A CAUTIONARY TALE

"My name is Daphne Wayne-Bough and I am a blogaholic."

Until exactly 12 months ago today I had never blogged. I was clean. My worst vice was a tendency to write restaurant reviews for Embassy magazines. And then, mad with grief after the loss of my beloved Harold, I read an article about blogging and a year ago today posted the very first piece on Chocs Away! about the Binche carnival. (Yes I know there's one dated August 2005, but I didn't actually post it until March 2006). Little did I know it would lead to an addiction which would consume most of my spare time and quite a bit of the day when I'm actually paid by someone to do something else.

I did not get a comment until my eighth post, on 18^th May, and I placed it myself just to see what it felt like. It felt good. On my ninth post (20^th May) Zoe of My Boyfriend is a Twat left a comment. She had to really, the post was about her. On the tenth post (21^st May), someone said “I really enjoyed looking at your site, I found it very helpful indeed, keep up the good work.” It was that nebulous character “Anonymous”. My eleventh post on 25^th May got two favourable comments from other users: Robin who said it was a “Tour de France” and Wrath of Dawn who said it made her scream. Whether from pleasure or pain was not clear. By June (15^th post or thereabouts) Zoe had linked to me and I was starting to benefit from the patronage and pimping of blogging’s answer to Heidi Fleiss, with visits from Peter of Naked Blog, Pat of Past Imperfect, and Vicus Scurra of West Hampshire (VSOWH). Anonymous was still a faithful visitor, and kept telling me how much he or she liked my blog.

The first time my comments box went into double figures, 20^th June, it gave me a "buzz", as I think the expression goes. The fact that the ten comments were a three-way conversation between me, Zoe and Peter is irrelevant. I was hooked. Sometime during the fateful 2006 World Cup I actually met Zoe and Quarsan, the world-famous Twat, in person. Vi Hornblower thinks blogging is giving me hallucinations and calls them my imaginary friends, but I know they are quite solid, some more than others.

By the end of June, Aunty Marianne, f:lux, ProblemChildBride and Cream had joined this particular circle of Hell. They linked to me, I linked to them, the blogging equivalent of sharing needles. On 6^th July came the second landmark, 20 comments. I was starting to feel like Judy Garland in “A Star is Born”. An apt analogy, as it would turn out. In August the comments started to creep up into the high 20’s, and on 15^th August the pinnacle of my blogging career – 36 comments for “My Gay Umbrella”. Never matched since. In October I jogged along at a steady 10-15 comments per post, and was getting more and more regular hits from the likes of Shyha, Banana, Frontier Editor, Dr Maroon and Calamity Tat. Sometime during that month I installed Site Meter and started to count hits. I remember being very excited when I went past 1,000! But of course I was already craving more, more, more. I was on a hiding to nothing.

By November I was occasionally hitting a heady 30 comments on a post, although sometimes as few as 5. I started getting careless, and made silly mistakes. I made a passing reference to a certain notorious North African head of state and was bewildered to find I had suddenly acquired a regular visitor from the People’s Jamarahiya. I ambushed him/her/it into betraying its presence, then deleted all references to the good colonel in every post and it disappeared. Proving it was a spy computer. Although I like to think of the great Muammar himself sitting in his pyjamas in front of his PC, chortling over my blog.

I made contact with more denizens of Brussels low-bandwidth society such as MKWM, Sir Gawain of England Expects, and the incorrigible Tippler, all avowed addicts with no ambitions to quit. We made a sorry little group, sat around a table in a Brussels pub, discussing hit counters and html, each of us secretly itching to get away and back to our keyboards. Apologies to all other blog abusers who visited me and who I have not mentioned. Blogging knackers your memory.

In January of this year I turned my first 10,000 hits and in February my first restaurant review was published in UpYours UpFront, the Brussels monthly edited by Tippler. Things had got so bad I had been forced to prostitute my talent in order to eat. I didn't clean the flat for, oh, at least a week. There was an itinerant eco warrior living under the dining room table for a month before I noticed he was there. It was Sid and Nancy in the Chelsea Hotel all over again. I was saved only by Scrumpy, the dear sweet boy, who forced me to go cold turkey by hogging the computer for two months solid, running clips from YouTube incessantly day and night, in a selfless vigil to keep his Aunty Daphne on the wagon.

Last week I was proud to be a contributor to Shaggy Blog Stories, a compilation of blog posts sold for charity. Although this is some kind of temporary redemption, I feel almost certain to relapse. Blogging will be the ruination of me. I am therefore going into rehab this Saturday for a week, and hopefully will come out clean and rejuvenated. Until the next time.

The moral of this sorry tale is, for any disheartened novice bloggers out there, that a blogging habit takes perseverance. If you don't want to end up like me, don't even start. Just say no. If you do want to end up like me, however, follow the advice of Robert the Bruce, during a bout of cold turkey:

"If at first ye dinnae succeed, try, try, try again. Git they fuckin' spideys awa', the noo."

Indeed, a few more tries would have come in handy last Saturday in Paris.