Commenters

As I said recently, this blog is ten years old. Out of curiosity, I have just been looking back at the people who would leave comments back in 2005. Almost the first was Alkelda the Gleeful - also known as Farida Dowler. She lives in Seattle and is a children's storyteller. We read each other's blogs regularly for a few years until Farida became a little tired of blogging and departed the blogosphere. If I wasn't so shy I would have looked her up in Seattle last year. Through blogging I learnt a lot about her, her husband and her little daughter. She was a great advertisement for American womanhood and she read my posts with thoughtful interest.

Another escapee from the blogopsphere was Brad the Gorilla. Also based in Seattle, he cleverly sustained the alter ego of a gorilla. He ate bananas and swung his arms as he mooched around the streets of Seattle. He had a wicked sense of humour and blogging with him became a kind of intellectual  jousting tournament which I very much enjoyed. It is a shame that Brad moved on or simply ran out of blogging steam.

Zandrea, Occidentally, Simon Langer and Andrea Sousa Tavares all left comments on this blog by the end of July 2005 but they disappeared long ago. One blogger who stuck around was By George. She was into art and online gaming and she had a problem with food in that she couldn't get enough of it but she was another nice American woman and we kept in blogging touch for many months until she also got fed up with the medium. I still wonder what happened to her.

By December 2005, Friday's Web was on board The Yorkshire Pudding bandwagon. She wasn't wealthy. She lived in the backwoods of North Carolina with her husband and kids and she wrote some fascinating posts. At times I feared that she was tiptoeing on the boundary between sanity and craziness for she was tormented by dreams of the better life she would never lead. It was just beyond her reach. We were close in the way we exchanged comments for maybe four years but she vanished back into the blogosphere's ether. Just like By George - I wonder what happened to Friday's Web. There were drugs and drink and tattoos and bills. It can't have been easy for her.

Friday's Web in January 2006

Five years ago, in July 2010, I wrote thirteen blogposts - some of them were connected with my brother's death. Looking at the commenters, I note that some familiar people were now on board. Lovely Kate from The Bay of Plenty in New Zealand - "The Last Visible Dog" and the equally lovely Helen from Brisbane - "Helsie's Happenings" and handsome Yorkshireman Brian ("Tannu Tuva") and equally handsome Georgian fellow Bob Brague whose name "Rhymes With Plague", Elizabeth from North Yorkshire and Jenny from Wrexham, Wales, Daphne Franks from Leeds and Michael from Sydney Australia., Libby from the English Midlands and Jan Blawat frm Sloughhouse, California.

Nowadays I interlink a  lot with Adrian from "Adrian's Images" and Meike from "From My Mental Library", John Gray from "Going Gently" and Graham from "Eagleton Notes". There's also Carol from "A Small Life", Lee from "Kitchen Connection", Red in "Hiawatha House" Canada and sometimes Tom Gowans from "A Hippo on the Lawn" in Angola. And how could I forget my blogging sister Mama Thyme in Colorado ("Peace Thyme Garden and Weather Station") or Hilly in the woods of Washington State ("Hilltop Homesteader")?

In ten years the players on my blogging field or stage have all changed. Comings and goings. Some people stick around for ages and others move on very quickly. Sometimes bloggers just get fed up with each other. Isn't that a bit like life itself? Nothing last forever. Everything changes.