grumpyf1

Great gosh almighty - I've been a newspaper columnist for five years. Shut. The. Door. It's five whole, actual, year type things since my first outing sullied the pages of the North West Evening Mail, preceded by the "Finalist becomes columnist" piece you see here (exceptionally poorly scanned - I was obviously over-excited and/or over-caffeinated). I'm not actually that colour, honest. A rambling, nonsensical brain-dump of weirdness , it's interesting how, in those early days, I was already writing in exactly the same way I have continued. Strangely, column number 255 appeared on their website today (a day ahead of the print edition) which is a nice, unintentional, anniversary marker. Spoiler alert: It's about our fridge-freezer breaking down. I know - cutting-edge, hyper-topical, journalism, eh? On a less celebratory note, visits to this blog (where it all began, of course) reached a low point in April not seen since November 2010. I guess I ne...

A strange thing happened last week. After posting about BBC3's Doctor Who spin-off, Class, An unprecedented 600+ views occurred in one day, taking me past the 80,000 total views point for this blog. Chuffed, I was. When I got up the next day and looked at the stats, a steady stream of views was still happening... and had been all night. This continued at steady rate, with over 2000 during the course of the day, in fact. Followed by a sudden and almost complete crash in numbers, back to normal. 30-odd hours of massive visitor numbers, then nothing. Statistical error? Shared by Class fans? Who knows. In the end, the post received 2722 views, making it the most viewed post ever (by more than double), trouncing the previous Queen gig remembrance from July. The more normal, modest, visitor rate has now taken the numbers up to 2900 so far this month, making this the most successful month ever. Baffling. The cynic in me suspects a glitch in the matrix, whilst the wannabe write...

Funny how it goes, isn't it? This blog is six years old, and I've experienced some euphoric highs in terms of visits, and some crushing lows that left me wondering why I was bothering. I was startled to log in the other day and discover that the Queen at Wembley column had, in the space of 2 weeks, become the most viewed post... by four times more than the previous best. As if that wasn't jaw-dropping enough, in under a week the fad food one has also become 6th most viewed post ever. The stats are a little limited on here, but it also appears that the views for these are predominantly from the UK - a switch from the more usual USA readership. Not sure what I did right, or if it's just luck, but hey - I'll take it. Thanks for reading them - you've made my day! (Another break from the CD A-Z today, for a new compilation from a-ha - 'Time and Again - The Ultimate'. True, I've already got the hits, but I'm a sucker for a good remix, and...

I went to a stately home at the weekend. This just might have been my favourite thing. You're right - it IS entirely unrelated to the rest of this post. This isn't the bleedin' Guardian, y'know. It's a funny old game, this blogging lark. I do wonder sometimes what I'm achieving by doing it, but it turns out I've clearly not thought about it too hard, as I recently passed 600 posts! That's an awful lot of randomness I've subjected you to, so thanks for sticking with me, and please accept my apologies. August was a particularly successful month if the blog views counter is anything to go by, with a figure of nearly 2000 for the month, making it my best month since way back in July 2012. Will I carry on doing it? After 600+ posts, this blog is now more an extended remix of my weekly newspaper column, as opposed to the stream of conciousness flow of random content that first appeared on here when I started out - much of it to do with Formula ...

3 years ago this very week, the winner of the North West Evening Mail’s “Big Blogger” contest was announced, and I’m delighted to say... it wasn’t me! I received a Direct Message on Twitter a couple of weeks ago that startled me greatly. It’s OK though – it turns out it was a mistake and @BigTrish66 isn’t going to scratch my eyes out for looking at her boyfriend. I then received an even more startling message than the first, from fellow columnist Darren McSweeney, giving me the heads-up that he was about to announce his retirement from columnising (or whatever the official word is for what we do each week) for this fine paper. Swirling back through the mists of time to the 9th of April 2012, it’s possible to make out two handsome and highly intelligent bloggeristas, who had successfully seen off a large field of competitors in the equivalent of a weekly blogging smack-down, to reach the head to head final. (In case you were wondering, I’m referring to me and Darren. Obviously....

