Today is the twentieth anniversary of the first post on this blog—the reason I’m trying to post every day this year.

This date is almost a fiction: the first post on this blog was transferred over from another one, so it isn’t the anniversary of this site; I blogged elsewhere earlier, so it isn’t the anniversary of my first blog post either. But it’s as good as any date.

I have anything meaningful to post on this auspicious occasion. I have enjoyed posting daily so far this year, and feel freed by the fact that the number of readers these days is probably tiny. I don’t have any way of counting visitors, but I surmise that my presence here is pretty invisible, as I don’t actively promote the blog, and I’m not on any of the major social media platforms. I can therefore write just about anything I want—and given that I disabled comments years ago, no-one can argue back.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of posting for clicks and comments, being mentioned on Newsnight and Channel 4 News, joint posts with Guido Fawkes, and appearing on lists of most popular bloggers. These days, I very much prefer the quieter online life.

If anyone is reading this—thank you for your company, and I hope you enjoy my writing.

The picture at the top of this post is an AI-generated image created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2.