A whole bunch of blogs I read have been trawling their archives for the last few weeks, and since substantive posts here are few and far between, I though I’d join in the archive unearthing.

Come September, I will have been blogging eight years, and there is an awful lot of writing hidden away in these pages. Some days I think I should pull the plug given my career change. But I am generally too proud of what I have written over the years.

It’s coming harder and harder to give a rationale for this blog. No one person would want to follow the mish mash of politics, cooking, cats and lately education. But I still like having a place I can write things.

Looking back to May 17ths past…

In 2011, I was improvising cherry cheesecakes out of store cupboard ingredients, and making good use out of a bag of frozen cherries. I’d lost my seat a few days before, and wrote some helpful tips for successors after that.

In 2010, I live tweeted from the Lib Dem Special Conference that discussed the coalition agreement.

2009 saw me giggling at swearwords on Countdown. I also brought you this photoessay from a recent walk I had undertaken around Nottingham’s Guildhall.

In 2008, I was enjoying my work.

Similarly in 2007, I had just had the fascinating opportunity to tour a power plant in Lincolnshire.

We got our cats in 2006 and it pleases me no end to see the comment from Rob there when in the last few days I’ve been able to reciprocate on his post about getting a puppy.

I rewarded myself in 2005, after a gruelling election campaign, with a six week holiday under canvas in France, and one of the first posts from the multi-thousand-mile road trip can be found that month.

So, there you have it. Travel, animals, francophonie, politics. A reasonably typical mix of posts from Niles’s blog.