It’s been four years since my last post to this blog. It would have been reasonable to assume that Necessary Revolution blog was dead. Or that its owner had died. Which is what happened. I died. According to the Intensive Care staff doctor looking after my case.

It all happened one dismal Saturday morning as I rode my bicycle into town (30km each way). Dressed for a ‘bit chilly’ turned out to be a touch underdressed for blizzard, howling gale and rain all wrapped within an eventual temperature of 2 degrees C. Two weeks later my family put me in an ambulance: double pneumonia with septic shock. Or so they said. Lung capacity down to about, well, sitting up was too much. So in went the drip and on went the beep beep machine. And apparently, into that drip they decided to inject potassium (no explanation provided). And towards death I went. Potassium is clearly not my thing. I passed out and when I came to I magically found at least five concerned looking medics all dressed in obligatory stethoscopes et al. One was holding a pair of those electric shock dinner plate things. Another had a syringe full of adrenaline. ‘You died’ they said. Your pulse went down to dangerous levels, at less than 35bpm.

‘errrrr’, I said, ’35bpm is my resting pulse rate’. ‘No it’s not. Someone your age should have a resting pulse of around 65’.

Time for my lecture on context. I am a serious cyclist. I ride 28,000km per year with at least 200,000m of ascending therein. My resting pulse is 35. ‘Oh, we didn’t know’. ‘You could have asked’. Asking would be about getting my context right. By way of the first step in any kind of treatment plan.

That’s not Normal for someone your age. Normal. Statistically Normal. Being positioned in a statistical bell curve. Normal is the bit in the middle, sitting under the peak of the normal curve dome. Normal is not in either of the tail ends of the curve. Life in the asymptotes, so to speak, is not ‘Normal’. But it’s far more exciting to live in the far right tail end. At least for a dedicated non-conformist like me.

The head doctor man agreed with me that should they have applied the electrical shockers, I may well have died. He thought that was all hilarious. He was a good bloke. Afterwards, in recovery, we had lots of lovely chats about the absolute psychotics running the economics game in academia and politics. He was intrigued by the ‘new’ perspective of ‘behavioural economics’. Which is nothing more than yet another re-labelling of what the Institutional Economists have been talking about since the late 1800’s. Running an economy around models of ‘Normal’ economic rational human agent behaviour is kind of dumb when all the players persist in refusing to comply with the behavioural norms of those models. So, like any good economist, the job to do when reality diverges from theory is to change reality. That, apparently, is the job of policy and politics. I loved it that a medical doctor should be so intrigued with the absurdities of contemporary economics and policy making. We had great discussions.

But it took about a year to recover my lung capacity back to ‘my’ normal. On the day I escaped the hospital, I got back on my bike (after near two weeks off, the longest-off-the-bike in over ten years; now that’s NOT Normal, for a cycling addict like me). I managed to ride 200 metres. My normal is 80km. So indoor cycling happened for about six months. I remember the first ride for real after that. It was glorious. I took off on my favourite gravel ride. It was a 40km loop. That nearly killed me all over again. But I was so pleased to prove that I could ride again. Light at the end of the tunnel etc.

The other reason why it’s been four years between posts is that I had been convinced (by all manner of ‘expert’ commentators) that ‘blogging was dead’. ‘No one reads blogs anymore’. The new Normal is at least video blogging. Wherein the blogger reads to you on camera, as to a dyslectic child. Because ‘reading is soooooo old!’ Tick Tock. Facebook, YouTube are the places to be. Blogging? who does that any more?

I tried the Facebook/Twitter thing. Platforms for morons. Anyone can say anything and they do. Brains not required. One thing credible academics learn is that the proffering of opinions as facts is abhorrent. Obscene even. It’s the anti Christ of what Phd’s are all about (Phd supervision was my academic business for 30 years). The cardinal sin of academia is to offer up opinions or pronouncements of fact without providing the foundation of a verifiable reference trail. There are no reference trails in sight on Facebook/Tik Tok et.al. Only asserted pontifications via people with zero or less credibility. Much worse, there are multitudes on those platforms who actually believe the crap they read. Yes, there are academics who are morons too. Bad academics pontificate without due recourse to reasoning. They know not what context means. They never dig below the surface crud of opinion making. Which is why I left academia as universities are turning into AI enhanced Facebook facilities. Any place where the word ‘epistemology’ has been forgotten is a place best forgotten. Epistemology (look it up or stay tuned to this blog as I aim to wallow in this theme for ever more) is a wonderfully deep universe that allows endless deconstruction of meaning down to the roots of understandings and knowing. It’s where critical thinking happens. My happy place. A place long gone from the degree factories that our universities have become. The ‘new Normal’ of academia is … Facebook. Or worse: AI.

So, given that blogging is now in the nether reaches of the normal bell curve for commentary, maybe it’s time to get going again. What’s in it for me? It’s a place to articulate and test out ideas I am working on for my latest book. Which is a book I am really struggling to write within the new Normal of ‘Woke’ and all manner of social memeing about what you can or cannot say these days; because the stuff you cannot say is the very stuff I am keen to write about. I’d better do an ‘autodidact’ exercise on the law. I love the autodidactical path; no one to tell me what to think and how to think, what’s Normal and what’s not.