What a load of blogs.

I've been browsing blogs.

Not for the first time, of course, but I was mentally categorising them. Very interesting. Strikes me that there are a number of discrete types.

a) Young teenage girls, very IT-literate and perky, many of them from Singapore and Malaysia, it seems, with highly decorated pages and novelty cursors. Their posts are dedicated to how much they adore their friends, things they've bought and partying. Very cute, very wholesome, very photogenic.

b) Young teenage girls and boys demonstrating slightly less expertise venting about how awful their lives are, how lonely they are, how everyone else is horrible and nobody, including you, dear reader, can understand them. The kind of thing that makes me want to reach in, grab them by the grubby t-shirt and say 'PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER', because people who have truly dreadful lives don't write this drivel. Occasionally someone kinder than me has posted some supportive mesage to say 'You are not alone' which they clearly find deeply irritating and to which they respond in a slightly snappy tone. Misery of this calibre can manifest as self-aggrandisement, and is occasionally dangerous. Just think Columbine. Unfortunately it is not only the young who think that being miserable makes them interesting... Fortunately it is mostly the young, and they grow out of it.

c) Misogynistic and inadequate men who advertise their hatred of the institution of marriage and their love of fornication, but whose words betray their fear and loathing of all women. They like to use all the pejorative words for female sexual organs, female sexual activity and.. well... women. But paradoxically, they are very keen on traditional roles. So lesbian parents are out. Even though they urge their fellow man to eschew the slavery of marriage and domesticity. Hmmm. Angry, angry little men. You can almost see the spittle settling on the keyboard as they type. I harbour a suspicion that much of their fulminating can be attributed to the fact that they can't get anyone to have sex with them. Luckily for these poor things, anyone can be a virtual stud.

d) Lots of World Cup blogs. Unbelievably touching, these. Not sure why. I haven't a sporting bone in my body, but the element of sport which I find so tender and so inexplicable is the pure love of the thing, which transcends national boundaries. These are people, who love their football, love their nation, and love their teams but not at the expense of others' nations and teams. This is definitely the positive face of football.

e) Corporate blogs. Dear God - does anyone read them?

f) IT blogs - ditto. This is unfair of me. Despite working for one of the world's largest computer companies for many years (but in marketing), I'm about as IT-literate as a clever fish. How anyone can find anything to talk about is beyond me. But then many feel the same way about politics. Or jazz. Or education. Or films. Or all the other things which I'm interested in.

g) Clever, interesting blogs by people who say not very much but write very entertainingly. These are the ones I've saved in my favourites, in a file called BLOGS which I will revisit.

Many more, but these are the ones which struck me particularly.

I shouldn't be wasting my time, as I'm supposed to be finishing the first draft of my new project, but I rationalise it by saying anything which shines a light into the dark recesses of the human soul can never, for a writer, be a waste.