3000

The 27th of September 2013 turned out be be something of a "red letter day" here at Blogfordshire Headquarters. Not only did the blog itself finally stagger over the three-year anniversary mark, but, for the first time ever, the monthly page view tally broke through the three thousand barrier.

Three thousand... Perhaps not much in terms of television ratings, or even in terms of other, far more successful blogs, but it was significant in these here circles simply because it hadn't actually happened before. This was a clear seven hundred up on any previous month, aided, I'll grant you by a record day where the views numbered 469 at the top of the month for no very good reason that I could ascertain, and, given that there still remains a number of hard-core "followers" numbering a good, solid ten, I think that you can be very proud of the effort that you're putting in.

This was after the overall all-time figures smashed through the 40,000 pageviews mark a mere nine days earlier, so, whilst this blog could never claim to be a "hit" it seems to have found a tiny place in the world to call home...

I am under no illusion. Those figures are really not important. This blog is written chiefly for myself, although the six of you I know to be regular readers are firmly in my mind when I set fingertip to keyboard, because, just in case I ever actually meet any of you "in the flesh" (as it were) and have to explain some of my more "radical" (and sometimes very temporary) opinions in person.

Judging by the "other" statistical monitor, those numbers are great big fat lies anyway, and are mostly due to "pings" coming from remote file servers in faraway lands, mostly drawn by strange words in the post title which seem to suck in electronic interest for no definable reason, and this strangely illogical cyber-probing seldom lasts for more than a second or two, so there's not much actually reading of the words going on, I can be quite certain of that.

A friend, fellow blogger (and, incidentally, my most regular commentator) recently asked a question that I think everyone who is prone to regular blogging occasionally asks, "Why am I still blogging? (http://akh-wonderfullife.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/why-am-i-still-blogging.html) and yet, given that his totals are one hundred thousand more than mine after perhaps only a year or so longer of playing this game, and his "followers" number in the dozens (although we're still never dealing with huge numbers here) I did wonder why on earth he was questioning what he does, given that in these limited terms, his  is something of a success story, and I decided that, for once, I ought to tell him so...

The maths speaks for itself... My own average is about 36, and my current total is running 100,000 behind yours despite being only a few hundred posts behind and I have been followed by the "Terrific Ten" almost since day one and no more... (although I do think that "following" has become less of a "thing" of late, to be honest...) 

Let's be honest here, you're a hit! A palpable hit! And whilst the rest of us may be Boring For Britain, you've certainly got more reason to pursue this follysome exercise than many of us would appear to have...

Dammit man, people LIKE what you're doing!!!

Before sliding into a more philosophical frame of mind (see also above)...

I think that all of us who do this suffer from occasional bouts of existential angst as to why we do so from time-to-time. 

As you know, when I write, I regularly make Eeyore seem like he ought to be a Holiday Camp Entertainments Manager, and I quite often want to give it all up, but, for whatever reasons, we plod on, presenting our wares to the world for no other very good reason than the fact that we can, but if it entertains a few people, or makes one or two of them take a moment out of their day to pause and think, it's not the most pointless thing that any of us could be doing with our time...

"Keep on keeping on" say I...

I know I do (and God alone knows why...)

If it really bothered me, of course, I could do more to "promote" these, my daily(ish) witterings, but I don't. These things are never all that likely to be immensely "popular" to be perfectly honest, I'm under no delusions there. However, from time-to-time I will be pleased enough with something that I will do something "additional" in order to promote something, and click on those buttons which will "share" a post on "Google+" (which is like not sharing at all) or Twitter, especially if I think that it might appeal to certain "niche" interests which people I occasionally banter with might have (as a rule, it generally doesn't, by the way), where it will be relevant for a microsecond before plummeting down the screen to be forgotten once more at the base of several hundred timelines.

I've pretty much - unless the circumstances are really exceptional - given up on linking these posts to FizzBok, though. Most of the time, with the exception of my most loyal contributor (see above), I may as well have been posting a tombstone for all the interest that is usually engendered. Although, to be fair, that pretty much sums up my entire FizzBok experience, to be honest. It was like being the invisible man and, despite the fact that my "friends list" numbered several times more than the number of people I may actually have face-to-face conversations with over the course of a year, it was still rather paltry and might, to a more impressionable soul, imply that I might not, in fact, be all that likable...

Much of what I used to see there annoyed me so much that I simply had to keep clicking the "Don't show in TimeLine" option to the point that I no longer existed in any real sense over there any more, which isn't, of course, very likable behaviour, but there we are.

So, here we find ourselves, enjoying a surprisingly popular environment, albeit in a small and rather unexpected way. At least the cyber-bots seem to be enjoying their visits anyway, and these regular reports from Lesser Blogfordshire will no doubt keep appearing, and the occasional bit of banter will amuse me for a fleeting few seconds before the awful grind of enduring enough of life to squeeze out the next observation of it has to be battled through.

