I gave my initial thoughts on the new socialist party in a recent blog, I will have more to say when I have time to assimilate all the information and misinformation coming my way – I remain cautiously optimistic but I think some proponents get things wrong whereas opponents who may have a valid point are unable to argue for it without a heap of abuse! I’m already writing it and will have something to share next week.

I’m busy this month reducing my routine work to make more time for more original content. I’ve been promoting petitions on various topics for over a decade, it’s what built me the following on Twitter/X that I have. Several people have said that they were unaware of a particular issue prior to seeing a petition I was promoting. I’m now promoting so many that it takes a week for me to post them all at 20-30 minute intervals. I also save a lot of material that I find interesting to post again, but I’m so busy with routine work that I find little time for anything original. So I’m going to be busy this month reducing the amount of routine work I do and organising the rest thematically. It will mean making some tough decisions, not of the Keir Starmer kind. There are some projects that it is very difficult for me to let go of but I need to make time for writing, something I’ve discovered I’m quite good at.

My campaign to raise awareness of the many lifeboats that are independent of the RNLI, although they may be part of another umbrella organisation, is the largest I’ve ever undertaken but has now become routine. In an endeavour to cut down on routine I have decided to discontinue my practice of giving a shoutout to one or two lifeboat organisations daily. This won’t happen all at once, it takes a month to cycle through them all, but when I post again it will be for the last time. I will however retain my pinned tweet on both X and Bluesky.

One topic I would like to focus on is Homelessness and Housing. I’ve written a blog based on personal knowledge about the situation in my local constituency and my MP actually read it – whether he will act on it is a different but, having experienced homelessness in the past, I have an interest in speaking up for others now that I am personally settled.

It’s no secret that I’m alcoholic, probably obsessive/compulsive too. I spend twice as much time on what I do now than I did when I was employed and I don’t get paid, nor do I expect to. I did a blog last year that gives you an idea what it costs me to run this account, I will never monetise it and ask for financial support to keep it going. If I ask you to donate what you can afford to a particular cause you can be assured I put my money where my mouth is. This is something you’ll hear about less often, my donations won’t stop but I’ll cease encouraging others – if you haven’t donated by now you never will, but I don’t hold that against you 😊

I’ve been asked to add alt text for images I post on Bluesky for the benefit of the visually impaired, but it’s impractical for several reasons:

• It more time consuming for me while being of little benefit to anyone else. Anyone who is unable to see a meme that is essentially visual will gain nothing from having it described to them.
• Some of my memes are done because I have more to say than I can fit into a tweet, I say it in a meme or I don’t say it all!
• Other images are intended to draw attention to an article that I think important, the image is less important as it doesn’t provide any more information than you can find by clicking on the link.
• I have the same response to people who complain that the text on some of my memes are difficult to read, I make them as legible as I can!

I also want to venture into other media, such as Zoom or WhatsApp, to enable me to collaborate with others. I’m also thinking of about transferring this blog to Substack where I appear to be developing a following without having published anything myself other than a couple of blogs I uploaded from WordPress, I still need to learn how to write directly to Substack.

I just had a setback when my electricity cut out unexpectedly because I had forgotten to check my balance. No electricity meant no Wi-Fi so I wasn’t able to top up online and couldn’t contact my provider by phone. You wouldn’t be reading this if a neighbour hadn’t given me access to his broadband.