Here’s One I Made Earlier

Like most children in 1970s Britain, I grew up watching Blue Peter. Very often, the show would feature a craft segment, usually involving tinfoil, toilet roll tubes and sticky back plastic. Invariably, rather than show you all the steps involved in building the Barbie shoebox house or the cardboard Dalek, the presenter would miraculously reveal the finished project from under the desk, announcing “And here’s one I made earlier.”

Well, I am about to pull the same trick on you, dear reader.

You may or may not be aware that I am about to get married. Yup, there’s a lady out there actually willing to spend a lifetime with a paunchy, long-haired, overgrown child who knows more about blog platforms than erecting shelves and has a distinct aversion to mowing lawns, washing cars and all those other things responsible husbands supposedly do on Sundays. Stuff that, I’m watching Doctor Who and blogging about comic books!

But the impending nuptials mean the blog may actually struggle to receive the attention it deserves. And I certainly don’t want to deprive you loyal readers.

Thankfully, in true Blue Peter fashion, I have a blog I made earlier. Last year, I experimented with a second blog, Christmaswatch, devoted to all things Xmas. Covering the true origins of Christmas traditions, classic Christmas literature and observations on the best festival we have, it was a place for me to unleash my childish excitement every December.

But the blog didn’t work. After all, it would only be relevant for a couple of months every year. This meant for most of the year, readers would not be searching for the information within, no one would link to it and it became difficult to justify keeping it going.

So I have a pile of blog posts – some of which may also be relevant to this blog with a few tweaks. As December looms, I am scheduling some of these posts to appear on CopyWrite, reducing the need for me to create new posts when I have the least time to do so. Automatically, posts should appear throughout December, supplementing the occasions I am able to post original material. And anyway, it’s nearly Christmas, so a few Christmassy themed posts would be nice.

If some of you read these posts last year (I doubt it), I apologise. They are repeats. But as so few people clicked on them back then, I think they actually stand more chance of being read this time around. The Christmaswatch posts will be marked as such with a subheader, so you will know which entries are the repeats and which posts contain original material.

There may be a couple without any direct relevance to a blog on writing, but hopefully they are of interest all the same. I love Christmas, particularly the history of the traditions. Maybe I can pass that enthusiasm onto some of you.

The first Christmas post will go live tomorrow, November 24th, a month before Father Christmas takes to the sky. I hope you enjoy it and allow the blog to run on cruise control while I pay some much-deserved attention to my future wife, get drunk on a bucks night, finalise wedding preparations (more on that in a future post) and get ready for our European Honeymoon.