I’m taking a moment here to mourn the loss of my late and lamented blog.  I would also like to give thanks to Mr Tomas Toman, whoever he is and wherever he is, who supplied my free Time Turner theme two and a half years ago.  I loved my theme.  I loved its digitised parchment-like ‘paper’ on which my posts appeared.  I loved its layout.  I loved my little sunflower I’d knicked from Google images.  My deceased blog was self-hosted.  It was a wordpress.org blog but, due to a recent turn of events, I’ve had to find another host and son No.2 suggested WordPress.com.  For an annual fee (the poor husband was badgered into paying £81 for a one year account) I’ll get all the plugins etc I had on the old blog without having to install them myself.

My WordPress account does not allow the use of my old theme but it comes with many free themes (I wasn’t mad enough to force the husband to pay up to $99 – it’s all in American – for a new theme) and a live chat thing which pops up at the bottom of the screen when you’re logged in as an admin.  So I rapidly chose a new theme, customised it with colours and type fonts and added my little sunflower as a remembrance from my old blog (lest I forget.)

And I’ve live chatted (for the first time in my life) twice with, first Raul, and then Gemma, and what helpful, happy people they are (there’s a reason they’re called Happiness Engineers.)

And now I’m going to take a moment to mourn the loss of an illusion I’d been under for quite a while, here in invisible blog land.  My new wordpress.com account came with enhanced stats (page views etc to those of us who blog) and these cold and heartless stats showed me that over half of my blog views were by me, the author.  I had no idea that my views of my own blog, via my admin page, were counted as bona fide views in the stats.  Those views have now been separated from the actual views and what a dismal sight it is.  And what’s worse is that a significant number of views have been coming from all over the world (it is the worldwide web after all) and are clearly those crawling spidery bot things.  And now I feel that my precious old blog has somehow been tarnished by visits from people I’d rather not have had visits from.

After I’d got over the shock that I’d written millions of posts over the course of two years to absolutely nobody, barring sundry family members (who are not ‘nobody’ of course) and people who occasionally landed on my blog whilst searching for something else, I gave myself a good talking to – after all there are much, much worse things in this god forsaken world (which I’ll be referring to in future, scintillating posts) than finding out your stats page is a misrepresentation of what was actually going on, and further reminded myself that I don’t advertise my blog – which is a waste of time in my opinion, considering that the Facebook page son No.2 linked me to garners me roughly one hit a post (thanks mother);  and considering that I don’t comment on other blogs, except when I really connect with the writing style (which happened just once, recently); or they happen to be blogs which provide lovely knitting patterns.

So, for the second time since I started writing a blog, I’ve questioned just why I feel compelled to type words out into the internet ether and I think it’s because my blog feels like a ‘place.’  Not a real place; not a walk to a favourite wood; or to the castle grounds down the road; but a virtual place, made up of electrical stuff and bits of code that I don’t understand, but it’s a ‘place’ all the same and a place that’s mine.   Somewhere I come to write, because writing is when I think ‘this is who I am.’  Just like reading a book, alone in bed at 9.00 pm, makes me feel ‘this is who I am.’

Anyway, hello new blog.  This is your first post and your first post is to check that everything works and so I can find my way around this new .Com blogging land.  I’ve given you a stock image, featuring the back of a flower, which sort of goes with my little sunflower.  I’ve customised you in the least garish colour palette option I could find, and I’ve chosen a font which resembles the font on my old blog.  I’m not good with change.  The unexpected demise of my old blog caused a couple of days of blog induced panic, in which son No.2 received many irritating messages from his mother (when he was at work too) and answered them all in a spirit of affability and patience.  I can verify that patience is definitely a virtue.

It’s mostly just you and me blog, but then it always was (and assorted spammers and bots) and there’s nothing wrong with that.  So, onwards and upwards (or downwards, which is much more likely.)  I’ll get my blog writing mojo back;  I’d better get it back and justify that £81 WordPress.com blog fee.