Two years

I remember two years ago today, on a Saturday evening, I sat in the chair next to the window in the front room, in front of a blank white screen, and I wrote my first ever blog post. It is the only thing I remember about that evening, and I only remember it because I have that first blog post as a permanent record that, whatever I did or didn’t do, whatever I had for dinner that night, whatever Kelly and I got up to that day, I wrote something. The first thing. Back then I wouldn’t have realised that that’s one of the powerful things about writing things down; it lends them the appearance of truth.

When I realised the two year anniversary was approaching I had all sorts of plans about what I could do to celebrate. At first, I was going to put up some of my favourite quotes from the blog, as a sort of retrospective, but I decided against that - mainly because the feedback I got was that it would be a self-indulgent thing to do (even by the admittedly self-indulgent standards of blogging in general). So that idea fell by the wayside, and I went back to the drawing board.

My next idea was that perhaps I could do a director’s commentary of my first ever post. I had that idea a while back and then to my horror somebody did it on a blog I read from time to time, so I shelved it. Picking it up again, I found the idea lasted about as long as it took me to read my first ever post. It’s okay, I suppose, but I don’t think it would stand up to much commentary; reading it back now, it seems like it was written by someone quite different to me.

Looking at it I’m also struck by how breezy it is, how breezy a lot of the early posts on the blog were. I wrote every day, on some occasions more than once, and it was very much a running commentary on what my life was like. And at first nobody was reading - some friends and family, but nobody beyond that. Then, from nowhere, readers started to appear and even now I don’t really know how they all found me.

Of course, a lot of the people who read the blog then don’t read it now, or do and don’t comment, in much the same way that some of you reading this now might not be doing so at some point in the future. That transience is strange yet reassuring, but that would never have occurred to me sitting in that chair two years ago deciding what to say and how to kick everything off. I don’t think I had any idea what the two years would hold, in terms of writing or indeed anything else.

It feels in a lot of ways like the longest two years of my life, given that so much has changed in that time. The shape of my life, my family, my friends and my health are all so different now. My world today has a big space in it which is filled by writing and putting ideas into words, such an important space that I wonder what I spent all that time on several years ago. I have a theory that time is a lot like money - unless you think hard about how (and on whom) you spend it you find you’ve frittered it away without even noticing and you haven’t got any left. So I feel glad that I invested it in this.

I’m also surprised by how much ground I’ve covered in the last two years. First there was the “here’s what I did today” phase and then there was “here’s a funny story from my past” phase, but those probably only took me through the first six months and after that things started to change. Or maybe I did; I can’t even put my finger on when that shift took place, but if you’d told the 2009 me the sorts of things he would end up writing about I’m not sure he would have believed you. I feel a certain kinship with him, only two years but thousands of experiences ago, with - in the nicest sense - absolutely no idea what he was doing.

What I realise, writing this, is that all my plans for celebrating this arbitrary anniversary are wrong because they’re fundamentally back to front. They are all about me when this should be about you. So thank you - thank you for reading and coming back, whether you’ve been doing it for weeks, months and years. Thanks for keeping me going and being encouraging. There have been times when I needed more encouragement than others - I still have a note in my notepad, scrawled on a train back from Oxford some time last year, which was the beginning of a post saying I was quitting blogging. I hope it’s the only post I never finish.

Thanks too to anyone who has sent me an email, mentioned me in a post, given me an award, sent me a recipe, sent me fanmail, visited a blog I mentioned as part of “That Was The Week That Blogged” or picked up any of the ideas in here like 100 Words or the “Seven things” meme I ran last year. Thanks too, to anybody who's commented. I'm very lucky with the comments I get, and all the stories and threads in those comments are every bit as much a part of my narrative as anything I’ve written. Knowing that we are all part of a community makes me feel oddly moved - in fact, this may be one of the only communities I properly feel I belong in.

I don’t think I have managed to avoid self-indulgence, have I? To be honest though, it was only to be expected on a day like today. The first birthday of my blog passed in a fairly downbeat manner, and I’ve never been one for doing the navel gazing reviews of the year at the end of December, but I hope you’ll forgive me for this one. You are, after all, probably the best reason for writing there could be - people who read it. Well, read most of it anyway; you probably deserve a medal if you've got to the end of this one.

So in terms of how I celebrate two continuous years since I sat in that chair and typed, all glib and pleased with myself, "I blame Doogie Howser, M.D.", well, I think you lot are the best possible celebration of that. So if you want to say something in the comments, or tell me what your favourite post was, or unlurk and tell me how long you’ve been reading for that would make me very happy indeed. And if you don’t, that’s fine too. We’ll all just carry on like this post never happened.