The move of my chum to LiveJournal, and 's firewall issues resulting in a non-LiveJournal blog-politique once again alert me to the fact that I have a complete inability to hold my own in political debate. I'm unable to argue the finer points of American foreign policy, basically because I don't really know what my exact stance is on anything. It's certainly not down to ignorance – I read newspapers cover to cover, I absorb leader articles, reader's letters, comment and opinion pieces – but sit me at a table opposite someone whose political views I find mildly abhorrent, and I'll be hammered into the ground as they expose my generally left-leaning, vaguely liberal viewpoint as pathetic, lily-livered stupidity. And I'll probably end up agreeing with them. It's an odd state of affairs, as if you engage me in a conversation about biscuits, blackboards, pine cones or pneumatic drills, I'll become highly charged, perceptive, precise, and leave everyone in no doubt about my withering contempt for, say, Rich Tea. Or pneumatic drills.

I didn't go to a posh university with a debating society, and even if I had, I'd probably have joined the biscuit society instead. I suppose my instincts are to defuse arguments; I don't like confrontation, and I'd rather everyone just got along. But this urge to mediate and be reasonable seems to have left me devoid of opinions, as I was mumbling about on Nick's journal the other day. The annoying thing is, as someone who – and god knows how – seems to have ended up writing for newspapers and magazines in order to pay the mortgage, I'm finding that my nebulous approach to politics is something of a drawback. If you achieve that writer's dream of landing a regular column, a weekly wage for expressing your opinions in public, you've either got to have some forthright opinions to express – Nick Cohen, Deborah Orr, Bruce Anderson – or you've got to have some pretty good mates in editor's positions, who are willing to give you hard cash in return for your views on absolutely nothing – i.e. wittering on in a fashion not dissimilar to the way I do here.

Now, part of the problem is that I don't like not to be liked; my horror at being on the receiving end of considerable bile from the urban exploration community last week after an editorial slip-up at The Independent is a good example. But if the contents of this blog were slung into a newspaper, I'd surely prompt the kind of hate that stirs up inside me every time I read Alex James's interminably f*cking tedious tales of country life, or the slurry that pours forth from Deborah Ross in her “My So-Called Life” columns, or, worse, “Our Woman In Crouch End”. Having said that, I'm sure they're lovely people. It's not their fault, is it. Maybe I'm just jealous. I don't know. I don't know what I think about anything. Maybe that's a good idea for a column.