One million words

Another landmark event to start 2015 with! I have now written a million words on my blog!

Of course, given a few years, any reasonably prolific blogger eventually clocks up such a figure. Many must have. And 'a million words' isn't necessarily the same thing as 'a million words that gripped the nation, and inspired a generation'.

These are a million very personal words. They are not Great Literature. They are not intended to be. But they are certainly a monument to time spent tapping on the keyboard. Whether I wrote rubbish or pure gold, that total represents a lot of midnight oil burned.

And I will claim a little credit for building up the total without using a single smiley. Nor one instance of the F-word, or similar easy-peasy substitutes for finding the mot juste. You can check up on my F-word claim - just enter it in the Search Box on the top right of this web page, and marvel at the lack of any result. Well, I hope you do marvel. Some might simply think me unbearably prissy and goody-goody, not using such language. Well, sod them.

Of course I saw this 'one million words' event coming for some time, and inevitably thought 'Aha, that will warrant a post! I must keep writing.' (Although the noble term 'writing' can in my case be freely interchanged with idioms such as 'churning out' and 'sounding off')

So how did I know? Well, I maintain a month-by-month analysis of word counts for all the posts published since the first in February 2009, on a big spreadsheet. Just as you might expect. The actual total at the end of December 2014 was 1,003,245. I must have written the millionth word in my post on 27 December titled What to do on New Year's Day. To avoid accusations of galloping mania, I have refrained from working out which word in which sentence in which paragraph was the millionth word itself. (Although I'm sure that's a big mistake. Someone of truly precise mind would yearn to know, and would never rest until they had positively and irrefutably identified that word. Fortunately, perhaps, I am not quite that focussed)

And what did I do on New Year's Day? Did I make it down to Stonehenge? The succinct answer is Yes. I will give the long answer in the next post.