It’s Not Like Anybody’s Going to Read It

I’m only an accidental blogger: when I started, I didn’t even know that blog was short for web log or what a blog is actually for.

It all started during the summer holidays in 2015 when I had nothing better to do. Exactly one year ago today, in fact. Fed up with the way my family pulled faces at the dinner table whenever I tried to share my clever thoughts about books with them, I typed my latest earth-shattering insight into my husband’s website editor instead…

Pride and Prejudice… manages to be witty about something utterly mundane. Jane Austen is all about character observation and style. The plot is not important.

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Why Not to Blog About Books (Pride & Prejudice)

Why Not to Blog About Books (Pride & Prejudice) was a piece of rebellion against book reviews, not a favourite genre of mine, and in particular a piece published in a (Spanish) national newspaper on Pride & Prejudice, a book that happened to be one of my favourite books in my twenties.

It’s also my first ever blog post – although when I wrote it I was blissfully unaware of having started a blog.

The author used some 500 words to say what could have been tweeted…

Having summarily dismissed the author of the book review, I briefly considered book blogs in general and concluded that they were a total waste of time…

And then I duly proceeded to waste time.

“It’s Not Like Anybody’s Going to Read It”

The following day I had another brilliant idea and made another entry. And the day after, another. (Then the novelty wore off.) At some point Mr Anglo-Saxonist inquired in passing as to what exactly I thought I was doing on his computer with his software… “I’ve started a blog,” I replied grandly and he went away.

A week and a few more entries later, he needed to test the server he had just set up for his work purposes and – for want of anything better – he tested it by uploading my ‘blog’. He was very pleased with the result (of his efforts, not my blog which he considered rubbish). Later, when I finished having hysterics at the idea that any random person now could read my unpolished thoughts, he pointed out that blogs were meant to be published. He seemed to think that this was a good line of defence and taking advantage of my temporary loss for words he helpfully added: “It’s not like anybody’s going to read it; you’ve got nothing interesting to say.”

On this happy note we left it there. It was only about a month later he started to complain of the volume of traffic on his server. That’s when I realised I had made it as a blogger: I had hundreds of readers.

In the form of spam bots.

(I’ll let you know when I also won the Nobel prize for literature with my blog.)

With today's links we'll celebrate the quirky talents of the woman in the bath with an eclectic selection of entertaining (I hope) posts from the early days of Waterblogged:
Tolstoy, Mario Vargas Llosa, My Grandmother and Me (On War & Peace) 
Herodotus and the Persian Wars
The Book I've Never Read
Glassfuls of Water into a Forest Fire (Flight to Arras)
A Girl Called Aeroplane
Taking the Prado to Atocha Station
When With Eagle Eyes He Star'd at the Pacific