I remain, as ever, glad that you're here, and I do occasionally wonder if there is anything else I should be doing to remind you that I'm here, but, as I may have mentioned before (see above), that really is not the point...

TRENDING

Am I a bit premature in spotting a trend here...?

I mean, I know that I’m never going to set the literary world alight with any of my astonishing prose, but the last two months of this epic daily two-year blog-fest have been showing a surprising increase in the numbers just at the time when I really believed everyone would, could and should have lost all interest.

Whilst I know in my mind that I’m always just talking to myself and, in fact, tend to feel slightly disturbed whenever I find out that I’m not, when September burst through that “best ever” barrier I thought “well, that’s fair enough” but when October did it again, and by quite some considerable margin, I did start to wonder what the hell was going on.

Now, of course, I’m suffering from “November anxiety” as the counters are all reset to zero again and we begin the inexorable climb up from nothing once more. The daft thing is that I know that I ought not to look at the numbers, and that, in many ways, the numbers are completely irrelevant. After all, it’s not as if I need to worry about “sales” or “ratings” or anything daft like that. My livelihood does not depend upon these pages to put bread on the table…

Thankfully.

No, believe it or not, I sit here writing, all alone in the dark purely for the “fun” of it. In other words, doing this every day has become, for better or worse, my “hobby”.

It’s what I do to “relax”, whatever that might be…

I might one day curl up and die due to a complete lack of interest, but that would be in the real world, not because of some massively inaccurate counter on a website somewhere, which bears no relationship to the numbers on another counter on another website somewhere, and both of which prove to be that my hard-grafted words, carefully honed thoughts and cleverly chosen phraseologies and bon-mots are looked at on average for less than five seconds, and usually only then by robots or computers from fat corporations trying to work out what my “interests” are…

They’re wasting their time. I have no other interests. Life is merely what I do to get by, and writing fills in the gaps. I’m patently not doing it for any “enjoyment” I might get out of it. I think that ship has well and truly sailed.

After all, none of those increasingly large monthly visitor numbers are down to “real” people. They’re patently not “real” people because, out of the hundreds of pieces of rubbish that I’ve written during these past two years, only three of them stand out from the crowd in any significant way, and all three of those have the word “post” in the title which seems to be what draws their visitors to them, albeit only for a microsecond, and usually because they’re “bots” of some kind tuned in to that particular word, phrase or saying…

But fully two thousand of those mildly impressive “all time visits” have been spent looking at those three pages and the rest, well the rest have kind of passed everyone by, which I think is a bit of a shame, but then I would, wouldn’t I…?

Sometimes I think that things would be no different at all if I merely sat here writing “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again for the entire winter. I’ve got a couple of unpublished posts that are a bit like that, actually. If you do regularly follow these witterings, you might very well start to spot the moment when I finally “snapped” if either of those ever appear. Perhaps I should impose upon you to request that you might want to send for the people in the white coats if that morning ever dawns, but seeing as you’re unlikely to have read this far in your five-second visit, and are probably a robot anyway, why should I hope that you’ll remember to do that…?

Anyway, I’ve done the numbers, and made up the gaps and, as we sailed onwards into November, the daily postings, at least in mathematical terms, completed their two years and by adding the 61 from the end of the first year to the 375 in the second and sneaking in a quick 296 for this year we scraped together enough bits and pieces to add up to two times 365 (plus one for the leap year) and so can claim to have reached our target, whatever it might have been.

Yay! Balloons, whistles, little twirly bits of paper falling from the ceiling and so on…

So I can clearly state that I’ve kind of done the numbers and this would be as good a time as any to come to a complete full stop and look for something else to do with which to fill those gaps, but you know I won’t. The backlog of other thoughts, notions and ideas would already drag us wearily towards the coming year if I never wrote another word, and we know that the addiction is far too ingrained for that to be likely.

No, my friends, we seem to be stuck with each other or, at least, I appear to be stuck with this obsession, and you are free to come and go as you please. Well, those of you that aren’t robots are in any case.

As for me, well it’s just Huey, Dewey and Louie and the remains of the “Valley Forge” until that graph plummets back down to zero and we sail into history…

REVISITING

It’s been “interesting” well, for me at least (I can’t really speak for the rest of you…) to “revisit” one or two of those hitherto publicly “unpublished” pieces which I wrote during that rather strange month when I chose to more-or-less “disappear” from BlogWorld for a while for various reasons, not all of which were completely without merit.

Some of those reasons, you see, actually made some kind of sense at the time… as I found out by reading one or two of the more “ranty” ones that are still safely locked in that Cybervault and remain unlikely to ever see the light of day unless I actually get to the point where I’m so desperate that I don’t have any words less or I just don’t give a toss any more.

Occasionally, that point feels like it’s only a heartbeat away, by the way, and I feel like telling the whole world to go and take a running jump, but the moment passes and sanity (or its nearest neighbour) prevails and the “nuclear” option is resisted for another day.

After all, the nuclear option isn’t really an option anyway, and even if it was, I’d be aiming at the wrong target. What’s the point in ranting at the wrong people when it wouldn’t be you that I’d be aiming my ire towards…?

