Welcome! Come on in, make yourselves at home. Please take off your shoes - the carpet is new. It's so nice to see so many smiling faces. Albeit a little creepy. As I've said three times now, Welcome!

A wise man once said, "Those who fail in History are doomed to repeat it." And although he and everyone else who has ever uttered that immortal sentiment was only trying to legitimise such a trivial discipline, it is as good an introduction to this entry as I could think up. Y'see, I thought before we could move on in this little venture, we need to take a look back at those memory ridden footsteps that have brought us here. Some footprints are quite clear, some a little hazy, some remind us of good times, others of the not so good times. Many of them are misspelled. Today will simply be a review for the benefit of those who may not know the history of my bloggery, and for the reminiscence of those who do.

The year was 2004. The month was June. The day was Wednesday. The hour, minute, second and so forth are irrelevant. I was a university student, sharing a house with a couple of cousins by the names of Dan and Jono (respectively). Now Dan was the shorter and older of the pair, and had, as they say, been around the block a couple of times. As well as being an avid jogger, he had a blog. For the longest time I had no idea what this was and had jumped to several incorrect and embarrassing conclusions. One evening he sat me down and explained what a blog was. He directed me to his own one, The Birm. Dan's blog was named after his former home in Birmingham Gardens. I made a mental note that Blogs may last a long time and it wouldn't be a good idea to name one after something that might not be relevant in a few years time. I must have lost that mental note because the following morning I wrote the first entry of my own new blog, Sandgate Road.

Sandgate Road (the blog) became my home on the web. Even when we moved from Sandgate Road (the road) to Andrew Close, Sandgate Road (the blog) lived on. Many a morning would see Dan and Jono lazing about the house while I was diligently writing entry after entry for my blog. It was during that time that Jono started his own blog, The Dorse. Jonathan was (and is) full of wit and cleverness, and he and Dan contributed almost as much to SGR through inspiration as I did through actually thinking it up and writing it. Times were good for SGR.

Blogs are quite like lamb roasts. They use up a lot of your thyme/time (it's a pun that sounded a lot better in my head). And so it was that when I also began the podcast, Ten with Tom, SGR began to suffer. TWT opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Through the wonderful power of Podcasting, my voice was sent out across the Earth. I gained many new friends and explored much that mere text media could not offer.

One day in late 2005, I married the most beautiful girl that God has ever created. I moved out of Andrew Close and into Wedded bliss. I'm still here today. I'm no longer a university student either. I have a real job, with real job hours. In many ways I'm not the fellow from a couple of paragraphs ago, and yet at the same time, I don't think I could tell us apart. TWT is still here (as soon as I get a new microphone). But sadly, SGR, through all the excitement has slipped into the forgotten place. I say 'sadly' quite intentionally because I miss the written media. There is certainly a lot one can do on a podcast that one cannot do in a blog, and there certainly seems to be a lot more people willing to listen to a podcast rather than read a blog. Nevertheless, the written word is a medium not without its appeal. I missed the way I could use just these 26 letters (often in the wrong order) to create whole stories. Stories that would need all manner of music, sound effects and vocal strain if they were to be transposed to a podcast. So I sat down to reopen SGR.

It was at this point that I thought of starting a new blog - actually that's not quite correct. 'Today Tom Wrote' isn't a new blog, but the same old blog under a new name. SGR hasn't died, it hasn't even been reincarnated, it has merely taken on a new name. It will be a little different to SGR, largely because I'm a little different.

Well, thanks for sticking it out and reading this far. It may have been a stretch, but worth it I'm relatively sure.

Goodnight kids

¶ 3:10 pm