…is paved with good intentions’ as somebody once said.

Given that it’s that time of year, but also bearing in mind that we’ve already established that I’m not one to make New Year’s resolutions, I thought I might at least to set down some intentions, blog-wise, for the coming year. At least it makes a change from apologising for not having posted more often. Sorry about that (See? British. Can’t help it.).

I started this blog over four years ago, as a retirement project – somewhere to set down what my strapline describes as ‘miscellaneous musings’ on humour and music, chucking in a few photographs as well (that being my real hobby, I suppose you could say). It’s for fun: mine primarily, but hopefully yours too.

That was the original intention.

As it turned out, the photography thing became more dominant than I had anticipated and pretty soon migrated to its own website. There’s plenty going on over there. Roughly speaking, I post about six times a week. However, it doesn’t feel like hard work because I enjoy taking the pictures in the first place, as well as what is grandly called ‘post-processing’ – i.e tarting them up in Lightroom. There’s also the challenge of trying to find images appropriate to specific themes, preferably avoiding anything too trite or patently obvious.

The key word in that last paragraph is ‘challenge’. Apart from the enjoyment I get from it, I post frequently on my photography blog because I’ve challenged myself to do so. Fair enough, they’re someone else’s challenges and I’m just responding to them, but you know what I mean. I don’t have – or haven’t had – that same stimulus to ‘productivity’ over here.

You can see that pretty clearly from the annual statistics that WordPress sends us (or sent: I haven’t had anything for 2016 as yet) evey December as a sort of end-of-term report (in my case, the Headmaster’s comment would probably be ‘must try harder’).

I put up 33 posts here last year, which compares with 41 in 2015 and 92 the year before. Set that against theonlyD800inthe hameau.com, with 257 posts in 2016, up from 119 in 2015 and only 64 in the previous year.

Back in 2014, however, I did pursue a challenge on this blog – the WordPress ‘365 Days of Writing Prompts’. I said at the outset that I wouldn’t be posting every day and so it proved, with a marked fall off as the year progressed. Undeniably, this declining trend was largely due to waning enthusiasm on my part, but I also found fewer topics ‘do-able’ as the year wore on.

Now, though, I’m challenging myself to revisit some of the previously rejected prompts from that series. Rest assured, though, there will still be some topics that are off-limits: for a start, anything that involves pontificating as if I have some kind of right to tell you what you ought to do. No ‘inspirational quotes’. Poetry’s a complete no-no as well:

You’ll be

Glad

To hear.

Anyway…since I got off to a flying start the last time I tried this, with four consecutive daily posts, first up this time around will be tomorrow, January 6th. Bet you can’t wait.