An old friend - a Guardian reader - wonders what the point of this blog is, and why I'm so angry and aggressive

I was pleased last week to discover that I'd received an email from a childhood friend I hadn't seen since school. Whenever I hear "I Get Around" by the Beach Boys, this erstwhile chum always pops into my head, along with a vision of the muddy garden of the new house his family had just moved into when the Best of the Beach Boys LP was released (or, at least, when I'd managed to save up enough pocket money to buy it). I used to be rotten at keeping in touch with people, and only began making an effort as I approached my half-century - in one case I wrote to a friend's old school asking for a contact address, only to discover that he was living in the same flat, with the same phone number, as when I'd last seen him 25 years earlier. Anyway, my old schoolfriend's email started off pleasantly enough, with personal stuff - but then moved on to the subject of The Grønmark Blog. Here's what he had to say:

My reaction to your blog is one of bemusement. Not because your views are diametrically opposite to my own although it has always amused me that in a generation of people with free university, relatively secure jobs for life and excellent pensions,  there are those who argue for a small state when they have been such beneficiaries of a liberal democracy. It's more the aggressiveness and anger that comes through. I thought at first that it was a parody but then realised it wasn't. And it did occur to me of course that people express far more definitive and polarised views on blogs than they might do in real life and come across in a different way: perhaps you are a pussycat really. But if not, where does that anger against those who have a different perspective come from? And quite what's the point?

It won't come as much of a surprise to learn that my correspondent self-identifies as a liberal Guardian-reader (and as a "humanitarian"-  but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he meant "humanist"). He also invites me to visit him - "we would always be happy to demonstrate that your perceived enemy might not be as nasty as you perceive" - adding that there's "a village nearby populated mostly by Conservative voters so you won't feel too alone."

I've been dithering about the email: I just don't know how to respond. After mulling it over for a few days, I've decided to answer some of the points in his email here - in my usual angry, aggressive style - having excised any clues as to the writer's identity.

My correspondent's bemusement is understandable. Educated leftists are always astonished to discover that other educated people don't share their political opinions. As for his "amusement" over the phenomenon of people who've apparently benefited from "big state" socialist policies supporting the concept of a small state, it's matched by my "amusement" at a generation of middle-class leftists who benefited massively from the economically liberal policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative governments of the 1980s but who have nevertheless spent the past 25 years vilifying the woman and the political philosophy of which they were "beneficiaries". I was similarly "amused" by all those enemies of "divisive", "elitist" private education at the BBC who ended up paying through the nose to send their precious offspring to London's finest private schools - the most committed left-winger I ever worked with, who once told he he had become a journalist to "change the world", sent his son to Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School! He said he felt awful about doing so, so that was all right, then. Up the workers! (In case I sound too "angry", he was a lovely bloke, very funny, and we got on like a house on fire - even after I told him he was a colossal hypocrite. To be fair, he also had one or two things to say about my support for Mrs. Thatcher.)

I'm also "bemused" by the implication that "liberal democracy" is somehow synonymous with a large public sector - i.e. a big state - when this is in fact one of the defining characteristics of totalitarian systems. Liberal democracy is the most enlightened, liberating, civilised political arrangement yet devised, and I wouldn't wish to experience any other. But the idea that, in order to count as a liberal democracy, the state needs to turn itself into a vast, coercive wealth-redistribution scheme which appropriates over a third of GDP (OECD average) in order to maintain an enormous public sector - well, that's nonsense. There seems to be a notion on the Left that without, say, the NHS, nobody, apart from the very rich, would be receiving any medical treatment in this country, and that if the state didn't provide "free" education the large mass of children wouldn't receive any education at all. I'm not a libertarian - I believe the state has a sizeable role to play. But, while it needs to defend the country from foreign aggression and protect its citizens from criminals, the rest is up for discussion. (It's odd that the only parts of the state machine the Left innately distrusts are the only truly necessary elements - the military, the security services, and the police.)

He thought this blog was a parody? Did he really believe I hated all the books, music, paintings, films and people I write about so enthusiastically? Or that I couldn't possibly be so silly - so misguided - as to actually disagree with all those self-regarding, virtue-signalling, EU-loving, Israel-hating, climate change-endorsing, Conservative-loathing, America-despising, frackophobic, LGBT-obsessed, "humanitarian" academics, broadcasters, journalists, politicians, pop stars, actors, students, TV personalities, writers, quangocrats etc. who seem convinced that the moral correctness of their own opinions gives them the right to demand that the money appropriated by the state from the rest of us should be spent only on those things which accord with their own modish left-liberal metropolitan preferences - while they impugn the intelligence, sanity and morality of everyone who doesn't share their opinions?

So, having accepted that I actually mean what I say, he then begins to question my emotional state - I am "angry", "aggressive". He wonders if I am expressing "far more polarised and definitive views" than I would in "real life". Sorry to disappoint him, but this is the way I express myself in "real life". As for my views being "definitive" or polarised", I wonder if he'd describe them in the same way were I expressing similarly vigorous support for the NHS, the EU, multiculturalism, state schools, higher taxes and mass immigration? I suspect not: after all, then I would be displaying righteous, justifiable anger on behalf of acceptable causes - whereas, since I'm supporting unacceptable causes, I must be emotionally damaged. Au contraire - despite suffering from a debilitating, medically-untreatable condition for the past three and a half years, I considered myself a cheerful, level-headed and relatively unsplenetic sort of cove who holds strong opinions and expresses them forcefully and, sometimes, exuberantly. If he would like to argue with me about issues - rather than speculating about my emotional well-being - he should feel free to avail himself of the comments section handily situated below each post.

As for his question, "What's the point?" - I don't understand what he's getting at. What's the point of writing a blog? What's the point of expressing my opinions? Well, because I enjoy doing so and quite a few people seem to enjoy reading what I write. What's the point of expressing myself forcefully? Because that's the way I think - I only write about things that matter to me, and I'm not a lukewarm sort of person. Besides, why would anyone write an anodyne personal blog full of milksop, namby-pamby, vacillating "on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand" pap - unless that's just the sort of person they are, of course? I'm not. Sue me!

Finally, his kind invitation to visit - not, it seems, so that two old pals can get together to reminisce and find out whether they still have something in common - but so that I can be helped to realise that my "perceived enemy might not be as nasty as you perceive". Thanks for the invitation, but as I don't see Guardian-reading liberals - whether humanitarian or otherwise - as enemies, or as intrinsically "nasty", I'm not sure what the point would be. Having attended a left-liberal university, having worked for several years in the left-liberal milieu of publishing, having spent twenty years working for the BBC - an organisation stuffed to the gunnels with left-liberal Guardian-readers - and as I live in an impeccably left-liberal, Remain-voting neighbourhood, as I'm a member of a church which is basically New Labour at prayer, and as many of my dearest friends are Guardian-reading left-liberals, I don't quite see what I would learn from meeting another example of the breed. Now, if he just wanted to chew the fat with an old pal who just happens to see the world differently, that would be different.

And I still can't figure how to respond to his email!