It was the Guardian's best blog competition that inspired me to start blogging, 52 weeks ago. That and reading some of the winners (and some of the non-entrants too). So I thought I'd start writing a blog, just quietly, one Sunday afternoon, while nobody was looking. And then a month later Google noticed me, and then Swish Cottage noticed me, and suddenly I had readers. Including my parents, who stumbled upon the site by accident and have been reading ever since. Concentrates the mind wonderfully, that. Your comments brought the blog to life, especially on days with a puzzle or a quiz, even if Haloscan haven't always been terribly reliable (incidentally, all your old comments are still there on the archive pages, it's just that Haloscan can't be bothered to count them all and so it just says comments(0) even when there are in fact lots of them).
I've enjoyed writing for the blog, mainly as a way of sharing stuff I like with others. I need to vent my brain somehow. In the absence of anyone else at home to talk to, I talk to you lot instead. My aim has been to keep as much of the content as original as possible, rather than just copying what somebody else has written, although I do like to slip in asmanylinkstoothersitesasIpossiblycan. I also like to keep the blog predictably unpredictable, so you never quite know what you're going to read next time you log in. I'm glad so many of you come back and have a look anyway. And I've tried hard to write at least one thing every day. Of the last 365 days, I've only missed out on 13 of them (usually because I've been out of town, although that doesn'talways stop me). It's not too obsessive is it?
Here's to the second year of diamond geezer, starting tomorrow. (And, you lucky people, it's a day longer than the first...)
12 months of diamond geezer
