This content is protected against AI scraping.
Shortly after we moved from Australia to the UK, I started writing a journal. At some point, after 2001, I began posting our holidays and other big events, online. I was working at Telewest at the time and they, helpfully, sent me on a course to learn how to build a website. And so I built mine. It still exists, with a lot of legacy stuff from the first years of my online life. It’s here.
The main purpose of posting our holidays online was so that our families back in Australia could keep up with us and follow our lives as we lived them. A lot of earlier posts have comments from, especially, our mothers, who enjoyed feeling like we were not 10,000 miles away.
I was still writing in my journal every day at the time but didn’t include the more mundane days of our lives for general consumption.
At some point, I discovered WordPress and blogging.
I spent some time transferring my website into the more structured format of WP and, eventually, this led to me writing every day.
Looking back over the last, gout-ridden days of 2025, has made me realise the folly in everyday writing. Of course, in a personal journal, it’s fine because it only has an audience of one, but there are only so many times one can write “I had gout and couldn’t leave the house today. Again.” Without getting intensely dull.
And so I have come to a decision not to keep writing every day. I will return to writing when things happen that I feel are actually interesting. Like when we go on holidays.
As an odd result, this will give me time to work on my writing. I love writing and think I may have some little talent in it but I feel it’s a waste exhausting my fingers on gout woes and the like. So, after a long chat with Mirinda, I have decided to create a second blog to run alongside this one. I have decided to call it Art & Quirky Stories.
This combines my two favourite subjects and, I hope, will lead to many, far more interesting posts in the future. (To be honest, currently, my most viewed posts fall into those categories.) I will only post when I find things worth posting about. Obviously, I will link from here when I have anything written there.
Anyway, I thought the start of a new year was the ideal time to start a new (writing) life.
Speaking of which…we had a load of snow fall on us today.
A bit late for a white Christmas but much nicer than the consistent rain.
understand- don´t understand. agree – don´t agree. accept – don´t accept.
Well, i have come to have yor blog as a daily routine. so i will miss it. And even when you have “nothing” to write about, i enjoy it. yes, of course it is because you do have a talent. And of course it is great that you can, according to your blog, use this talent in a more fruitful way.
Anyway, i will miss the blog. and be all the more happier whenever you are there again, in my inbox. (Please, it is not only travels that are interesting…)