450 and still limping along............

A milestone of sorts has been reached as this is the 450th posting I've made to my blog. There's nothing significant about this other than the fact that it's a convenient marker. Posts 1-150 and 151-300 were collated into a hard-covered book format and I'm going to do the same with Posts 301-450. I have a feeling that my rather odd choice of blocks of 150 comes from my reaching Post 150 and thinking that I probably wouldn't be doing any more. Either that or the book 'makers' had a good price deal on that coincided with Post 150. As I've admitted before, I know it's an exercise in vanity publishing but it is a useful way of keeping a record of what I've written. 

As the screen-grab below shows, I'm regularly getting around 1000 'hits' a month (it's fascinating to see what of my 'back catalogue' is being read - but that's a story for another post) and, since I've started, there's been 30,000 page views. Although this encourages me to continue putting fingers to the keyboard, I'm definitely not writing for, or to, an audience. The blog is still my way of marshalling my thoughts on various topics (plus a few diversions into fantasy and plain daftness!) and doing something I get immense pleasure from. 

I get the impression that some readers think I'm a lot more earnest than I really am. Of course, sometimes I am very angry about the things I have an opinion on but I probably don't get authentically angry as often as I might suggest. A lot of the time it's just me being tongue-in-cheek: I get angry to amuse myself. It's cathartic, I find it amusing and it makes me happy. And when some of my more political rants irritate those of a different philosophy, then I'm even happier.

I don't take myself particularly seriously and I've definitely written posts where I thought "I'm going to take the mickey out of myself". For example, I recently waxed lyrical about a steam cleaner I'd (not really) seen and there were some comments along the lines of: "would you recommend it?". It just goes to show that people will take anything seriously. My recommendation would be not to take everything you read from me literally - except those posts where I am being 'grown up' about something. And I'll leave the reader to figure out which ones they are. Onwards, onwards to Post 600 - unless I run out of steam before then.