Happy 10 year anniversary to me!

- March 31, 2019

It just hit me the other day – I’m a sucker for waxing nostalgic and maudlin reminiscing – when I was trying to remember the last time I wrote a post (nearly 5 months ago), it dawned on me that the 10 year anniversary of me starting my blogging ‘career’ (editor’s note: we can’t come up with a better word) was fast approaching. It was actually 4 February 2009 that the Layman’s Guide to International Relations was launched, to minor fanfare, and it ran for some 2 years before being reincarnated right here as Funfare for the Common Man.

(editor’s update: this was post was mainly written late January 2019 – it’s now no longer ‘fast approaching’ but has instead come and gone.)

It’s about quality over quantity, however. Those 2 years were pretty fun and epic, at least for me.

(I’ve mentioned this before – why the blog name change? Why the switch to a new title and format? It’s all there in the archive, but I will only say this – my original choice of title, The Thoughtful Animal, was already taken, and ‘The Poor Man’s Thoughtful Animal’ was too awkward and contrived.)

(The Thoughtful Animal, though I rarely read it, is a very good blog by the way, though it’s barely been updated over the past 4 or 5 years, so perhaps one these days it will go extinct and I can nab the title for myself.)

Ten years. Well…shit. What’s happened since then?

A very brief recap of those 10 years:

2009 (winter-late summer): some splendid shenanigans and hijinks in Kyrgyzstan and other parts of Central Asia.

2009-2010 (autumn-late summer): getting my teaching degree, a bit of travelling in Eastern Europe, summer school teaching tomfoolery (and plenty more shenanigans).

2010-now: Kyiv, teaching, working, etc. Marriage, a child. (etc)

A bit unfortunate, I suppose, that I wasn’t doing any writing from 2003-2009: some fun stuff happened over the years, though my loyal and devoted readers, from both blogs, will have come across many trips down memory lane, where I’ve regaled you with sordid tales from the likes of Nigeria, Lviv, Spain, Latvia and a few other places from over the years. It’s all there in the back catalog.

A [less] brief, but still brief, recap of the past year or so:

So, 2018…not much happened, really. (!)

I started off the year promising to write a blog post a week as part of my 2018 resolutions. I was aiming for 1000 words, 52,000 for the year. Never had a chance.

I had a pretty decent excuse: having baby in February. When I made the ‘promise’ to blog more at the start of the year, it wasn’t like I didn’t realise my wife was about to give birth, I just got a bit naïve and badly misunderestimated [sic] how little time I’d have for myself. Or I was overly ambitious.

And then I got into some ‘reflections on reading’, of which there were 4 parts. A part 5, for sure, and maybe even a part 6, were intended, but I think that boat has sailed or that horse has bolted and I’ve moved on from that. My loyal band of fellow readers hopefully enjoyed it, and I think I covered enough ground about the joys of reading, though I did want to wrap up with a final, overly philosophical post about the therapeutic benefits of reading and how reading is the answer to all of humanity’s problems, but the stuff I’ve written will have to suffice.

I also put together a sort of ‘reflections on fatherhood’ post last July, but it’s a rambling, waffling mess, even by my standards. Just after my late July post ‘On sabbatical from fatherhood’, I did in fact have a 1 week sabbatical when my wife and daughter went to Vienna. I lugged my computer around Kyiv for nearly 12 hours doing a sort of pub crawl, typing as I went. I’ve just had a look at it for the first time in months and I’m not actually sure whether I had any intention of doing anything more with it. I have [partially] written two more posts on the same theme, but they’re in a half-finished inchoate state. I may consider revisiting

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…and that was a few words from my daughter. There I was in the flow of writing, trying to grab a few precious moments before the poor wee dear wanted to be picked up to see what I was doing. She likes to bang away on the keyboard a bit.

Let’s rewind ten years and I’ll share a couple of my favourite posts.

This one is from March 2009: vodka drinking in the park

And this one is one of my early ‘hits’ and could hardly be a starker contrast to my life now. Back then I was leading a more rambunctious existence, to put it mildly. These days our daily excitement is in the colour and consistency of our daughter’s poo. Those days I was grabbing the balls of Kyrgyz nightclub bouncers and trying to avoid the police.

Here’s a teaser: the opening paragraph from that post:

A bit of doggerel on Kyrgyzstan's finest moments

Or, a coruscating wrap-up of 5 months of mayhem and shenanigans

Horse-riding and blistering burns in the countryside…drunken wedding shenanigans… bizarre medical treatments…being stalked by a student and yelled at by a ‘prostitute’…almost getting jumped by the Kyrgyz army in the bathroom…grabbing the undercarriage of a bouncer at a nightclub and almost seeing a repeat of the Latvian broken rib experience…wonderful new friends (and one very special one)…and the Vagina Monologues in two languages. These have been among the numerous gems and highlights during my time in Kyrgyzstan…

You can read the rest here.

In the meantime I’ll be looking for the time and inspiration to write something else soon.

Compare and contrast

Life in Kyrgyzstan, in all its hazy glory: