Geoff Arnold poses me the following challenge:

Name five people you’d like to blog with. I interpret this as “name five people, living or dead, whose blogs you’d like to read and link to”; only a supreme egotist would expect mutual blogrolling from a superstar.

[…deletia…]

The blogs where I read about this said something about “tagging” other bloggers, but that seems inconsistent with the spirit of blogging. Memes spread if they deserve to. Let’s see if this one does. Your turn. (However, if I were tagging, I’d choose Terry, Alec Muffett, and Jonathan Schwartz.)

It’s an interesting thought experiment not least because of the selection, but also for second-guessing whom you think would make a particularly good blogger in the first place – it’s a conceit on the basis of the prejudices you’ve formed over someone else entirely.

Most probably someone who is long since dead.

There are people I’d regrettably reject out of hand – somehow I can’t imagine Wilde as a blogger, just something in his style makes me feel he’d think it too public, too openly squalid for his wit.

Were I to name five people who I think would blog well at some/more points in their lives, be interesting, and probably have the right mindset, I’d choose:

• Henry Kissinger, but only if we timewarped him back to the ’60s and ’70s.
• Alan Clark, but of course we have his diaries. Complete bounders are always interesting.
• James Thurber, just because.
• Prince Albert, under-recognised brainiac and liberal.
• Socrates, notorious boozer and troublemaker.

…and if I were allowed to slip-in an extra one, I’d choose William Herschel to experience at first the expansion of peoples’ minds with the growth in understanding of the universe…

…and then I’d tag Jim.