So, the sun is shining nicely again. I was rather glad for the grey day yesterday, as I had a dreadful cough -- started on Friday, was bearable out walking on Saturday, basically kept me in bed on Sunday, which would have been depressing in blazing sunshine. Naturally I am well enough to go to work today, though still feeling a bit rough. Will be very husky-voiced for my several meetings this morning.

Anyway, I took the opportunity of yesterday's inactivity to read Locas (which I feel non-recriminatingly sure you haven't begun yet, given your situation), which was an interesting experience. Most of that material I haven't looked at for 15 years, the later stuff read only once in issues dribbling out once or twice a year, and reading it all in one big slab gave a very different feel. Some things were not at all what I remembered, a couple of stories I expected to be there were omitted, and some others I didn't remember at all. I don't think I ever read the final section first time around, and it made me a bit tearful, but then I was in a weakened state.

I have no idea what you'll make of it all, if/when you do read it. The opening Mechanics story is a bit hard-going, so I hope that doesn't put you off.

Then last night we watched The Incredibles on DVD. Ian hadn't seen it, on account of being unwell when our group outing went, and he liked it so much he insisted on watching it again almost straight afterwards, which I thought a teensy bit OTT, but anyway it was fun.

I started blogging at the end of July 2003.

I'd been aware of the phenomenon much longer, but the idea seemed tiresome and self-indulgent and I never really paid it much attention; one of the perils of being an old internet hand is a tendency to be a bit jaundiced about it all, and I certainly was about this.

...

One of the things about discovering blogging in this way is that you can have both a lot of diversity and a lot of history at your fingertips in a very short time; most blogs accrete material fairly slowly, but over time and space that all adds up to quite a body of writing and human experience. Coming to it fresh, with low expectations, proved eye-opening. I was, perhaps patronisingly, enchanted by what seemed a whole world of literate, thoughtful, witty and amazingly honest people; and, I suppose, wanted to be a part of it.

Sort of. Noncommittally. Maybe.

At any rate, I thought it would be an interesting experiment and, though I had no idea what, if anything, I would have to say -- I knew that I didn't want to just keep a diary of my daily to-ing and fro-ing -- I was curious to try, and also (semi-professionally, being a software developer myself) curious about the nature of the software that people used to do all this. Many of the blogs I'd seen ran on Movable Type, so I downloaded that and had a little play with it, initially on my own laptop, but very quickly graduating to a hosted domain. (I was interested in experimenting with web technologies anyway, some for work, some just for play, so getting a domain of my own to mess around in seemed like a reasonable thing to do.)

It began pretty tentatively, but fairly quickly gained a bit of momentum, found somethng approaching a style, grew to be a habit. Gradually picked up some readers, some of whom became friends, one a lover who had a rather devastating effect on me. Blogging became a part of my life.

...

The content has always been personal, anecdotal, discursive. Along the way it picked up a few other threads, notably snippets of fiction and occasional photos. It is, for the most part, rigorously honest. In the last 9 months or so it has suffered from a conjunction of depression (with a small d) and work busyness, leading to a drop in the volume of posting (with an anomalous spike in November 2004, probably the most verbose month to date, thanks to some accelerated story writing).

I no longer feel I have much to prove as a blogger and can let it go for a week or even more without an entry, but I like to keep things ticking over and have no intention of letting it drop altogether.