Lurkers

When I created this blog it was with a very clear audience in mind: me.

More precisely I had in mind me, Hayley and our future child. I pictured the three of us in about 20 years time when I start struggling to remember which drawer my socks are in, let alone what I felt about the variety of buggies available back in 2005.

But I also realized there might be a further interested audience: friends near and far who would like to read what we've been up to and respond via email, letter and telephone. I've been delighted to find that that audience not only exists but responds too. I really appreciate that.

But of course, as this is the world wide web, there is a further constituency of the audience: lurkers!

This is the unseen, unheard audience of an uncertain size that exists in cyber-space. It's a motley crew who find themselves on our patch for diverse reasons. They've stumbled across us by chance or perhaps were washed up on our shore courtesy of a shared interest and a search engine.

For some perhaps this blog is a brief distraction. For others maybe even a form of entertainment. I know I regularly re-visit certain blogs. They interest me. They entertain me. They give me a window into the lives of people I will probably never know. I may not even bother to send a single comment on what they write. But after a few months I feel I start to know them.

Of course, I don't.

Watching a soap opera character on TV, you may start to feel you know them, but they are a facade. And you certainly don't know the actor behind the facade, whose life is rich in reality in a way that his fictional persona will never be. And so it is with blogs and bloggers.

Don't get me wrong, everything in this blog is true. But it's a 2-D sketch of a 3-D life. There's no substitute for interaction. I can say more in person than I ever can in a blog.

So if you want the real picture (and the real dirt), it's good to talk.