10 Years and Counting...

A LITTLE over 10 years ago (June 17, 2004 for those playing at home) I wrote a blog defending my home state of Queensland. This was prompted by Game II of the 2004 State of Origin series, where Queensland won courtesy of some Billy Slater chase-gather-kick-chase-gather-score magic.

At the time I was living by myself in a small two-bedroom flat in the little town of Cooma, a young journalist hoping to a) move back to Brisbane, and b) become the chief cricket writer for a national publication. More disturbingly, New South Wales would go on to win the series the night before a photo of me in a Queensland Origin top appeared in the local paper to say I was now the local sports journalist. Any blogs I wrote were publicised via the old-fashioned means of sending mass emails out to people, which played havoc with both work and Hotmail/Yahoo mail accounts.

Fast-forward ten years and I live alone in a small two-bedroom flat back in Brisbane. (As an aside there's not much to read into why I live alone other than I am one of the messiest people around, only consistently bettered by an ex-colleague who once lost a book in a cereal box. True story.) I write reports for work, albeit in SQL rather than English. I'm not the chief cricket writer for a national publication but do have at least one such person following me on Twitter and have had an article published on ESPN Cricinfo, which I believe is the most-read cricket website in the world. It's also pretty easy to publicise posts via social media, which was pretty much unheard of in the deep, dark days of 2004.

So ten years after starting this blog and the end result is pretty much the same. A change of scenery, change of job.

And a whole bunch of living life in between.



I HAD planned on writing about the last ten years, summarising it in one simple blog post. Thinking about it now though I'm not quite sure how I would go about that, so instead, I'm going to try for something else.

Once a week. Story at a time. 52 snippets on Life, The Universe and Everything (from the last 10 years). I'll start at the start (winter 2004, why haven't you been paying attention?) and work my way through. If there's a topic you think should be covered then feel free to suggest them. I don't know how this will turn out, or indeed if I will actually write 52 different blog posts in a year when I've barely covered that in ten years, but it could be interesting.

Living the last ten years certainly was.