Remember, remember

It looks like we might have made it...

I wrote the first entry on this blog precisely 12 months ago. It was always conceived as a project as opposed to a way of life, and one with a limited existence. Treating the blog as a finite undertaking was crucial to me starting it at all, and even more of a reason for me to stick with it for so long.

Initially I didn't set a fixed end point, preferring to trust my instinct to know when the moment was right. Over the last few months, however, an ideal moment to bow out presented itself, and that moment is now.

Increasingly I've found it difficult to write here out of love rather than simply duty. The blog has also become far too introspective of late, as well as mutating into a generally gloomy, unhelpful read.

So it's time to pull the plug.

Looking back I'm amazed at the variety of thunderously ordinary topics I've held forth on, from bus etiquette and toilet etiquette to my favourite sounds and smells. I've talked about tea and trains and crisps and lost loves and Tesco and George Orwell and getting locked in and crying at films and Prime Ministers and time itself.

I've walked all the way around London and assembled an A-Z of Liverpool. I've turned 30. The clocks have gone forward then back. I've written about some of my favourite poems and also a few books.

I've seen David Cameron arrive and Charles Kennedy leave. My one great enduring prediction, that Tony Blair would be out of office within the year, has amounted to bugger all (though at least we know by what point he intends to stand down. Allegedly).

There have been some topics, though, to which I appear to have returned time and again. I seem to have exercised, though assuredly not exorcised, an unhealthy obsession with my neighbours, and a similar fondness for droning on about the London Underground, none of which can have made for particularly illuminating reading. Other than to illuminate some of my petty prejudices.

I've clearly got a hang-up about the 1990s, which depending on your age is either totally understandable or thoroughly reprehensible. I'm sick of jargon and bad English. Sleep is something I'm alternately in defiant awe of and in desperate need of, most often the latter. I miss my hometown.

I'm quite a stickler for anniversaries, marking the 100th, 200th and 300th posts with relish. Above all, though, I'm clearly fanatical about the weather, be it beautifully cold, appropriately damp or, most pertinently, too damn hot.

The most traumatic posts, though, have undoubtedly been all to do with my leaving one job and starting another, in the process moving 200 miles south from Liverpool to London.

This blog began when I was at my wits end, looking for change. When it arrived I found I was far too distracted by the emotional wrench required in leaving somewhere I had lived for 12 years than to recognise and celebrate the fact I was getting out of a job I hated. I remain profoundly at odds with the city in which I now have to call home. I also continue to miss certain aspects of Liverpool with a passion that is almost too much to bear.

Part of which is why I have decided to lay down my virtual pen. You can only take so much linguistic confession before it becomes too much of a burden - and too much of a bore - for both audience and author.

With that in mind you may consider this more of a threat than a promise, but I'm leaving the whole blog online with a view (and hope) that someday I'll feel inclined to resume entries once more. That won't happen, though, until I feel I have something more to say. It won't be important - none of this blog is important - but it will be new. And will hopefully mean something. To me if nobody else.

One whole year of my life is recorded here. To those who did, thanks for reading.

...Yes, it looks like we've made it to the end.