Golly - who'd have thunked it. This blog has now reached the ripe old age of 4. It seems much longer since I first thought I'd have a stab at adding my voice to the billions of others being ignored on the interweb, but here I am - still shouting pointlessly into the void. My blogging habbits seem to have changed quite dramatically during the years too; Where I once dipped in randomly, and blogged about a variety of topics (but largely F1) in small, ranty, bursts, now the blog reflects the longer postings that appear in my newspaper column. Were it not for this blog, I wouldn't have considered entering the Big Blogger contest that led to my glorious not-quite-winning and subsequent getting-a-column-but-without-a-prize. The F1 content may have lessened dramatically, but I think the depth of the writing has improved, and I'm sure I'm a better writerist for it. But then again, I'm still shouting down a wire with squillions of others, without the slighte...

Yesterday this blog passed the 30,000 page views mark. You're thinking the same thing as me, right? Why? How can that even be possible? From starting up the blog, it took 27 months to reach 10,000, just 4 more to hit 20,000 and another 6 to get to this point. I can only presume you've mistaken me for someone else who is genuinely interesting, and landed here by mistake. Sorry about that. So, what's coming up in the future? Well, I'm not running Fantasy Formula 1 this year, so there will be less F1 stuff. I haven't decided exactly what I might do on here though - I have an odd OCD-esque need to do things in a structured way, so if I did one race review I'd wind up feeling the need to do one every race. We'll see on that one. The North West Evening mail still haven't cottoned on to the fact that I'm a hopelessly uninteresting writer, and are still printing my column every Friday (number 45 tomorrow is about teambuilding, and features a soc...

Incredible. At some point today, this blog passed the 20,000 page views mark. What's even more startling is that, whilst it took 27 months to reach 10,000, it's only taken a further 4 to get to 20,000. And I still have absolutely no idea why. Seemingly, the post most viewed is the 'Fantasy Formula 1: the other stuff' from the Spanish GP last year which, as far as I can tell, is only mildly interesting at best. Of the 20,000 views, nearly 12,000 are from the USA, and about 4500 from the UK. I've no idea why that might be either, apart from the fact that America is jolly big, and has a lot of people in it. From my first post on the 8th of December 2009, I notice that how I blog has changed - from short, observational pieces, to longer article-length items, largely brought on by my entry in the North West Evening Mail's 'Big Blogger' competition, and subsequent offer of a newspaper column (even though I only came second). Who knows what the futu...

You know that blog post I writted (look it up) the other day about fog light users that are about as nice as the undead on a feeding day? Well, it's been cleaned up slightly, and is residing here on the North West Evening Mail's website, as I've entered a blogging contest. Basically, the competitors blog for a fortnight, and the one with the least hits each day gets eliminated. I think. It wasn't very clear. I may have just purchased a condo in Spain or something. Anyway, the prize is a laptop (niiiice!) and a weekly column in the paper for a year. Just think how many people I could offend in a year! Literally dozens!! If you wouldn't mind, pop over and have a look. I feel dirty asking for favours, but I've hacked your computer and know all your dirty secrets, so you've got to. Ta. (Blogging and blackmailing tunes by The Divine Comedy - Live At Somerset House)

Apologies for the absence of blog posts. Earlier in the week I got an HTC Wildfire, and have become slightly obsessed. OK, very obsessed. And I still haven't figured out half of what it does, largely because I'm not 14 and don't have an instinctive understanding of technology bred into me by the fact that my parents copped too much radiation from their mobile phones in the 90s. I can now tweet on the move and... I guess I can blog on the move too. Oooo. I hadn't thought of that! *goes a bit glassy-eyed for a few seconds* Anyway, there's a fair bit of interesting F1 stuff going on, so I'll try and catch up this coming week. Assuming I don't get seduced by the phone again.... Oh - Cadbury creme eggs are back! Yay!! (Listening to "The Greatest No. 1 Singles", currently on Robbie Williams' Millennium...)