The Blogging Diaries - Part One
This tumblog is my fifth attempt foray into the world of blogging and the fourth incarnation of SpiroJunk, which, for the slow of mind, is an anagram of my name. Which, for the bereft of mind, is Jon Purkis.
I first got into blogging in 2004, inspired by the trendsetting Phil and his then successful Phil’s Brains blog. I was at University, so I had plenty of time in which to blog and plenty of stories to tell.
My first post was typically pointless, foolishly bringing up the unanswerable “why should I blog?” question in a self-preserving attempt to prevent anyone else from getting there first. But, I soon got into the swing of things as I found that writing about your life is at once cathartic, ego-boosting and sociable. The posts were mostly bland accounts of nights out, but that seemed to work for everyone involved. Reading back through them, it’s nice to be reminded of things I would have never otherwise remembered, but, predictably, the younger Jon is immature, innocent and embarrassing, especially when he goes on lengthy rants about Big Brother.
The more comments I got from friends, the more I got into it. And the more I got into it, the more I wrote. The Uni football match reports were my favourites, regularly exceeding the 1,000 words mark. I wasn’t into the whole “brevity” thing. At my peak I was blogging 40 posts a month. Quality control was a definite issue, especially when you consider that I wrote five paragraphs about a Sting music video. That is ridiculous.
The blogging high-life didn’t last. In June 2004 a few days after my 20th birthday it all came crashing down around me. I had been presenting on a community radio station whilst back home, which had stemmed from my hospital radio days. On the night of my third show (which I called “The Basement” - how cool), I got taken into the office of the three 40-something founders, who quizzed me in detective style about my knowledge of something called “SpiroJunk”. In a scene out of Damages, they slowly revealed their case, eventually presenting me with print-outs of my blog, complete with idiotic photograph of me in the corner and certain lines of text highlighted
Thanks in large part to their SEO incompetences, my blog was the first Google search result for the radio station and some local busybody had dobbed me in. I had actually forgotten that two months before I had written a blog post taking the piss out of the station. It was tongue in cheek stuff, but to people reading it cold it sounded pretty bad. The station was based in the roughest part of Salisbury, so one of my witty lines was “they’re getting the kids off crack and onto the radio”. They didn’t seem to get that one.
I started crying, like the pathetic child that I was, thinking that my radio career was ruined. The reason being, that a guy at the local commercial station had heard my show and said he could see hear me working for them one day. My two-step plan to become the next Dr. Fox had been crushed and I couldn’t believe my stupidity at slagging them off for all the world to see.
My reaction was rash. No sooner had the tears dried; I was deleting the post forever. My one exciting brush with controversy and I erased it from history. I wrote an apology post that sits on the front page, serving as a reminder to how cowardly and pathetic I was.
I called time on spirojunk.blogspot.com, but it wasn’t long before I was blogging again….
