A musing on five years

My current locale...

Five years ago today, I wrote an article about a set of fireworks. Gorton is a small area in the south of Manchester, and for the first few years of my life it was the place I called home, before me and my family moved to the marginally more scenic town of Droylsden in Tameside. Of course for my parents, it had had more permanence. At least, I guess so. That's the only reason I can think of as to why we attended those fireworks in the first place. Had I not attended those fireworks, I would not be on this website typing as I am now.
     Blogger is something of an archaic platform to work with. It wasn't exactly hip and trendy when I started using it in 2009, but it was a fair bit more popular than it is now, in an age where all of your blogging needs can be better suited by Wordpress or Tumblr. But then again, popularity was never my main aim - it was an attempt to express opinions about stuff. To a teenager bristling with opinions, an opportunity to do that in a space with few people will challenge you is a very attractive option. Once I started writing regularly I advertised my blog on social networks for a while, hoping to gain an audience like that of the blog that inspired me, Dan's Media Digest. But there's a reason why he's just been shortlisted for a "UK Blog of the Year" award and I've not written anything in months.
     Nostalgia Filter, or as it was once called, Audenshaw Reviews, is at its most fundamental a procrastination aid. Writing about something, making a project of it, is a task I used to set for myself - both because I enjoyed it, and because it felt satisfying to do something productive. As a result, I've I've ended up writing a short book. Taking a very rough average, I have a wordcount of about 900 words (for a standard length review, sometimes I find less to talk about, sometimes more.) Extrapolating that out for the 802 posts I've tagged as either "Review" or "Opinion", and that comes to 721,800 words. That's seven novels. In the past five years I've written seven novels. Except they weren't novels. They were blog posts about TV shows and films. (Note to self - the word blog isn't in the blog's internal spellchecker dictionary.)

A photograph from the event that inspired it all.
(Original owner unknown, please comment if
you want credit.)

     In the past five years, I've done my GCSEs, my A-Levels and the first term of the first year of my degree. I've performed in four stage productions, had a total of 63 articles published in external publications and have posted the word "Thanks" 934 times. (Including this one.) In that time I've watched over 700 hours of television and film in order to review it here, and then countless more hours after that to write up the damn things, with a minimum of about 45 minutes for each one to write it up. Which if you calculate it forward again means that I've spent a bare minimum of 601 hours writing here. That's almost a month.
      Time gets away from us so quickly. Right now this is the longest thing I've written for the blog in months. What began as a place for an arsey teenager to mouth off without being ridiculed by his peers has become something I'm immensely proud of, and something I regret not having done more with. I had planned for so long that this would be the end of this blog - something frightening for me to see as I look at the little (1) next to my "Scheduled Posts". But I don't think it is the end. Not yet.
     For hopefully not the last time,

Thanks.