Skip to main content

5 years on... The Big Blogger grand final!


I mentioned earlier today that is was milestones time...

Well, here you go! Just over 5 years ago (on the 6th of April, 2012) the article above appeared in the North West Evening Mail, as me and Darren McSweeney battled to become the paper's new columnist.

Competing in the Big Blogger competition, we'd seen off the competition by garnering the two highest number of visits to our posts on their website, the field being whittled down each week.

And exactly 5 years ago this very day... Darren won.

As the photoshopped picture of us in a stare-off indicates, we have actually never met, and there was no animosity between us. Darren wrote great articles tackling local issues, whilst I... well, you've probably figured that out by now. One of the paper's snappers came and took some pics of me at work to create the article, one of which is still used in the header image for my column in the print edition of the paper each week.

I was contacted shortly after my crushing defeat by the paper's Deputy Editor, who kindly said they liked my stuff enough that they wanted me to write a column too. Darren got Monday, and I book-ended the week with my Friday slot.

Darren got a laptop, whilst I managed to negotiate a free copy of the Friday edition each week.

So, we're tantalisingly close to it being 5 years since I became a newspaper columnist. Time flies when you have head full of nonsense, eh?

(CD A-Z: Mike Oldfield's "Exposed".)      

Comments

  1. And you're still going! Top effort and a great weekly read.

    ReplyDelete
  2. And you're still going! Top effort and a great weekly read.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Schaf Shuffle

The weather – source of endless fascination, conversation, irritation and (just recently) excess irrigation. And a fidgety weather presenter on the BBC... I’m endlessly fascinated with the weather, and will confess to making sure I catch the BBC’s updates whenever possible. Not the local ones, where half the presenters look like they got dressed in the dark, or ITV, where they seem to know very little about actual weather, but the national forecasts. Delivered by actual Met Office personnel, their job entails a tricky mix of waving your hands about a bit, explaining about warm fronts without smirking, and trying not to look too pleased whilst mentioning gales force winds and torrential rain. Or stand in front of Cornwall. Each has their own presenting style, but there is one who intrigues me above all the others. Step forward, Tomasz Schafernaker, the 37 year old man from the Met who breezed onto our screens in 2001, as the youngest male ever to point out that it was going to r...

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

RIP Jenwis Hamilbutton

We are gathered here in this... (looks round a bit) um... blog, to mourn the passing of Jenwis Hamilbutton. His life may have been short and largely irrelevant, but he touched the lives of so many people that... sorry? Oh. Apparently that was someone else... Jenwis Hamilbutton rose briefly to fame on twitter during 2010, when he was retweeted by BBC F1 presenter Jake Humphrey, having criticised his shirt. A similarly unspectacular claim to fame occurred when a tweet he crafted at 1am on a windy night appeared in F1 Racing magazine. An amalgam of bits of Formula 1 drivers Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button (mostly the hopeless bits), he came into existence via 3 pints of cider, a Creme Egg and the Electric Light Orchestra’s mournful 1986 farewell album “Balance Of Power”, played loudly over headphones. In his short existence, he was followed on twitter by Paul Hardcastle of “19” fame, and a bunch of slightly odd but jolly nice people, whom he was never entirely sure actually exist...