I struck me suddenly today, thinking about this blog, that the experience of writing it, and more particularly of looking at the statistics relating to my readers, bear some similarities with receiving a classic Valentine’s card. Traditionally the essence of this is that it ought to be anonymous, to keep the recipient guessing about the identity of the sender. This resembles my experience looking at the record of who has been reading my blog.
The identity of readers is, of course, anonymous. All I see is the IP code of each person who has dropped by, together with a little flag telling me the country of origin of the person concerned. In fact, I only know the identity of very few of my readers, usually limited to those who have made a comment on one of my messages, and given a name along with the message. The statistics package also tells me how often a particular contact has read one of my posts, and I realise that there is a small cohort of regular readers out there, who remain completely unknown to me. Checking out each day who has visited the site, therefore, has a lot in common with receiving a traditional Valentine. Somebody out there loves me! But I actually have no idea who.
I can’t play the Valentine game, of course, because you all know who I am. So I suppose that this is an opportunity to tell you, whoever you are, that your interest is appreciated. Happy Valentine’s Day!