No Vembers Were Harmed In The Writing Of This Post

I don’t know what a vember is but it matters very little because we are officially in the one month of the year when they are scarce. At least I presume the lack of available vembers is the etymology behind the naming of the eleventh month of the year.

Although I obviously know that it isn’t.

But we haven’t got time to talk about the etymology of November. You can look that up on Wikipedia later on.

Today, being the first day of the month, means that we need to discuss, with some urgency, the state of the stats on my blog.

Because that’s what I apparently now do on the first day of the month. Although I won’t be doing it on the 1st of December because on that day I’ll be kicking off the much-celebrated (or, as is more often the case, much-ignored) annual James Proclaims Advent Calendar of Christmas(ish) Films.

But for the last few months I have started the month with a retrospective of the previous month’s stats, and this is mostly because 2020 has yielded some record-breaking numbers for this blog. And it’s hard to pin down exactly why this might be the case. What has been different about 2020 in comparison to other years (aside from a global pandemic, which would easily explain a mild increase in web traffic to an inconsequential blog)?

Anyway, you’ll be thrilled to know that October 2020 continued the trend of this blog being slightly more popular than it had previously been. Although the numbers do appear to have plateaued a bit. Even regressed slightly. But that is no cause for alarm. If the stats do begin to drop off significantly then I can always go back to pretending that I don’t care about stats. So I’ve got all bases covered.

The biggest highlight of October was really the fact that I managed to continue my daily blogging streak. Because traditionally October has tended to be a month of blogging slumps for me. So writing 31 posts in October was a genuine achievement, even if a lot of the posts were the seventeen syllable ditties that I claim are haikus but which are more akin to senryus. If indeed they are akin to anything at all. Anyway, it would be churlish not to celebrate my achievements just because they aren’t very impressive.

November is generally a different story in terms of productivity. I don’t need a global pandemic to find November depressing, so most years I manage to produce a lot of posts in a bid to fight off the winter woes. This year, the combination of a resurgent coronavirus and the general misery of cold weather and very little daylight ought to ensure that my blog continues to be full of updated content for many more weeks to come.

Some of that content might even be passable. And most of it will be short. Which is rarely a bad thing.

So you can safely assume that there will be something new, and of questionable value, to read on this blog tomorrow.

But until then I must depart. I’ve heard a rumour that there may be still be some vembers available in Tesco and I want to get there before they run out.