Time passes

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

Marcel Proust

I receive a sharp reminder once a year of the passage of time… and in particular of the passage of time since I started writing this blog. That reminder comes in the form of the renewal demand from my hosting company for the pleasure of supporting my various websites – of which this blog was the first, having been created back in 2012. I started blogging at the end of January that year so now is the time that I must stump up in order that I may continue so to do.

For those gentle readers who don’t really get this whole blogging thing – there was a time when blogging was all the rage. That was the few years before I took it up, naturally, and by the time had I started keeping this journal the youngsters were already saying – “Blogging?… Nah!”

Now, of course, I am nearly a whole decade further behind the times – and you know what? – I really don’t care that I am old-fashioned. I am sixty seven, for goodness sake. I am allowed to be old fashioned.

For those of you who like statistics – in the nine years that I have been writing this blog I have written 925 posts (averaging just over 100 posts a year – approximately two a week). If the internal statistics are to be believed I have written nearly 365,000 words in that time and uploaded some 2,590 images – many of them my own photographs.

Not bad, huh?!

I started blogging when I learned that The Girl was going to take up a good job here in Victoria, even though I still needed to work for a few more years in the UK before I could retire and move to Canada to be with her. Faced with the prospect of carrying on a long distance relationship with an eight hour time difference I figured that I would need to find things to occupy my time (other than working!). When her job fell through and she came back to the UK some ten months later I decided to keep the blog going – documenting our eventual move to British Columbia, which was rescheduled for 2015.

I could have stopped once we settled here but I decided to keep it going – as a way of keeping a foot on both continents. I am blessed to have regular readers on both sides of the pond who seem happy to keep up with my chunterings.

Has the blog changed much? It is certainly less verbose than it used to be and I don’t reach for the thesaurus quite as much as once I did. I enjoyed getting to explore the language and to play little games with prose, but as I have grown older so have I started to keep things a little more simple – more straightforward. I have noticed that I do the same with song lyrics – which is no bad thing…

Having made it this far I will, naturally, be shooting for the complete decade.

After that – who knows?