Letter from America

I often wonder what Alistair Cooke would make of Blogging. For those of you who don't know Alistair Cooke had a long running show on BBC Radio. Each week he reported to the UK his interpretation of events happening in America. His first letter was in March 1946 and he retired in March 2004, unfortunately he died later that month.

In a bizarre way I feel that he was the first real blogger and I think that later in his career some clever fella at the BBC was actually putting his letters on to a weblog on the BBC website.

The reason I was thinking about this was that he referred to his audience as "my dear listener", a term that I recently came across again while reading L.A. Confidential (a book that my wonderful wife recommended to me, and it is a very good gritty read). It is set in 1950s LA and features a celebrity gossip magazine which too refers to it's readers as "dear readers".

I think that this term has fallen out of favour with the press and radio, so I think that I will try to use it more.

So my dear readers (if anyone will actually read this is another thing!) this is the end of my wittering for today.