Farewell to our lemon tree …

Another little corner of the old internet I used to live in crumbles away today, as blogging service Typepad is closing its doors for good.

From March 2006 to October 2008 I used to write A lemon tree of our own, a blog about my wife and I moving to Chania in Crete, back in the day when people either ran their own websites or used a hosted platform with their own address, before everything got subsumed into social media.

My Typepad account lapsed long ago due to the expiry of a bankcard at some point, but I managed to login over the last couple of days to export an XML file of everything I wrote. But what to do with it? Nothing, I guess. Nobody needs me being slightly sarcastic about some long-closed bar on a Greek island.

I used to think that everything on the world wide wide should have a persistent URL forever – you should have seen the size of the redirect file on the old currybetdotnet server making sure things didn’t break each time I switched server/platform – but that kind of vision of the web seems unfashionable now.

What my currybetdotnet blog looked like in the early 2000’s

I do miss the more DIY days of the web. I can’t be sure, but this picture of before we moved into our house in Chania was me on the balcony of a little place we rented for a couple of weeks, almost certainly working on the templates for the blog.

And it was lovely having a blog. Obviously there was still loads of spam and whatnot, but people used to message us and ask questions about the place and our lives, and we had some regular commenters, and it was just nice to be … online.

[This was all the furniture we had when we first moved in]

It is funny looking back at the about page of the old site now, which included such gems as:

“If you never seen or read a blog before, according to this Wikipedia entry on blogs they are ‘a website in which messages are posted and displayed with the newest at the top’. There is also a handy overview of what they are over on the BBC site by Alan Connor. Basically it is a kind of online diary that we will be updating most days, with our thoughts on trying to find a home and some work in a new country where we are only just beginning to learn the language.”

That link to the BBC, obviously, now 404s.

Our about page continued:

“And why is it called ‘A lemon tree of our own’? Well, firstly because all the good and famous blogs have really stupid names. But mostly because the first time I went to Greece was on a family holiday in the eighties. One of my strongest memories is of being so impressed that I could reach out from the balcony in my bedroom, and pick fresh lemons from the tree in the apartment’s garden.

We really want to find somewhere to live in Greece where we can have a lemon tree, and however things work out, we have agreed to buy a lemon tree for our wedding anniversary this year. Which has caused much marital hilarity: ‘You only want the tree so every time I look at it I feel guilty because you’ve married such a lemon of a husband’ and ‘No, I want the tree so that every time you look at it you have to think of my sour face’”

But all good things come to an end. When we left Greece, we left the lemon tree behind. I wonder whatever happened to it …

[Our lemon tree at our house in Chania in May 2007]