Fred Bloggs and so do I

There was a time when blogs were cutting-edge rather than faintly quaint. I first heard of them in an episode of The West Wing — something about Josh and a gas-guzzler, if I remember rightly. They began to take off around the start of the millennium and, by the time we arrived in Spain in 2004, were still new enough to feel vaguely adventurous.

They sounded interesting. I’d kept a diary for years, so that slightly dutiful “captain’s log” approach — more record than invention — was already second nature. The difficulty was not how to write one, but what on earth to write about. No one was going to be gripped by the news that I’d been to the shops or that the car was making an unfamiliar noise.

That changed once we began to settle into Spain. Suddenly there was an avalanche of things happening — new customs, new frustrations, small triumphs, daily absurdities. I assumed, with only a mild dose of egocentric bias, that if I found them interesting, someone else might too. Apparently I still believe that, which is why I’m always faintly surprised when I write about something I consider droll or curious or quietly amusing and hardly anyone reads it.

In the end, it was simply the meeting of habit and opportunity: my long-standing tendency to record things, and the arrival of blog platforms that made it easy to do so publicly. Out of that came the Life in… series — with Life in Culebrón lasting the longest, largely because we’ve lived here, on and off, longer than anywhere else.

When I went looking for how to do it at first, I found Blogger, WordPress and maybe Squarespace. I found Blogger the easiest to understand though, if I were doing it again, I'd probably go for WordPress now. I'm sure it wasn't plain sailing because even now, when I have to change something on the layout of the blog, I can tie myself in knots before I finally work it out.

At least that’s how I remember it. But I’ve just gone back to check my first entries, and they’re from January 2006. By then we were well settled in Culebrón and about fourteen months into our time in Spain. There’s no grand explanation on the blog. It doesn’t say I’m doing this to win a Pulitzer, or for any other particularly sound reason. I just started a bit after the start of the new year for no obvious motive. The very first entry? About getting so drunk on cheap Spanish brandy that I fell over and hurt myself. Not especially informative — or a promising start.

Over time, the blog became more of a record of our life here — less “dear diary” and more informative, though still rooted in our own experiences. We’d see the hogueras for the first time, or our first mascletà, and I’d write about them. The pieces were short back then. I just counted the words in one from June 2006: 108. Last week’s blog, in February 2026, ran to 618. A couple of years in, I was still writing about personal experiences, but I began adding a bit of wider context. I’ve just reread one from 2008 about being on the dole; at the time, it might have been useful to someone else struggling to sign on. As for when they turned into the long, rambling essays they are today, I’ve no idea.

They were easy to write at first. I’d go into a bar and be amazed by the range of tapas, so I’d write about what I saw and ate. I’d marvel at how, despite the crowds, a waiter would still track me down, take my order, bring my food, and take my money at the table. But eventually you run out of new bars—or new astonishments like the first time I saw Moors and Christians (the last, in Sax a couple of weeks ago, barely got me out the door). Things change.

Sometimes the blogs flow easily. Something happens, I make a mental connection, and I bang out a first draft in twenty minutes. That usually means spending another couple of hours shifting the word order, fixing something that doesn’t sound right, or adding and trimming bits of information. Other times, the buggers simply won’t cooperate. I have an idea but can’t make it work. I can’t get it to read properly. I can’t even piece together the basic thread. Occasionally I’ll spend seven or eight hours wrestling with the damned thing — and it’s never the ones that take the longest that prove most popular. When it drags on like that, it’s hardly a pleasure.

Statistics-wise, I’ve never really had readers. If I tried to “monetise” the blog, as Google calls it, I’d earn nothing. Who would advertise on a site that, on a good day, gets a couple of hundred visits? The posts about my cancer experiences were the most popular recently — maybe 700 views at first — but I’ve never been able to predict why some pieces take off and others don’t. A couple of recent posts I was rather pleased with drew only eighty or ninety hits, whereas one on Pinoso’s population statistics pulled 800.

So there you are, Atholl. My take on blogging.