20

Huh.

It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old.

20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason.

I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine.

Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage is a relatively conventional one, I suspect. I'm always irritated by columns that try to extract extra meaning from the quotidian. It's not that staggering, and I'm not all that interesting. I've changed, obviously. Probably a bit nicer, definitely a bit more tired, still, remarkably, cooking for a living. If you'd told me then that I'd still be on the line now I probably would have jacked it all in and done something daft like get a proper job. And I'd have lost out, because life's pretty good.

It's seen three kids, three books, two businesses and one (still thankfully extant) marriage, it's older than many of the most important things in my life, it's outlived some of the others. The world is a very different place now to what it was when Coastalblog started, and in many ways it is exactly the same. I wouldn't have envisioned the shitshow that is the 2020s back then, but that's the optimism of youth for you. I note that the really political posts seem to have died off a bit of late, that's what 13 years of perpetual what the fuckery will do to you. TBH, I don't miss them, I don't imagine you do either.

I dunno, I'd say I'm running out of steam, but looking back I see I say that every few years, that's the advantage of keeping this sort of thing going for as long as I have, it gives me a bit of perspective, on myself, as much as anything else. It's also quite nice to have written evidence, I've kept the receipts, so to speak, I can't mythologise my past because it's already written down, I know who I am, and who I was, and that, in a strange sort of a way, is quite comforting.

It's also quite nice to still be doing something I did as a younger man, as I sink into middle age it's cheering to retain some of the habits of my younger self, and it stops me doing terribly middle aged things like having an affair or taking up Golf. There's a lot of mockery about middle aged men getting the band back together, but it's less laughable if you never stopped playing (that said, there's nothing wrong with getting the band back together, either). Plus, it forces me to think, and that is something I'd quite like to keep doing.

So I suppose I'll keep toddling on for a bit, see where it takes me. God knows. I have no insights, everything changes, everything stays the same. But I'll keep plugging away here, in the absence of anything better to do, there are worse habits to have, like Golf, for example.