But enough of this.

Reading through those thirty odd pages made me realise that fewer than half of them could really be considered “adequate” enough for sharing with the wider world in general, whilst the majority, whilst I accept that my brain was in a stranger than usual place during that month, were the deranged meanderings of a self-obsessed jerk…

Pretty much like most of the rest of the time, I suppose…

This does lead me, however – because there is actually some point to all this preamble - to the rather inevitable conclusion that burbling on and spewing these things out every day might actually be something to be considered as being far “too much” and, perhaps, reducing my output to every other day at most, might actually create a “better” product in some way.

Of course I already feel a tangent coming on about how we might define “better” and consider the horrific “management speak” cliché where “better” most often actually means “far, far worse” (especially if you happen to be a consumer…).

Still, it is worth a thought, although I do have to consider you lovely people who are kind enough to indulge an old man by reading his irrelevant drivvle each and every day. Would failing to stoke the fires of intrigue on only alternate days break the habit…? Would you swiftly forget to set your dial to “Lesser Blogfordshire” and drift away to the other, shinier things which might try to distract you...?

After all, so many local daily newspapers have gone weekly in an attempt to survive, and look how that’s turning out for them…

I also found from reading a few of them some time later (I seldom do, you know...) that my little tropes, verbal ticks and themes are pretty constant and that some of the things I have been referring back to here were only ever written there and so nobody else would have the first clue as to what I was going on about.

No change there then…

Still, it was nice to realise that at a time when I was convinced that I “couldn’t” write at all, it seems that some of the stuff that I was churning out was actually okay(ish) and so I felt confident to “unlock” the vault and release the half dozen or so that you’ve had the “pleasure” of reading across this past week or so and, when added to another couple which were released early for good behaviour, that makes a grand total of eight of thirty two that have been allowed to roam free in the world providing they don’t disgrace themselves, re-offend and get put back in the box.

I guess it’s a “trust” issue.

If you do the maths, you’ll realise that there are, of course, a few more in there, but I need to keep back some ammunition for those dreadful dark damp days as winter starts to brew itself up properly and my brain freezes and I need something to fall back upon, (possibly as soon as tomorrow if I can’t get my brain back into gear...).

Of course, at the moment, I’m convinced once again that I don’t seem to be able to write half as well as I thought I used to either (hence desperate nonsenses like this one), and so the cycle continues…

Rather more happily and against all the odds given what I’ve been churning out over these past few weeks, September - incidentally the two year anniversary of the beginnings of these outpourings – turned out to be, in terms of visits at least, a “record” month which is, I suppose, something to be pleased about. It might mean that the fatigue of familiarity isn’t quite setting in with you all yet, or it might just mean that I’ve been around so long now that people are kind of getting used to me being here.

It might, of course, just mean that there’s such a random scattering of titles and thoughts that the search engines keep picking up on them and luring in the unwary traveller who then, like at the “Munsters” house, takes one look around and is running for the gate…

No doubt I’d be running away too, if I had the energy…

NO POINT

Before we start, this really, really isn’t directed at you. You are, after all, already here, but these musings and rattlings of the bones of the skeletons in my cupboard are really being read by less and less people all of the time and, on occasion, I feel that I have to “take a moment” to reassess quite what it is that I’m hoping to achieve whenever I take it upon myself to sit down at a keyboard, string a few words together and then decide to share them  with the (not exactly) waiting world outside, who seem to be mostly indifferent to whether I actually do, and are hardly anxiously hanging on with bated breath waiting for the next instalment.

When I say “you” in that last paragraph of course, I could of course be referring to absolutely no-one at all… There is evidence to support the fact that one or two of these pages have never been “viewed” by anyone at all, so “you” might not have read one word of this so far, which makes every word of it so far appear to be just a little bit pointless.

Such is the strange duality of the life of the habitual bloggist. You write to share, but mostly you just write. The sharing part is beyond your control and, much like in shop-keeping, there isn’t a great deal you can do about it apart from presenting your wares where you will, and hoping that people will feel intrigued enough to poke their noses around the corner, have a quick look around and hopefully feel compelled enough to visit again.

Meanwhile, there remain all of the little, I can only call them “disappointments” I suppose, that come along with this weird world that I’ve chosen to join. I post links that aren’t followed, and they’re rarely, if ever, “liked” or “recommended” to anyone else by those who do venture here. Those are the moments when you really do feel like just giving up, when you start to realise that this is how things are “supposed” to work if you are ever going to achieve a modicum of what those “in the know” might call “success”, so that, in the end, the whole sorry enterprise can seem like the colossal waste of time that you always suspected that it really is. Very few of my “visitors” take the time to “comment”, so when they do it’s like finding a gold nugget and I feel that I should respond, even if, in the end, those responses lack the care and forethought that I like to think I put into these writings before I dare to hit “publish” and can end up seeming crass and flippant when really, I’m just so very grateful for the opportunity to engage in a bit of an exchange of ideas.

