kept his salary and perks, slept with his secretary, puched a voter, done allegedly dodgy political deals without declaring an interest, been photographed playing croquet when he should have been working, been roundly mocked for having two jags, and yet still appears to be quite happy in office. People said Tony was made of Teflon because nothing every stuck: Well this is one Slippery Johnny, with no-one ever quite able to pin him down long enough for him to lost his job.

Even if, as it is rumoured, he has some good dirt on Tony Blair and so can’t be fired, he must be able to see the damage he’s doing the government and the Labour party, and want to resign in the best interests of a turbulent, troubled party which needs less scandal not more. Surely he can’t be seriously thinking about disrupting the smooth and orderly transition by running for PM himself, because there’s far too much dirt on him already.

He can’t keep on going like this forever: Johnny must split from the government soon, if only so the party gives an appearance that it’s doing something. Or is this the greater problem with New Labourites, as we saw with Charles Clarke? They’re so obsessed with themselves that they won’t resign for the greater good, they have to be pulled off the government scene in a most undignified way?

It’s one of those questions that troubles many bloggers. The temptation, particularly when one starts blogging, is to post daily. I resisted that temptation primarily because I started out on a group blog, but there was a definite period when I first moved over here to sjhoward.co.uk that I posted very frequently – just look at the number of posts in January 2005 compared to January 2006. But I don’t think I’ve ever posted merely for the sake of posting daily. Back then, the site was new and fresh, I had a lot to say, and a lot of time to say it. Just recently, life has been getting in the way of posting more regularly – there are many things I’d like to post about, and indeed many posts I start and never finish because I don’t always have the time when I’m working 13 hour days.

Eric Kintz reckons that posting too regularly is damaging to a blog’s brand. I don’t think I’m in any danger of posting too frequently right now, and it would appear that that’s a good thing. Others would say that failing to post daily means that readers lose interest in the blog, and readership dips. That’s certainly not been the case here. January 2006 generated three times the hits that January 2005 did, and the site is now riding a high greater than ever before, with monthly hits way into the hundreds of thousands.

So how do I decide how often to post? I don’t. I simply write on here when I feel I’ve something interesting to say and the time to sit down and type it. There’s no scientific analysis of the best time of the day to post to gain readership, nor the frequency of posting that generates the most interest. It just fits in with my life.

It’s much the same system as what I post about – I post what I want to write, not necessarily what people want to read. Just recently, there’s been quite a few relatively parochial posts like this one, focusing on how I run the site. They can’t be of much interest to many people, but it’s good to get off my chest and put down in words the way I think I do things. I find it really rather cathartic to express myself in this way. If I didn’t, I’ve no doubt that the site would be mothballed by now.

Perhaps that’s the great unwritten rule about blogs: Write for yourself, not for anyone else. That way, you are the sole judge of your own success, and you can never truly fail.

July 2005, this site:

A very strange story, this one. The centre of Birmingham – almost 20,000 people – evacuated for a night due to a ‘real and very credible threat’. So what was this threat?

July 2006, BBC News site:

Part of the centre of Shrewsbury has been sealed off by police after what they describe as a “serious incident”. West Mercia Police have not yet released any details about the incident but they have said they expect the area to be closed for most of Sunday.

I don’t know if anything similar’s happened in between these two times, but it seems odd to be sealing off town centres and evacuating people without ever releasing details of why. I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but clearly something is going on and we’re not being told what. In the latter case, we were told by the West Midlands Chief Constable that “the people of Birmingham were in danger last night”, but never told why.

Are these two incidents connected? I have no idea. I do know that towns (including Birmingham) have updated evacuation plans. Is that connected to any of this? Or this is all just co-incidental, or even relatively normal?

I have no idea what’s going on with these events, and it doesn’t look like anyone’s going to be telling the public any time soon. So I guess the key question has to be: Why not? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

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Well, it amused me, as many things do… 😉