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Most bloggers are bores. After some initial over-excitement about the form, it soon turned out that bloggers usually don't have special truths to tell. There are exceptions, though.
This week, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, normally given to an author and a journalist, gave a prize for the first time to a blogger as well - and it was won by a policeman, writing about his job, under the pseudonym "Jack Night" (his site is called NightJack).
Reading back over Jack Night's numerous postings over the past 13 months - he has now more or less stopped, he says, to write a novel - it's obvious that the prize was both worth inaugurating and deservedly won.
Not only is Jack Night a good writer altogether but the anonymity and running format allow him to tell us more about what it is really like working as a policeman in Britain now than would be possible in any other way.
We're obsessed with the police, endlessly eager for formulaic dramas and fly-on-the-wall documentaries. But an intelligent working policeman describing how his job strikes him turns out to be quite a different thing.
Jack Night has been a policeman for 15 years, starting out wearing "the blue suit of truth", as he calls it, before becoming a detective constable, sometimes investigating the most serious violent crimes. He likes it. He always wanted to be a detective. "To be allowed to do what I do, for pay, is a privilege."
But though he says he's "not politically inclined", he takes a harsh view of current criminal justice. He despises "Jacqui Klebb" and fears that the police have moved from serving society to serving the Government.
"As far as sentencing goes, we have lost the plot and it is consequently now entirely possible to live a career of criminal life without facing any serious consequences," he asserts.
One posting is devoted to what he roundly calls "the Evil Poor". In another, "A Survival Guide for Decent Folk", he candidly advises on what to do if you happen to find yourself under suspicion or arrest.
"Anything you try and do because you are decent and straightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed." And in a strand called "Only 24 Hours to Crack the Case", he describes specific incidents, one after another, many of them harrowing, almost as short stories. It's head-clutching stuff.
After the G20 disgraces, the police lost a lot of public sympathy. Paying attention to what Jack Night and other police bloggers have to tell us might help us understand what they face. Perhaps it's true: only in a blog could it have been done so directly.
• Some people think Thought for the Day on Radio 4 should be abolished. But every now and then, a Thought for the Day bursts out of the other side, passing through insufferability into being cherishable for its daftness.
This week, the Rev Angela Tilby said Susan Boyle, of Britain's Got Talent, reminded her of Jesus, "identified with the broken figure of Isaiah — one with no beauty that we should desire, despised and rejected of men, one from whom men hide their faces". You can't say fairer than that. "We have these treasures, says St Paul, in earthen vessels," Tilby said. You might say the same of Thought for the Day.
Croydon's hidden treasure
Everything that has come out of the wreck of the Mary Rose has an astounding freshness, as if it had been transported to us in a time machine, not buried in the Solent for more than 400 years.
Items from yew bows to pewter plates, leather jerkins to surgeons' instruments, are almost shockingly authentic. At the moment only six per cent of the artefacts recovered are on show in Portsmouth, in a tired museum. When the new one opens, hopefully in 2012, that will go up to 70 per cent.
In the meantime, a special exhibition of Hidden Treasures from the Mary Rose at the Whitgift School, Croydon, until 7 August (www.MaryRoseHiddenTreasures.org) provides a good fix. Some 250 objects are there, well displayed. This exhibition has been oddly underpublicised.
You can touch one of the Mary Rose's great oak beams, feel a huge rope, miraculously preserved by being so heavily tarred... Among the events commemorating Henry VIII's accession 500 years ago, this one makes it all real.
• Sad news. Dan Brown, author of the most rubbish bestseller ever, The Da Vinci Code, has managed a sequel, The Lost Symbol, to be published on 15 September, after leaving fans without reading matter for years. Gail Rebuck of Random House calls it "a publishing event without compare". Let's hope so.
More interestingly, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura, left unfinished at his death, is to be published by Penguin Classics on
3 November.
Like all his work, it was written on file cards and the edition will reproduce all 138 of them, with a transcript. There's no book I could anticipate more keenly, even if it's unlikely to sell as well as Brown's.
Reader views (1)
Do we know 'Jack Night' is a serving policeman? The terms of service specifically exclude writing articles or books without very senior approval and I doubt if an officer would risk his pension.
- Eduardo, N London, 24/04/2009 12:49
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