However, this nagging sense of not making any progress with making the mutterings themselves more widely appreciated could be because I don’t have the vast mass of contacts that many people seem to have who actually take some sort of an interest about whether they’re still breathing or not, but that’s nobody’s fault but mine, as the mighty Led Zep might have put it, although not about something as trivial as this, I’m sure.

The actual truth is that most of my internet “friends” don’t read a word of it, and, if you look at the figures, it appears that most of my “followers” (and I do dislike the messianic overtones of that) don’t read it either. Most of the “real” people who I actually see and know don’t read it, despite the many hints that I’ve dropped over the last couple of years. My family (such as it is) don’t read it either as a rule (mainly because some of them don’t even know it’s here and I would like it to stay that way, thank you very much), although one of them seems to drop in from time-to-time to work out just quite how mad I’m becoming…

Some days it might seem that even I don’t read it (but then you may have noticed that from mi spelinz and the gramer wot uze I…) but that’s because since I worked out how to “post date” or “schedule” these things, I do occasionally not quite remember which of them I have chosen to “entertain” you with on a particular morning. I do, after all, like to get slightly ahead of myself to allow for those “braindead” mornings when no words will come, although playing that particular game is risky and it does cause occasional havoc when real-world current events overtake the schedule…

What tends to happen is that you get a really, really “good” day and all of those people realise that there’s nothing there that they like and so it’s followed by a really, really bad day...

A friend of mine went “fishing” the other day, attaching a quick self-deprecating memo of  the “I can write what I like, nobody reads it anyway” variety to his latest posting. Naturally this elicited a small but significant flurry of positive responses (and one slightly more cynical one from a certain blogger you might know…) claiming that each and every one of them was reading every word he wrote every day which, I presume, wasn’t the experience that the author was getting, otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the need to add his memo in the first place.

At least people did claim to be reading him, though. Here in Lesser Blogfordshire, these pages are regularly read by three or four rather lovely people and the occasional stray, and similar attempts at flagrant “fishing” that I have tried in the past have had a response resembling the tumbleweed blowing through an old wild west ghost town.

Like in most things, it really comes down to who you know…

In fact I think it’s impressive that he has a large enough circle of people who are prepared to actually notice when he mentions such things, and it does prove that numbers really do make a difference when it comes to making connections in life. I think it also makes it pretty clear that, despite the fact that he might believe his efforts are stuttering or even stalling, in the end they will prevail, whereas, eventually I suspect that my own will falter and cease.

“Falter and Cease” – Undertakers to the Under-appreciated.

Not, I know that I am not really under-appreciated. You few, you happy few, are very loyal and very supportive, which is why these mutterings have managed to keep stumbling along through the darkness during those times when I’ve really considered calling it a day. I do know that if I ever properly stop (as opposed to taking one of my “little breaks” in which the thoughts and ideas still manage to come to mind despite the change of focus), like my Amazon reviews, they are very unlikely to ever start up again. If I let these pages lie fallow for a couple of months, like I keep on fully intending to on occasion, I know that when I try to resume them I will wonder how I ever found the time, make a half-hearted attempt at writing something that will feel to me like it is a really bad piece of writing, and then just give up.

It’s a pattern. It’s what I do…

But I guess that we all need to feel that what we’re doing has some kind of point, however pointless it might be in itself, because it’s a fairly common practice amongst many of those of us who swim in the murky waters of the internet peddling our feeble wares. Some just bulldoze their way along without really caring one way or another, and others are far more introspective and worry about it all the time, hence the need for the occasional reassurance a “fishing” trip can bring.

A bit like in real life, I suppose...

After all that, of course, May 2012 turned out to be a particularly robust month in terms of “page views” of my own humble efforts at entertaining the world from my headquarters in Lesser Blogfordshire, as last month eventually hurtled into an “all time top two” position, and it might very well have climbed even higher if I hadn’t had a crisis in confidence at the start of the week and decided that my last few offerings were far too tedious to bother posting links to…

After all, subjects like lost keys and morning coffee are hardly the kinds of things that you should feel proud enough of to want to draw any attention to them now, are they...? As it happened, events beyond my control rather overtook the nice little routines that I had managed to put into place in my new life. After all, like cousin Mycroft, it takes monumental events to shift me off the rails of my predictable routine, and when they do, my own quiet little place in the great scheme of things can seem permanently shattered and changed forever, and small things, like my quiet little piece about my morning coffee last Monday, now feels like it belongs in another world.

Another acquaintance of mine did one of those “I’m checking to see who reads my stuff, so post this to your status” experiments during the same week, but in that instance the “fishing expedition” finally drove even me to switching them off in my news feed (now that I know you can do that) after weeks of reading what came across to me as being their “Look at me, aren’t I great? Please tell me how great I am…” postings that seemed to me to have an air of increasing desperation about them which, as we all know, works for some people, especially those who are easily manipulated, and are a definite (or literal) “turn off” to others.

