A nice new accolade from EssexLive

It’s funny really. I do sometimes forget that I have an audience for this here corner of the web. In fact, whilst not wishing to sound glib, I genuinely believed it was just my good self twittering into the great cyber ether without much of a thought of an audience beyond that. It’s only through other endeavours of mine professionally in the last year that I’ve started to take it a bit more seriously.

So when EssexLive, the online portal for my local newspaper got in touch a couple of weeks ago to say that they were writing a feature about the best blogs from the county’s very own to follow on social media, I was firstly rather taken aback, then secondly checking to see they’d got the right person, then thirdly. Well. It’s not very British to admit this, but I felt rather proud.

As I’ve often said, what I have wanted more than anything to achieve with the blog – and I believe I have done – is to create a positive, good humoured place on the internet and digital stratosphere generally which, for all it’s wonderful use as a tool for communication, creativity and endless supply of YouTube videos of cats falling off window ledges/tables/delete as applicable, is still filled with trolls, scaremongering, shouting and sidebars of shame. I want to be the antidote, the tonic to all of that.

So now my blog has been placed 10th in the list that EssexLive have compiled and published this weekend, it’s given me the confidence to know that I’m doing something right, especially with a totally self run and funded blog. Moreover, to know that I have the support of my home county, the place I have lived, worked and grown up in for all of nearly three decades makes me feel incredibly patriotic.

Big thank you has to go to Tommy Wathen, their delightful correspondent who interviewed me for his write up, and to all the other brilliant Essex blogs who have made the list. Here’s to putting more blogging talent on the map for Essex and the UK!