Ellee Seymour

  I have either met the sacked vicar, the Rev Tom Ambrose, or spoken to him on the phone during my days as a Cambridge reporter, but I’m afraid I can’t remember anything about him. I just know we made contact at some time.

The vicar of Trumpington has been sacked after a tribunal heard he had spat at a parishoner.  Perhaps this should come as no surprise if you read an extract from this verse, one of my favourite by Rupert Brooke, called The Old Vicarage, where he describes the local people:

For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,

I don’t think the poet had spitting in mind when he penned those immortal words…

I’m a self-confessed blogoholic and feel guilty when I neglect blogging because of work and other demands on my time. This week has been like that, and I expect the next couple of weeks to be the same too.

If you are as addicted as me, then please do read this story, it’s a cautionary tale and describes how writers in America have been blogging till they drop - literally.

However, America has a different blogging culture where writers are paid and on some of the bigger sites, they can earn between $30,000 - $70,000 a year or more. But the pressure is intense and speed is of the essence. If a blogger is beaten by a millisecond, someone else’s post on the subject will bring in the audience, the links and the bigger share of the ad revenue.

Here are some extracts from the New York Times article:

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

So please, don’t forget to take time to chill out - I’ll try and remember to do the same. And apologies to my regular bloggers for not visiting your site this week, I will get round to it when I can.