But then, perhaps that’s what everyone else thinks about me, and perhaps they’ve already done precisely the same thing. After all, none of us are above a little bit of fundamental hypocrisy when it comes to this sort of nonsense, are we...?

QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS…

A few weeks ago I mentioned a strange and rather alarming experience I had with what may or may not have turned out to be junk mail from a company claiming to be involved in debt collection. It was all a bit traumatic and not a little bit annoying too, but hopefully that’s all gone away for the time being.

Rather strangely, however, on that very same weekend I also got a telephone call from Ipsos MORI, the poll people, asking me if I had a few minutes to spare to answer a survey they were doing.

I was, of course, rather naturally on my guard after all the letter shenanigans of the previous couple of days, so initially I did my level best to seem rather reluctant. Sensing this, my interrogator told me that the survey was about the London Olympics and I played my trump card: I had no interest whatsoever in the London Olympics.

This of course did not work, as the questionairre was really about companies that were sponsoring the Olympics and so, after a bit more chunnering  and mumbling on about not wanting to give out personal information over the telephone (like giving out my age, even though a quick internet search about the content of these very pages could probably tell that to the world if it were remotely interested), I agreed to answer his questions, all the time remaining on the alert for those “out of the blue” queries that might really have been trying to elicit details of my credit cards or bank account in much the same way that rummaging through my bins might.

I was, after all being most unfair because, in the past, I have willingly answered their questions, and indeed have been known to do one of their week-long studies of my behaviour before now, and once let one of their terribly nice researchers into my home to fill in pages and pages of some survey or another, so it hardly seemed fair to refuse this guy who was, after all, just trying to do his job, and it wasn’t as if I didn’t have the spare time on a Sunday afternoon.

I’m not sure what good my answers were, though, because they were mostly “don’t knows” really. So much so that the beloved, who was listening in, asked me whether they were conducting some kind of vagueness survey. However, as I’m forever pointing out to her that those cosmetics adverts that claim that “85% of women agree” always seem to display the tiniest of captions that say something along the lines of “26 of 31 women surveyed” which hardly seems to be a huge sample to me, I can’t really imagine my little answers could do anything but harm the outcome for the massive corporations and would no doubt be thrown into the bin of “unrepresentative results” anyway.

Coo! The things we talk about for fun in our house!

So, whilst still on the alert for the possibility that my caller was phishing for personal data that he could sell on to some criminal masterminds, we stumbled on with our merry dance and I showed my usual ignorance when it comes to all matters of energy supply, failed to recognize the vast majority of the names of the energy supply companies that feed this great nation of ours with all its power, many of them turning out to be French it would seem, and found out that I was totally unaware of any of the companies that are spending their corporate millions on the huge folly otherwise known as “London 2012”.

Granted, there were a couple he mentioned that usually are the ones that sponsor these kinds of events, but I could honestly say that I didn’t know whether they actually were, because each of them had a big enough rival that might just have beaten them to the punch. Not only that, of course, but in previous years, when I have been made aware of their official sponsorship of whichever event it was, I’ve been more concerned as to whether they could honestly consider themselves to be purveyors of a “health drink” or whether the term “official restaurant” could really be accurately applied.

Nevertheless I’m still savvy enough to spot a tallying question to ensure that my answers are consistent, and, despite all my wariness, the whole process was successfully completed although, if they do only find another thirty people like me, however unlikely that might be, the results might just persuade all of those corporate sponsors that they really are wasting all of their money, especially amongst people of my age living in rural areas so far from where the Olympic events are probably likely to take place. Although I eventually threw him the bone that I might just watch one or two things on TV if I really can’t find anything else to watch (I did, after all, quite enjoy the rowing during the Athens games - no, not the 1896 ones… - when I was up early and writing some nonsense a few years ago, so it’s not without precedent), my questioner also seemed rather disappointed that I wouldn’t be seeking out any of those “must have” tickets so that I could “enjoy” the events whenever it is that they do finally happen…

Sometime during 2012, I suspect, although I can’t be quite certain when exactly.

Still, I do now wonder what Ipsos MORI will be able to read into the psychology of my ignorance about the Olympics and whether my little contribution to the vast numbers of statistics will sway or skew the results in any way…

I suspect I’m just going to be filed away with the other nutters.

Again.

SHALLOWS AND AMAZON

We started this week by examining some of my shallowness and, as the week draws to a close, I feel that I should probably continue in much the same vein. It does, after all, give us all some kind of thematic closure as these little observations lurch over the line and we reach this, my 200th contribution to the incessant babble of cyberspace (blows once and rather half-heartedly on a metaphorical cardboard trumpet in ‘celebration’). Two hundred seems a good, honest and round number even though I am choosing to include the bits and pieces in the ‘other’ place (that dare not speak its name) in that total. Two hundred: an even number starting with an even number - for me, at least, the world seems more in order this morning.

I wonder how long that will last...?

