This, according to the wordpress system, is my 3,000th post since I began this blog in September 2004 with some initial jottings.

That post has some artwork which pokes fun at Ed Fordham, newly famous for his work on equal marriage, and nailbitingly close to beating Glenda Jackson in the last general election. At the time in 2004 his was a name that Simon Hoggart didn’t know – and Hoggart left us recently too.

There’s a link to Cafépress shop I’d forgotten I had with two designs – one about swearing in French and one about not like Skegness very much. How time changes a person.

If 3,000 posts in a little under 10 years seems a lot to you, bear in mind that for a large chunk in the middle, automatic posts of some sort or another were happening. I had a responsibility to provide content on Lib Dem Voice, which was automatically reproduced here by a machine that permanently knackered my categories. And for a long while, my prolific tweets were also munged into blog posts before the gizmo that did that stopped working as well.

These days the tone has changed as my work has moved from politics to education, and there has been the suggestion made on more than one occasion that living one’s life so publicly on the internet is a bad idea for a teacher. Although the writing contained herein is not worth a hill’o’beans it is perhaps the one project in my life that has some sustained continuity to it and it holds a great deal of sentimental value for me. As it happens, I don’t think what I write is of interest to my students, so although the blog has vanishingly rarely led to questions in the classroom like “what on earth are Mr Brain’s Faggots, sir?” I think I can continue with it without too much concern.

Indeed although some of the things I write about has a little interest for people other than me, most hours the hits to the blog are in single figures these days.

I’ve always struggled with the difference between personal and professional blogging, and mixed the two up merrily with scant regard for building an audience. I write, sometimes at length, what I want to, when I want to. It’s a personal archive as much as anything else and when I want to try and remember something I’ll often come here first. Had I wanted to be a solely political blogger, or these days, a blogger with a focus on education, I’d have had to follow the instructions better; write more tersely and remember Duffett’s first law – it’s not about you, it’s about them.