XVI

At the start of 2010 I was looking to find a home for a thousand word piece on Ronnie Lane I'd recently written. Record Collector had commissioned me three months earlier but in the interrvening period the magazine had had a shake up at the top and the new editor no longer wanted it. Bastards. I rang round other mags/periodicals but nobody was biting. Fuck it, I thought, I'll put it out myself. So after a couple of conversations with my good friend Mondo (you can still find him & Piley at Ship Full of Bombs with their splendid radio show/podcast Podrophenia, he persuaded me to become a blogger.

I tought myself basic html coding and designed a website/blog under the banner 'Even Monkeys Fall Out of Trees' and on 15 February I went live. With no preamble I dropped the Ronnie Lane article into a world where everyone, it seemed to me, was blogging. Sixteen years later and I'm still here. 'Even Monkeys...' became 'Are We There Yet' a few years later and in all that time I've made countless friends and contacts (virtual & F2F) and (again, in my experience) I continue to find it both a thriving and all welcoming community. I still love writing my blog and reading others'. And I'll tell them that when I see many of them them In Leeds at BlogCon26 later in the year.