I’ve thought for a while that people might not appreciate why I chose a tagline of “blogging hard…” when I obviously don’t post that often. A look at my wordpress stats shows that over the past five years I’ve posted on average once every eleven days.

That’s not very “blogging hard” at all. That’s more like “blogging moderately for west lancs”.

There are others in the district who post much more frequently, most notably Paul Cotterill who in a neat symmetry posts an inversely proportional eleven per day.

Around the same time as I started this site, there was a habit in local politics of everything being described as [verb]ing hard for [your area]. I confess that I used it in some leaflets that back in 2002/03 to describe candidates activities – it was always a good arm-waving phrase, an easy tagline. However, we seemed to get to a point where everything was [verb]ing hard. My favourite was a Local Strategic Partnership newsletter which had a banner across the top “Working hard in partnership for West Lancs”. I saw it and swore that I’d try (hard) to avoid using it again, but in a fit of unrestrained irony adopted the “blogging hard” tagline for this blog.

I’ve been told that irony doesn’t work north of Luton. Good irony, perhaps. Badly executed irony probably doesn’t work south of Luton either. I am told that some people in West Lancs take things like this very seriously indeed and to be honest I’ve considered changing it on several occasions. I did consider changing it to “blogging hard for Ormskirk” particularly given that I’m standing in the local elections, but that would mean getting out the gimp and changing the banner, and changing the settings, and… oh, you know… there are better things to do.

So there you go. It made me smile for about 30 minutes when I first put it up five years ago and (some) people take it seriously. No problem really, but I felt the need to explain.

Update 5th October 2009
I came across this review of this blog at politics.co.uk this evening. Some good points that I’ll address elsewhere and maybe make some changes, but they do state:

Also, if we’re being pedantic – and this is a review after all – the blog’s tagline ‘blogging hard for West Lancashire’ may be stretching it a bit, the blog is updated about once or twice a month.

To keep the good people at politics.co.uk happy – and to avoid any unnecessary confusion and trauma – I’ve added a link to this post to the top of each page. Happy reading!