First prove

I started this blog for several reasons.

First, because I had gotten out of the habit of blogging. I would faithfully post up to twice a week at my peak, at www.hofflimits.co.uk, though the stream of posts has dried up to a trickle of late. I missed that regularity of mental stretching, though my brain sometimes lacks the gluten to give it the necessary spring. 

There is one key reason for the drop off in the number of my blog posts: twitter. Over the last 4 or so years, I've tweeted about 18,000 times and thoughts that would previously gestate throughout the working week, slowly taking shape, forming gradually into an argument instead would get pumped out as 140-character brain farts as soon as they had been semi-formed.

But not only does twitter encourage you to expel your thoughts as soon as you conceive them, it also exposes you to a world of other minds, thoughts, and blogs. The speed of comment, joke and thought now moves with such pace that blogging seems almost too slow. What had started as a way for me to try to play with original thoughts around current affairs seemed somehow out of place. By the time I'd formed my government-breaking piece about MPs expenses, everyone had moved onto the 50p Tax Rate, or 50 Shades of Grey and had already had the same thoughts as you.

The other reason was because I regularly tweet my adventures in baking using the #breadtalk hashtag and I wanted a way of documenting it without resorting to storify. The main reason for baking is not so much to create something worth eating but to see what I learn. If my Hofflimits blog had the operating principle of "original thoughts only", then the point about my baking was 'don't try to make something you could more easily buy in Tesco'. Otherwise what is the point?

I bake bread because I like the process: of thinking, trying, experimenting, failing, trying again, waiting, watching and learning. And if, at the end of it, there is something worth eating, then so much the better.