Only having signed up to Twitter a few weeks ago, I don’t suppose I’m the first to observe its ability to become a great time-waster. I can’t help scrolling down looking at stuff that may only be of tangential interest – but there’s always the compulsion to look at the next tweet, or see what’s going on with other tweetsters. I wasted a lot of time wondering why I couldn’t send someone a message before realising they had to follow me as well as vice versa.
Nevertheless credit to fellow researcher @charliepoteen for suggesting I tweet my blog, if that’s a legitimate phrase. I do so partly to find out what I’m missing, and also to help increase the potential audience for my books. Early indications are that the number of blog views has increased.
One of my first tweets was a blurry photo of four heavy, large cardboard boxes full of old copies of The Sporting Life cluttering up my hallway as an example of Research. They were kindly donated by Simon Holt, top man, top commentator and top provider of Foreword to my Brighton book. A few racegoers leaving Fontwell the other day will have seen the transfer between his car boot and mine of these rare yet probably unsellable documents, most of which date from the mid-1990s. I’m going through each newspaper to see if I can spot anything interesting about Salisbury or all the old courses I’ve written about – or indeed any other subject that takes my fancy. You might think it pointless to look for material about the courses I’ve already written about, but I cannot stop myself from wanting to discover more about their history.
It is incredibly laborious, though. Each newspaper is folded in half and it takes roughly an hour to reduce the thickness of the pile by an inch.
The feature of last week was a visit to the best racing library in the country, if not the world, where the fruits of others’ research about early racing at Salisbury were generously made available to me. More digging, closer to home, next time.
