There is a saying in the UK; Today’s news is tomorrow’s chip paper.

This is of course referring to an age when the British fish and chip shops used to wrap their deep-fried takeaway heart-attack fuel in old newspapers. This was both necessary to keep the meal warm and an attempt to stem the flow of cooking oils coating the said fish and chips–that have escaped the first ‘greaseproof’ paper layer–leaking on to your clothes while carrying it on the way to the park or seaside promenade bench, where you would then battle with vicious gulls–or your previously ‘not hungry’ partner–to consume the majority of the delicious contents.

Photo by Digital Buggu on Pexels.com

Nowadays they use plain paper, or more often some sort of polystyrene container. They’re only better to pile up and spill out of public waste bins and blow around the environment as never-decomposing tumbling litter lodged in hedgerows all over the countryside, but at least someone makes money due to chip shops having to buy either of these things, unlike when they used to get old newspapers for free.

Anyway, the point the saying was making was that all of the words lovingly published in the papers, carefully crafted or otherwise by fleets of journalists, the stories, accompanied with your interested, amused or shocked reactions to them, are soon destined to be forgotten by everyone as we move ever onwards through our unique individual lives. Big stories today, moving on to something new tomorrow

I have come to realise that, unless you are writing something worthwhile, the same is true for old blog posts. Regular readers come and read whatever rubbish I’ve just posted, which is lovely of them, and then the post gradually works its way down and is eventually pushed off the home page of the blog as newly published items are added over time.

After it disappears (or in truth, actually pretty much a day or two after publishing) the only time any of my old posts get any attention at all seems to be when the automated software bots run around randomly picking old posts to ‘like’.

Sadly, old blog posts are not even used for wrapping chips later.

I don’t live in the past. I don’t reminisce a lot and my posts tend to be created, published and exist in the now. Of course the past informs and has created what I am now, I just don’t tend to miss it enough or want to relive it in any way.

So, I have deleted all my posts that are older than three months and I’ll be deleting that far back every time we go past the start of a new month from now on. So it was 167 posts. Now it’s 41.

I don’t see the sense of keeping them around, a silly light-hearted and insignificant verse about bananas sitting in a binary form, memorised on some bank of endless hard drives in an anonymous data centre somewhere. I mean, I think it was a good and funny enough verse, but I can’t keep digging it out and reposting it, hoping to wring a little bit more interest out of it. Besides, bananas go off bloody quickly and are very messy to wring out.

I’ll not be kidding myself that I have a ‘body of work’ that would be worth anyone trawling back through. My output isn’t like a journal of my life that I’ll find it interesting to go back through at some future time. It’s always been disposable guff here, and I’ll be happily disposing of it as I go, so if you do like something that much (pfffttt!!), copy and paste it somewhere else (or even share or reblog it) while it’s up here.

PS: I’d be interested to hear your thoughts about, and what you do with, ‘old’ posts etc, if you have any.

Thank you for visiting Scribblans today. Sorry it probably wasn’t very good.
This bit of text here used to be me wittering on and effectively begging you to share the post, but I have decided not to bother with all that for 2021. Most people ignore it anyway.