A Decade Down

Today is the tenth anniversary of the first post in this august (ahem) journal.

Later on, I shall see if I can manage a proper post reviewing the changes that I can remember in no particular order. But - if it transpires that I can't, at least I have managed to mark the date one way or another!

Ten Years On

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

Ten years ago today I started this Live Journal with no particular expectation that it would last the week, much less a month, year or decade. I had tried from time to time over the years to keep a diary, but they always ended up abandoned after a few days, with every entry along the lines of the Molseworthesque, “Got up, had breakfast, went to school/work. Mucked about a bit. Went to bed”.

I NEVER got the hang of keeping a diary and I don’t think that I have now, either. Somewhere in my brain, not too deeply buried, is a pedant: a slightly OCD pedant, I suspect. To me a diary suggests something that you fill in every day or at least with an entry for every day, in which the minutiae of your life are transcribed. Intellectually, of course, I know that is not true – many diaries are periodic, sporadic and often simply contain whimsy and flights of fancy or speculation.

But I could never keep a diary like that. It would have to be the monolithic recreation of my day and my daily life just isn’t that exciting.

I am not and never will be a Samuel Pepys, much less an Adrian Mole (or, God Help us, a Bridget Jones).

Add to this the fact that I really don’t much like writing much beyond a short note with a pen or pencil and you begin to see the problem. Typewriters never really cut it for me because even if I could be bothered, the diary would have been on loose sheets and not in a book. So there we are; no diaries for Bryan.

I tried keeping a blog. It didn’t really work (yes, I am aware this is just semantics and that LJ is essentially a blog, but bear with me). I kept it going for a few months, which in itself was an achievement, but then it fell into disuse and I deleted it several years ago – something I now regret, incidentally, because while it never quite did what I feel a blog ought, it did begin to mutate into the sort of thing I write here and it would have been nice, with hindsight, to have access to the drivel that was going through my mind back then in the same way I have an intermittent record of the last ten years’ drivel here. I still can’t keep a blog by the way. I have one over on Wordpress that I almost never visit, because that’s where I put the ‘sensible stuff’ and I don’t write ‘sensible’ very often.

A journal however, has different connotations. Particularly a journal on the intarwebs. It doesn’t suggest a daily record of thoughts (ironic, given the derivation of the word) and it doesn’t suggest a blog as my pedantic little mind would have it. It suggests to me a place where I can jot down thoughts, whimsies, news items and such as they occur to me. It is a big, open notebook-come-scrapbook and that, I can do.

Anyway, ten years ago today, at an appropriately early hour of the morning, I activated my account (in those days you had to be invited), having received a code from, as I recall, pax_draconis and set to. I didn’t even really know what LiveJournal was, I just knew that the cool kids were using it and that even if I never wrote in it, I wanted to see what they were saying.

Over the years, of course, many of those who wrote back them have largely given up and some have even deleted their accounts. A couple, sadly, are no longer with us. But there are other people who have come along and who write in this little community of ours. Many of these people I have never actually met, but we natter on here and share observations and thoughts and while it may not be as busy a place as it was e few years ago, I still like LiveJournal, even if I am not as prolific a participant myself as I one was.

I’m not going anywhere. Here’s to the next ten years.