I’ve been blogging for a while. Over eleven years on this blog for starters, although I did notionally exist before I started writing here, and sometimes I wrote other things in other places. Although you’d be hard-pushed to find any of it now. And it’s probably not worth trying, in all honesty. I’m not even sure it’s really worth doing a deep dive on the stuff that is available on this blog. And yet, that is what I’m doing here.

For the last eleven years, I’ve resisted re-posting my old stuff on these pages, essentially letting my posts sink or swim on the day they were posted. But blogging isn’t what it used to be for me. I’ve been a negligent father to my blog for the last few years, mainly because I like to believe I haven’t been a negligent father to my actual children. But I would like to be more attentive to the blog too, and so I thought now might be the time to start recycling some of my old posts and seeing if they can swim at the second time of asking.

And what better post to recycle than the very first one that was ever posted on James Proclaims. The ‘where it all began’ moment, if you will.

Ironically, as you’ll discover if you read any further, it turns out I’d already recycled this one once.

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The All-Important First Post

Originally posted on May 10th 2015

I’ve started numerous blogs over the years. They always start well. I usually post regular updates for a few days, sometimes even two or three posts daily. Then I miss a day, then a few days. This becomes a few weeks and then, really, the blog is dead; my passion runs out.

Eventually, when the blogging bug bites me again, months or sometimes years later, and I return to my now neglected online journal, I find that I am embarrassed by the content, that I had been trying too hard to be funny, poignant, or profound, and that my regular early posts, born though they were from enthusiasm, lack any real purpose. Subsequently, when I attempt to resume my internet diary, I find that my new material doesn’t sit well with that which is already there.

The only solution has been to delete the old blog and start anew. With renewed vigour.

“This time I will get it right,” I boldly claim, “this time I will produce a blog worthy of note, an electronic series of missives designed to change the world, revolutionise the written word and simultaneously entertain and inform the people of the world.”

And then I miss a day…

Since 2006 I have abandoned several blogs and none has made it to more than a few months old. So maybe I’m not cut out for blogging. Maintaining an online journal requires the kind of dedication and commitment that I’m not really known for. I don’t really hold out much hope for this blog, but I haven’t done one for a couple of years so it seems appropriate to try again – I’ve gone and paid for my own proper domain name this time so I might as well give it a proper go.

Nonetheless, it’s probably not the best portent for success that I recycled most of this post from the ‘first post’ of my last attempt at a blog…