Happy 20th anniversary to my blog – and a merry Xmas to you

Journalists are notorious for leaving deadlines to the very last moment, and that is how, having set myself the target in 2002 of “have your own Movable Type server up and running with your own blog by Christmas” I ended up posting my first personal blog post on 24 December 2002 – “Danny Sullivan interview – and Google’s Xmas turkey“.

What my blog looked like in the early 2000’s

Of course, the blog changed design several times, eventually I moved from currybet.net to martinbelam.com, and now the lovely William Turrell makes it all tick for me rather than my being my own sysadmin and it breaking every six months etc, but twenty years, eh? Blimey. Imagine just how many terrible cancellable opinions about journalists I published back then. And they are all still live on the internet. Christ.

Anyway, talking of Christ, I wish you a very Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Fantastic Festivus, Wonderful Winterval, Happy Holidays, and all that jazz.

Oh, and no extensive end of year chart like I used to do mainly for my own benefit back in the day. But I have made, also mainly for my own benefit, what I think is a lovely playlist of sixteen songs from 2022 that you could play. It features, among others, Tess Parks, Sharon Van Etten, Warpaint, Helen Ganya, Sigrid, PVA, Nilüfer Yanya, Laura Jeana and Julia Jacklin, and is proof to me that there is simply loads and loads of great new music around at the moment, and brilliant artists to go and see live, and all the curmudgeons moaning “there’s no good new music anymore” etc etc can do one.

Personal news: I can guarantee that next year is going to bring some more m-orchestra gigs, more Thursday quizzes at the Guardian, and a return of the Friday reading weekly newsletter for season 14. Take care, and I will be posting again here soon. I mean, twenty years. Why would you stop?

(From L-R): Martin, Willow, Emma, James. Only one of these things existed when this blog began.