happy vigentennibloggiversary to me

One thing that happens as you get older, in addition to unexplained shooting pains in various limbs, male pattern baldness (see below), increasing irascibility and decreasing ability to make it to the toilet in time, is that you forget things. A significant recent thing that I forgot, or more accurately failed to notice, was the twentieth anniversary of this blog. The initial Hello World post was actually on August 26th 2006, so exactly twenty years and two months ago today.

I can't at this point in my life remember why I started the whole thing up in the first place; it is an odd coincidence that the blog and my relationship with my now wife started up around the same time, but I don't recall starting the blog solely as a vehicle to crow about getting laid on the regular after a bit of a break. I think it was just a thing that a few people were doing in the heady days of Web 2.0 excitement at the bar to involvement in internet content creation suddenly being lowered quite a bit.

It is nonetheless a fact that my life has evolved somewhat since late 2006, most notably in that I am now a married father of three, and have moved house three times, the two most recent moves involving actual adult stuff like home ownership and mortgages. As a result of those things (mainly kids and mortgages rather than marriage, to be clear) a significant percentage of my hair has fallen out and what remains is somewhat greyer than it used to be. Photos below are from the respective trips to Swanage in September 2006 and September 2026; to be fair all of my fellow Swanagers have changed a bit too in twenty years, although you should note that Robin has not changed into a bald guy with a long beard, that's Harry.

In my defence, among the middle-aged things that you might stereotypically have expected me to do are gaining a load of weight and turning into a Nazi, neither of which I have done. Well, I suppose I should qualify that statement by saying: while it is empirically verifiable that I weigh almost exactly the same now as I did then, whether my views have taken a right-wing lurch is probably not for me to say. I don't think so, though. It should also be noted that I'm mildly sceptical about the trope of people getting more right-wing as they get older, though I accept that offering up a single data point (i.e. me) isn't a refutation.

I would imagine that if you took the cohort of people who started up a blog around 2006 you would find that upwards of 95% of them abandoned it within a year or so and some percentage of the remaining 5% abandoned it at some point in the intervening nineteen years; of the tiny sliver who stuck with it I'd imagine most of them would show a similar posting profile to me: initial wild enthusiasm (282 posts in 2007 alone) and prolixity settling into a cynical weariness with offering any sort of opinion on the world and a rather sparser posting schedule (51 posts in 2025), maybe leaning on some regular hooks to hang stuff off (in my case mostly book-related stuff) to retain some sort of posting discipline and avoid complete stagnation. For what it's worth I do find the discipline of trying to occasionally corral my thought into a coherent shape to be beneficial, and I continue to do it because it amuses and entertains me to do it. I think that is the only reason that would ever keep anyone doing it, outside of the unlikely scenario of becoming some sort of viral internet sensation and (even more unlikely) actually being able to monetise it in some way. There, though, you'd presumably be on some sort of obligatory posting schedule and I'd imagine that might become a chore, although the income would be nice.

Anyway, I have no plans to pack it in; leading candidate for causing me to do so would be the Blogger platform being shelved and having to relocate to some other platform at a high cost of time and effort (and perhaps actual monetary cost). Second on that list is probably my own death; assuming that doesn't happen I'll see you in 2046.