We started this blog in August 2006 as an open letter to our families about our big adventure in France. The first blog post was us breaking the news that we had paid a deposit and signed the compromis de vente on a house in Preuilly sur Claise. Doing it this way meant that everyone got all the news at the same time, and multiple emails didn't have to be composed.
At first we only wrote when we had news, which meant only three posts in the first month, and they were basically "the story so far". We then started with our observations of life in France, working on the house, dealing with French bureaucracy, and reporting on our visits.
In November 2007 we did our first non France post, and that was about the opening of the new Eurostar line which passed close to our London home. By then we had a number of regular readers and followers, a number of whom we had met.
Since then we have tried to cover whatever is going on in our lives (with some exceptions), including our travels, family events, recipes, and lots of nature information from Susan, in addition to the Preuilly sur Claise stuff.
It wasn't until the 21st February 2008 that we started blogging every day, and until COVID kicked in over 12 years later we continued to blog every day. Finding interesting stuff to write about during lockdown was difficult, and we stopped first our regular Sunday writings about Australia, and then our Saturday posts "further afield".
Although the lockdown is over we're still only writing five days a week, less when real life gets in the way, and that's probably how we will continue for the foreseeable future.
Writing a good blog post takes time: sometimes it feels like we have spent most of the day doing it. It's no wonder that many great blogs have fallen by the wayside. When we started blogging it was the funky newish technology and everyone was doing it. Since then many pretenders to the throne have come along and we sampled most of them until Tictoc arrived. That was a social media too far, so we are sticking with three or four blogs, two Instagram accounts and a number of Facebook and Twitter accounts. But it all takes time.
We have no intentions of stopping the blog, but we hope you will understand if you arrive and discover that there's nothing new to see.
4 comments:
Simon, you and Susan have to be commended for writing a post every day for such a long time. It is understandable that at some point you get short of subject matter. I always enjoy the posts whenever they appear.
You are on my daily list, I love the posts about France, rural France, life in a small town. I have read on and off for years, rarely commenting.
Sometimes no news is good news and that is what I will think when nothing is posted for the day.
glad you are keeping on posting, I enjoy reading however often you post. Thank you for sharing
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