Archive

I'm presently in the middle of the digital equivalent of moving house, and the site http://angusbatey.com is temporarily closed down, while http://angusbatey.co.uk is faulty. We're working on this.

If you're coming here in search of something that used to be here, or via a link from someone else's site, I can only apologise for the inconvenience. Please send me a message at my temporary email address:

angus-b@inbox.lv

and I'll try to respond promptly.

Similarly, if you're trying to get in touch with me for work-related reasons - whether that be to offer me work, or ask about something I've done previously, of anything else along vaguely similar lines - or are a real person trying to contact me for any other reason, please feel free to send a message.

If you're a web designer, SEO expert, digital-marketing genius, app developer or cryptocurrency broker, and if you intend to send me a message saying Hi I'm great, and I can help your business achieve lots more sales but the only contact info you're willing to give me is a free email address and you don't include any links to a website that proves your bona fides, please be aware that if you send such a message I won't reply because I'm not interested (except to try perhaps to understand exactly how this particular scam actually works, which I have to admit confuses me), but your name and email address will be added to a page I'll be making public and prominent on this site in due course.

Thanks

ANGUS

So: a blog. It's not that I've resisted having one, more that I've not thought I'd ever have the time. But now I feel like I can't afford not to make the time. Why? Not sure. We'll see. Partly because I always have stuff I want to say and no particular outlet to say it. That might sound odd for someone who doesn't work in journalism to hear a journalist saying, but I think we all have tons of stories we'd like to tell that we're unable to convince anyone to publish: maybe some of those pieces will end up here. Maybe someone will see something here that contains the germ of an idea they'd like me to work up somewhere else. Maybe this'll be the shop window that I always thought my published work would be, but usually isn't. Or maybe it's not going to be any of those things, and I'll just end up sounding off about stuff with nobody paying the slightest bit of attention. We'll just have to wait and see.###

I remember a brilliant website years ago called My Pointless Opinion. It was written by someone called Darren Star (not the Hollywood TV producer - apparently an Australian journalist exiled in London) and was just a new piece, once a week, banging on bad-temperedly about some burning issue of cultural import - why the wrong person had been thrown out of Big Brother, how cereal manufacturers are secretly skimping on giveaway plastic toys, and so on. On one memorable occasion the site got reviewed - favourably - in a lads' mag and the following week Darren urged any of its readers who'd chanced upon his site to stop buying it, switch to any one of its rivals, and write an abusive farewell email to the editor. Helpfully, he published the editor's email address. In many ways that was a blog, before the term was coined: though it wasn't full of links to other sites and there wasn't a comments form underneath each entry it fulfilled many of the same criteria.

I expect whatever happens here to in some way follow in Mr Star's footsteps: not in the sense of going back to Australia, or dying, or whatever may have happened to him - he wrote some peculiar pieces after he became a victim of a kind of cyberstalker, and the site wound down a few weeks after the planes hit the twin towers - but because I do definitely also intend to use this... thing as a means of banging on about stuff that gets on my wick. Though I expect I'll also be talking about stuff that I like, am energised and enthused by, because positivity inspires at least as much as negativity. Either way, I'll make it up as I go along.

Sky High $calendar .= "
";