Happy Birthday, Blog

Friday, 27 September

Ten years and eight days ago I copied the snippets of Paris-Berlin life that I’d been collecting on my computer since January and pasted them to my new website, then went live with the first full-blown essay “Elsa, a French Dog in Berlin”.

I began this enterprise at the urging of young Sebastian K, who was helping me with the publication of my first novel Someone Else. He said a “blog” would be a great – practically an essential – marketing tool in the year 2014.

At the time the concept of an "online platform" was as foreign to me as the German I was struggling to learn. Reluctantly I began writing entries that were often haiku-like in their brevity (“Last night we finished Weissensee. We are bereft.”*). Often as not, there were no pictures.

The process snowballed, and by the end of the year, I was hitting my stride, with regularly published photo-essays. Not a surprising direction, given my long-running interest in photography and the visual way I approach writing, but to me a surprising development, given my original recalcitrance.

Elsa remained the guiding light, nudging me to discover and make sense of Berlin, leading me to view Paris from new angles.

There are way too many recorded events to list here - including births, deaths, illnesses, the publication of a second novel, terrorist attacks, the sale of a much-loved house and several trips to foreign lands - but in the spirit of my early verbal economy, suffice it to say that by the time we traded Berlin for the Perche, we were two years into another lost dog...

...who continues to inspire many posts...

Happy 10th Birthday, dear Blog 🥳 🎉🎂🥂, and how fitting that it coincides with the publication of my third novel Civilisation Française.

Thank you, Sebastian, for prodding me into this venture. Thank you, dear Readers, for reading it, for your encouraging words that keep me going.**

And thank you dear Elsa, dear Tasha, my muses.

*A brilliant German tv series about life in East Germany, far superior to Deutschland 83 that got so much more press.

**A great birthday present would be getting friends to sign up for a free subscription!

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