The Appeal of Mrs Toogood

It’s the New Year and a boringly obvious time for reflecting on times past and planning for times future. If you don’t want to read my ruminations, come back next week for more of the traditional low-rent apple excitement. Sort of.

I started writing this nonsense in 2019 which makes this the beginning of Season Three, at least in my own delusional self-regarding mind. I haven’t been able to write much over the last two months, largely because of the demands of a full time Masters course (and, to my shame, the release of a new expansion for World of Warcraft). Fortunately (-ish) for everyone concerned, it turns out that I’m not doing a full time Masters course after all. I’m actually doing a part time Masters course but have been attending twice as many lectures and writing twice as many assignments as I needed to. I’m not going into the finer details of how this happened but, suffice to say, the blame lies not far from my door. Now I’m doing the course over the way more sedate period of two years, I’ve suddenly got time to waste spouting drivel about trees.

Except, really, there’s not much more drivel I can spout about trees. Not my trees at any rate. They’re in the ground and growing but there’s not much else going on.

As part of my course, I’ve been reading about what it takes to write a successful blog. The conclusions are pretty obvious: quality writing, which is sadly unlikely, and lots of it: two or three posts a week in fact. That’s a bit beyond me but I am planning to post something most weekends. Apparently, Saturdays are when people read frivolous stuff like this.

To enable the blog to be marginally more interesting than watching paint dry, I’m going to diversify a little bit. Instead of relating everything to the handful of trees I have planted near Louth, I’m going to investigate the rural wonders of this glorious county (Lincolnshire). I still plan to spend most of my time muttering about orchards but there might be a few references to the strange case of Louth’s missing anorak or even the Haxey Hood Game. If that’s not to your taste, please for the love of Pete unsubscribe now and pretend this never happened. I won’t be upset. I’ll probably just feel guilty that you read any of it in the first place.

The other thing more successful bloggers than me recommend is promoting your outpourings on social media platforms like Facebook. I’ve thought long and hard about this, but the bottom line is that I can’t stand Facebook. I think it’s bad for society, bad for your peace of mind and I don’t want to engage with it. That means no mahoosive audience building but also means I don’t have to worry about appealing to anyone other than the close relatives who I’m hoping will feel morally obligated to continue reading. What I am going to do is attempt to improve the layout and maybe add some tags to old posts. There’s about 40,000 words floating around in one long stream of text at the moment and it could do with being easier to find your way about, assuming you’re looking for anything other than the exit door.

Future posts should be longer than this and might be more interesting, assuming I’m ever allowed back on a bus. Next week I’ll let you know how my cider making plans have been going. Spoiler: not well.

Happy New Year and thanks for reading. I wish I could promise the coming year will be more entertaining.