400,000 Hits!

I was delighted yesterday when I achieved a milestone when my companion blog ‘Age of Innocence’ reached 400,000 hits.  I would have got there a lot earlier if Google hadn’t changed their search engine algorithm in February 2013 which halved the number of page hits at a stroke because prior to this I was moving close to 20,000 hits a month.

Thank you to anyone who has ever visited a page there.

I am not conceited enough to think that all of these are genuine visits and I am certain that a lot of web surfers will have found themselves on one of my eight hundred and fifty-six posts by mistake and wondered what on earth they were doing there but it is a milestone nevertheless.

I started the blog in November 2009 and called it ‘Age of Innocence’ as intended it to be a quick run through the early years of my life by taking a look at the big news stories of the year.  I explained the rationale behind it like this…

“The first few years of our lives are truly the age of innocence when we have a glorious lack of awareness of the external national and global issues that are going on all around us and shaping the world and the environment to which we will one day grow up into.  For me the end of the world was the bottom of the back garden, the end of the street or the physical boundaries of play imposed by my parents. 

They say that everyone remembers where they were the day that John F Kennedy was shot and I can confirm that my very first consciousness of world news events was November 22^nd 1963, the day the President of the USA was assassinated.

Considering the matter of news awareness has made me think about all of the newsworthy events that occurred during that first ten years of life when I was sublimely oblivious to what was happening in the world.  Lots of momentous things were going on of course it was just that they were not registering on my personal news alert sensor that was only kicked into life the day that John F Kennedy died.”

Eventually I recorded the first eighteen years of life in this way up until December 2010.

In 2011, I did a Madonna and reinvented the blog and set myself the ambitious project of posting a blog every day for a year by searching back in time and finding a pot-pourri of Madeleine memories and significant events on a day in history or in my life that gave me a special ‘Memory Nudge’ and something to write about – I called this ‘A Life in a Year’.

I completed the project but sometimes it was hard work because when you have only lived, in the words of Shirley Valentine, ‘a little life’ it is difficult to find 365 events to write about so in 2012 I revisited the posts and took some time to reassess them, left some where they were cryogenically frozen in time, but those which I considered my favourites or the best or the most interesting I edited, reviewed, dismantled, reconstructed and hopefully improved and reposted.

In keeping with my theme of ‘New Light Through Old Windows” I decided that my project for 2013 would be to take a page at a time from my dad’s old scrap book (c 1950-55) and find a memory story that leaps from the page but I am no longer posting every day because I am running out of things to say…

To date the ten most visited posts are:

British Birds – The Robin		23,517
1966 – Pickles the Dog and the Football World Cup		11,008
1957 – a Sister, Spaghetti, Scouting, Sputnik and Stanley Matthews		7,545
Travel Journal		6,414
A Life in a Year – 14th January, Henry Ford invents the Hamburger		5,715
A Life in a Year – 4th June, Naturism and Health and Efficiency Magazine		5,049
1968 – Shootings and Assassinations		4,002
The Miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand		3,873
1955 – Polio, McDonalds and Disneyland		3,836
1960 – Beatles, Lego and Lady Chatterley		3,604

Once again – thanks to anyone who has ever visited and read any of my ramblings.