Adrian Baldwin
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It's my party and I'll cry if I want to

11/25/2014

2 Comments

 
Picture
Do birthdays ever make you feel a little melancholic?

Today sees this site reach its third birthday; here before you, three years of care, commitment and creativity - and approaching 300 articles for that matter.

But should I celebrate or have some kind of site party? The thing is, I am not sure.

What dear reader do you think?

The site’s original purpose was to assist me in my search for gainful employment; to my absolute relief, that aim was achieved within three months of the site going live - but that meant a repurposing was necessary.

Since the end of February 2012, adrianbaldwin.com/co.uk/.net has essentially been about entertaining visitors; this achieved (well attempted might be more appropriate) by sharing my reflections on…

…well anything really.

In fact “random” is the adjective that best sums up the content. There is some site architecture, there are some loose/ongoing themes (the 70s, cars, music, nuclear matters) but there is a real risk that the criticisms, “inconsistent”, “unstructured”, “untidy” or “unplanned” could be levelled – all with some merit!

Being self-critical, it is certainly the case that a reader with a specific interest i.e. jigsaw puzzles could come across my site, read one relevant post and then never find anything else that was of interest to them.

My site reminds me of the famous line from the Forrest Gump movie “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get”. Certainly a reader will have no idea what they’ll be subjected to on their next visit (hoping of course there is one).

Like the chocolate chooser, at least a site visitor knows there will be something to consume – and that must be better than finding an empty box! The risk is they might not like what they try; but then the very element of risk surely makes a selection more exciting!

The fact is that I enjoy writing and I manage this site as a hobby, albeit a rather solitary one. From a selfish perspective I guess that it suits me to leap from topic to topic without boundaries; it stops it getting boring or just getting too hard. From a positive perspective, I have proved (to myself anyway) that I can write about anything; that I can find an angle that makes a subject interesting and worth writing about.

But is this just self-congratulatory nonsense, a form of literary masturbation? Aside from some self-indulgence, what has this site achieved since 2012? It hasn’t made me any money, or made me famous; my twitter following remains pitiful.

Even my website stats have been inaccurate thanks to Weebly messing up the counts.

What do you think? I’d really like to know.

My questions to you:
  • Do I carry on as is? 
  • Is another repurposing exercise necessary? 
  • Do I stop?

My questions to myself are:
  • Have I achieved everything that I am going to with this environment? 
  • Would my time be better spent doing something else? I am sure that Mrs Baldwin has firm views on this. 
  • Should I surrender my plethora of website addresses to the other Adrian Baldwin because he is a real author?

Two songs spring to mind, so in between playing Christmas Compilation CDs in my car, should Prince “1999” or Lesley Core “It’s my party” get an airing; celebration or commiseration?

Help me choose which one to play.

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2 Comments
Christopher T
11/27/2014 11:30:25 pm

Dear Adrian,

As skewed as your Weebly stats may have been, you can be sure to have at least one dutiful and grateful reader. That's me, by the way. I feel compelled to petition that you keep the website alive, and I'm going to tell you why.

I was born in the late 1980s and, outside of my Dire Straits, Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd album collections, my view of the 1970s is generally marked by bell-bottom flairs, casual racism, the first Rocky movie, political upheaval, and the colour orange. At university, I learned that academics often present the decade as one being dragged, its platform shoes kicking and its ringed fingers clawing at chest hair, into cultural modernity. The recent Yewtree scandals have only added to the perception of the decade as a fraught and sordid one, a ten-year-long Abigail's Party, except with more cat suits and sexual harrassment.

However, your blog does a great job of bringing some jovial normality to the era. Rather than the sweeping, narrative-driven 1970s given to us in The Professionals re-runs and Panorama specials, your blog gives us a view of the perod that is celebrated without prejudice or tight-collared revisionism. A few days ago I caught an early 90s Whitesnake track on the radio and felt the same pang of childhood nostalgia that you likely to derive from corduroys and Mark III Cortinas. I immediately thought of your blog and its relationship to the years of your life that are long passed but never forgotten.

It can be said that your blog has become a lense into my own future, a type of modern memoire that seeks to give order to the disorder of memory. The 1990s, in my case, are not long passed, and Oasis and Blur records have not quite receeded into the cultural memory like the ELO and Yes albums that gather dust in backalley record shops in the bohemian parts of town. However, that day will come, and I'll probably be the one blogging about it - reflections on Toploader and Grange Hill sitting alongside reviews of people carriers and TV shows about Ant and Dec.

If you've achieved everything you wanted to achieve then you've most certainly done it well, but I for one can say I'm glad to know when a bizarre ornament you own is featured in a BBC documentary.

Maybe you're Adrian Baldwin the author, and the man of the same name is a less prolific imposter.

Reply
Adrian Baldwin
11/3/2015 08:37:12 am

Hi Chris,

I can hardly believe it but since your comment above, another year has flown by. Thanks in no small part to your words of encouragement, my site continues to function and demand precious scribbling time.

A post celebrating four years of adrianbaldwin.net will follow and within its body, you will get another name check.

I hope that you are well, that life has been good to you - and of course that you have continued to find content in my blog that justifies your time spent in reading it.

Kind regards,

Adrian

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