Regular visitors to us here in Lesser Blogfordshire (and there are at least two of you left...) will know that I have on occasion been known to get terrifically over-excited by numbers, and rather disturbed by any proliferation of those of the odd kind. Somehow it can be slightly more difficult for me to relax when the quantities of these postings I’ve written are sitting uneasily upon an odd number or indeed if any of the many other statistics which I seem to fret over (despite the rest of the world really not being at all troubled by them) are. For, rather sadly, I am indeed that shallow, and even though I’m not proud of the fact, it’s something I’m trying to come to terms with having to live with.

Dropping off a cliff 

Nevertheless, numbers have been much on my mind in recent weeks for various, rather pointless, reasons. Not only have the numbers been flying thick and fast due to my listening to the World Cup Cricket, and the usual proliferation of bills at the end of the final quarter of the financial year, but in ways much more personal to my little life here at home. For example, that sudden recent spurt of interest (if I dare to even call it that...) due to my own misjudged arrogance propelled the page views hereabouts through the 3000 barrier way sooner than expected, and they were hightailing towards the 4000 mark before I really knew what was happening, although very quickly, things returned to normal and dropped off a cliff back to their usual ‘barely troubling the scorers’ state of normality.

The ‘bearded wonder’, the late great Bill Frindall, who used to be the ‘number one’ scorer on Test Match Special used to get quite grumpy over that expression anyway. Just because a batsman got naught didn’t mean that his job as a statistician was made any easier for it, he would say. In fact, a swift turnaround of batsmen could make things rather more frantic and hectic for a scorer for a few minutes than anyone who was well set and cruising along nicely to an innings that was allegedly ‘troubling’ the scorers would.

It’s a shame really, all those numbers careering down that steeply sloping incline. I hadn’t got so excited about the possibility of finally achieving some kind of progression since I learned how a Fibonacci sequence worked. You know the one, where the next number is the sum of the previous two. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 etc. which is terrifically useful in all sorts of ways but mostly seems to make people happy because of its relationship with the so-called “Golden ratio”. Fascinating stuff, but now those numbers are flatlining again, in fact even more so because there’s a bloody great spike in the middle that requires the graph to be drawn to a smaller scale to accommodate it, and which now makes all the ‘normal’ stuff look like the whole thing is bordering upon the braindead, which might be a good word for it, I know, but it can leave me feeling just a tad defeated by the failure of my very best efforts to entertain to actually do so.

Once upon a time the most that these musings had ever been looked at in one single day was 55, and I know that one of that 55 was me checking a security issue via another PC, so even that was a figure inflated above and beyond the actual notice there actually might have been. I also know that at least two of them every morning are just ‘pings’ which are some kind of technical thingumajig which happens when you post the data onto Twitworld, so I can claw even those less than monumental numbers right back down to zero without any help from anyone else should I need to persuade myself once more of the cruel world and its heartless lack of interest in these rantings and ravings.

So, having successfully discovered the secret of boring a tiny proportion of the world to tears on a daily basis, where do we go from here? Has a crossroads been reached? Is a rubicon in the vicinity of having to be crossed? Is it indeed make-or-break time for the good folk of Lesser Blogfordshire or are we about to go into a terminal economic tailspin that even the most copious number of clichés cannot rescue it from? Well, I am still grinding the gears to churn out something for you every morning, but it is getting tougher to actually do whenever I start to consider whether there really is any real point to it all.

Meanwhile, the statistics and numbers over on Amazon stagger ever onwards towards the 1000 mark in the  ‘number of people who found this helpful’ tally after a less-than-solid run dating back to September 2009, when a sudden desire to share a tiny bit of information that had been unclear when I made one of my purchases transformed into another doomed and ultimately short-lived obsessive desire to share my opinions with the big wide world whilst lurking in my dark little cave from which I seldom emerge. I did recently renew this particular relationship briefly by contributing review number 118 in order to finally get it off that troubling and horribly odd number of 117 that it had been stuck on since last August which was the last time I’d felt able to be bothered with actually writing one.

It might seem the strangest of reasons for reviewing something, but that odd number had niggled at the back of my mind for eight months without me feeling able to compose anything of substance to change it. Strange as it might seem to you, whilst I felt perfectly content to post these babblings in Lesser Blogfordshire during that time, for some peculiar reason I was completely unable to compose any kind of rational or useful opinion on any of the tat that I had acquired in the meantime.

I think I know why, of course. There had been a couple of comments written under one or two of the reviews which implied that I had somehow managed to “cheat” the statistics and improve my position in the charts, and I think I rather took it personally that someone should think that I was either (1) that shallow or (2) that bothered by such a thing. I suppose that I should, of course, have been flattered that they considered me capable of engineering such a feat (I really wouldn’t have known how…) or indeed by the suggestion that I could motivate people to do such things, or indeed that I had enough friends and acquaintances whom I could organise in such a way to do my bidding. It did of course prove to me once again that the world is full of strange people with even stranger priorities and that, as usual, when you are accused of such shenanigans it tells you much more about the mind of the accuser than the person that they accuse.

