Today this blog turns seventeen years old, the first post being Welcome to the Journal posted at 12:23pm on Saturday 9th August 2008 (I never did finish that art project I wrote about in that first post).

And while I don’t particularly like posting ‘meta’ posts—posts about my blog or about blogging in general—I’m going to make an exception for this.

This blog was a rather late addition to this website which launched as an online gallery of my artwork (and other assorted things) at some point in 1996—the exact date and month is lost in time, but for the sake of convenience and orderliness let’s pretend that it was also 9th August—making the website itself twenty-nine years old. A short history of the various iterations of this website can be found here.

By coincidence, a few days ago John Lampard posted Had a website since the 90’s? You’re an internet person on his blog (responding to Kris Howard’s WordPress anniversary, and thoughts on blogging) so I guess that makes me an internet person.

There is no secret to the longevity of this blog or the wider website other than my own bloody-mindedness and the fact that there’s no grift involved. I just use this space to write up my thoughts on my artistic practice and on the research I do in parallel to—and which informs—my artwork. This research is primarily about the weird, folklore and folk horror, utopianism, the post-apocalyptic pastoral and post-industrial, politics (mainly anarchism and Mark Fisher’s concepts of acid communism & capitalist realism), hauntology, masks, nature, exhibitions, ritual, and the English eerie.

I’ve no idea how many people read this blog: I ripped out all the Google Analytics stuff from the whole website a couple of years ago because it felt like a nagging distraction. I know that some people read it because when I post links on social media to the blog posts here they get liked and re-posted/boosted, and people occasionally quote something I’ve written here on their own blogs, or email me their—frequently very intelligent and thoughtful—comments, for which I’m always grateful. That’s good enough for me.

This time next year this blog will be able to drink, smoke, and vote, according to UK law - and the website itself will hit a landmark big birthday of being thirty years old.

There are websites far older, far more frequently updated, and certainly far more popular than this one, but this is—first and last and always—mine.

Onwards!