I am enjoying Patrick Crozier's new blog a lot, which I think is basically because he seems to be enjoying it himself so much. He seems liberated, and he tells me that he is liberated.

He kindly gave me a mention recently, on the subject of how, at my two personal blogs, I don't concern myself with my hit rate. Patrick asks himself:

Should I have a counter?

I don't have to. Brian, for instance, doesn't. He reckons that it would just get him all obsessed by the hit rate rather than the more important business of writing stuff.

Actually, although I dare say this is exactly what I have said to Patrick over the phone a few times, that is not quite it.

It's not so much that writing is more important. It is more that hit rate conditioned writing is (a) hard work, and (b) different.

Partly I ignore my hit rate because, believe it or not, I do not now know how to count it, and learning this, as with learning anything computational, would be an effort, and an effort that I cannot be bothered with. Commenters: feel free to tell me all about how to do this, and all about how very easy it is. You will be ignored.

If bothering with my hit rate would be a small bother, doing writing of the sort that bothers about its hit rate every day, twice, would be, for me, just too difficult. I already write hit rate conscious stuff for Samizdata, and for this. I am even now busy trying to wangle other weekly and paid blogging gigs. Economically, fussing about the hit rate here wouldn't make sense. It would be too much like hard work.

My membership of the Samizdata team is the basis of whatever clout I have as a blogger, and hence a big part of why people with money to spend on blogging are willing to share some of it with me. But the stuff I fling up at my Culture and Education blogs has only to interest me. You do not like it? Skip it. There are plenty of other blogs.

But, for me, the most important but also elusive reason for doing writing that is hit-rate-indifferent is that such writing can sometimes, I believe, be rather good, and good in a way that might never get written if the hit rate was all the time at the front of the writer's mind.

Some of one's best thoughts can be provoked by stupid – even embarrassing – trifles.

For example, I used once to be embarrassed that I often have classical music on in the background when busy with something else, because, quite frankly, it makes very pretty aural wallpaper, if you happen to like the pattern, so to speak. Proper Music Critics, on the other hand, hardly let a year go by without doing some piece about the Deadly Availability of classical music, as if listening to great music as if it was dance music at a dance where you are not dancing were some kind of crime. When playing a Beethoven symphony, for instance, Official Behaviour says that you should drop everything, switch off the phone, set aside your computer keyboard, and solemnly park yourself in a chair in front of your hi-fi boxes as if settling down for a real live concert, and then listen with a solemn expression on your face and maybe even the odd drop of sweat rolling down your brow. Well bollocks to that. I just put on the music, and I drop everything only during those rare times when the music grabs me and refuses to be ignored. In other words (profound observation): hi-fi boxes reverse the social revolution that classical music went through at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Great Musicians are back to being domestic servants.

Closely related to embarrassing is just plain dumb, and dumb is closely related to smart. I remember, in this connection, a delightful television programme done by pinko (and therefore non-mainstream) art critic John Berger, in which he got some children to look at a renaissance painting. The children spent a long time discussing whether the Jesus in the painting was a man or a woman. Berger said, and I agreed, that this is a very good observation, about that particular painting and about Christianity in general. I have never forgotten it. But how many times do you get Proper Art Critics giving the time of day to a notion like that? Well, nowadays they probably do it all the time, but I do not think they did so when that TV programme was first shown, about two or three decades ago.

The thing is, responding intelligently to "culture" is all about responding as you really do respond, rather than only as you feel you should and only as you have been taught to. Such shared decencies are not to be ignored of course. Not all the time. But much illumination is also to be found by listening every now and again to your inner twelve year old, who says, when confronted with, say, a crucifixion painting, something like: Cool! Blood! Special effects! And thereby puts his grubby finger on a truth about such paintings that is mostly considered too undignified to talk about.

In my particular case, responding as I really do respond can also mean something like ignoring the Probable Samizdata Majority View. For me, Jane Fonda, despite also being Hanoi Jane, was a terrific movie actress. If you genuinely think that Jane Fonda genuinely was not a terrific movie actress, fine, I can respect that. But if you say that she was not a terrific movie actress because she also sucked up to North Vietnam, then I say you are missing something, something which might illuminate the strengths and virtues of your enemy, something you might not want to think about, but which you should.

While I was writing this, I decided it would do for Samizdata. Then I changed my mind. Wasn't sure if it was good enough, or expressed tightly enough. Here, I don't have to worry about that.