Possibly I’m wrong here because you do seem more organised than I do, but I am pretty sure you have never counted how many conversations you’ve had with someone. And apparently I have, because it turns out that this is the 750th Self Distract blog I’ve written.
If you’re going to count something, I feel you may as well do it thoroughly so after some poking around, I can tell you something. Over the 749 Self Distract posts up to this one, I’ve written 587,160 words, including several good ones. I mean, I’ve written the word “myriad” and used it correctly 24 times.
Self Distract in any recognisable form started in February 2006, which is frankly another country. It didn’t become a weekly natter with you until after I left Radio Times in 2012 or so.
I’d like to say it’s been an unbroken weekly blather every Friday, but that’s not quite true. The result of the Brexit vote was announced on Friday, June 24, 2016, for instance, and I was too paralysed to move.
Then there was pretty much the whole of December 2017 when my website was broken. But apart from two total failures, then, it’s been every week for a decade, so an otherwise unbroken run of 521 Self Distracts.
Some 500 posts ago, I told myself I was writing this because I missed having the deadlines I did of a TV history column in Radio Times and a DVD review one in BBC Ceefax and BBC News Online. They all seemed to end at the same time and I do miss them, but really I was writing Self Distract to write to you and that’s done me a lot of good over the years.
Often it’s been the one quiet, still moment in my week. In bad weeks it’s been the one quiet refuge. It’s continually been a lagrange point, which is something I apparently first mentioned as being on my mind back in 2013.
Other times what I’ve written here has been indirectly responsible for my being commissioned to write various things. And once it was directly responsible for my being flown to California, where I got to meet a couple of my writing heroes.
But looking back over half a million words, I keep seeing times when I was trying to describe something that I didn’t understand. And the action of trying to describe it to you visibly helped me see what I meant, helped me see why I felt the way I did about something.
Self Distract is about writing, about what we write about, and what we write with when we get around to writing. It is inescapably a journal of what is on my mind, yet it’s not a diary. I am not writing it to me, I’m writing it to you, specifically you, and whether I’ve done that well or poorly, the focus has helped me. Thank you.