Review number 118 was a strange one as it was basically a slimmed down version of something I intended to publish as a posting here – and eventually did - but because it was about a book I thought to myself “hang on…” and realised that I had that elusive number 118 pretty much written and (as they say) good to go. Two birds, same stone. Strangely, due to the wibbly-wobbliness of my typing habits, the review got zapped into cyberspace first, a mere seven months after the last one (no-one could accuse me of shirking my responsibilities…) and I started to wonder whether I would now get somebody accusing me of plagiarism instead (even though I was only plagiarising myself), because, unless you knew who I was, you might never realise the connection…

Rather naturally, of course, and as is always the way with these things that I fret and worry about, nobody else even noticed, which rather brings us neatly back to my earlier point and that now rather sad, age old question that also made up the last recorded lines in the life of the late Kenneth Williams:

“Oh, what’s the bloody point?”

E + I = 0

“Ladies and gentlemen, the management of Lesser Blogfordshire would regretfully like to announce that, temporarily (at least we hope temporarily – your own views on this may vary), our energy and our inspiration are zero, and all services in the area of bloggeration are hereby suspended for the foreseeable future. Any enquiries you may have about this matter can be forwarded via the usual channels. We apologise for any convenience this may cause.”

You might have been expecting some kind of announcement to this effect for a while now, ever since I started suggesting that barrels were being scraped and things were running on empty, but I’m not quite ready to give up on telling you of my little adventures just yet, although, after a solid three month daily pounding of your braincells into pulp with my incessant babble, perhaps it is time to slow things down a little and take more time over my meanderings and put a little more thought into them, and stop forcing myself into a daily ritual I can’t possibly maintain.

Look at the sums. They can’t possibly add up.

There is (surprisingly) a lot of science that goes into all of this artfulness, and ultimately, as sure as entropy is entropy and the total heat death of our universe is inevitable, occasionally the mathematics will tell you that it’s time to take a step back, and pause before soldiering on.

The sum of all my ignorance

This can be best demonstrated using the formula
E + I = 0, where ‘E’ represents the energy and ‘I’ represents the inspiration.

The more widely used and more familiar variation of this formula may also be expressed as
m(E + I) = 0 with ‘m’ being the motivation.

This is known around Lesser Blogfordshire as the “me-myself-I” variable, to distinguish it from the other which is sometimes also called the “ee-aye-oh” formula which is not to be ever confused with the “ee-aye-addy-oh” formula which, of course, is always positive due to the addition of the ‘addy’.

There is also the reaction factor to take into account. For example, if  e > r (where ‘e’ is the inputted effort and ‘r’ is the response or reaction to that effort) then ‘e’ becomes infinitely greater which ultimately determines the longevity of the creative flow. Reaction has been steadily reducing recently (you only have to take a look at the graphs…) probably due to a perceived diminishment in the quality of the basic product. You will just have to believe me when I tell you that to achieve such a lack of quality on such a consistent daily basis takes a great deal of effort. (Note to self: This self-deprecation stuff is starting to get tired… but then, I AM tired, so…)

However, despite my now obvious singular lack of understanding of the higher end of the field, I have always quite enjoyed mathematics. Well, mostly. Apart from that “A” level “applied mathematics” examination paper which still remains the longest and least productive three hours that I ever spent on this sad little planet. Pure mathematics did interest me and, despite having forgotten most of what I ever learned, still does in a small way. Perhaps the reason that cricket first attracted me were all those statistics, and the only thing that has ever interested me about football is the complexities of the permutations and possibilities of all those numbers in the tables.

Over the years I’ve worked with quite a few people who insisted that they were terrible at maths and that you don’t need it for artwork anyway, but for me, art and mathematics have always been inexorably intertwined. After all, you can’t build a model spaceship from scratch without some knowledge of geometry, can you?

Maths was always essential for layouts. How many degrees to rotate your element, how many lines of which size of type will fit in a certain area, etc. Nowadays, of course, a lot of the actual calculating is done inside the computer, but that doesn’t diminish the mathematics of it (and aren’t all digital processes just a row of 1s and 0s anyway?) and all those lovely 3D computer generated characters are built on the most basic of geometric forms.

There remain flaws in the mathematical arguments against persistence in bloggery, but then aren’t there always? After all, maybe the total heat death of our universe isn’t inevitable. Ultimately total expansion requires energy and with so many variables can there ever be a moment where there is no possible reaction in a single atom somewhere out there? Movement requires energy and a total collapse would require energy, so maybe all that static is the remains of previous universes sitting there stagnant whilst ours expands to fill the space…

Or something.

As to the mathematical argument, well maybe the motivation is the most important factor, although without effort and inspiration, no amount of motivation will multiply that above zero. So, inspiration seems to actually be the key to it all. Sadly, if I were to try and regale you with the humdrum realities of life in Lesser Blogfordshire, the monotony would become apparent very quickly, so the odd embellishment and dredging of the most dim and distant of memories becomes essential to the whole experience. 

