WHY THE SEA IS BOILING HOT

So today marks a year of writing this blog. I know you'll all be uncontainably excited by the occasion, having meticulously followed my tedious ramblings through all 255 posts, marvelled at the dull poetry and raised eyebrows at the odd punctuation.

In my first post, The Trouble With Blogging, I threw open the curtain on my life, hoping that it would be interesting, that my thoughts wouldn't be offensive and that my writing wouldn't be pretentious.

Thinking about it, I think I may well have failed on all three counts at one point or another. You know what though? I'm not as bothered as I thought I would be about it. It seems Future Me has mellowed out a bit in the space of 130,000 words.

There's been a lot I haven't said. I wrote drafts on The Nature of Swearing, on football as a religion, and of course about the day I told a girl that I liked statistics. I wrote a lot of stuff too, about the two terrible things which happened in the last week of June - knowing that I could never post any of it. Maybe when I review the year at the end of December, I'll be able to go into more detail.

It also occurs to me that I've never really explained why I called this blog, Why The Sea is Boiling Hot. Well, there's no time like the present: it comes from a line in a poem by Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland. He was a lover of puzzles, of maths, of words and of poetry, and as such, he sits alongside Edward Lear in my list of Victorian heroes. In the macabre poem, a walrus is trying to distract some oysters by proposing to talk about anything and everything under the sun:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax
And cabbages and kings
And why the sea is boiling hot
And whether pigs have wings."

- from The Walrus and The Carpenter, Lewis Carroll

... and I thought the idea of a walrus talking disparate nonsense as a form of light-hearted poetic distraction, was just about perfect for this blog.

Happy anniversary.

M