How I turned my love of pointless things into a popular heritage blog

Bradford-born Alan Burnett, 74, moved to Halifax as a youngster where he began taking photos. The photographer has since worked a range of jobs from being a bus conductor to an economics lecturer but one thing that has endured the test of time is his love of photography.

He said: “Themes have emerged, but just as quickly vanished again - the very purpose of pointlessness is to enjoy creating things without a specific end or objective in mind. I suppose, over the years, images have become more important than words, but this reflects the fact that, as I get older, I seem to enjoy pictures more than words , a reversion to early childhood, perhaps.

“With old photographs, it is often the marginal detail which fascinates me the most - not the subject that was being captured fifty or one hundred years ago, but the clothing they were wearing, the buildings in the background, the people walking down the street.”

Alan left school as a budding trainee press photographer for a local newspaper, but due to operational changes at the time, the job offer was cancelled.

He said: “For a time I did a variety of temporary jobs - bus conductor, employment exchange clerk, warehouse worker - before going to college and then university. I continued to take photographs both in the Halifax area and in the Potteries (where I was at university)."

Photographing the pointlessness in life

When Alan started working as a lecturer in economics and industrial relations at Doncaster Institute of Higher Education, the photographs continued, but now they were of Halifax and South Yorkshire as well.

“During the mid 1980s, I gradually lost all my hearing and this made teaching more and more difficult so I concentrated on writing on the subject I was now specialising in - European Union social policy,” explained Alan who replied to our questions via email due to his hearing loss.

He then went freelance producing newsletters for the European Commission in Brussels and specialist European information for a variety of other organisations. By the mid 1990s, he returned to live in Halifax.

Alan said: “Needless to say, I was still taking photographs.”

By 2006 he had retired from his various working activities, and that is when he set up his first blog, to satisfy his love of history, research, photography and pointless things as well as giving him freedom.

“The blog started as a celebration of pointlessness - after decades of writing material on a narrow and somewhat specialist range of subjects, this was an opportunity to write what I wanted, when I wanted and how I wanted.

“It was also an opportunity to showcase some of my new, and old, photographs. I had always kept my negatives over the years and I was able to start to explore these via high-resolution scanning. At the same time, I discovered that there was a growing interest in old photographs - for want of a better term, the nostalgia market.”

Blogging is “like a daily Wordle which I always win.”

Like a lot of people, over the last ten years, Alan has increasingly used social media. He built up a local following on Facebook and Twitter to promote his “pointless blog.”

He added: “Twitter has become a particular favourite, given the ability to share images accompanied by a limited number of words.”

Alan said there is no purpose to his blogging.

“It is equivalent to a game of patience: it passes the time and amuses me.

“If other people find interest in the blogs and social media posts, that is a bonus, but, having been producing material almost every day for sixteen years, I would carry on whether people followed me or not. It's like a daily Wordle which I always win.”

You can find Alan’s blog at https://alanburnett.com