State of the onion

From time to time (more often in the heady days of Harmless Drudgery's youth) I take stock....

<inline_ps>
Well I just got it myself. Stock...  onion... Oh well.
</inline_ps>

 My last report (18 months ago) started thus:

In its first twelve months, from October 2012 to September 2013, the Harmless Drudgery blog attracted just over 7000 visits. July 2013 was the only month with more than 1000 visits (1070, to be precise). In the first 5 days of September 2017, the total was just over a thousand (1053 to be precise – another 17 would have supplied a pleasing symmetry, but the gist is clear)

'So shaken as we are, so wan with care' as Henry IV Part One put it 'Find we a time with frighted peace to pant'. Well, not 'frighted peace', exactly, whatever that is...

<translation type="informal">
I think what he meant by 'find we a time...to pant' was 'Let's have a bit of a breather'.
</translation>

... but self isolation (which is, I suppose, a sort of 'frighted  peace').

Anyway, the blog is not maintaining that 200+ hits a day level (1000+ in 5 days), but the present performance is not too shabby (nearly 80 a day this month – a good deal healthier than I reported here

At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day)

back in the pre-referendum era):

Last 12 months' 'page visits' to Harmless Drudgery
I suspect the latest month's improvement may have something to do with people
having an unwonted amount of time on their hands

<autobiographical_note>
That 2015 post has called to mind  a song I wrote in the style of Peter Starstedt (he of Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  [and little else] fame), which underlines the mistake perpetrated in a review I read in The Times a good few months ago (needs citation, as they say in Wikipedia,  but the object of the review was probably this). It was a review of a biography of Paul Simon, which said that Simon's experience of singing to uninterested audiences in Greenwich Village explained the words 'people writing songs that voices never shared'. I'm not sure whether it was the reviewer or the author who came up with this nonsense, but it was (nonsense, that  is). If the words  had been 'people writing songs that nobody ever listened to, the rotten swine' then maybe the writer's observation would've been less banal, less simplistic, less platitudinous. 

It's fairly obvious to me (and to anyone else who has written a song that nobody else ever sang – or  even heard) that Paul Simon was referring to precisely that sort of splendid isolation – people writing songs that were never heard outside the song-writers bedroom. 

</autobiographical_note>

But it's time for my constitutional.

b

Update: 2020.04.05.19:55  – Added inline PS

Update: 2020.0414.14:30 – Added PPS

Further evidence of a link between lockdown and blog-readership; (daily figures courtesy of Blogger):