Coastalblog is 18!
Yes, in a quite surprising turn of events, I note that this wheezing, hoary, web 1.0 dinosaur has reached the age of majority. Older than my kids, older than my marriage, it's outlasted countless jobs, one whole business and the entirety of what one could laughingly refer to as my academic career. It is also, I can't help but note, considerably older than faceboko and twitter, meaning I get to shake my head wisely and sadly at the excitable behaviour of these upstarts (I am too old to even acknowledge the existence of tiktok, believing firmly that there's nothing worse than adults trying to muscle in on the kids stuff, and the less said about snapchat, the better*).
While the world has changed considerably since then, with a much more widely varied and exciting menus of threats to bring about the end of humanity, some things have remained much of a muchness. The very first post here asked what the point of it was, so I probably wasn't off to a flier, it also presciently suggested that I wouldn't post that often, which for some years (notably The Source Years) was definitely the case., where it was on the money was the discipline of the thing. It's a reason to sit down and write, and without it, I might not. And while I am not, by any stretch, the writer I once thought I would be, I find it hard to think of myself as not a writer, so I keep plugging away.
And, in a sense, it's worked. I look at the view counts for those first hesitant posts and (as I'd already suggested) no one was reading. These days, some people are, more than watch GB News, anyway. Some of the posts get a few hundred reads, not a drop in the ocean, I know, but enough to make me feel like there are people out there (and probably more than the total number of books I've sold down the years, it's a tough life here in the literary wilderness).
And it's nice to chart my life through it, from relatively carefree twentysomething to careworn bloke, and all points in between. The last eighteen years have seen marriage, becoming a parent, starting a business, the death of my brother, winding that business up, taking over another business, publishing some books, it's distinctly possible that it will be the most eventful period of my existence. I certainly hope so, I'm rather planning to stay as I am for the next few years, as where I'm at at the moment is pretty nice, thanks. Through it all, Coastalblog's bobbed about, occasionally being used to vent spleen on personal matters (though very rarely), occasionally as a vehicle for unforgivable whimsy, and mostly an opportunity for me to foghorn my terrible opinions at a largely uncaring world. I've tended to steer clear of career-related posts, though there are occasional recipes.
In a widely varied career of posts of hugely patchy quality, there are a few that entertain me still. The was the time that I broke the story of the hapless Fort William FC a week before The Times, for one. A lot of the stuff from the old days is in-jokes amongst my friends, now that I have no social life at all to speak of, the bulk of the posts are of the category I'd consider "Angry bloke fumes uselessly at Government", though one of my favourites (and one of the most popular) is last year's analysis of Gordon Ramsay's Full English.
Far and away the most popular post in the blog's history is Reasons to be Cheerful part 2, which should probably be some sort of a lesson for me, people like cheerful stuff (though it got twice as many reasons as part 1, so what does that say, eh?) There are a couple of political ones in the top ten, and bafflingly, a book review of a Paul Auster novel (wasn't even one of his best ones), which, if nothing else, goes to show that I'm wildly inconsistent..
And there we have it, eighteen years (and one day) of mithering, muttering, fretting, obsessing and occasionally writing something people want to read. Who knows how much longer I'll keep it up for, but I'm not stopping yet.
*Why yes, I do sound like a middle aged man. There's a reason for that.
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