One year on: thank you!

I’ve just realised that today is the first anniversary of when I first began blogging.  Yes, I set up my blog several months before that, but I did only manage to write the one post.  Clearly I wasn’t ready for it at that point, but the moment arrived on 30 December 2014 and I haven’t looked back.

I’ve said before how much I get out of blogging, and it remains true.  I find the act of writing helps me realise what I think, what I want to say, and to be more critical of myself.  The act of taking photographs for the blog changes the way I look at things.  The fact of knowing that other people are reading what I write makes me more thoughtful of how I express myself and what I say.

And that’s before I add in all the things I have learnt how to do in order to be able to blog.  Like, how to use WordPress.  How to use my phone camera.  How to upload photos.  Plus realising that I do have some things to say, and that there are a more than a few people out there interested to hear them and to join in the conversation.

At first I thought I didn’t mind whether or not anyone reads the blog, that I was writing primarily for myself.  And to some extent that is and remains true.  But only to a point (to use one of my much-missed mother-in-law’s stock phrases).  Because if I’m honest it does now matter to me that others read my blog, it matters very much, and I certainly appreciate every single comment anyone has ever made.

I can hardly believe that more than 100 people now follow my blog, and I know that others also read it from time to time.  I can see from the site stats that there are readers all around the world (regulars in Canada, USA, Australia, Denmark, India, Ireland, as well as the UK), and I can hardly get my head around that.  Yet of course, I in turn read blogs written by people who live in Canada, the US, Norway and Australia as well as around the UK, and that’s one of the things that inspired me to start my own blog.

Anyway, today I am taking this opportunity to do what my parents always taught us to do, and that is to write a proper ‘thank you‘ letter.  This is to and for you, dear reader.

Thank you again for sticking with me, for encouraging me, for inspiring me, for just being such a lovely kind and generous bunch of people.

To those of you who already blog, thank you for your posts.  I enjoy reading them, even though I may not follow your blog I do drop by from time to time.

To those of you who don’t write but kind of think you might like to, I would really encourage you to give it a go.  You never know, you might really enjoy doing it.

I’ve had quite a year!

And here’s to 2016, whatever it may bring.