4 years of blogging - Thanks!

Write away

Four years ago, I found an outlet, a place to vent my spleen, a place to turn over the issues, events, ideas that affect me in all sorts of ways – I found blogging.

I have always liked political conversation, from a child I had an engaging interest in current affairs, as I travel a lot, I have been amazed at how I meet other travellers and no matter where they are from, I seem to know some current event about their homelands.

Yet, my day job has nothing to journalism, politics in a broad sense if you leave out office politics or public relations – I am an everyday geek working with computers and providing solutions in that field.

I must confess, I am a bit of a news junkie – I need to know what is going on and something comes up that sounds incredible, sometimes unbelievable, usually farcical, at times profound, occasionally downright stupid or amazingly ground-breaking – these sometimes reflect my emotional reactions to those things.

I have heard myself say – “Who writes these lines?” “No Kidding” “That is unbelievable” and more – all these reactions find a way of becoming my experience penned out in a blog.

Numbers and thanks

In four years, I have written close to 800 blogs and sometimes I go over something I have written before and wonder what facet of my personality was being exposed, it sometimes reads like an entirely different person and makes me realise that we are repositories of great potential and almost never exploit that resource to the full.

In all, I must express thanks and gratitude to people who have visited my blog, left interesting comments, become part of my community and become friends – I know I do not write to everyone’s liking, but that is the reason it is my blog and nobody else’s, the fact that it is public is coincidental – well, maybe not.

In closing, I would like to revisit some of the blogs I have posted over the years, some of the content still holds true and others are just as trivial as they are.

Highlights

One topic that affected me most was an event in January 2007, as bloggers have gotten used to tagging each other to learn more about their quarry, there was this post about sexual experiences, many were talking about their first copulation in their mid to late teens mine did not read like the first urges of consensually stolen moments of ecstasy, rather someone was doing me at 7 – it exposed the underbelly of child-sex abuse that never gets properly resolved in Nigerian society, I hope my contribution to the topic was useful. – My Sex Post (17^th January 2007).

I have never married but I have always been intrigued by the man-wife dynamic, sometimes communication breaks down, the relationship gets physical then customs, culture and traditions militate against finding the best solution to an untenable situation – Batter yourself, not your wife (21^st February 2006).

What PowerPoint presentations have become in corporate organisations can be likened to what karaoke is in a night club. Sometimes so much energy is expended on presentation to the detriment of the job itself – my polemic - Alexis' PowerPoints were her shoulder pads ... (11^th December 2003).

Three Moroccans fuelled on alcohol and drugs found release in kicking me to the ground and sending me to hospital – I only wished the police had the initiative to take my report at the station outside the hospital rather than try and fulfil bureaucratic idiocy of asking me to lodge that report somewhere else – I walked away – Couscous from a bicycle (5^th December 2004).

Some would have wondered if I had a fascination with cows, I had to ask how beef from one cow ends up in 9 states – Cult of the Mad Cow (29^th December 2003), how supermarkets keep your beef steak looking fresh and red – The Beauty of the dead cow (22^nd February 2006) and a cow could not have been holier than Shambo – Vigil for the cow eternal (24^th July 2007).

I was writing about football and I have written a lot about the sad state of English football. This time I was writing about the 2006 World Cup, some teams I expected to perform were doing poorly and I was explaining how Holland was really 2 provinces of the Netherlands with a map. It has become my most popular post because everyone who searches for a map of the Netherlands almost always ends up on my blog – maybe I should rename that post to creating blog traffic – Looking for football miracles (18^th June 2006).

I have bashed religionists, lamented about Nigeria excoriated a lot of policies around the war on terror and commented on all sorts of socio-political issues - sexuality, liberty, African leadership and many other things.

Finally, we must not forget the children; the memory of Yanire Izaga who died so young at the hands of those she loved and Madeleine McCann who till today is missing, abducted from the comfort of a holiday bed in Portugal.

As for blogging, it is my catharsis and has such beneficial therapeutic quality for me, I hope it does for you.

Thank you, everyone.