Excerpts From a Life

I spent a few evenings this week doing the digital equivalent of clearing out the loft: going back through old blog posts that never had excerpts and finally writing them. Pure housekeeping. The kind of job you put off for a year because it’s boring, then put off for another year because now it’s boring and big.

What I didn’t expect was to end up reading my own life back in fast-forward.

When you publish a blog post, it’s just a post. A photo of two lattes in a Tim Hortons. A soup recipe. Monks singing John Lennon. A rant about the TV licence. A match report shouted at a telly in Paisley about a football club two hundred-odd miles away. Individually, half of them barely justify existing, and I nearly didn’t publish some of them at all.

Read in one sitting, though, they stop being posts and start being threads.

There’s the running thread: a torn disc and four nights in hospital, the slow shuffle back to the gym, “showing up feels like enough”, Couch to 5K finished and then abandoned, twice. Then a January on Ward 27, an MS diagnosis, one too many “I’ll start tomorrow”s, and now a year-long training plan with next summer’s Paisley 10K written at the end of it. I haven’t crossed that finish line yet. But reading the thread back, it turns out I’ve been running towards it, on and off, for years. The archive was keeping score before I’d even set the goal.

That January stay deserves a mention of its own, actually. One hospital admission produced half a dozen posts: the case for independence, a reflex game built at 3 AM, the surveillance economics of a supermarket loyalty card, the view from the window of Ward 27. You can put me in a bed, apparently, but you can’t make me stop typing.

There’s the politics thread: leaving one party for another, the Coronation I lasted three minutes of, Reform creeping up the ballot papers, and the case for Scottish independence made from every angle I could find, including flat on my back in an NHS bed.

And there’s the web thread, the longest of the lot: a kid getting online in 1994 to the sound of a screaming modem, then decades later moving his whole digital life onto a little server he controls, building his own search engine, and still, somehow, blogging.

None of it was planned. Nobody sits down and decides “I shall now document my recovery arc”. You just write about whatever’s in front of you, and years later the archive quietly turns out to have been telling a story.

That, I think, is the best argument for owning your own site, and I’ve never quite managed to articulate it before. On the platforms, the feed only cares about your latest post. Everything older effectively evaporates, sorted into oblivion by an algorithm with no interest in who you were in 2017. Here, nothing evaporates. The version of me who lost a fantasy £100 a bet on the 2017 general election is still on this site, being confidently wrong, forever. That’s not embarrassing. That’s the point.

And somewhere in the recent posts there’ll be a thread just starting that I can’t see yet. That’s the other thing about archives: you only spot the threads from the far end.

So here’s a small suggestion, if you have a blog: read your archive, oldest first. And if you don’t have one, consider this your sign to start. Not for the audience. For the archive. Future you will want the receipts.

(And yes, this post has an excerpt. I’m a changed man.)