In something under five hours it will be time to say goodbye to 2012, and hello to 2013. I'm not sure we'll stay up that late, in which case I will see in the New Year by putting up the 2013 Den Phillips East Coast calendar in the hall, and putting my old 2012 diary away in a drawer of my desk. That's another year of writing a daily blog entry, apart from the week I took off when we were on holiday.
Some entries have been lovingly crafted in reasonably competent prose. They will be the ones I wrote on days when blogging wasn't squeezed in between several other things, or when something interesting happened to write about. Some have been more slipshod affairs, with wandering tenses, and the same word cropping up five times in two paragraphs. They were written in a rush, or on days when I was feeling ill or out of sorts. I have kept almost entirely to my principle of never pressing the Publish button on a computer linked to the internet after consuming any alcohol. Yesterday was an exception as I had a couple of beers over lunch before launching into my account of cooking Elizabeth David style The fastest posts have been knocked out in under twenty minutes, and the slowest stretched to over an hour, on days when I was feeling pernickety or inspired , and didn't have anything else pressing to do. I'll probably speed up if the weather improves so that I can get out into the garden more.
Cardunculus has not gone viral during 2012. My mum reads it, and some friends, and a few random assorted people who fell into it by mistake. The mother of a folk singer I said kind things about found out and liked the entry about her son, though I'm not sure she's been an avid follower since. The Systems Administrator's brothers dip in from time to time, as a handy way of keeping tabs on the SA. I had lunch early in the year with some former colleagues, and after listening politely to their tales of woe about competition for school places, school fees, and exam grade trauma, I mentioned that since the start of 2011 I'd been writing a blog. One replied Yes, but how many people read it? and the rest giggled nervously about what I was going to say about them on it. None showed any desire to write down the address.
As a matter of policy I say very little about my friends. Some professional journalists make their living, or at least part of a living, from using their families and friends as material for their columns. I suppose their families are OK with that. I guess that if you start dating a columnist you sign up to the idea that your private life will be amusingly recycled in the Lifestyle section of a national newspaper. Since I am not a professional journalist and none of my friends or relations or my colleagues or employers agreed to star on screen, even in an obscure blog that's read by a few regular followers and a drunk bloke who clicked on the wrong link, they should be allowed their privacy. The SA gets a starring role, but you will agree only as a heroic character portrayed in an almost entirely positive light. Plus the SA is particularly well placed to exercise rights of veto and censorship.
So the blog is simultaneously true, and deeply misleading. It is a true record of things that happened. You could identify the lettuce farm, the ramshackle 1960s house, and garden on Google Earth. You would find us pretty much as described, middle aged, used to work in the City, had enough, with our cats and chickens and bees. The picture of the changing seasons, of days getting longer and shorter again, of sun, rain, snow, cold, and how that affects the way people spend their days in the countryside, even in twenty-first century south-east England, is pretty accurate. You would not need Sherlock Holmes' extraordinary powers of detection to track down the plant centre, where you would find the boss, the owner, the manager, the dog. If I say I went to London and saw such and such an exhibition then that's what I did. When I tell you I have just noticed the first Iris unguicularis of the winter then I have.
The blog gives a misleading impression of my interior life because it skips over much of the personal. If we see friends for a meal, for instance, that is probably the most significant event of the day. Since I am not about to rehash private conversations in public, or write a restaurant review of their cooking, the friends may get a passing mention in one sentence, or no mention at all, while the day's blog entry is a riff on painting the hall, or a meditation on toads. And I don't generally seem to talk about books very much, despite reading quite a lot. I don't know why not, except that I never set out to post a series of book reviews. Maybe that will change in 2013, and you can join me on my current baffling journey through the history of Prussia and my struggles to work out which King Frederick the author is talking about now.
I will keep going in the New Year, despite having still not gone viral. Next year in Jerusalem. Blogging is good fun and entirely free. Blogspot let me have this platform for nothing. I suppose they are hoping I will produce some advertising revenue eventually, or at least that enough others will, while the marginal cost of hosting me is zero. Forcing myself to sit down and write something every day and submit it to the scrutiny of other people, albeit a handful, may not have made me a good writer yet but it has made me a better writer than I would be otherwise. And it is handy for my mother and the SA's brothers to be able to keep track of what we're up to. So Happy New Year, to those of you who know us, and to anyone who followed a stray link and doesn't, but has somehow made it this far anyway.
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