Flags

You will have seen my flags on the right. I find them mesmerising. And I get a little thrill every time I see a new one pop up, from somewhere like Uruguay, Lithuania, or Qatar.

When I started writing this blog a little over a year ago, I was contemptuous of bloggers who expend an inordinate amount of energy worrying about how many people visit their site. If you've got something to write, do it, and don't worry about who's going to read it. After all, weren't there lots of Victorian diarists who faithfully filled out their entries every day in the expectation that nobody would ever read what they had written? And isn't a blog just an electronic equivalent of a diary?

It turned out it wasn't quite so simple. After the initial enthusiasm waned, it was hard to find sufficient inspiration to keep on coming up with new ideas. And in fact I found that I did need feedback, an indication that someone somewhere out there is reading what I am writing, and I'm not just whistling in the wind.

In the modern world, travel has become so much easier, and people move around in search of jobs and also for fun. This means we no longer live in small communities where we all know each other; and quite often we can live in a place where we know almost nobody. That is partly why networking sites such as Facebook are so successful: they provide a means for people to create a powerful virtual community, to reassure themselves that they are not alone in the world.

Now, I have never quite got the hang of Facebook: all that poking each other and sending virtual gifts seems so banal. And I simply don't want to know if someone I once met briefly a couple of years ago is just now going out for a pizza. But maybe my focus on flags is no different really from the accumulation of friends in Facebook: we are all trying to create an assurance that we are part of a wider community.

Also, I think the flags are really pretty.