In which I'm very honest about my politics and everything

Everyone is doing a substack and apparently that's cool but being a blogger isn't.

I’ve been a blogger since 2008, so practically anti-diluvian. For a while it was the cool new thing to be and the area I work in, food, started having awards for best blogger.

Then blogging started to be controlled by PRs and their budgets. Very wealthy young beautiful women like Deliciously Ella started doing it. I looked at her ‘blog’ and it wasn’t. It was an expensive (around 15k I heard) website. Another wealthy young heiress, Skye McAlpine, also had a ‘blog’. It started off quite ordinarily with slightly amateurish photos then, after about 4 posts, suddenly the photography and propping and design were like off-the-scale professional. Within a couple of weeks this girl became an expert pro photographer. Every one of her food shots from her palazzo in Venice had about 300 quids worth of flowers on the table.

Needless to say this ladies won awards (Observer Food Monthly best blog for Ella in which she admitted she had assistants write the posts) and Skye got massive book deals and a Sunday Times column in which she wore Dolce and Gabbana dresses in the photos. (Who took those then?)

Fucking annoying tbh.

Next the Observer Food Monthly dropped the best blogger award and replaced it with the best instagrammer award, won first by city boy @clerkenwellboy who took photos of all his Michelin star meals at posh restaurants paid for by his city boy salary.

What I loved about blogging is it democratised writing and publishing. People with no useful contacts suddenly had a voice. This is no longer the case.

Journalists were quite snotty about blogging, although the more honest realised that this and online generally rather than print was the future.

But hey, now there’s a thing called substack and apparently people get paid. People pay to read their posts.

I’ve done a bloody good blog with highly researched writing and recipes and photographs for over a decade Msmarmitelover.com. No one is fucking interested really anymore.

PRs are rude when you apply for a press trip and say you are a blogger. You can be an instagrammer although now that’s probably TikTok.

I love the internet. I love social media. I’m trying to do TikTok but like my instagram feed, it’s all a bit too eclectic. It’s not quite branded enough.

But here we go, I’ll try Substack. I doubt I’ll earn any money from it as I’m yesterday’s news.

Right now I’m on a press trip in Palermo, Sicily and I’ve missed the first day because I’m ill in bed. I’ve got a fever, the shits and a headache. I’m missing everything!