The Decade

Although most people don't realise it, ten is a pretty arbitrary number - a consequence of biology and cosmic design, it's simply because we have five digits on each hand that we picked ten for the first double digit value. But regardless of the reasons why, it's generally accepted to be an important number, and so here I am writing a post on what is the tenth birthday of this blog. Ten years since that first post. Crikey, I honestly didn't expect it to last this long and reaching this far invokes that paradoxical feeling where although the start seems like such a long time ago, it also feels so familiarly close.

Radio Shak has already been the longest project I've ever been involved in for a while now - longer than all my jobs put together, longer than any hobby I've participated in; heck it's outlasted many of the friendships I've had; which is sad if only because it's also appears to be pretty normal. On the other hand I can count many of my current friends as somehow being found via these pages, directly or indirectly, so perhaps this is just a symptom of the future.

As has been the theme in the previous few anniversary posts, I've all but accepted that this is what my blog will be now: mostly restaurant and film reviews (the hatred of which makes up the totality of any explicit feedback I've received) with perhaps the odd opinion piece every now and then.

Yes there will always be those fifty odd drafts I have saved which I might one day get back to completing, but they mostly seem oh-so-outdated now; as much as I like to deny it I suppose I am a different person from who I was a decade ago. On the other hand I'm reading the first few posts and maybe I'm not that different after all. Whatever the reality, I did (reasonably) think that my life would be different to how it has turned out, and that in all the obvious ways - in fact I think it was when I realised that change wasn't necessarily going to be the case that the steam might have run out here; perhaps that's also when I felt that I no longer needed to express myself in this particular way either (much to the joy of the friends I leveraged for my ranting instead).

So here it is, a decade of my ramblings. It might even be the milestone at which to stop, but I don't think there's any need for an action as dramatic as that - judging by the way the Internet is going I suspect it's more likely that Google will make that particular decision for me. On the other hand who knows, maybe I'll decide to focus more on my writing this year? I wouldn't bet on it though; after all, ten is nothing but an arbitrary number really.