So, this is a long-winded and roundabout way of telling you that things are going to change just a smidgen here in this dark corner that we spend so much of our mutually shared time in. After all, as a great philosopher might have once said if such things had been around at the time, “Blogging just for the sake of it is like being a broken pencil - ultimately pointless.” The batteries need an input of energy and the braincells need time to start to think again and I may well be trawling through my back catalogue of some half-written, half-witted half-thoughts for a while to see what is there, or my may very well just shut up for the odd couple of days whilst I wonder about how to continue with these efforts. Who can tell how that will turn out…?

I’m toying with trying to be “pithy”.

What are the chances of that?

SUDDENLY “POPULAR” IN GERMANY

It’s a funny old thing here in Lesser Blogfordshire that we get access to statistics about our humble offerings that do make you question whether the effort put in is inversely proportional to the interest in it. The posts I’m most pleased with are seldom the most read and the ones that I feel a bit underwhelmed by are the ones that seem to be the ones that get the most response.

With one notable recent exception, the most times any page has been looked at is twenty seven. Now, for me that’s something of a result, because it’s twenty six more people than usually listen to anything I may have to say.

There are only eight people in the world who claim to “follow” these meanderings through the woollier corners of my mind, so none of the pages are ever going to set the world alight. There might have been potentially a lot more once upon a time, but I think an early offering on a morose morning happened to coincide with one or two people’s first dabbling and made them realise what a sorry, sad individual I was and they ran away, vowing never to return.

Suddenly, however, one recent post has become a small hit amongst the population of Germany, which confused me for a time as it was the first of my rather acidic observations of my recent experiences with the NHS, and it rather surprised me that such an interest would be shown in that subject over there. I mean, I know that the whole European Union thing tends to lead to a great deal of mutual interest in how the inner workings of our sister nations might work, but I really didn’t expect that a tiny event in the life of one elderly lady on a bitter Sunday morning would become the most viewed of my humble musings by some considerable margin.

Then I twigged.

Somewhere in the depths of that text lay the answer – my unfortunate acronym for mum’s “GentleMan Friend” (which I won’t repeat here in case you think I’m fishing for more hits) has another more political and financial meaning in Germany and all of those viewers were seeking out - through the simple process of a quick Googling - a bit more information about that, and no-one at all was actually reading the drivvle that I was pouring out, they were simply clicking, finding something irrelevant, and moving on.

There was still nothing to keep them here with me in Lesser Blogfordshire.

Still, at least some of the “Erudite Eight” are still with me, although we genuinely do seem to have peaked at eight, never to become the “Notable Nine” or the “Terrific Ten” it would seem.

I do sometimes reflect upon my life and wonder why it is that I struggle to be a “person of interest” (if that doesn’t have too many other connotations) to those I have known. I meander around the peripherals of FizzBok and I notice so many whose friendships number in the hundreds and wonder what it is that I do wrong… I signed up about six months ago and very quickly climbed to the astonishing figure of thirty two and then… stalled.

That’s it.

Thirty two people I have known in my entire life are interested enough to pay the slightest bit of attention to my existence. Thirty two! Out of 500 Million people who are FizzBokers, surely in terms of simple statistics I know more of them than that…? Was I truly that awful or unmemorable? Is it just because I was always so ridiculously dull? Actually, rather astoundingly, the number has dropped over Christmas. One of my precious chums has chosen to drop out of the world of FizzBok and now I am down to an annoyingly odd number, which is (you’ll have already worked this out for yourselves) thirty one.

Lucky I don’t dwell on these things… (I don’t know the symbol for “sarcastic”, but if I did, maybe this would be a good place to put it).

Still, the interweb’s a funny old place. One little misplaced acronym and you’re suddenly slightly popular in a distant country, and acronyms are such tricky things, especially with so many new ones coming into use through the use of TXT SPK. Sometimes I struggle to keep up. I’m so very old that LOL still makes me think of “Loads Of Love” rather than “Laugh Out Loud” which has meant that I have to “doublethink” a lot of the things that I read. Sometimes I do wonder if the people writing some of these things realise how often they are being misinterpreted. For example, I very quickly realised I couldn’t use the two letter acronym for “Gentleman Friend” simply because it caused a potential gender confusion that I suspect anyone who knew my mother might have been confused by. I have, on more than one occasion, had to admit defeat when reading some threads on the net, simply because the excessive use of the acronym meant that I basically couldn’t get the gist at all of what the writer was trying to get across, IYKWIM...

I guess I am getting old.

Communication is a wonderful thing, but miscommunication can lead to all sorts of confusion, so I must apologise to anyone in Germany seeking a wise and erudite overview of the German M******l F**d (I’m sorry, I just nearly did it again, didn’t I?) because you won’t find it here in Lesser Blogfordshire, and I guess I’ve wasted some of your time.

Meanwhile, if “popularity” for these musings was all that I did seek, I would take the opportunity to insert a lot of random acronyms here, and see what happens.

But I won’t.