I’m coming up on twenty years of blogging, and I thought it would be fun to look back on how it has gone so far. It was Julio who persuaded me to blog in the first place. Julio got me started on so many things — and if I am lucky, he’ll persuade me to do one more thing.

I got off to a bad start. My first 1,000 posts were only read by friends, and looking back, that’s no surprise. They were awful. I got a handful of comments from those same friends, but even they started to drift away. Maybe three of those friends still read me, but none of them comment.

Here’s my first post.

I did enjoy writing those awful posts, though, and I think I got better over time.

Out of those 1,000 posts, maybe 20 of them were any good. I wrote about five posts about Roger Ebert in this period. I still like them, but this is my favourite. It’s about Ebert imagining what it’s like to be someone suffering or — worse — someone causing suffering.

I think this is the time I started to get better at writing.

Here’s another recommendation from Julio. He says we should always go to the funeral. The post is mostly about my dad’s funeral, but it’s also about how you should always go to the funeral because it will bring comfort — even if you barely know the deceased.

We never did have a funeral service for my dad.

My favourite posts are the ones that weave together some thoughts about the world, with some mundane episode of my life. This one is about how to buy a book for someone who likes books — and even someone who doesn’t.

Funny coincidence, but Matt bought me On the Road just before this, and I am reading it again now.

Ragged Clown never got a lot of readers, but I get even less now — unless I write about cancer. In this one, I reflect on the first year after I was diagnosed.

Anything I write about cancer immediately gets 200 readers — mostly people I know — and then I get another 500 from Reddit or Facebook or whatever. Cancer is popular.

My most popular post came from a fun little discussion at the pub with my friend Gavin. We’ve both had unusual lives, and we tried to count up the number of things that we have done that most people probably haven’t.

I woke up the morning after with 30,000 hits because someone famous had linked to me on his blog.

I have a few posts that are not very exciting, but they get hits week after week and year after year, probably because they show up at the top of Google when you search.

This is my favourite. We had a party at my school with lots of beer. It somehow ended up on the front page of every newspaper in the country, with stories about the depraved children of today.

I also get lots of hits from The Sea Cadet Promise, All About Gliomas, and best of all, How to Write an Essay.

This post about naked dancing is usually quiet, but every now and again, it will resurface. At a difficult time in my life, Mrs Clown thought it might cheer us up if we took all our clothes off in the shopping centre.

By the way, if you want to see naked people in a shopping centre, Doris has a new show starting soon in Austria.

A few years back, I decided that I had nothing left to say. But before I quit, I rearranged the home page to have my favourite posts at the top. Most blogs put the most recent posts at the top — but recent posts are usually boring. Mine are, anyway. Why not put the good ones where people can find them?

I started blogging again a couple of years ago. I still don’t have many readers, but I have a solid contingent of commenters, and I am truly grateful to them. I treasure their comments.

I started two more blogs over at Substack a couple of years ago (Julio’s fault again!). The best bit about Substack, is that everyone interacts with each other and leaves comments. I get 100s, sometimes 1000s, of readers over there. I usually copy posts here if I think you lot might be interested, but if you really want to see everything I write, go subscribe to me on Substack.

One of the Substacks is about philosophy and other weighty topics. I promised myself I wouldn’t write about politics any more, but with the events in America over the last year, it’s hard to stay away.

The other Substack — Scattered Memories — is more personal stuff. Mrs Clown asked me to write my memories down, but I didn’t know where to put them. I thought I’d write them on Substack for now, then put them in a book or whatever when I am done.

Anyway, that’s a quick history of The Ragged Clown. It’s like a walk through the old days. This is not a very good post, but I enjoyed writing it.