I have a new friend who is intelligent and cultured.  My new friend shares my interest in keeping a journal of some sorts – although I suspect my new friend’s private musings are more eloquent than those that I have been posting online since 2005.  In the early days of our acquaintance, I mentioned that I had been blogging for a while and I recently shared the links to my previous online incarnations.  My new friend is now becoming acquainted with Sniffy.

There’s something really rather nice about opening a door on your past to somebody who has come into your life… and potentially dangerous.  This person knows me in the now; the bored Tina who is desperate to do something useful with her life, but who has had most of her enthusiasm drained from her by a secure job and a mortgage.  When I started blogging back in January 2005, I was healthy, happy (for me), untainted from the disappointments of love and work, I had Max the cat, there was no Rocky, no emotional baggage.  I was a free, don’t give a fuck spirit who found it so easy to write each day about any old crap that came into my head.

What are the consequences of allowing a relative stranger get to know you through words that were written when you were nine years younger?  Well, it’s a hell of a lot easier to tell somebody to go and read your old blog than actually go over the whole fucking history of your life, so that’s a bonus.  It also provides another insight into a person, seeing how they reflect on the happenings of their days; how their opinions change (or not), how they develop their writing style, and how this changes when the author is aware that they have an audience – as I did back in the day.  Oh, those days when I’d argue in my comments sections of posts.  When the folk of Stornoway made me their enemy, when Ryan the Catholic picked on the wrong queer.

Of course, in those days, I used to be arsed with linking to things and shit.  These days, well, I obviously can’t.

But one thing my new friend has made me realise is that the stuff I wrote, every day for so many years, is actually (in part at least) pretty bloody OK.  Everything I wrote reflected my feelings, opinions, experiences and I would always be more than happy to talk about exactly the same things with my friends and probably colleagues.  I guess at the time, and maybe even now, the reason I didn’t advertise my blog to people who I knew in real life was the “geek factor”, which means I was only uneasy about letting people know about the thing because they’d think I was a bit of a twat for keeping an online journal.  But what the hell?  People I know have interests that don’t particularly interest me, so why should I be bothered that people dismiss all this just because it’s not their particular bag? I’m not.  I share stuff on Facebook and Twitter that are bitesized snippets of the long-winded opinions that I’d previously choose a blog post to write about. Within the confines of  140 characters, I can write “Traffic home shit again, thanks @TGFM @salfordcouncil cockmunchers #prioritybuslane #ohfuckIverunoutofcharacters”, but here I can tell you the whole fucking story, and much, much more.  More importantly though, I can generate something that in years to come, I will be able to look back on and actually have a giggle at.

So, anyway (:@), encouraged by my new friend, I have reflected on my previous blogging exploits and realised that all that old crap is actually not that bad at all.  And so, anybody who happens to read this will be THRILLED to find that I have imported all those old posts from my Cakesniffing days  into this blog.

Happy reading, losers.