Sliding Off

Less, sometimes, is more.

My friends often say this to me.

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Imagine an old-school Night Duty. A quiet one, after a couple of nightmare shifts. It’s 04.30 and the sergeant says you can slide off early. That’s what I’m doing with this Substack. Not disappearing. Just ‘sliding off’ for a while. I’m sure I’ll have something I need to share sooner or later.

I started this project in July 2022, a smidgeon over two years ago. In that time I’ve written 76 articles and approximately 150,000 words. I’ve kept this Substack free, despite offers to monetize it. I’ve garnered 2000-odd subscribers and enjoyed interacting with some great people. It’s been a rewarding experience.

Now I’ve decided the Substack needs to take a back seat (and other social media too). Why? In case you’re interested, and in no particular order;

I don’t want to be Boring

This is easily the most important reason. I’ve, more or less, said what I wanted to say when I started writing about policing. My worst fear is being repetitive, boring or samey. I’m not going to pressurise myself into creating content for the sake of it, or to meet arbitrary deadlines - you as a reader would notice. In this game, the reader is the first, second and third priority. Besides, sometimes, less is more.

Time

Most of my Substack pieces take a day of ‘real-time’, i.e. thinking, researching, finding links, actually writing the bloody thing and then publishing. That’s a day less to focus on my other writing. That’s taken a backseat recently, which is entirely my fault. My multitasking was never up to much. I need to concentrate on other projects, some which might appear as Dominic Adler and others which might not.

Health

I’ve been housebound, on and off, with a chronic health condition for nearly a year. Most of the time I’m knackered because of it. I’m receiving treatment, part of which involves taking a shitload of meds. My prognosis isn’t too bad, by the way, but my violin-playing and marathon-running days are definitely behind me. Ha ha ha.

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I’ll be back when my inspiration tanks refill, or the Job does something even more spectacularly stupid than usual (in which case it won’t be long). In the meanwhile, I thought it might be interesting to share my five most popular (by views) articles and a couple of personal favourites.

The five most read are;

Plod - Class, the British police and why coppering isn’t a job for the posh.

Blue Tickets - The death of goodwill in policing.

Refs - Coppers, bad food and getting caught drinking on duty.

Morale Patch - Crappy police industrial relations, through the prism of a small piece of cloth.

Mud, Ming-Ming and the Turkish Slipper - An irreverent look at police nicknames, most of which would get you sacked nowadays.

Two articles I’m quite proud of are;

The Everything Police - how the police became social workers.

Three Small Words - A personal piece, and one of my earliest, about dealing with death as a young police officer.

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Hey, stay in touch. Don’t be a stranger. Comments are open. I’ll also check into my messages here, or you can contact me via my website. As ever, if anyone needs a jobbing writer with a particular set of skills, you know where I am.

Until then, dear readers, adios. And if you want something to read, check out my Amazon page.

Cheers,

Dom

If you know, you know.

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