Glad all over

WordPress has a facility which tells me the search terms people have used to find this blog. I’ve just had a look at the list, and I am in roughly equal measure pleased, entertained and baffled by it. The top ten, edited to remove near-synonyms, looks like this:

1. Fail
2. Barack Obama’s mother
3. London smell
4. Scary playgrounds
5. Zed Police Academy
6. Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre
7. Palestra
8. Margate
9. Young Bono
10. Earthquake ball

It’s good to know that I am the go-to person for each of these things. The “Fail” searches were all last year, but there were a lot of them. The people looking for “Barack Obama’s mother” are a steady trickle, and I hope, but doubt, that they find what they wanted here. Of course, I have skewed their results even further in my favour now with this post. Sorry.

Some links to liven up your Friday afternoon:

• When cakes go bad
• Best Onion story for weeks
• Me on Twitter (I am a better writer there than I am here, because the 140-character limit forces me to ruthlessly extinguish everything that isn’t to the point.)

Gladallover is one today.  In the last year I’ve made 197 posts, you’ve made 56 comments and there have been 6,375 page views, which averages out at just under seventeen and a half posts per day, though this average is fairly meaningless since in the first month of its life  there were 289 views and this month there have been 2,993.  Although it means very little in reality, I do find it gratifying when traffic goes up, so if you are reading this then thank you and do please come again.

As it enters its second year, I expect gladallover to become more mature and reflective and perhaps a little wiser, like an elderly maiden aunt who has seen it all already.

I’ve been at home alone all afternoon and evening, with grand plans to make inroads into the pile of DVDs I’ve amassed over the last few weeks.  They are all things I want to watch, and most of them are things which my regular viewing companion isn’t interested in, limiting the times I can watch them to those when he is, as today, otherwise engaged (at the pub).

So what have I done?  Nothing at all, of course.  I’ve had Alibi on for some of the day, without really paying it any attention, and I’ve got the Big Fat Quiz of the Year on right now but I’m barely watching it.  I’ve read half of two different Miss Marple books, both of which I have read before.  I’ve eaten four slices of toast.

So my question is:  how do I motivate myself to engage in activities which – and here’s the thing – I’m only supposed to be doing for fun in the first place?  Or maybe a better question is: if I can’t, does it matter?  Maybe eating toast and reading bits of books I’ve read before is a valuable way of spending time.  As valuable, anyway, as watching The Fox and the Hound or season 4 of Lost.  That’s probably the answer.

…when it’s even cold on the tube.