Blogiversaries (although not mine)

There's only so many times I can beg for forgiveness for not updating -- Steph, I'm amazed I survived your recent blogroll pruning -- but I do sort of have an excuse. Sort of. Last week, as in not the week just ending but the one before, I packed my bag and set off for the Reading festival (I refuse to call it the Carling Weekend Reading, however much cold beer they give me), so I was gone Thursday through to Monday of this week. Then because this week was a 4-day week due to the bank holiday, work has been a touch manic as it also coincided with a quarterly review for one of my accounts.

In order to make it up to anyone who is left reading, I will dedicate a whole post to the festival -- to the bands, the photos and my self-absorbed anecdotes. And no, that does not sound like the ret of the blog. Shut up.

Anyhow, I've noticed a few Blogiversaries around these parts lately; including the lovely Steph and the endlessly talented (but no less lovely, I'm sure) WDKY. I don't know off the top of my head when my blogger anniversary is, this blog has been kicking around for years in various forms, only the previous incarnations posts have been removed. As far as writing online goes, I've been furiously at it for the past six years or so. If anyone is interested, I could go delve into the old text files and find my first entry and repost it here.

To begin with, I found Open Diary through a nifty little toolbar thing that works a bit like Firefox's "stumble upon". You pressed a button; it took you to a random site -- although I think you earned points to win prizes with each site you visited. I found Open Diary and was fascinated reading the various diaries. Then after perhaps a week of lurking I was angsty enough to create my own. I chose the username "Sharkbait" -- it was originally going to be "Sharky Sharky", after the Eddie Izzard quote: "I swam like a boy chased by a sharky sharky". However, Fiona and I were huge Eddie Izzard fans and I had only just set up an email address under the name "Jay Sharky Sharky" -- I figured if she saw a post under that name, she would read it. And I couldn't have that.

I poured my heart and soul onto Open Diary for many years, through the summer of 2000 and into my second year at university. I wrote about Fiona, I wrote about classes, I wrote about work and my dreams. I wrote in it when I went to university in Utah, and I wrote in it when I came back and Fiona broke my heart. I met San on Open Diary and I wrote about our first meeting and charted our relationship. But in the end I wasn't satisfied with the site for various reasons, and I found Diary-X. Diary-X became my new love, and I wrote under various names there until the great crash of 2006.

Pretty much everything I wrote there was backed up, and only the majority of my posts from the beginning of this year were lost. It was when I needed somewhere to go, I came back to my blogger. I deleted old posts kept here, when for one reason or another I hadn't posted in diary-x, and I started over. It didn't feel the same and it still doesn't, but at the same time you can get used to just about anything -- and I don't know if I will move if/when codexed ("diary-x reborn") goes live.

If I am feeling very self indulgent one day I might upload some greatest hits posts -- not my best writings, but some of the key moments. Like the email I wrote to Fiona when I wanted her back, and her reply ("no"), and the day I met San, and times we've broken up, and the night in Leicester when the chavs beat the crap out of me and fractured my jaw, and the night when Deb and I got drunk and played pool until the early hours...

But either way, even if those posts don't ever see the light of day again, and even if I can't remember when I created this blog or when the first real post was (there’s a few "archive" posts at the start that I brought from diary-x but got bored too quickly to repost any more) -- despite any of that, I plan to keep writing. Somewhere. Even if nobody reads it, even if it's not the most eloquent, exciting or funniest of blogs, I'll still be writing because it's just about the only thing I can do.

That, and my compulsive need to record everything.