Great blogs I've never written

I have to admit it: I’m an idle blogger. I wake up in the night with the text of a well-crafted posting half there in my mind. I have good intentions actually to sit and type it in the morning. But then there are e-mails to answer, there’s that report which has to be read before 9am or – heaven forfend – there’s actually some work to be done. And so, the posting is posted to the back of mind and becomes just one more which could have been a contender.

I can still remember some of them. There’s the one entitled ‘Is it RIP for the BBC?’ where I was going, for once, to agree with my ward colleague on a financial matter: he, you will remember, affects to imagine being an economic ‘liberal’ is compatible with being a true social liberal -- or is it that I affect to imagine the opposite? I can't quite recall. My humble submission on the larger issues of what it is to be a liberal was going to be the subject of further postings, in which I was to discourse on the nature of liberalism in the twenty-first century. And then there was the one that I actually began writing at 6:30 this morning asking ‘Where are the liberal Catholics?’ – a question to which many will think they have the answer but which was going to allow me to muse aloud on the conservative revanche to the feminist challenge to the liberal tradition of emphasising the private sphere, beyond the public gaze (got that?).

But they all remain in the capacious recycling bin that’s somewhere in my mind – and that gets emptied much less often than once a fortnight. But, somehow, I don’t imagine the blogosphere is lesser without them.